Middleboro Review and so on blogspot: DRONE KILLINGS

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Tuesday, December 28, 2021

RSN: FOCUS: Peter Maass | The US Military Is a Machine of Impunity

27 December 21

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FOCUS: Peter Maass | The US Military Is a Machine of Impunity
Peter Maass, The Intercept
Maass writes: "Wartime savagery requires that its perpetrators are told that their actions are acceptable - maybe heroic - and must not cease."

Wartime savagery requires that its perpetrators are told that their actions are acceptable — maybe heroic — and must not cease.

My education in wartime savagery started in Bosnia in the 1990s. Reporting on the war, I visited death camps, saw civilians get shot and beaten, interviewed torturers, and was arrested multiple times for being in the wrong place and asking too many questions. Despite all of that, I sensed at the time that my Balkan lessons were incomplete — and those instincts have been confirmed by the past 20 years of U.S. warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

We tend to associate barbarism with the kind of things I saw in Bosnia: close-quarters violence in which the perpetrators look into the eyes of their victims and leave the fatal encounter with drops of blood on their boots. That’s an inadequate understanding because it excludes the killing-from-a-distance that is now central to America’s forever wars, which have increasingly moved away from ground combat. According to the nonprofit organization Airwars, the U.S. has conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones since 2001, with at least 22,000 civilians killed and potentially as many as 48,000.

How does America react when it kills civilians? Just last week, we learned that the U.S. military decided that nobody will be held responsible for the August 29 drone attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children. After an internal review, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin chose to take no action, not even a wrist slap for a single intelligence analyst, drone operator, mission commander, or general. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby bizarrely said, “We acknowledge that there were procedural breakdowns” but that “it doesn’t necessarily indicate that an individual or individuals have to be held to account.”

There has been quite a lot of savagery-adjacent news to absorb this month. The New York Times just published a two-part series by Azmat Khan, based on military documents, revealing that U.S. bombings since 2014 have consistently killed civilians but that the Pentagon has done almost nothing to discern how many were harmed or what went wrong and might be corrected. As Khan noted, “It was a system that seemed to function almost by design to not only mask the true toll of American airstrikes but also legitimize their expanded use.”

Savagery consists of more than the act of killing. It also involves a system of impunity that makes clear to the perpetrators that what they are doing is acceptable, necessary — maybe even heroic — and must not cease. To this end, the United States has developed a machinery of impunity that is arguably the most advanced in the world, implicating not only a broad swathe of military personnel but also the entirety of American society.

Elite Accountability

Impunity tends to begin at the top. No American general has been disciplined for overseeing the catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor for lying to Congress about these disasters. The opposite has occurred — stars have usually been added to their shoulders, and when they retire from the military, they tend to march into well-paid positions as board members in the weapons industry or elsewhere (even though they are not strapped for resources, thanks to pensions that can reach $250,000 a year). The reputation-protection racket is so galling that an Army officer who served two tours in Iraq wrote a now-famous article in 2007 that noted: “A private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

We should not be surprised. We are a society that excels in elite unaccountability. Just look at the number of bank CEOs who faced criminal charges after the 2008 financial collapse (zero), or the number of Sackler family members who were criminally charged after their company, Purdue Pharma, started the opioid epidemic with OxyContin (also zero), or the number of billionaires who avoid paying income taxes (lots of them). And let’s not forget the politicians and pundits who goaded America into an illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and suffered no consequences. It’s not clear who takes their cues from whom, but it is obvious that all of these elites benefit from the con.

Military impunity is somewhat unique because it stretches downward, too. If an intelligence analyst or drone operator or fighter pilot follows orders and procedures for an airstrike that kills dozens of civilians in a wedding party — which has happened — they need to be excused of wrongdoing. After all, who gave the orders, and who set the procedures? These questions would require looking up the chain of command, and for that reason, they are not asked with any intention of finding the answers. That’s why it was with no sense of alarm that secret military documents published by The Intercept in 2015 noted that in a two-year campaign called Operation Haymaker, 9 of 10 Afghans killed in U.S. drone strikes were not the intended targets. For the U.S., this was the acceptable cost of doing business.

The Pentagon’s culture of impunity for killing civilians stands in contrast to its zealous pursuit of soldiers for other offenses. Unlike the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the financial industry, or the IRS, which oversees taxpayers, or the Senate and House ethics committees, which keep an eye on members of Congress, the U.S. military has wide authority and deep resources to impose an array of penalties, from pay reductions to loss of rank and death sentences. The military avidly uses these powers, too. In 2020 alone, there were more than 37,000 cases of discipline in the armed forces, and since 2001, there have been more than 1.3 million cases.

Yet these powers have been used sparingly or not at all when it comes to airstrikes that kill civilians. One of the worst massacres in two decades of warfare occurred not long ago, on March 18, 2019, when U.S. warplanes dropped bombs that killed scores of civilians, mostly women and children, in an Islamic State enclave in Syria. The carnage was immediately apparent. As the Times reported last month, an analyst who watched the attack on a drone video typed into a secure chat system, “Who dropped that?” Another analyst wrote, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.” A quick battle assessment settled on 70 people killed.

A legal officer flagged it as a possible war crime that warranted an investigation, the Times noted, “but at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike.” The Pentagon’s inspector general looked into what happened, but even its report was “stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.” An evaluator who worked on the inspector general’s report, Gene Tate, was forced out of his job after complaining about the lack of progress and honesty. Tate told the Times: “Leadership just seemed so set on burying this.”

I could go on for thousands of words describing other airstrikes that killed civilians and resulted in no discipline or slight reprimands that were issued only after embarrassing reports from news organizations and human rights groups. For instance, there was a 2015 airstrike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed 42 patients and staffers; the military’s reluctant discipline included counseling and retraining for some of the personnel involved. The point is this: A military establishment that has enthusiastically enforced requirements for things as petty as wearing a reflector belt while jogging has consistently failed to discipline soldiers for wrongful bombings that its own battle assessments acknowledge have killed civilians.

The machinery of impunity actually has two missions: The most obvious is to excuse people who should not be excused. The other is to punish those who try to expose the machine, because it does not function well in daylight. That’s why Daniel Hale, an Air Force veteran whom the government accused of leaking those classified drone documents to The Intercept, was sentenced under the Espionage Act to nearly four years in prison. It is not the act of killing civilians that will result in definite and heavy punishment, but exposing the act of killing.

Undoing Impunity

In 1992, I interviewed a Muslim girl in Bosnia who had been raped. “The Višegrad warlord took a fancy to her,” I later wrote, “and one night dragged her and her younger sister away from their mother, who of course was crying hysterically and holding onto the legs of the warlord, who kicked her away and shouted, ‘I am the law.’”

The warlord’s name was Milan Lukić, and he was one of the most evil men in a war that had a surplus of them. He killed women and children with particular ruthlessness, one time setting fire to a house in which 59 civilians were sheltering; they all perished. But Lukić was saying one honest thing when he kidnapped the sisters: He was the law. His paramilitary thugs had a monopoly on violence in Višegrad and the full support of Serb political and military authorities. At the time, I didn’t imagine that their crimes would catch up with any of them.

My interest right now is in the durability of these machines of impunity, not the comparative depravity of the crimes they protect (what happened in Bosnia was genocide). It seems ridiculous to think that the U.S. military’s cover-ups will be undone. The Pentagon is now getting even more support from the country in a form that is easy to measure and crucial to sustaining its clout: funding. Congress has just passed a military budget of $768 billion, which is more than was allocated in 2020, even though U.S. troops withdrew this year, in a humiliating fashion, from their forever war in Afghanistan. Despite what has happened, America’s elected representatives are not loosening their protective embrace of the Pentagon.

Yet the impunity that seemed eternal in Bosnia turned out to be short-lived, at least for the elites of criminality. Lukić is now in prison with a life sentence, thanks to his conviction at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity. Key wartime leaders were extradited to the Hague too. Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia, died of a heart attack before his trial concluded, but Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, the political and military leaders of Bosnia’s Serbs, were convicted of genocide.

America in 2021 is not Serbia in 1995. Our machinery of impunity is not susceptible to pressure from larger nations. But the journalists, whistleblowers, and researchers who have done the hard work of exposing its lies — they are still at work. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the more these people uncover, the harder they toil. I wouldn’t bet against them.

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Wednesday, December 22, 2021

RSN: Charles Pierce | The American Drone War Is My Lai on Repeat

21 December 21

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Charles Pierce | The American Drone War Is My Lai on Repeat
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "So, while we're all pricing lumps of coal to send to the Manchin houseboat, maybe we can spare a few moments to estimate how many terrorists we've been creating overseas."

