05 January 22
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There's a new actor in the piece with regard to January 6.
Hey, we have a new one, according to the New York Times.
Now congressional investigators are examining the role of another right-wing paramilitary group that was involved in a less publicly visible yet still expansive effort to keep President Donald J. Trump in power: the 1st Amendment Praetorian. Known in shorthand as 1AP, the group spent much of the postelection period working in the shadows with pro-Trump lawyers, activists, business executives and military veterans to undermine public confidence in the election and to bolster Mr. Trump’s hopes of remaining in the White House.
By their own account, members of the 1st Amendment Praetorian helped to funnel data on purported election fraud to lawyers suing to overturn the vote count. They guarded celebrities like Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, at “Stop the Steal” rallies, where huge crowds gathered to demand that Mr. Trump remain in office. And they supported an explosive proposal to persuade the president to declare an emergency and seize the country’s voting machines in a bid to stay in power.
You have to admit they have a real gift for naming themselves. At least they won’t be testifying in Latin.
Made up largely of Special Forces veterans and former intelligence officials, 1AP was founded in September 2020 to protect Trump supporters from harassment at rallies and to safeguard free speech rights from “tyrannical, Marxist subversive groups,” Mr. Lewis wrote in a thread of tweets announcing the creation of the group. In a video attached to the thread, he said it would be “a tactical mistake” to discuss how many members 1AP had, noting only that it was several times more than the dozen in a standard Special Forces operational unit.
I’m starting to wonder whether or not having a massive intelligence apparatus and a huge standing military since the end of World War II has been all that great an idea, especially now that the alumni are starting to go into business for themselves. After all, the original Praetorians got pretty good at icing emperors with whom they were dissatisfied, and they defied the civil authority to do anything about it. Which, most times, it did not.
In the interview, Mr. Rhodes described how the two groups worked together at the rally. He then urged Mr. Trump to “wage war” against “traitors” at home by imposing martial law. That was the same message that Ms. Powell, Mr. Flynn and others in their orbit were advising at the time. Mr. Lewis says he played his own small part in the effort to persuade Mr. Trump to declare martial law. On Dec. 18, he said on a podcast last year, he drove Ms. Powell and Mr. Flynn to the White House to meet with Mr. Trump. It is not clear whether Mr. Lewis attended the meeting, where Ms. Powell and Mr. Flynn urged the president to declare a national emergency and demand a recount of key swing states on live TV, according to the business executive Patrick M. Byrne, who was also there.
Another member of 1AP posted on Twitter that afternoon, claiming he was in an “overwatch position” in Arlington County, Va., where prosecutors say the Oath Keepers had placed at a hotel an armed “quick reaction force” that was prepared to move into Washington if needed. As for Mr. Lewis, he told The Daily Beast last year that he was at the Willard again on Jan. 6, away from the chaos at the Capitol. “Today is the day the true battles begin,” he wrote on Twitter just as the Capitol was breached.
There were people who saw this coming. Journalist Dave Neiwert was on this case back when it seemed that this kind of thing was limited to a bunch of goons in the wilds of Idaho. In Alt-America, his most recent book, Neiwert reminds us of Robert Paxton’s persuasive definition of fascism as a movement that is marked…
“by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood”, in which “a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion”.
A lot of what Paxton describes has evolved into instinctual behavior in our present politics. These elements of fascism are already here. Its vocabulary and syntax have long been an important part of our national dialogue. They simply have not yet fully coalesced. God help us if they do.
Washington, Jan. 6, 2021: A police flash-bang grenade illuminates Trump protesters outside the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
ALSO SEE: US Could Be Under Rightwing Dictator by 2030,
Canadian Professor Warns
The U.S. is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. What should Canada do then?
We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.
Leading American academics are now actively addressing the prospect of a fatal weakening of U.S. democracy.
This past November, more than 150 professors of politics, government, political economy and international relations appealed to Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would protect the integrity of US elections but is now stalled in the Senate. This is a moment of “great peril and risk,” they wrote. “Time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching.”
I’m a scholar of violent conflict. For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto.
Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals.
I’m not surprised by what’s happening there – not at all. During my graduate work in the United States in the 1980s, I sometimes listened to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk show host and later television personality. I remarked to friends at the time that, with each broadcast, it was if Mr. Limbaugh were wedging the sharp end of a chisel into a faint crack in the moral authority of U.S. political institutions, and then slamming the other end of that chisel with a hammer.
In the decades since, week after week, year after year, Mr. Limbaugh and his fellow travellers have hammered away – their blows’ power lately amplified through social media and outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax. The cracks have steadily widened, ramified, connected and propagated deeply into America’s once-esteemed institutions, profoundly compromising their structural integrity. The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war.
How should Canada prepare?
In 2020, president Donald Trump awarded Mr. Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The act signalled that Mr. Limbaugh’s brand of bullying, populist white ethnocentrism – a rancid blend of aggrieved attacks on liberal elites, racist dog-whistling, bragging about American exceptionalism and appeals to authoritarian leadership – had become an integral part of mainstream political ideology in the U.S.