This New York Times report calls for a public statement from a certain former president. No, not that one*. The guy before him.

So, while we’re all pricing lumps of coal to send to the Manchin houseboat, maybe we can spare a few moments to estimate how many terrorists we’ve been creating overseas.

Regular visitors to the shebeen are familiar with our Guy With the Goat Cart Theory of Asymmetric Warfare. There is a dusty street somewhere in the Middle East. Sitting at a small cafe is a terrorist leader that we would like to kill. We order up one of our spiffy drones for a death-from-above show run from some console in Missouri. Meanwhile, a guy with a goat cart comes meandering down the road on his daily business. Maybe he runs a fruit stand. Maybe he repairs small appliances. Who knows? Anyway, right when he’s passing the cafe, the Hellfire from the drone explodes, vaporizing the terrorist. Unfortunately, it also vaporizes our goat-cart driver. So the basic tally is that we’ve killed one terrorist, but we’ve made enemies of the goat-cart driver’s wife, all of his kids, his brothers, his wife’s brothers, and all of the nieces and nephews for whom he was the kindly old uncle who brought them all oranges whenever he came by. Nobody in the village will get their toasters fixed for quite a long time, so they’re pretty pissed, too.

So, I repeat, how many terrorists have we created? From the New York Times:

The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.
The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.

First of all, this is a monumental news break for the Times, My Lai from the air on repeat. It's also a record of complete moral abdication on the part of the United States with regard to the war it has decided to make in that part of the world. This is an astonishing bit of reporting. It also calls for a public statement from a certain former president. No, not that one*. The one before him.

The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.” This was the promise: America’s “extraordinary technology” would allow the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones.

Well, that didn’t work out very well, did it?

The Times even found a Pentagon spokesman who conceded the basic principle underlying the Goat Cart Theory, while insisting that any practical implementation of it is purely accidental.

He described minimizing the risk of harm to civilians as “a strategic necessity as well as a legal and moral imperative,” driven by the way these casualties are used “to feed the ideological hatred espoused by our enemies in the post 9/11 conflicts and supercharge the recruiting of the next generation of violent extremists.”

Doing a swell job there, folks.

There is no way to determine that full toll, but one thing is certain: It is far higher than the Pentagon has acknowledged. According to the military’s count, 1,417 civilians have died in airstrikes in the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria; since 2018 in Afghanistan, U.S. air operations have killed at least 188 civilians. But The Times’s analysis of the documents found that many allegations of civilian casualties had been summarily discounted, with scant evaluation. And the on-the-ground reporting — involving a sampling of cases dismissed, cases deemed “credible” and, in Afghanistan, cases not included in the trove of Pentagon documents — found hundreds of deaths uncounted.

What is most galling is the continued insistence by administrations of both parties on clinging to the fantasy that all our causes are just, all our anger is justified, all our weapons superior, and all our intentions pure. We make war in places the way that human beings always make war in places: with bloody certainty and for our own purposes, until we decide not to make war in that place anymore.

Often, the danger to civilians is lost in the cultural gulf separating American soldiers and the local populace. “No civilian presence” was detected when, in fact, families were sleeping through the days of the Ramadan fast, sheltering inside against the midsummer swelter or gathering in a single house for protection when the fighting intensified. In many cases, civilians were visible in surveillance footage, but their presence was either not observed by analysts or was not noted in the communications before a strike. In chat logs accompanying some assessments, soldiers can sound as if they are playing video games, in one case expressing glee over getting to fire in an area ostensibly “poppin” with ISIS fighters — without spotting the children in their midst.

Jesus, it’s 20 years since 9/11 and we still don’t know anything about the places we’ve been making war, or the people who live there and just want to continue to live there. Read the whole thing, and read the next part tomorrow. And try to remember it when the goat-cart driver’s nephew comes to call.

In a Public First, January 6 Committee Requests Information From a Sitting Member of Congress January 6, 2021. (photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images)

In a Public First, January 6 Committee Requests Information From a Sitting Member of Congress
Peter Wade, Rolling Stone
Wade writes: "As Alex Jones filed suit against the House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6 and indicated his intent to plead his Fifth Amendment right not to self-incriminate, the committee moved forward with its investigation, asking Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) to provide documents and testimony. Perry is the first known member of Congress to be asked to supply information to the committee."

“At this time, the Select Committee seeks your voluntary cooperation,” the committee wrote in a letter to Rep. Scott Perry

As Alex Jones filed suit against the House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6 and indicated his intent to plead his Fifth Amendment right not to self-incriminate, the committee moved forward with its investigation, asking Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) to provide documents and testimony. Perry is the first known member of Congress to be asked to supply information to the committee.

The committee requested testimony from Perry, one of 21 Republicans who voted against a bill to honor Capitol Police officers who responded to the insurrection, in a letter requesting his voluntary cooperation. It has not yet issued a subpoena to Perry.

“I stand with immense respect for our Constitution, the Rule of Law, and the Americans I represent who know that this entity is illegitimate, and not duly constituted under the rules of the U.S. House of Representatives,” Perry said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “I decline this entity’s request and will continue to fight the failures of the radical Left who desperately seek distraction from their abject failures of crushing inflation, a humiliating surrender in Afghanistan, and the horrendous crisis they created and refuse to address at our southern border.”

“At this time, the Select Committee seeks your voluntary cooperation,” the committee’s chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), wrote in the letter. Thompson went on to say that the committee has “evidence from multiple witnesses” that Perry played an “important role” in the efforts to install Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general, part of a plot to keep Trump in power despite his electoral loss.

According to the letter, both Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue have “provided evidence” to the committee about the plans to install Clark. The letter alleged that Perry had “multiple text and other communications” with Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, about Clark via encrypted texting app Signal. The committee has requested a deposition from Clark, but Thompson wrote that Clark told the committee he intends to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said he also plans to exercise his right not to self-incriminate. He additionally claims that his activity around Jan. 6 is protected by the First Amendment right to protected speech and journalistic activities and the Fourth Amendment right to privacy. Meadows sued the committee as well after providing documents and communications, hoping to prevent the panel from accessing his Verizon phone records. Organizers of the Stop the Steal rally that directly preceded the deadly riot have also sued the committee to keep their phone records secret.

“With respect to his deposition subpoena, Jones has informed the Select Committee that he will assert his First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights to decline to produce the documents requested by the Select Committee, asserting that he engaged in constitutionally protected political and journalistic activity under the First Amendment, that the Fourth Amendment guarantees him a right of privacy in his papers, and that he is entitled to due process and the right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment,” Jones and his attorneys argued in a lawsuit against the committee filed Monday.

In the suit, Jones said the panel requested he appear for a Jan. 10 deposition and rejected his request to submit “written responses” to questions instead of in-person testimony. The suit claimed that the committee has issued a subpoena to AT&T for “virtually every phone call and text that Jones made” between Nov. 1, 2020, and Jan. 31, 2021. The select committee is “only interested in prosecuting political adversaries,” the suit said. Further, it argued that the panel has no “legislative purpose.” The suit also cheekily refers to the two Republican members of the committee — Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Mich.) — both as “purportedly” Republican members of the House.

How One of America's Largest Employers Leans on Federal Law Enforcement People arrive for work at the Amazon distribution center in the Staten Island borough of New York, Monday, Oct. 25, 2021. (photo: Craig Ruttle/AP)

How One of America's Largest Employers Leans on Federal Law Enforcement
Emily Birnbaum and Daniel Lippman, POLITICO
Excerpt: "Amazon has found a powerful ally to help it protect its sprawling operations from fraud and abuse: the U.S. government."

Amazon has increasingly tipped off the Justice Department and FBI to investigate its own employees and the sellers using its platform, according to a POLITICO analysis. 

Amazon has found a powerful ally to help it protect its sprawling operations from fraud and abuse: the U.S. government.

The company has increasingly tipped off the Justice Department and FBI to investigate Amazon’s own employees and the sellers using its platform, according to a POLITICO analysis and a dozen interviews with Amazon employees, former federal prosecutors and financial crime experts. In addition, it has hired dozens of former DOJ and FBI employees, some of whom are filling out its internal teams aimed at policing its platform.

In the process, Amazon has built a closer relationship than many large companies have with federal law enforcement, a deep cooperation with one branch of the federal government that could help the company’s reputation in Washington as Amazon faces intensifying scrutiny from Congress and federal agencies over its market dominance and fraud on its platform.

The federal government has also indicted 20 people for crimes related to Amazon in the past year and a half, according to an analysis of public records — a number that exceeds indictments related to other comparably large companies like Walmart and FedEx. Over the same time period, the DOJ has announced three indictments against people committing criminal activity involving Walmart and two involving crimes related to FedEx.

Meanwhile, 15 more people are under federal investigation for Amazon-related crimes, according to the DOJ’s disclosures. Six of the people indicted have pleaded guilty; 14 are awaiting trial. In many of those cases, Amazon either tipped off the government or cooperated closely with the investigations.

J. Kelly Strader, an author and academic focused on how companies deal with the government when they handle white-collar crime, said Amazon’s approach suggests a strategy that goes beyond simply reining in criminal activity.

“This looks like a huge and powerful company attempting to generate goodwill and appear to be cooperative with the government,” Strader said.

Ankush Khardori, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in financial fraud and white-collar crime, called Amazon’s tighter relationship a “smart thing for a company like Amazon to do in the current political climate,” in which the major tech companies are coming under greater regulatory scrutiny.

“It’s interesting because it’s different from a lot of the other tech companies,” Khardori said. He added that the other companies have a more “passive” relationship with law enforcement — mostly focused on access to their data.

While federal officials have discretion over which criminal cases they choose to pursue, Amazon has invested significant resources into pushing prosecutors and investigators to take on cases that it prefers. And the company appears to be getting results.

Many of the law enforcement actions show Amazon attempting to address the billions of counterfeit goods, fraudulent listings and scams on its ever-growing e-commerce platform amid criticism from federal regulators and U.S. lawmakers that it hasn’t done enough to curtail criminal activity. (Amazon said in 2019 that it had more than 8,000 employees fighting fraud on the platform, a number that stands at 10,000 now.) In doing so, Amazon has also built up an apparatus to make sure its issues get quick attention from law enforcement agencies with limited resources, in what some critics argue amounts to outsourcing what should be internal policing of its platform to federal law enforcement.

“This is not the best way for Amazon to deal with these issues,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Consumer Protection Subcommittee. “Amazon’s platform has become a crime scene riddled with dangerous, defective and counterfeit products. While Amazon cooperates with the government in some cases, in others, we have seen it relist its own supply of counterfeit products multiple times even after agreeing to stop.”

The company has established an internal unit filled with former federal prosecutors and investigators to root out counterfeits on Amazon’s platform. That unit, which Amazon created amid legislative threats from lawmakers, has been busily handing off leads to the government.

One former government official who now works at Amazon said the company has formed “analytical groups” filled with former government officials that are tasked with conducting investigations both into fraud and theft on Amazon’s platform.

Although Amazon is known to have sway with lawmakers and regulators, the company’s successful push for criminal proceedings is meaningful, considering law is traditionally seen as an arena insulated from corporate influence.

For its part, Amazon argues that its referrals to law enforcement show that it is taking forceful action against criminal activity.

“We take our responsibility seriously to protect our customers and selling partners from fraud and abuse,” said Amazon spokesperson Jodi Seth. “We are proud of the industry-leading investments we’ve made in technology and human expertise to prevent criminal activity and deter bad actors.”

“Like any responsible company, when we become aware of activity that is potentially illegal, we refer it to law enforcement to further investigate,” Seth said. She added that Amazon encourages “more companies to help stop fraud at the source by holding bad actors accountable — it’s the right thing to do and it would help protect more people.”

DOJ, meanwhile, said it does not favor any company in deciding what to investigate.

“The Justice Department’s long-standing practice is to encourage tips of criminal wrongdoing from all sources, to not favor one company over another, to follow the facts and evidence where they lead, and to bring criminal prosecutions only in accordance with the Principles of Federal Prosecution,” DOJ spokesperson Dena Iverson said in a statement.

Comparable employers like Walmart and FedEx also struggle with criminal activity across their large operations, though they often face different issues. Former FedEx employees, for instance, have been connected to a trucking bribery scheme and charged with mail theft. And Walmart has been the victim of high-profile robberies. The DOJ has sued Walmart for unlawful opioid distribution and FedEx for drug-related criminal charges. The companies have disputed the charges, and the charges against FedEx were dropped during the trial. The DOJ has not sued Amazon, which has a smaller footprint in pharmaceuticals distribution.

Amazon builds ties to the feds

Amazon has spent years building a closer relationship with federal law enforcement, by partnering with the DOJ and FBI and hiring many former officials. It’s similar to the approach taken by large financial institutions like banks, which often proactively refer cases of money laundering or fraud to the government in order to avoid liability. “Sometimes when companies or financial institutions uncover fraud, they want to get ahead of it,” said one former federal prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss cases they participated in. “They want to go to the government and say, ‘This is a one-off.’”

Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor in the securities and commodities fraud section of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago, said law enforcement often begins to rely on the groundwork laid by big companies like Amazon, who can afford to invest resources into their partnerships with the government. “If a company is able to put together a case well, they can serve it up on a silver platter with a bow on it to law enforcement to make it very easy for federal law enforcement to take,” Mariotti said.

Amazon has hired people with deep ties to federal law enforcement to bolster its work. The company currently employs at least 21 former federal prosecutors and at least 49 former FBI employees, according to a review of LinkedIn pages of current Amazon employees. Those hires include Jeffrey Goldberg, former deputy chief of the fraud section of the DOJ’s criminal division; Andrew Devore, former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York; and Sean Farrell, former chief of the FBI’s cyber unit. Brian Huseman, the vice president of public policy at Amazon and a powerful figure in its Washington office, is a former DOJ trial attorney.

“Amazon’s hiring of former federal law enforcement agents seems like a strategy to avoid liability without seriously addressing the fundamental problems with its marketplace,” Schakowsky said. Amazon did not respond to a question about its hiring of former DOJ and FBI officials.

Aitan Goelman, former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, said former government officials “do get a head start in terms of credibility” in the eyes of current federal prosecutors. “[Prosecutors] are less likely to believe someone’s coming in and misleading [them] if they’re a former FBI agent,” Goelman said.

Joining forces on big investigations

Amazon has teamed up with the federal government on a slew of cases in recent years.

Amazon extensively supported and publicized the DOJ’s prosecution of six individuals, including two former Amazon employees, who were indicted in the Western District of Washington on charges of bribing co-workers to gain advantages for third-party sellers on the company’s platform. That trial is expected to begin in January.

Amazon has also invested significant resources into taking on Carl Nelson, a former Amazon Web Services real estate manager whom the company has accused of participating in a complex pay-for-play scheme to steer AWS into entering into certain data center leases. During the FBI’s investigation, which has lasted more than 22 months, the bureau has seized more than $890,000 from Nelson and his wife, Amy, forcing the couple to sell their house and cars, liquidate their retirement funds and move in with family in Ohio, according to court filings. Nelson denies all of the allegations, and he has not been charged with any wrongdoing. Nelson sued Amazon in Washington for breach of contract, and while some of his claims are still pending, the court found that Amazon willfully breached its contract with him and awarded him damages. Amazon is pursuing civil racketeering and antitrust claims against Nelson in Virginia, among other allegations.

“I exist in this world where a company can simply accuse someone of a crime … and as a result a government can take away every dollar a parent has,” Amy Nelson posted on her Instagram earlier this year. “No one should have to endure this.”

Although Nelson’s case is uniquely complicated, he is only one of several dozen former employees who have faced the combined resources of the U.S. government and Amazon. Amazon reported one of them, former employee Vu Anh Nguyen, to U.S. authorities in July 2020, accusing him of using Amazon’s internal tools to produce fraudulent refunds to himself and his associates. Nguyen pled guilty to one count of wire fraud and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.

Amazon has also teamed up with government investigators to go after sellers who have abused its giant platform.

The company assisted with an investigation into Joseph Sides, a Florida man accused of creating more than 500 Amazon accounts using false information to place more than 1,200 orders, which he returned and refunded. Sides ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years probation.

The e-commerce company has touted its cooperation with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the Department of Homeland Security during an investigation into four men accused of wire fraud and money laundering. The men were arrested and charged with engaging in a scheme to systematically defraud Amazon’s vendor system, forcing Amazon to pay for goods that the company had not ordered, according to the company statement. Amazon did not offer more details on the company’s views on the case.

Ilana Haramati, a lawyer representing one of the defendants in that case, Zishe Abraham, called the government’s charges “trumped up civil disputes disguised as purported crimes.”

“Taxpayer dollars and government resources should not be used to help Amazon settle a business score,” Haramati said in an email.

The Trump administration launched a campaign led by DHS to force Amazon and other e-commerce platforms to crack down on counterfeits and illicit activity on its platform. One former senior DOJ official told POLITICO that the DOJ and FBI have also been pressing Amazon for years to better police criminal activity. The former official added that the DOJ needs to be “mindful and careful that they’re not being used by the company that brings them the complaint and the information — that they’re doing so for legitimate law enforcement reasons and not to gain competitive advantage and some sort of business advantage.”