But one can’t blame only Mr. Limbaugh, who died in early 2021, and his ilk for America’s dysfunction. These people and their actions are as much symptoms of that dysfunction as its root causes, and those causes are many. Some can be traced to the country’s founding – to an abiding distrust in government baked into the country’s political culture during the Revolution, to slavery, to the political compromise of the Electoral College that slavery spawned, to the overrepresentation of rural voting power in the Senate, and to the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War. But successful polities around the world have overcome flaws just as fundamental.
What seems to have pushed the United States to the brink of losing its democracy today is a multiplication effect between its underlying flaws and recent shifts in the society’s “material” characteristics. These shifts include stagnating middle-class incomes, chronic economic insecurity, and rising inequality as the country’s economy – transformed by technological change and globalization – has transitioned from muscle power, heavy industry, and manufacturing as the main sources of its wealth to idea power, information technology, symbolic production and finance. As returns to labour have stagnated and returns to capital have soared, much of the U.S. population has fallen behind. Inflation-adjusted wages for the median male worker in the fourth quarter of 2019 (prior to the infusion of economic support owing to the COVID-19 pandemic) were lower than in 1979; meanwhile, between 1978 and 2016, CEO incomes in the biggest companies rose from 30 times that of the average worker to 271 times. Economic insecurity is widespread in broad swaths of the country’s interior, while growth is increasingly concentrated in a dozen or so metropolitan centres.
Two other material factors are key. The first is demographic: as immigration, aging, intermarriage and a decline in church-going have reduced the percentage of non-Hispanic white Christians in America, right-wing ideologues have inflamed fears that traditional U.S. culture is being erased and whites are being “replaced.” The second is pervasive elite selfishness: The wealthy and powerful in America are broadly unwilling to pay the taxes, invest in the public services, or create the avenues for vertical mobility that would lessen their country’s economic, educational, racial and geographic gaps. The more an under-resourced government can’t solve everyday problems, the more people give up on it, and the more they turn to their own resources and their narrow identity groups for safety.
America’s economic, racial and social gaps have helped cause ideological polarization between the political right and left, and the worsening polarization has paralyzed government while aggravating the gaps. The political right and left are isolated from, and increasingly despise, each other. Both believe the stakes are existential – that the other is out to destroy the country they love. The moderate political centre is fast vanishing.
And, oh yes, the population is armed to the teeth, with somewhere around 400 million firearms in the hands of civilians.
Some diagnoses of America’s crisis that highlight “toxic polarization” imply the two sides are equally responsible for that crisis. They aren’t. While both wings of U.S. politics have fanned polarization’s flames, blame lies disproportionately on the political right.
According to Harvard’s renowned sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol, in the early 2000s fringe elements of the Republican party used disciplined tactics and enormous streams of money (from billionaires like the Koch brothers) to turn extreme laissez-faire ideology into orthodox Republican dogma. Then, in 2008, Barack Obama’s election as president increased anxieties about immigration and cultural change among older, often economically insecure members of the white middle-class, who then coalesced into the populist Tea Party movement. Under Mr. Trump, the two forces were joined. The GOP became, Dr. Skocpol writes, a radicalized “marriage of convenience between anti-government free-market plutocrats and racially anxious ethno-nationalist activists and voters.”
Now, adopting Mr. Limbaugh’s tried-and-true methods, demagogues on the right are pushing the radicalization process further than ever before. By weaponizing people’s fear and anger, Mr. Trump and a host of acolytes and wannabees such as Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have captured the storied GOP and transformed it into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy.
And it’s not inaccurate to use the F word. As conservative commentator David Frum argues, Trumpism increasingly resembles European fascism in its contempt for the rule of law and glorification of violence. Evidence is as close as the latest right-wing Twitter meme: widely circulated holiday photos show Republican politicians and their family members, including young children, sitting in front of their Christmas trees, all smiling gleefully while cradling pistols, shotguns and assault rifles.
Those guns are more than symbols. The Trump cult presents itself as the only truly patriotic party able to defend U.S. values and history against traitorous Democrats beholden to cosmopolitan elites and minorities who neither understand nor support “true” American values. The Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. capitol must be understood in these terms. The people involved didn’t think they were attacking U.S. democracy – although they unquestionably were. Instead, they believed their “patriotic” actions were needed to save it.
Democracy is an institution, but underpinning that institution is a vital set of beliefs and values. If a substantial enough fraction of a population no longer holds those beliefs and values, then democracy can’t survive. Probably the most important is recognition of the equality of the polity’s citizens in deciding its future; a close runner up is willingness to concede power to one’s political opponents, should those equal citizens decide that’s what they want. At the heart of the ideological narrative of U.S. right-wing demagogues, from Mr. Trump on down, is the implication that large segments of the country’s population – mainly the non-white, non-Christian, and educated urban ones – aren’t really equal citizens. They aren’t quite full Americans, or even real Americans.
This is why Mr. Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him – a falsehood that nearly 70 per cent of Republicans now accept as true – is such potent anti-democratic poison. If the other side is willing to steal an election, then they don’t play by the rules. They’ve placed themselves outside the American moral community, which means they don’t deserve to be treated as equals. There’s certainly no reason to concede power to them, ever.
Willingness to publicly endorse the Big Lie has become a litmus test of Republican loyalty to Mr. Trump. This isn’t just an ideological move to promote Republican solidarity against Democrats. It puts its adherents one step away from the psychological dynamic of extreme dehumanization that has led to some of the worst violence in human history. And it has refashioned – into a moral crusade against evil – Republican efforts to gerrymander Congressional districts into pretzel-like shapes, to restrict voting rights, and to take control of state-level electoral apparatuses.