Public naming and shaming

Amazon differentiates itself from other large corporations by publicly touting legal actions it has taken against its employees and users amid accusations from lawmakers and regulators that it has not done enough to police its platform and has allowed employees access to data from third-party sellers.

When a man in Rhode Island pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges for returning products that were of lesser quality to Amazon for refunds, the company issued a news release expressing gratitude to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Rhode Island. The court sentenced Michael Chaves to 30 months in federal prison for defrauding Amazon of more than $50,000.

In a press release about the Western District of Washington case last year, the company wrote, “There is no place for fraud at Amazon and we will continue to pursue all measures to protect our store and hold bad actors accountable.”

Goelman, the former assistant U.S. attorney, said companies are often willing to put up with the bad publicity of criminal proceedings to deter current workers from attempting to take advantage of their positions. “Companies don’t want the negative publicity of articles written about fraud on their platform, but they also want to make themselves a harder target,” Goelman said.

Still, some other big retailers shy away from that approach. A Walmart executive said while the company does sometimes pursue criminal proceedings against employees, it has chosen to keep such legal action out of the press. “I think there are ways to send a signal to our own employee base that these things won’t be tolerated without having to do a press release,” the executive said, requesting anonymity in order to speak candidly about internal company dynamics.

Deflecting legislative scrutiny

Amazon began partnering more closely than ever with federal law enforcement as it came under fire in recent years for the masses of counterfeit products on its platform — and particularly after Congress began considering legislation that would force the company to take more responsibility for the counterfeits on its site.

One congressional aide involved in negotiations around the INFORM Consumers Act, which would require Amazon and other e-commerce platforms to implement more anti-counterfeit measures, said Amazon set up a unit focused on counterfeit issues only after the legislation was introduced.

“The sequencing of it could make it appear” that Amazon set up its Counterfeit Crimes Unit, which was established specifically to aid law enforcement investigations, in response to the legislative threat, the aide said, requesting anonymity to speak about private discussions with Amazon. Amazon did not respond to a question about whether the unit was established in response to legislative pressure.

The aide said lawmakers backing the legislation believe law enforcement can help reduce the number of counterfeits but “one-off, after-the-fact enforcement actions” are not enough to solve the issue. “There’s too much volume of illicit sales on these sites for that to be an adequate deterrent,” the aide added.

For now, legislation that would force Amazon to take more measures to police crime on its platform is moving slowly through Congress. And in the meantime, Amazon is only continuing to strengthen its ties to federal law enforcement — including by recently hiring Matthew Alcoke, a senior FBI official who was in charge of counterterrorism for the bureau’s D.C. field office during the Jan. 6 insurrection, as senior manager for physical security at AWS, according to a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss personnel. Alcoke didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A UAE Agency Put Pegasus Spyware on Phone of Jamal Khashoggi's Wife Months Before His Murder, New Forensics Show A projected story line and images (featuring Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman) were projected onto the front of the Newseum in Washington, D.C., Oct. 1, 2019. (photo: Michael S. Williamson/WP)

A UAE Agency Put Pegasus Spyware on Phone of Jamal Khashoggi's Wife Months Before His Murder, New Forensics Show
Dana Priest, The Washington Post
Priest writes: "Emirates flight attendant Hanan Elatr surrendered her two Android cellphones, laptop and passwords when security agents surrounded her at the Dubai airport. They drove her, blindfolded and in handcuffs, to an interrogation cell on the edge of the city, she said. There, she was questioned all night and into the morning about her fiance, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi."

The new analysis challenges NSO claims that the
murdered journalist’s wife, Hanan Elatr, ‘was not a target’

Emirates flight attendant Hanan Elatr surrendered her two Android cellphones, laptop and passwords when security agents surrounded her at the Dubai airport. They drove her, blindfolded and in handcuffs, to an interrogation cell on the edge of the city, she said. There, she was questioned all night and into the morning about her fiance, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The spyware had been developed by an Israeli firm, NSO Group, for what it says is use against terrorists and criminals. The website was configured by NSO for a United Arab Emirates customer, said Marczak, whose research group is based at the University of Toronto and devoted to uncovering cyberespionage.

The new analysis provides the first indication that a UAE government agency placed the military-grade spyware on a phone used by someone in Khashoggi’s inner circle in the months before his murder.

“We found the smoking gun on her phone,” said Marczak, who examined Elatr’s two Androids at The Washington Post’s and her request. Emirati authorities returned them to her several days after her release.

Marczak said he could see the Android trying to install Pegasus, but he could not determine whether the spyware had successfully infected the phone, which would enable Pegasus to steal its contents and turn on its microphone. But he said the UAE operator did not type the website address in a second time, which would ordinarily be expected in the event of a failed first attempt.

Elatr’s phone was confiscated just after she and Khashoggi had gotten engaged and were in a long-distance relationship. Because both traveled frequently, with Elatr based in Dubai and Khashoggi in Washington, they often discussed travel and meeting plans in the United States and abroad using apps on their phones, according to Elatr and her phone records.

Marczak discovered the https://myfiles[.]photos address in 2017 while researching the presence of Pegasus spyware on global networks. By scanning the Internet, Citizen Lab was able to identify a network of computers and more than a thousand Web addresses used to deliver Pegasus spyware to the phones of targets in 45 countries, according to group’s landmark “Hide and Seek” report. The methodology has been used by other cyber-researchers to identify Pegasus hacks worldwide.

The researchers found a particular set of web addresses, including https://myfiles[.]photos, associated with Pegasus targets primarily in the UAE.

Working with an international journalism consortium led by the Paris-based nonprofit Forbidden Stories, The Post reported in July that an unknown operator employing Pegasus sent five SMS text messages over an 18-day period in November 2017 and a sixth one on April 15, 2018, according to an analysis by Amnesty International’s Security Lab of Elatr’s Androids. The research could not determine if the texts resulted in Pegasus being installed inside the phone.

Marczak’s research advances the understanding of what happened to Elatr’s phone by identifying a UAE agency operator in the process of trying to install Pegasus on the device while she was in UAE custody. He also found forensic data indicating her Android was also trying to install Pegasus.

Following The Post’s report in July, NSO Group chief executive Shalev Hulio said a thorough check of the firm’s client records showed none had used Pegasus to attack the phones of Khashoggi or Elatr before a Saudi hit team murdered him in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018.

“Regarding the wife of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi … We checked and she was not a target,” Hulio told an Israeli technology publication in July. “There are no traces of Pegasus on her phone because she was not a target.”

After The Post’s most recent reporting, NSO’s attorney, Thomas Clare, said, “NSO Group conducted a review which determined that Pegasus was not used to listen to, monitor, track, or collect information about Ms. Elatr. The Post’s continued efforts to falsely connect NSO Group to the heinous murder of Mr. Khashoggi are baffling.”

Clare said the premise was “deeply flawed” and the details “make no sense from a technical standpoint.” He said Pegasus is installed remotely and that it would therefore be “completely unnecessary and make no sense” that a human would type the address of a Pegasus-linked website into a target’s phone.

That capability is described in NSO’s own marketing materials, first published in an unauthorized leak in 2014. The documents were filed as an exhibit in an ongoing lawsuit WhatsApp brought against NSO in 2019, alleging that Pegasus used the WhatsApp messaging service to infect phones. The materials state, “When physical access to the device is an option, the Pegasus agent can be manually injected and installed in less than five minutes.”

Clare acknowledged that the spyware uses SMS texts to send website links that deliver Pegasus attacks. But he said that “technological safeguards prevent” this method from being used six times in an 18-day period. The NSO marketing materials say that “the system operator can choose to send a regular text message (SMS) or an email, luring the target to open it … although the target clicked the link they will not be aware that software is being installed on their device.”

Clare said the marketing materials “are outdated and do not necessarily provide accurate descriptions of the software’s capabilities and limitations as of 2018.”

The Israeli Ministry of Defense requires NSO to get its approval before selling Pegasus to a foreign country to ensure the sale is in Israel’s national interest. NSO says it has sold Pegasus to 60 government agencies in 40 countries.

NSO said it has no visibility into the real-time targeting of individuals by its clients after it licenses its software to them. But the firm can demand access to customer records to investigate allegations of abuse. The company has said it has shut down five clients in the past several years and forgone millions of dollars in revenue because of its concern for human rights. It also said its technology has saved many lives by enabling law enforcement agencies to catch terrorists and criminals.

“There is one thing I want to say: We built this company to save life. Period,” Hulio told The Post in July.

He said of the reports of the attacks on journalists and other abuse: “It’s horrible. I am not minimizing it. But this is the price of doing business. … This technology was used to handle literally the worst this planet has to offer. Somebody has to do the dirty work.”

The international investigation found that authoritarian governments have used Pegasus against journalists, human rights defenders, diplomats, lawyers and pro-democracy opposition leaders. New revelations continue to roll out. France found traces of the spyware on the phones of five ministers. The U.S. State Department announced that indications of Pegasus were found on the phones of 11 employees in Uganda. After initial denials, Hungary admitted it used the spyware.

Countries have responded forcefully. The United States, Britain and France each spoke with high-level Israel officials to express their consternation. The Biden administration blacklisted NSO Group from receiving access to certain U.S. technologies last month, adding it to an “entities list” reserved for companies whose activities are “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.” NSO said it was “dismayed” by the move and is seeking its reversal. Apple is suing NSO to prevent it from targeting iPhones with Pegasus in the future.

“I’m glad governments are beginning to understand that the lack of regulation can lead to deadly consequences,” said Randa Fahmy, Elatr’s Washington-based pro bono attorney.

The UAE, a federation of monarchies in the Persian Gulf, has been one of NSO’s most notorious clients. It has used Pegasus against anti-regime activists, journalists and even a royal princess attempting to escape her father, the international media investigation and others have found. In October, a British court revealed that NSO Group ended its contract with the UAE because Dubai’s ruler had used it to hack the phones of his ex-wife and her lawyer, a member of Britain’s House of Lords.

The UAE continues to deny all allegations against it. The UAE Embassy in Washington did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In the past, the UAE has denied allegations that it used Pegasus against human rights activists and other civil society figures.

The UAE is a longtime ally of Saudi Arabia. In 2013, the two countries signed a mutual security agreement promising cooperation on intelligence and law enforcement matters. The UAE has spied on Saudi dissidents abroad and sent them to Riyadh, according to human rights groups and a recent lawsuit filed in federal court in Portland, Ore., on behalf of an imprisoned Saudi human rights activist.

The human consequences of Pegasus abuse

Three years ago, Hanan Elatr was a globe-trotting supervisor for the Emirates airlines. She was married to a pro-democracy icon and earning a salary that allowed her to support her mother and siblings. Today, she said, she fears for her life.

“Every day when I see the daylight, I don’t know why I’m still alive, because I’m the second victim after Jamal in this tragedy,” she said in a recent interview, tearing up. “I lost my life … I used to provide for my family and now I can’t even find my own food.”

She has spent most of her savings and for a time was sleeping on an air mattress in an empty apartment. At age 53, she recently moved into a basement bedroom of a stranger while waiting for her political asylum case to work its way through the system.

With the help of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), she recently received a temporary work visa. In addition to organizing her new life, she dresses in her finest clothes and high heels, does her makeup and hair and then takes the Metro or buses to job interviews at local hotels and restaurants. Last week she landed a job as a waitress for $2.70 an hour plus tips.

Elatr said she feels forgotten in the wake of Khashoggi’s murder. She found out he had disappeared via Twitter after waking up from a long flight, alone in her apartment in Dubai. While she was dealing with the likelihood he had been murdered, she was also learning that he was planning to marry another woman, an accepted practice among Muslims in some countries.

His new fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, was waiting for him outside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He had gone there to obtain a document necessary to marry her. Instead, he was murdered with the approval of Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman, U.S. intelligence agencies later concluded. Mohammed has denied any involvement, and some of his underlings have been convicted and sentenced for the crime.

Cengiz, whom Le Monde later dubbed the “unofficial heiress of Jamal Khashoggi,” became an effective spokeswoman in front of the crowd of television cameras that gathered outside the consulate.

Elatr, meanwhile, has struggled for attention. She was Khashoggi’s fourth wife, after his three divorces. Many of Khashoggi’s friends in Washington did not know about his marriage to her in Virginia in June 2018.

“Nobody knew her. Jamal had kept it a secret,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, a longtime human rights advocate and the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a Mideast-focused organization founded by Khashoggi. “I don’t know what was going on in his head.”

Amnesty International’s initial steps to help Elatr as far back as May are still tangled in bureaucracy and miscommunication seven months later, according to correspondence between the organization and Elatr’s attorney. The organization said it has been overwhelmed by surges in refugees and said that “unfortunately there were unexpected delays” in handling Elatr’s case, but it intends to reconnect with her to complete a review of the matter.

In Turkey, Cengiz’s life has been demolished, too, she told The Post in an interview in Istanbul this summer. Turkey has assigned her constant bodyguards, and safety considerations prevent her from traveling in the region and remaining in her academic position.

“In the case of both Hanan and Hatice, their lives have been completely upended. Both have paid a tremendous price,” said Whitson. “Hanan has been interrogated and harassed by the UAE and is in dire financial straits and Hatice,” too, is suffering.

Death threats, interrogations and house arrest

On the evening of April 21, 2018, Elatr had finished a 15-hour flight from Toronto to the UAE, weary and ready for bed, when she entered immigration as usual at Dubai International Airport. She immediately noticed a cluster of official-looking men staring at her. She knew that Khashoggi was a target because of his human rights advocacy. She rushed to the bathroom to call her sister.

“Something is not right,” she remembers telling her in the toilet stall. She quickly deleted WhatsApp, which she and Khashoggi used to communicate. When she came out of the restroom, a large man trapped her on one side and the sole woman in the group on the other. “Walk with us quietly and behave,” the man whispered.

She felt sick and began shaking uncontrollably, she said. The agents drove her to her home, blindfolded and in handcuffs, to search for documents and computers, according to her sworn affidavit in her asylum case. Three friends of Elatr’s have given her lawyers affidavits attesting that Elatr recounted the same facts to them soon after she was released.

Then they drove her to the al-Awir Central Jail, a large high-security complex, on the edge of the city. She was fingerprinted. Agents took a DNA swab from her mouth. They photographed her face from various angles. And then more intense questions about Khashoggi began late at night and into the morning.

She recalled them asking: What are Jamal’s activities? Who is Jamal’s network? What is Jamal’s income? How is Jamal’s health? She answered every question, she said. She said she told them there was no network preparing to topple the Persian Gulf monarchies. Yes, Khashoggi wanted political activists freed from Saudi prisons. Yes, he favored democracy and respect for human rights in the Arab world. But the royal families should have roles, too, like those in Britain and Sweden. When the agents left her alone, she slid onto the floor to sleep.

The agents brought her back to her house after 17 hours, but she was put under house arrest for 10 days. The interrogations and months-long stints of house arrests continued over the next year, as did phone harassment by her intelligence agency handler, who called himself Mohammed Abdu, she said. Elatr’s siblings in Dubai and Egypt also were interrogated and had their passports confiscated when they tried to travel to see their ailing mother or visit Elatr.

Unbeknown to Elatr, the Emiratis had been using Pegasus to try to spy on her as far back as November 2017, according to Amnesty’s Security Lab. It was a period of telephonic courtship between two people always on the go, as she traveled for the airlines and he gave speeches and met associates in Europe and Turkey.

The profilers designed fake SMS messages to get her to click on a link and infect her phones: They tempted her with a flower bouquet she would receive at home with one click …

Dear Hanan, a flower bouquet was sent to you. Choose delivery location here: http://bit.ly/ …

… photos from her sister Mona if she would click on another link …

MONA ELATR shared a photo with you on Photobucket! Click here to view it and download our app. http://bit.ly/ …

… a package waiting at the office of a common Emirati carrier, if she would click on yet another …

Dear HANAN, you have a package from CAIRO via Aramex, enter PIN 3483 and choose delivery location on our map: http://bit.ly/ …

The beginning of April was a big week for Elatr and Khashoggi. He had proposed to her on April 3, she said, and gave her an engagement ring. Pegasus was used in an attack on one of her phones again on April 15, 2018, with an SMS message using the “myfiles[.]photos” website address, the same one the agent would type into one of the Androids a week later.

The couple continued to meet and communicate by phone, using multiple new apps that Khashoggi told Elatr he hoped would make it harder for him to be surveilled. Just past midnight on Sept. 7, their last in-person meeting, she texted him after she had landed in New York City. They planned to stay together at the Sheraton Hotel.

Hello Jamal. I am on the bus on the way to the hotel. Where are you Jamal?

He responded:

In the hotel lobby

Followed by a message about his impatience in waiting to see her.

Three weeks later she sent him her flight schedule, which had her arriving at Dulles International Airport on an Oct. 20 flight to Washington, where they planned to meet again.

On Sept. 30, Khashoggi was in Turkey arranging to marry Cengiz but sent Elatr birthday greetings from two phones. One message read:

“Bless you, happy birthday, may you be well and happy this year.”

On Oct 1, at 2:12 a.m., she replied:

“I appreciate it a lot and hope you are well and happy … from the plane back to Dubai.”