When the situation is framed in such a Manichean way, righteous ends justify any means. One of the two American parties is now devoted to victory at any cost.
Many of those with guns are waiting for a signal to use them. Polls show that between 20 and 30 million American adults believe both that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump and that violence is justified to return him to the presidency.
In the weeks before the November, 2016, U.S. election, I talked to several experts to gauge the danger of a Trump presidency. I recently consulted them again. While in 2016 they were alarmed, this last month most were utterly dismayed. All told me the U.S. political situation has deteriorated sharply since last year’s attack on Capitol Hill.
Jack Goldstone, a political sociologist at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., and a leading authority on the causes of state breakdown and revolution, told me that since 2016 we’ve learned that early optimism about the resilience of U.S. democracy was based on two false assumptions: “First, that American institutions would be strong enough to easily withstand efforts to subvert them; and second, that the vast majority of people will act rationally and be drawn to the political centre, so that it’s impossible for extremist groups to take over.”
But especially after the 2020 election, Dr. Goldstone said, we’ve seen that core institutions – from the Justice Department to county election boards – are susceptible to pressure. They’ve barely held firm. “We’ve also learned that the reasonable majority can be frightened and silenced if caught between extremes, while many others can be captured by mass delusions.” And to his surprise “moderate GOP leaders have either been forced out of the party or acquiesced to a party leadership that embraces lies and anti-democratic actions.”
Mr. Trump’s electoral loss has energized the Republican base and further radicalized young party members. Even without their concerted efforts to torque the machinery of the electoral system, Republicans will probably take control of both the House of Representatives and Senate this coming November, because the incumbent party generally fares poorly in mid-term elections. Republicans could easily score a massive victory, with voters ground down by the pandemic, angry about inflation, and tired of President Joe Biden bumbling from one crisis to another. Voters who identify as Independents are already migrating toward Republican candidates.
Once Republicans control Congress, Democrats will lose control of the national political agenda, giving Mr. Trump a clear shot at recapturing the presidency in 2024. And once in office, he will have only two objectives: vindication and vengeance.
A U.S. civil-military expert and senior federal appointee I consulted noted that a re-elected president Trump could be totally unconstrained, nationally and internationally.
A crucial factor determining how much constraint he faces will be the response of the U.S. military, a bulwark institution ardently committed to defending the Constitution. During the first Trump administration, members of the military repeatedly resisted the president’s authoritarian impulses and tried to anticipate and corral his rogue behaviour – most notably when Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, shortly after the Capitol insurrection, ordered military officials to include him in any decision process involving the use of military force.
But in a second Trump administration, this expert suggested, the bulwark could crumble. By replacing the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs with lackeys and sycophants, he could so infiltrate the Department with his people that he’ll be able to bend it to his will.
After four years of Mr. Trump’s bedlam, the U.S. under Mr. Biden has been comparatively calm. Politics in the U.S. seems to have stabilized.
But absolutely nothing has stabilized in America. The country’s problems are systemic and deeply entrenched – and events could soon spiral out of control.
The experts I consulted described a range of possible outcomes if Mr. Trump returns to power, none benign. They cited particular countries and political regimes to illustrate where he might take the U.S.: Viktor Orban’s Hungary, with its coercive legal apparatus of “illiberal democracy”; Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, with its chronic social distemper and administrative dysfunction; or Vladimir Putin’s Russia, with its harsh one-man hyper-nationalist autocracy. All agreed that under a second Trump administration, liberalism will be marginalized and right-wing Christian groups super-empowered, while violence by vigilante, paramilitary groups will rise sharply.
Looking further down the road, some think that authority in American federalism is so disjointed and diffuse that Mr. Trump, especially given his manifest managerial incompetence, will never be able to achieve full authoritarian control. Others believe the pendulum will ultimately swing back to the Democrats when Republican mistakes accumulate, or that the radicalized Republican base – so fanatically loyal to Mr. Trump – can’t grow larger and will dissipate when its hero leaves the stage.
One can hope for these outcomes, because there are far worse scenarios. Something resembling civil war is one. Many pathways could take the country there – some described in Stephen Marche’s new book The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future. The most plausible start with a disputed 2024 presidential election. Perhaps Democrats squeak out a victory, and Republican states refuse to recognize the result. Or conversely, perhaps Republicans win, but only because Republican state legislatures override voting results; then Democratic protestors attack those legislatures. In either circumstance, much will depend on whether the country’s military splits along partisan lines.
But there’s another political regime, a historical one, that may portend an even more dire future for the U.S.: the Weimar Republic. The situation in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s was of course sui generis; in particular, the country had experienced staggering traumas – defeat in war, internal revolution and hyperinflation – while the country’s commitment to liberal democracy was weakly rooted in its culture. But as I read a history of the doomed republic this past summer, I tallied no fewer than five unnerving parallels with the current U.S. situation.