The next day he was murdered.

Elatr intends to ask Turkish authorities for his phones. The authorities have refused to release them or to publicly share what they have learned. As relations warm between Turkey and Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Elatr doubts she will ever get answers.

“I feel very devastated that I might be the tool to watching Jamal,” Elatr recently told The Post. “I want to know how many countries were watching my husband move and what were the tools used against my husband.”

Black Wealth Could Get 40% Boost if Biden Heeds Calls to Cancel Student Debt Debt Collective rally. (photo: Facebook)

Black Wealth Could Get 40% Boost if Biden Heeds Calls to Cancel Student Debt
Ella Ceron, Bloomberg
Ceron writes: "The Biden administration's plan to let a moratorium on student loan payments expire has renewed calls for the president to forgive student debt of up to $50,000 per person. If enacted, the move would help millions of Americans, particularly Black borrowers."

The Biden administration’s plan to let a moratorium on student loan payments expire has renewed calls for the president to forgive student debt of up to $50,000 per person. If enacted, the move would help millions of Americans, particularly Black borrowers.

“It’s time for the administration to cancel $50,000 in student debt and give relief to people who are getting crushed,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, tweeted on Monday. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, urged Biden to “lean on his executive authority” to ease student loans burdens for millions of Americans.

A June report from the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, found that erasing $50,000 in student loans per person would immediately increase Black wealth by 40%. The analysis found that Black borrowers in the bottom 10% of net worth would have around $5,000 more forgiven than their White counterparts.

Forgiving $50,000 in student loans “would provide more benefits to those with fewer economic resources and could play a critical role in addressing the racial wealth gap and building the Black middle class,” the Roosevelt Institute wrote in its brief. “The reason for this progressivity is simple: People from wealthy backgrounds (and their parents) rarely use student loans to pay for college.”

President Joe Biden campaigned on forgiving up to $10,000 in undergraduate loans per borrower. Under his plan, students who attended public colleges or historically Black private colleges would qualify for additional forgiveness if their families make less than $125,000. Earlier this year, Biden resisted calls from congressional Democrats to forgive $50,000, and has yet to enact his plan.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a Dec. 14 briefing with reporters that Congress hasn't yet sent Biden a bill to forgive or cancel $10,000 in debt, but that “if Congress sends him a bill, he's happy to sign it. They haven't sent him a bill on that yet.”

According to the Education Data Initiative, 43.2 million Americans collectively hold $1.75 trillion in student loan debt, but Black students graduate with more debt and it takes them longer to pay it off, too. According to 2019 analysis from the Center for American Progress, 32% of Black students had already defaulted on their loans six years after beginning either a two-year or four-year college.

This is partly because Black people in the U.S. hold seven times less wealth, on average, than White people — making it harder for them to pay off their debts even when making middle-class incomes. Loan burdens are also holding Black people from building additional wealth through buying homes or starting businesses.

'They Are Fed Up': US Labor on the March in 2021 After Years of Decline Demonstrators rally in front of Jeff Bezos' home in New York City in November. (photo: John Lamparski/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock)

'They Are Fed Up': US Labor on the March in 2021 After Years of Decline
Michael Sainato, Guardian UK
Sainato writes: "Amid constant claims from some industries of labor shortages as the economy recovers from Covid-19 shutdowns, workers have been pushing employers and elected officials to raise wages, improve working conditions and benefits such as paid sick leave through walkouts, protests, rallies and strikes."

Workers went on strike and pushed union drives in record numbers after corporations made giant pandemic profits

In 2021 workers appear to have had enough.

Amid constant claims from some industries of labor shortages as the economy recovers from Covid-19 shutdowns, workers have been pushing employers and elected officials to raise wages, improve working conditions and benefits such as paid sick leave through walkouts, protests, rallies and strikes.

The last few months of 2021 saw workers quit at record or near record rates, while an uptick of strikes occurred around the US in October and November 2021.

“I’ve been traveling a lot to picket lines all over the country in the last couple of months, been in so many different states and across all industries. But the one thing that’s been really consistent is the sentiment of the working people who are out there taking the risks is that they are absolutely fed up,” said Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the main union federation in the US.

Thousands of workers went on strike in 2021 at Frito-Lay, Nabisco, Kellogg’s, John Deere, Volvo, Frontier Communications, New York University, Columbia University, Harvard, carpenters in the Pacific north-west, hospitals, airports and at coalmines in Alabama, while workers at several fast-food and retail chains including McDonald’s, Walmart, Wendy’s, Burger King, Bojangles, Jack in the Box and Family Dollar, held walkouts or short-term strikes.

Shuler believes that the hardships of the pandemic – when so much focus was put on the sacrifices of workers in often manual jobs that were deemed essential – has sparked a reawakening of labor politics in America, especially as some companies have tried to go back to business as usual.

Shuler added: “When I was walking the line with those Nabisco workers, and Kellogg’s workers, I kept thinking about all of them in the plant, making Oreos and the Ritz crackers, while the rest of us were inside consuming those. Those are the folks that really made the sacrifices and the whole time, they were told that they were essential. Then they go to the bargaining table, and they’re basically disposable because the companies continued to profit through the pandemic and then say, ‘Thanks, but we’re not going to compensate you, we’re not going to protect you, we’re not going to value and reward you for making those sacrifices.’”

One of the year’s most important strikes is playing out in the deep south where about 1,100 coalminers at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama have been on strike since 1 April, as workers fight for better wages after accepting concessions in their previous union contract.

“The past eight months have been some of the hardest times of our lives. I don’t think any of us imagined the strike would be going into its ninth month with no end in sight, but I’m proud of our resolve,” said James Traweek, a miner who has worked for four years at Warrior Met Coal in Brookwood, Alabama.

Other strikes have broken records.

At the Tenet Healthcare-owned St Vincent hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, about 700 nurses have been on strike since 8 March over understaffing and cuts at the hospital before and during the pandemic, the longest strike in Massachusetts’ history.

Tenet Healthcare has sought to permanently replace nurses on strike as the hospital faces fines from the state for closing down inpatient behavioral health beds due to the strike. An agreement fell through in August over Tenet Healthcare’s return to work agreement that would have prevented some nurses from returning to their previous positions.

“Saint Vincent hospital nurses’ fight has now become all of labor’s fight,” said Marlena. “It’s a big red flag for all of labor and all of humanity that if you stand up for what you believe in on principle and stand up for patients and you stand up for one another as workers, Tenet Healthcare’s strategy is that you can be replaced and will be punished for that. That’s very dangerous, this strategy trying to diminish our union rights instead of coming to a settlement, trying to intimidate nurses to cross a picket line.”

On 18 December, a tentative agreement was reached after the US secretary of labor, Marty Walsh, served as mediator in the final negotiating session, which will end the strike if approved by the nurses.

The Labor Action tracker at Cornell University Institute of Labor Relations documented 346 strike locations in 2021 as of 10 December. Johnnie Kallas, the project director , attributed an uptick in strikes in October and November to increased leverage of workers in a labor market where workers are in high demand and burnout of workers who have continued working through the pandemic.

“Labor market conditions can provide workers with more leverage, but strikes don’t just automatically happen. They often require deep organizing and always require incredible sacrifice,” said Kallas.

Unionization rates in the US have declined over the past few decades, but several union organizing efforts were launched in 2021 in response to pandemic working conditions, while labor leaders and unions continue pushing for labor law reforms to rein in anti-union employers and facilitate US workers’ ability to organize unions and engage in collective bargaining.

According to unionelections.org, 890 union elections in the private sector were held in the US in 2021 as of 11 December, with 573 resulting in a new union certification. Union election rates and union density in the US have been in a downward decline over the past several decades, though approval of labor unions in the US is at 68% according to a September Gallup poll.

“If we see any changes, it will be next year. Between the tight labor market and the high profile coverage of the strikes and recent elections, Starbucks for example, I’d expect to see some increase,” said Kevin Reuning, assistant professor of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who manages the unionelections.org website.

Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, attempted to form the first union at the retail giant in the spring and though the union lost the election, the National Labor Relations Board has ordered a new election to be held due to Amazon’s anti-union misconduct. At the same time New York’s attorney general is pressuring Amazon to reinstate a fired employee and improve safety protections amid a union organizing drive led by the terminated employee, Chris Smalls, in Staten Island.

Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York, also won a historic union election on 9 December, forming the first union at a Starbucks corporate store in the US. A second branch is likely to have won their union election after challenged ballots are resolved and three more stores are set to hold union elections in Buffalo, New York, and another in Arizona. With the union victory spurring optimism, it could lead to more stores requesting to unionize.