First, in both cases, a charismatic leader was able to unify right-wing extremists around a political program to seize the state. Second, a bald falsehood about how enemies inside the polity had betrayed the country – for the Nazis, the “stab in the back,” and for Trumpists, the Big Lie – was a vital psychological tool for radicalizing and mobilizing followers. Third, conventional conservatives believed they could control and channel the charismatic leader and rising extremism but were ultimately routed by the forces they helped unleash. Fourth, ideological opponents of this rising extremism squabbled among themselves; they didn’t take the threat seriously enough, even though it was growing in plain sight; and they focused on marginal issues that were too often red meat for the extremists. (Today, think toppling statues.)
To my mind, though, the fifth parallel is the most disconcerting: the propagation of a “hardline security doctrine.” Here I’ve been influenced by the research of Jonathan Leader Maynard, a young English scholar who is emerging as one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers on the links between ideology, extremism and violence. In a forthcoming book, Ideology and Mass Killing, Dr. Leader Maynard argues that extremist right-wing ideologies generally don’t arise from explicit efforts to forge an authoritarian society, but from the radicalization of a society’s existing understandings of how it can stay safe and secure in the face of alleged threats.
Hardline conceptions of security are “radicalized versions of familiar claims about threat, self-defence, punishment, war, and duty,” he writes. They are the foundation on which regimes organize campaigns of violent persecution and terror. People he calls “hardliners” believe the world contains many “dangerous enemies that frequently operate in and through purported ‘civilian’ groups.” Hardliners increasingly dominate Trumpist circles now.
Dr. Leader Maynard then makes a complementary argument: Once a hardline doctrine is widely accepted within a political movement, it becomes an “infrastructure” of ideas and incentives that can pressure even those who don’t really accept the doctrine into following its dictates. Fear of “true believers” shifts the behaviour of the movement’s moderates toward extremism. Sure enough, the experts I recently consulted all spoke about how fear of crossing Mr. Trump’s base – including fear for their families’ physical safety – was forcing otherwise sensible Republicans to fall into line.
The rapid propagation of hardline security doctrines through a society, Dr. Leader Maynard says, typically occurs in times of political and economic crisis. Even in the Weimar Republic, the vote for the National Socialists was closely correlated with the unemployment rate. The Nazis were in trouble (with their share of the vote falling and the party beset by internal disputes) as late as 1927, before the German economy started to contract. Then, of course, the Depression hit. The United States today is in the midst of crisis – caused by the pandemic, obviously – but it could experience far worse before long: perhaps a war with Russia, Iran or China, or a financial crisis when economic bubbles caused by excessive liquidity burst.
Beyond a certain threshold, other new research shows, political extremism feeds on itself, pushing polarization toward an irreversible tipping point. This suggests a sixth potential parallel with Weimar: democratic collapse followed by the consolidation of dictatorship. Mr. Trump may be just a warm-up act – someone ideal to bring about the first stage, but not the second. Returning to office, he’ll be the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy, but the process will produce a political and social shambles. Still, through targeted harassment and dismissal, he’ll be able to thin the ranks of his movement’s opponents within the state – the bureaucrats, officials and technocrats who oversee the non-partisan functioning of core institutions and abide by the rule of law. Then the stage will be set for a more managerially competent ruler, after Mr. Trump, to bring order to the chaos he’s created.
A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. Over the past year we’ve turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of COVID-19, reconciliation, and the accelerating effects of climate change. But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unravelling of democracy in the United States.
We need to start by fully recognizing the magnitude of the danger. If Mr. Trump is re-elected, even under the more-optimistic scenarios the economic and political risks to our country will be innumerable. Driven by aggressive, reactive nationalism, Mr. Trump “could isolate Canada continentally,” as one of my interlocutors put it euphemistically.
Under the less-optimistic scenarios, the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history. What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country, and the U.S. regime demands them back. Do we comply?
In this context, it’s worth noting the words of Dmitry Muratov, the courageous Russian journalist who remains one of the few independent voices standing up to Mr. Putin and who just received the Nobel Prize for Peace. At a news conference after the awards ceremony in Oslo, as Russian troops and armour were massing on Ukraine’s borders, Mr. Muratov spoke of the iron link between authoritarianism and war. “Disbelief in democracy means that the countries that have abandoned it will get a dictator,” he said. “And where there is a dictatorship, there is a war. If we refuse democracy, we agree to war.”
Canada is not powerless in the face of these forces, at least not yet. Among other things, over three-quarters of a million Canadian emigrants live in the United States – many highly placed and influential – and together they’re a mass of people who could appreciably tilt the outcome of coming elections and the broader dynamics of the country’s political process.
But here’s my key recommendation: The Prime Minister should immediately convene a standing, non-partisan Parliamentary committee with representatives from the five sitting parties, all with full security clearances. It should be understood that this committee will continue to operate in coming years, regardless of changes in federal government. It should receive regular intelligence analyses and briefings by Canadian experts on political and social developments in the United States and their implications for democratic failure there. And it should be charged with providing the federal government with continuing, specific guidance as to how to prepare for and respond to that failure, should it occur.
If hope is to be a motivator and not a crutch, it needs to be honest and not false. It needs to be anchored in a realistic, evidence-based understanding of the dangers we face and a clear vision of how to get past those dangers to a good future. Canada is itself flawed, but it’s still one of the most remarkably just and prosperous societies in human history. It must rise to this challenge.