“It was a major victory,” said Brian Murray, a Starbucks barista in the Buffalo area and one of the organizers with Starbucks Workers United. “I think our real fight will be now getting a first contract and hopefully having them recognize the right to organize, but with these wins I’m sure we’ll see more workers organizing nationwide in the near future.”

Why You Can't Trust Claims of Humane Treatment on Meat and Dairy Labels. Hogs at an Illinois farm in 2018. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Why You Can't Trust Claims of Humane Treatment on Meat and Dairy Labels.
Jessica Scott-Reid, Vox
Scott-Reid writes: "Most meat, dairy, and eggs sold in the US come from factory farms, where animals are tightly packed together in dark, unsanitary warehouses. But you wouldn't know it while browsing the meat, dairy, and egg aisles at the grocery store."

Why you can’t trust claims of humane treatment on meat and dairy labels.

Most meat, dairy, and eggs sold in the US come from factory farms, where animals are tightly packed together in dark, unsanitary warehouses. But you wouldn’t know it while browsing the meat, dairy, and egg aisles at the grocery store. A carton of “all natural” eggs might bear an illustration of a rustic farm; packages of chicken meat are touted as “humanely raised.”

In a few cases, these sunny depictions are accurate. But far too often they mask the industrial conditions under which these animals were raised and slaughtered.

Animal welfare and consumer protection advocates have a name for such misleading labeling: “humanewashing.” And research suggests it’s having precisely the effect that meat producers intend it to. A recent national survey by C.O.nxt, a food marketing firm, found that animal welfare and “natural” claims on meat, dairy, and egg packaging increased the intent to purchase for over half of consumers.

The problem is that most of the feel-good terms that food companies place on their products and appear in their advertising, such as “humane” or “ethically raised,” aren’t legally defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The USDA does require documentation to support the claims, but according to experts, those claims aren’t closely scrutinized.

And according to the data research company SPINS, meat and dairy products sold with animal welfare claims are on the rise, while the USDA reported that in 2019 alone, the agency received over 10,000 applications for animal-raising claims.

Over the past two decades, undercover investigations into factory farms have racked up hundreds of millions of views on social media, giving more people for the first time a glimpse into the barbarity of America’s meat industry. Growing awareness of these conditions has led to higher expectations among a certain subset of consumers that animals raised for food should be treated better.

But rather than engaging in the costly endeavor of actually changing their farming practices, far too many major meat producers are attempting to assuage consumer concerns by merely changing their packaging and advertising with claims of sustainable farms and humane treatment. These efforts mislead consumers, and undermine the small sliver of farmers who have put in the hard work to actually improve animal treatment.

The problem of humanewashing underscores an important point for animal welfare efforts: Consumer concern can only go so far. Consumers need accurate information to make more informed choices, but even then, they shouldn’t alone bear the burden of reducing animal suffering through what they buy, especially when that entails navigating a messy haze of dubious claims. Real policy change, with consumers and animals in mind, is needed to rein in America’s humanewashing problem.

The labels you read on meat packages, briefly explained

Humane claims presented on meat products first emerged in the mid-’90s, says Dena Jones of the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an American nonprofit advocacy group. The labels started appearing in the UK before making their way to US shelves by the early 2000s. “Through the success of those [labeling] programs, consumers started to view humane and humanely raised as a valuable claim,” she says.

“Then, the industry figured that out. And that’s how we got here.”

“Here” is a meat, egg, and dairy market in which food companies can easily make animal welfare and sustainability claims that sound wholesome and genuine without changing their practices meaningfully — or at all.

For example, labeling claims such as “ethically/responsibly/thoughtfully raised” have no legal definition and can be used on products that come from factory farms where welfare requirements are no higher than standard practices. In essence, any producer can make these claims.

Labeling claims made about the environment in which animals are kept can also be deceiving. For example, stating that meat from chickens or turkeys is “cage-free” may give the impression of higher animal welfare and entice a more conscious consumer to choose that product over another. But the claim is practically meaningless because chickens and turkeys raised for meat in the US aren’t caged.

On the other hand, most hens raised for eggs are caged, and when “cage-free” is found on egg cartons, it means something. However, typical cage-free egg farms often still subject chickens to awful conditions. While the birds are indeed never caged — which is a significant welfare improvement — they’re likely not given access to outdoors, as marketing may imply.

Some claims, such as “vegetarian-fed” or “omega-3-enriched eggs” can also give the impression that the animal care on these farms is somehow superior to what goes on at standard factory farms, even though the claims have nothing to do with animal welfare. Meanwhile, the “organic” label can have meaningful animal welfare implications — though it’s complicated.

Even when certain terms are defined by the USDA, they can and are often used to exaggerate the level of animal care, such as “free-range.” “Consumers should understand that free-range likely isn’t what they picture it to be: chickens spending all their time on pastures,” Rachel Krantz wrote for Vox, “because space requirements are undefined, and because free-range birds do spend most of their time indoors.”

Humanewashing and regulation

At its core, humanewashing is a regulatory problem. The USDA and FDA oversee different parts of the food industry, and each agency has different processes for approving product labels that enable meat, dairy, and egg producers to exaggerate animal welfare claims.

Let’s start with the USDA, which regulates beef, pork, chicken, turkey, and other meats, as well as “liquid eggs” — meaning eggs used as an ingredient in liquid or powder form by food manufacturers and restaurants. (“Shell” eggs, the kind you buy in a carton at the grocery store, are regulated by the FDA; more on this later.)

If you run a company that sells any of these products and you want to slap “humanely raised” on them, the expectation is that no one from the USDA actually comes out to inspect your farms (and they wouldn’t even have a definition of “humanely raised” to judge it by). Instead, meat producers must merely fill out a written application offering substantiation as to how their animals are “humanely raised,” supply a sketch of the label ... and that’s about it. Essentially, the USDA is taking the meat company at its word.

When AWI reviewed approximately 45 of those label applications, “half of the files the USDA gave us we consider inadequate substantiation of claim,” says Jones.

A spokesperson for the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) told Vox, “The Animal Welfare Institute has brought their concerns to our attention and we are reviewing the materials they submitted to determine whether any changes need to be made to our approach to animal raising claims.” However, FSIS jurisdiction only applies from the time of slaughter, not when an animal is alive on a farm.

This USDA preapproval process has the effect of shielding meat producers from labeling lawsuits, so there’s almost no way to legally challenge the labeling of products under USDA regulation, according to Jay Shooster, an associate and senior animal welfare legal fellow at Richman Law & Policy, a social justice law firm based in New York. Shooster says that’s because courts have held that USDA-approved labels are immune from private lawsuits and federal authority — through the Poultry Products Inspection Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act — preempts state laws that cover false advertising.

Instead, advocacy groups file complaints with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a government agency that exists to protect consumers from fraud or deception in the marketplace.

Earlier this year, AWI filed a complaint against the meat producer Boar’s Head, requesting that the FTC investigate the company for allegedly using false and misleading claims stating its turkey and chicken sausage products are made from animals that are “humanely raised.” AWI argues that Boar’s Head uses the same cruel, industry-standard practices as other meat producers, so it shouldn’t be allowed to promote its products as humane.

On its packaging and website, Boar’s Head states: “Boar’s Head Brand defines humanely raised as animals raised with shelter, resting areas, sufficient space and the ability to engage in natural behaviors.”

That definition might sound nice to the average consumer, but it doesn’t tell us much about how the company actually treats its animals.

For example, all factory-farmed chickens and turkeys are provided “shelter,” which usually looks like being confined in a dark, barren barn. “Sufficient space” is subjective, and Boar’s Head doesn’t define how much space is sufficient. Boar’s Head doesn’t explain what a “resting area” is, or what “natural behaviors” their animals can engage in. And the company doesn’t address breeding — the most critical welfare problem for chickens raised for meat. (Nearly all chickens in the US have been bred to grow so large, so fast, that they have trouble walking.) Boar’s Head didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Some humane labeling claims are backed up by third-party auditing, which sounds like it should help, but the credibility of these audits can vary, and can be difficult for consumers to parse. In some cases this means independent animal welfare organizations are checking on and confirming welfare label claims, while in other cases the audits are being done by for-profit companies with varying standards.

The egg industry’s main trade association, the United Egg Producers (UEP), says it hires independent auditors to inspect farms that get its “United Egg Producers Certified” label, but that doesn’t mean much since the UEP’s animal welfare guidelines allow for continuous cage confinement, one of the cruelest practices in intensive farming. (UEP’s separate “cage free certified” label does not allow for cages.)