U.S. Border Patrol Agent Joe Curran looks at border fence construction at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Lukeville, Ariz., on Jan. 7. (photo: Carolyn Van Houten/Getty)
The ‘big, beautiful wall’ has kept US citizens away from the no man’s land it created – and in effect ceded territory to Mexico
I hadn’t been to this area for more than a year because of the pandemic, and I was startled at how different this remote part of Texas had become. The most obvious change is the steel 18ft-high bollard fencing, among the last vestiges of Donald Trump’s glorious border wall with Mexico.
Trump visited this site in June with Governor Greg Abbott to tout his accomplishments in controlling the border and to praise Abbott for taking up the anti-immigrant baton that resonates so well with the conservative voting base in Texas.
The last time I came to visit this spot, no wall existed and the historic cemetery – the Eli Jackson cemetery – was under a 24-hour vigil by a Native American tribe called the Carrizo/Comecrudo, as well as other supporters who feared a border wall would destroy sacred burial land and a sacred piece of history.
The Eli Jackson family built this cemetery, designated a historic landmark by the state, on land owned by Nathanial Jackson, Eli’s father. Nathaniel was a slave owner from Alabama who fell in love with and married one of his slaves, Matilda Hicks, before the two fled to the banks of the Rio Grande in 1857 and settled on the border with Mexico. Nathaniel was known for his generosity to visitors and his ranch soon began a relatively unknown line of the vaunted Underground Railroad in which fleeing slaves escaped servitude and, with the Jackson family’s help, fled to Mexico where slavery was forbidden.
The Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe and its descendants also claim this area and, with the permission of the landowners, set up a camp in January 2019 to fend off any wall construction. Many of the inhabitants who camped out said they were veterans of the Keystone pipeline protests in northern Minnesota. And given the supply tent and other facilities that were erected adjacent to the Eli Jackson cemetery there was a suggestion that organizers hoped that a similarly large protest would develop in south Texas to fight the border wall.
And despite a 24-hour vigil, often by as few as one or two diehard protesters in heat and cold for nearly a year in 2019, the efforts to protect the cemetery fell victim to Covid in 2020. As federal construction crews erected Trump’s wall ever closer to the cemetery, the landowners finally told the protesters to vacate. Soon, a large sign declaring the cemetery closed and camping prohibited was posted and the steel bollards marking the wall’s arrival began to overtake the horizon less than 100 yards from the burial grounds.
When I returned to this remote site, about a mile from the Rio Grande, the first thing I noticed was a road to get over an earthen flood levee and back to the cemetery was closed; a sign said the area was now a construction zone, a Trump border wall just a few yards east of the road. I found another road that circled around to the cemetery.
The protesters’ area of encampment, once a cleared field, was now the site of overgrown vegetation, leaving little evidence of human habitation for the better part of a year, suggesting the border wall decay has begun. It’s a decay that marks the beginning of a no man’s land: virtually uninhabitable, threatening because of its isolation, essentially a chunk of US territory that might as well belong to Mexico.
That’s because in south Texas the term border wall is a misnomer because of the unpredictability of the Rio Grande and a treaty with Mexico. While the great river is dammed and channeled along its international path through Texas, the Rio Grande can still bite back with massive and unpredictable flooding. One attempt to mitigate the threat resulted in a treaty with Mexico that was signed during the Nixon administration that prevents either side from altering the flow of the river with land impediments – something like a border wall.
To protect from flooding in south Texas, a long, mostly earthen levee generally follows the route of the Rio Grande from about a mile away. So, while border walls in Arizona and California may straddle the border with Mexico, those in south Texas are typically located atop or adjacent to the levee system, meaning that this so-called protective barrier is ceding about a mile of US territory behind the wall, effectively creating a no man’s land.
It was true under the wall that was built by the George W Bush administration and it’s true of the walls that were erected during the Trump administration.
Beyond the threat the creation of a no man’s land has to private homeowners and their property values, this region is also rich in ecological sites along the river. One of these, called the Southmost Preserve, is a thousand-acre wildlife preserve home to one of the only two remaining large stands of native Mexican sabal palm. More than 900 acres of that preserve is now in a no man’s land south of a Bush wall and locals generally avoid it because of the potential danger a no man’s land poses. Another Bush wall runs near the historic Hidalgo Pumphouse Museum and World Birding Center in the city of Hidalgo. Several nature trails run behind this area. But many of those trails are now behind a border wall and impassable or too dangerous to enter.
Critics had predicted that a Trump border wall in this region would have the same no-man’s-land result. What I didn’t realize was how quickly the negative effects of this isolated land would be felt. Aside from all the warnings to keep out when I recently visited the Jackson cemetery, there was an emptiness in this area that I had never felt before. An isolation that hinted at vulnerability.
The irony of this situation is that Texas, a state that brags about its commitment to property rights, continues its fight to finish the border wall. But I noticed that there was one section of the Trump wall that was about a mile long in this area. Then there was a mile-long gap before another section of wall began. So, this barrier effectively did little to deter unauthorized immigration because the migrants simply need to walk a mile or two in either direction to go around the wall. But this barrier, this big, beautiful wall, as Trump called it, that was built to protect US citizens from the “invasion” of migrants, was only truly effective at something else: keeping US citizens away from the no man’s land that it created and ceding the territory to Mexico.
President Joe Biden's administration is funding millions of dollars' worth of upgrades to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/Getty)
President Joe Biden's administration is funding a new $4 million courtroom.
Namely, in the coming year, the administration is planning on building a new courtroom on Guantánamo Bay, according to Ron Flevsig, a spokesman for the Office of Military Commissions. The courtroom is expected to cost American taxpayers $4 million, according to The New York Times, which first reported the news.
Nearly 800 detainees have passed through Guantánamo Bay detention center since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, many of whom haven’t been charged with a crime or even been to trial yet. And while a new courtroom could signal an interest in getting proceedings to chug along, advocates of closing Guantánamo Bay tell The Daily Beast constructing the new courtroom doesn’t even come close to signaling that Guantánamo Bay closure is on the horizon anytime soon.
“Building another courtroom suggests that the plan is to forge ahead with trials in the commissions,” Scott Roehm, Washington director for the Center for Victims of Torture, told The Daily Beast. “That’s not only a fool’s errand, but a slap in the face to victims’ family members who’ve watched—or at least watched as best they can given the secrecy that still surrounds the commissions—[trials] crumble for two decades.”
The new courtroom is directly contradictory to Biden’s stated objective to close Guantánamo Bay, and squaring that circle won’t be easy moving forward, said Wells Dixon, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
”I think what this reflects is the Biden administration’s policy incoherence—if not policy failure—on Guantánamo,” Dixon, who challenges unlawful detentions at the Guantánamo prison, told The Daily Beast. “The decision to spend millions of dollars to build another courtroom is inconsistent with the administration’s stated policy objective of closing the prison.”
The new courtroom is drawing criticism from Capitol Hill as well.
“For nearly 20 years, the detention facility at Guantánamo has defied our constitutional values and the rule of law,” Sen. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told The Daily Beast. “It’s long past time to recognize the failure of the military commissions, close Guantánamo’s detention facility, and end indefinite detention. It makes no sense to continue pouring millions of taxpayer dollars into a military commission system, including by building a new and secretive courtroom, that is inconsistent with our values and has failed to deliver justice for the 9/11 victims.”
Biden’s troubles with justifying not closing Guantánamo Bay nearly one year into his presidency only begin there. The news comes months after the Biden administration pulled the U.S. out of Afghanistan, which has led Guantánamo Bay lawyers to argue that the conclusion of the war invalidated the United States’ detention authority.
The detainees remaining at Guantánamo Bay, then, must be released, they have argued in court, as The Daily Beast reported. According to the Geneva Convention, when there is a “cessation of active hostilities,” prisoners must be repatriated.
The Biden administration clearly isn’t doing that. Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Daily Beast this move is unconscionable, as it is a further stain on America’s human rights record.
”It’s part of the literal and figurative architecture that successive administrations have built to facilitate the censorship of torture which is the ongoing original sin of Guantánamo. It is confounding that the Biden administration would allow this to go forward even in the face of the president’s promise to close Guantánamo,” Shamsi told The Daily Beast. “The fundamental problem remains, which is that this is a system that is now a symbol and reality of gross human rights violations.”
The Biden administration has had trouble threading the needle on its Guantánamo Bay policy in other ways. When the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Guantánamo Bay last month, not a single representative from the administration dared to testify, which drew criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Of course, the Biden administration has appeared to make some progress—it transferred one detainee out of the prison in July of last year, and White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said the administration aims to close Guantánamo Bay by the end of Biden’s presidency.
But it’s easy to see that timeline slipping. The negotiations and approvals for that prisoner transfer—the first of the Biden administration—were made during the Obama administration. And, as Durbin pointed out last month, if prisoners are to be transferred out at that pace, detainees would remain even if Biden were re-elected to a second term.
Advocates for closure say the addition of the courtroom is not a step in the right direction, in particular because the real reason behind the snail’s pace on Guantánamo Bay cases isn’t the lack of space.
”There is a consensus that the commissions have failed—but they haven’t failed because of a lack of courtrooms,” Roehm said. “They’ve failed because they were never about justice. It’s a trial system the government hoped would allow for prosecuting the defendants while hiding [its] torture and denying [detainees] fundamental rights.”
”It’s widely accepted that the military commissions have failed to achieve justice for anybody. And building another courtroom at Guantánamo in 2022 is throwing good money after bad,” Dixon told The Daily Beast. “It’s doubling down on a system that has failed.”
Lawyers and victims’ families have long lamented the slow pace of proceedings at Guantánamo Bay, which they say stems from difficulties of running proceedings on a remote island, procedural and personnel issues along the way, and the lack of attention to due process and human rights.
Just this week, a set of hearings in the case of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, who is accused of coordinating suicide bombings, was canceled because the judge presiding decided to take a post over at the FBI and is leaving. He’s the fourth judge to preside over the case and then bail, setting the case back along the way.
Critics of Biden’s lagging approach to Gitmo say the failure of the administration to make progress on closure is self-inflicted: While the Obama administration had a special envoy on Guantánamo closure at the State Department, no such office has been carved out during the Biden administration.
Last year, Secretary of State Tony Blinken expressed interest in reviving the office, but it’s not clear that any progress has been made. The State Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
For now, the path forward from here is not clear and neither is the Biden administration’s plan to close Guantánamo Bay.