While the USDA covers meat, poultry, and liquid egg products, the FDA oversees dairy, fish, and shell eggs. The FDA doesn’t have a label preapproval process like the USDA. So, explains Laurie Beyranevand, director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School, food producers regulated by the FDA can essentially write whatever they want on their labels regarding farming practices and animal treatment (which also opens them up to litigation from advocates — more on this later). When reached for comment, an FDA representative referred me to the USDA/FSIS, which both referred me back to the FDA.

Advocacy groups have been pushing for a change in the standards and enforcements for meat and dairy labeling. AWI is asking the USDA to change how it regulates food labels, though notably not by asking it to legally define “humane.” “We don’t want [the USDA] to define humane, because we know they would define it as industry standard,” Jones says. Instead, AWI is requesting the USDA mandate third-party certification for humane and sustainability claims so that they are indeed above industry standards. That would look like the higher-welfare standards detailed in the certification AWI created, Certified Animal Welfare Approved, for the advocacy group A Greener World.

A more direct route involves challenging humanewashing in court. Richman Law & Policy has filed complaints on behalf of nonprofit advocacy groups in response to advertising claims made by mega producers like Tyson, Cargill, and Sargento.

How Tyson responded to its lawsuit challenging the company on its humane and sustainable claims for its chicken products is particularly telling. Tyson admitted in court that the terms it used were “merely opinions, predictions, and aspirations at best.” This year, a DC Superior Court rejected Tyson’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, ruling the nonprofits adequately alleged “injury to those consumers who have been or will be deceived by defendant’s alleged marketing and advertising.”

“Most consumers don’t want to support this industry that is abusing animals, workers, rural communities, and our environment,” says Shooster. “But rampant false advertising is leading consumers to buy the exact products they’re trying to avoid and taking customers away from businesses that are offering genuine alternatives.”

In 2018 and 2019, Richman Law & Policy filed two separate lawsuits against Ben & Jerry’s over its claims that it sources milk and cream from “happy cows,” alleging that only a small amount of the company’s ingredients come from higher-welfare farms. Ben & Jerry’s argued that it never claimed to exclusively source ingredients from “happy cows,” though in 2020, the company announced it had removed the claim due to a label redesign. Later, Richman withdrew from one case, and another was dismissed.

“While we haven’t done an official survey of our cows’ happiness, we’re proud of the work we’ve done with Vermont’s family farmers over the past 35 years,” a Ben & Jerry’s spokesperson told Today in 2020.

Shooster says that going after individual companies “creates legal precedent that impacts the whole food industry and deters other companies from making similarly deceptive claims.”

Yet another avenue for change involves taking labeling challenges to the Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division (NAD), which is tasked with enforcing “high standards of truth and accuracy” in advertising and media.

In 2019, AWI filed a complaint with NAD against Hatfield Quality Meats, a subsidiary of Clemens Food Group, the 11th-largest US pork producer. The complaint pertained to Hatfield’s labeling claims that its pigs were “Ethically Raised by Family Farmers Committed to a Higher Standard of Care, Governed by Third Party Animal Welfare Audits.”

NAD ruled that Hatfield’s standards were “not sufficient to substantiate the claim,” and recommended they remove the claim from their labels. The decision marked the first time NAD recommended the removal of a label claim on a meat product. (Hatfield did not respond when reached for comment.)

A consumer’s guide to higher-welfare meat, milk, and eggs

For consumers seeking meat, dairy, or egg products from farms that exceed — to varying degrees — baseline factory farming conditions, advocates often point to three specific labels: Global Animal Partnership (GAP)-Certified, Certified Humane, and Certified Animal Welfare Approved.

As Rachel Krantz wrote for Vox in 2019 about the Global Animal Partnership-Certified label:

GAP is a nonprofit that uses a five-step program to rate the welfare of cattle, chickens, pigs, hens, bison, goats, sheep, and turkeys. For chickens raised for meat, steps 1 through 3 each require improvements related to space, air quality, lighting, outdoor access, and other issues. But not until step 4 are producers required to use “higher-welfare breeds,” meaning birds that do not grow so fast they can barely walk. You might be familiar with GAP if you shop at Whole Foods, which uses the rating program for its meat, dairy, and eggs.

Though their standards are higher than the typical factory farm, activist investigations of a couple of GAP-approved farms have alleged abusive conditions. In response to one investigation, which documented dirty, injured turkeys, a Whole Foods spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal: “Our team found that the conditions were not as they were portrayed in the video.” In response to another investigation, where investigators found turkeys being thrown and kicked, GAP suspended the farm in question and stated it was investigating the matter.

Meanwhile, “[t]he Certified Animal Welfare Approved certification is overseen by the nonprofit A Greener World (AGW),” Krantz wrote. “For a producer to receive certification, continuous outdoor pasture access is required for all animals, and crates and cages are prohibited for all species. Additionally, transportation time for all chickens and turkeys cannot exceed four hours, since they are not given food or water during transport.”

Krantz also adds that Certified Humane, not to be confused with American Humane Certified, “has set welfare standards for each species. These include no cages for hens and sows, and, for chickens and turkeys, shorter transport times and better lighting relative to industry standards. Cattle are required to have outdoor access, but chickens, turkeys, and pigs are not.”

These programs certainly require better conditions for animals than the typical factory farm, which is undoubtedly good — though it’s important to bear in mind that even “humane” treatment is a low bar considering nearly all farmed animals are treated in ways that would be criminal if done to a dog or cat. And buyer beware — some major meat producers and industry groups have created their own labels and certification programs, with requirements that simply codify standard factory farming animal treatment.

For example, the One Health Certified program was created by one of the largest poultry producers in the US, Mountaire Farms. But the ASPCA and Consumer Reports have both deemed animal welfare claims made by the One Health Certified program to be misleading. The grocery chain Giant Eagle recently decided to discontinue One Health Certified chicken from its stores after allegations of humanewashing. (Mountaire did not respond to a request for comment.)

Other certification programs that seem to do little more than codify standard animal treatment, rather than meaningfully improve it, include American Humane Certified by the nonprofit American Humane, and the Farmers Assuring Responsible Management (FARM) program, which is run by the industry group National Milk Producers Federation. When reached for comment as to whether the FARM program simply follows standard industry practices, a spokesperson stated that it “reflects the latest science in its dairy animal care standards.” (American Humane did not respond to a request for comment.)

Despite clear differences among certifications, consumers have little understanding of them. A new survey from animal advocacy group Farm Forward found that among respondents who say they purchase humanely labeled meat every month, around 40 percent incorrectly believed that all products sold under GAP, American Humane Certified, and One Health Certified came from pasture-raised animals.

“These results demonstrate that consumers are largely holding all of these certifications, regardless of whether they are independent or industry-created, to the same standards, and are unable to distinguish among them,” the report reads. “This confusion creates the perfect environment for humanewashing.”

This is unsurprising, given that most consumers aren’t going to look into the specifications of each label. But the survey also found that consumer confusion is high even when it comes to more straightforward labels: Almost 40 percent of respondents thought that eggs from “cage-free” hens guaranteed that the hens were raised continuously on pasture.

What’s a conscious consumer to do?

There are a few important takeaways: Get acquainted with the labeling and certification landscape, eat less but “better” meat, and try out more plant-based meat alternatives.

At Vermont Law School, Beyranevand says nearly every year a student in her food regulation and policy class expresses disbelief that it requires taking a legal class in order to understand how food labels are regulated — or not regulated — in the US.

“If we have students in law school who feel like it’s absurd that they are taking this class to learn about food labels, then maybe we should make the laws more accessible,” she says.

To help the general public better understand food labels, Beyranevand and her students developed an interactive site that dissects what certain food labels actually mean. AWI, Farm Forward, the ASPCA, and Vox have also created labeling guides.

Another issue with purchasing higher-welfare meat, dairy, and eggs is that they cost much more than factory-farmed products, making them inaccessible for many Americans. One way to deal with this price differential is to opt for higher-welfare products but fewer of them.

The higher cost also limits how wide a consumer base higher-welfare meat, dairy, and egg products can reach. The same is true of plant-based meat, dairy, and egg alternatives, which also typically cost more than factory-farmed products. But those are continuing to come down in price, and taste better than the meat analogues of the past.

Setting aside alternatives, the confusion created by humanewashing poses a challenge to the work of changing consumer habits. Jones believes it’s neither fair nor realistic to put all of the responsibility on consumers to make sense of ever-changing information. “I don’t think we can expect consumers, or at least a large number of them, to ever be able to figure this out on their own,” she says.

Ultimately, what’s needed to curtail humanewashing is policy change — getting the USDA to require third-party certification for humane and sustainable claims, and to ensure they’re higher than industry standards, or calling on Congress to actually define humane and other terms.

Either path will be an uphill battle, but perhaps there’s an opening for the animal welfare cause by leaning into an alliance with one of the most powerful constituencies in the US: the consumer.

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