Many victims’ families have been arguing that plea deal agreements may be the best route for the U.S. government to take at this point. But if the Biden administration were truly interested in making progress on that front, it wouldn’t be about adding a new courtroom, according to Roehm, who says it all comes down to political will—or lack thereof—to take other steps.
”Pleas are the only realistic way to try to salvage a modicum of justice. This administration doesn’t need to throw money away at new courtrooms to do that,” Roehm said. “It just needs to decide it’s going to chart a new course.”
“Until the White House intervenes, it’s going to be business as usual at Guantánamo,” Dixon said.
Willie Stokes walks from a state prison in Chester, Pa., on Tuesday after his 1984 murder conviction was overturned because of perjured witness testimony. (photo: Matt Rourke/AP)
The trial witness was charged with perjury just days after Willie Stokes was convicted of murder in 1984. But Stokes didn't learn about that perjury plea until 2015, decades into a life sentence.
Stokes, 61, walked out of a state prison near Philadelphia eager to get a hug from his mother and a corned beef hoagie. His mother was too nervous to come after several earlier disappointments, so he greeted other family members instead.
"Today is a tremendous day. We're all very thankful," said his lawyer, Michael Diamondstein. "However, it's also a sad day, because it reminds us of how lawless, unfair and unjust Philadelphia law enforcement was for so long."
Both detectives who allegedly offered witness Franklin Lee a sex-for-lies deal to help them close a 1980 murder case are now deceased. Lee was in custody on unrelated rape and murder charges at the time, and said he was also promised a light sentence.
"I fell weak and went along with the offer," Lee told a federal judge in November, recalling his testimony at a May 1984 preliminary hearing when he claimed Stokes, a neighborhood friend, had confessed to killing a man during a dice game named Leslie Campbell.
Willie Stokes was convicted even though a key witness recanted
Lee recanted the story at Stokes' murder trial in August 1984, but Stokes was nonetheless convicted and sent to prison for life. Days later, Philadelphia prosecutors charged Lee with perjury — not over his trial testimony, but over the initial testimony he'd given at the preliminary hearing. Lee pleaded guilty, admitting he'd made up the confession, and was sentenced to a maximum seven-year prison term.
"The homicide prosecutors that used Franklin Lee's testimony to convict Willie Stokes then prosecuted Franklin Lee for lying on Willie Stokes. And they never told Willie Stokes," Diamondstein argued at the November hearing in federal court.
Stokes' mother, now elderly, has been planning for his homecoming as his appeals gained traction, only to face repeated setbacks, she told The Philadelphia Inquirer, which first reported on the case.
But Lee's mother also played a role early on.
In federal court testimony last November, Lee said his girlfriend — who detectives summoned to have sex with him at police headquarters back in 1983 and who was allowed to bring marijuana and a few dozen opioid pills — told his mother about the deal he'd struck.
His mother told the woman not to go down to the station again. Instead, police secured him a sex worker the next time, Lee said.
"Once I talked to my mother, she told me, 'I didn't raise you like that, to lie on a man because you got yourself in a jam,'" Lee testified, according to the transcript. "She said, 'I couldn't care if they give you 1,000 years. Go in there and tell the truth.' And that's what I did."
One surviving prosecutor, now in private practice, did not immediately return messages seeking comment Tuesday. However, he has given a statement saying he doesn't remember either case, according to court files.
Philadelphia police offered no immediate comment on the case.
The U.S. magistrate who heard the appeal called the omission an "egregious violation of (Stokes') constitutional rights," and a U.S. district judge agreed, overturning the conviction last week.
As for Lee, he ended up serving 35 years on the rape, murder and perjury charges. He got out of prison two years ago and now works as an assembly line supervisor.
He apologized to Stokes in court "for the problem I caused."
"I'm going to take his tears to indicate he's accepting the apology," U.S. Magistrate Judge Carol Sandra Moore Wells said.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, whose office has championed about two dozen exoneration cases, supports Stokes but has not yet formally decided whether to retry him. That decision should come before a scheduled Jan. 26 hearing in state court, a spokesperson said.
Colombian soldiers on patrol in Aracua, Colombia last March. (photo: CNN)
"Although we are making every effort to end this nightmare, violent acts are likely to persist since armed groups do not seem to cease their territorial disputes," Ombudsman Camargo lamented.
"Our people flee because they fear being affected by the clashes, which mainly occurred in Tame, Saravena, Arauquita, and Fortul municipalities,” Camargo explained, adding that some displaced citizens had been threatened to death by the armed groups.
Currently, the Office of the Ombudsman works to create a register with the identity of the displacement victims and their place of temporary residence to keep attentive to their needs. It has also provided financial and psychological support to the relatives of 24 citizens killed in the clashes.
"We are making every effort to support our people and end this nightmare. However, we cannot deny that acts of violence against citizens are likely to persist since armed groups do not seem to cease their territorial disputes," Camargo lamented.
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Armed groups have historically been present in the Arauca department, where the limited presence of the State allows them to control drug trafficking routes, increase cocaine production, and extort money from the civilian population.
On Monday, President Ivan Duque announced he will send two Army battalions and war equipment to the region to increase intelligence and counter intelligence operations. Camargo, however, disagreed with this decision, which he considers will foster even more violence.
“What we need are peace-booster policies, which base themselves on a holistic approach that enables to end organized crime and the humanitarian crisis it has generated for decades,” he stressed.
A river flows through the Bawan village forest. (photo: Indra Nugraha/Mongabay)
The program is one of the largest socioenvironmental experiments of its kind, aiming to reallocate 12.7 million hectares (31.4 million acres) of state forest to local communities and given them the legal standing to manage their forests.
Under the program, the government has granted land titles for 4.7 million hectares (11.6 million acres) of state forest to 1 million households as of August 2021. But an analysis of 4,349 land titles across Indonesia, covering 2.4 million hectares (5.93 million acres), or more than half the total granted, shows the program hasn’t led to a reduction in forest loss on aggregate.
The researchers, from German think tank Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, said they failed to detect substantial reductions in the deforestation rate in forested areas after they were issued titles by the government.
“Because substantial deforestation reductions are not part of the intervals from our analysis, we can rule out that the overall effect is strongly negative, i.e. there are no substantial aggregate deforestation reductions,” study co-author Sabine Fuss, a climate scientist, told Mongabay.
This is particularly true for community titles aimed at conservation, namely village forests and community forests. Village forest titles are granted to villages, while community forest titles are granted to cooperatives for a period of 35 years.
Both titles allow for non-logging activities such as the collection of non-timber forest products (such as honey), agroforestry and ecotourism, as well as restricted logging for noncommercial purposes. These selective logging activities are only allowed in areas designated as production zones, as they’re aimed at avoiding net deforestation.
Despite these programs being designed with forest conservation in mind, the study found that forest loss actually increased in village forests and community forests.
This comes despite the social forestry program being touted by the government as one of the factors contributing to the recent decline in the country’s deforestation rate, based on the idea that forests that are managed by communities will be better protected and more sustainably managed.
The forestry ministry’s director-general for social forestry, Bambang Supriyanto, did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment.
Before and after titling
The researchers compared the changes in outcomes over time between a population enrolled in a program (the treatment group) and a population that isn’t (the comparison group).
In this case, the comparison is between areas with land titles — before and after approval — also known as treatment areas, to control areas, which are slated to get community titles in the future.
The researchers then looked at changes in deforestation rates in treated areas compared to control areas. They did this by running an analysis for different types of landscapes — undisturbed primary forests and degraded primary forests — using the Hansen Global Forest Change and the Margono natural forest data sets for Indonesia.
While the researchers found no overall reductions in the deforestation rates, they found an exception in a particular community title called community plantation forests. This title is aimed at restoring degraded areas by allowing communities or farmers to operate and restore timber plantations.
Before the introduction of the community title, community plantation forests had higher forest loss rates than village forests and community forests, with 50% more deforestation for areas of primary forests that had been degraded.
The researchers found substantial decreases in forest loss rates on degraded primary forest in community plantation forests. They said this indicates “an opportunity for increased conservation by including Indonesian communities in efforts to restore degraded plantations.”
Fuss said the study didn’t look further into the possible reasons why the social forestry program hadn’t resulted in reduction of forest loss in general.
“However, some prior research and anecdotal evidence indicates that communities lack incentives and resources to make sustainable use of their areas,” she said.
Market factors and lack of funding
One of the reasons for deforestation rates persisting or even increasing on these community-titled lands is the absence of shared social structures or formal rules that govern access to a resource, in this case forests, and its use, the researchers say.
As a result, people have open access to the resource and are likely to act independently according to their own self-interests instead of thinking about the common good of all users.
To resolve this “open access” problem, strong and effective institutions are needed at the village or community level. This way, the institutions can make community members agree on rules regarding the use of their resource, and subsequently monitor and punish them accordingly if they break the rules, the researchers say.
However, they point out that many communities lack institutions and resources to monitor their areas or agree upon and enforce rules on resource use. Villagers and community members may also find it more profitable to clear land to plant cash crops than restore or protect forests.
This is because local communities may perceive social forestry titles as a sign of decreased government presence on the titled lands, and thus of a lower risk of sanctions against activities that violate regulations, such as land clearing for agriculture.
And communities may also feel more secure in their ownership of the land as it’s less likely to be expropriated or subjected to competing claims from plantation companies.
As a result, communities may be more inclined to invest in their lands, and if demand for agricultural products from cleared land is strong enough, this investment may come in the form of clearing land to plant whatever crops are the most lucrative.
And if communities have access to the market for palm oil and other commodities where demand is elastic, which is often the case for deforestation frontiers in Indonesia, they’ll have even more incentive to clear their lands.
Ahmad Dhiaulhaq, a postdoctoral researcher on forest and land governance at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), agreed that this exposure to the market-based economy could push some communities to clear their land.
“We have to see our people not as a homogenous entity,” Ahmad, who was not involved in the recent study, told Mongabay. “There are still communities that maintain their close relationship to nature by protecting their forests, that are still very traditional like the [Indigenous] Baduy people, but there are also communities that have been interacting with the market.”
For communities that have access to the market, investing in sustainable activities that are in line with government regulations, such as non-timber forest product collection, ecotourism and selective logging, might be less attractive as they don’t provide sufficient incentives to increase conservation efforts, Ahmad said.
“Maybe their needs aren’t being met solely by relying on the forests, and thus they have no other option but to clear them,” he said.
If this is the case, additional resources or incentives will be needed to drive down deforestation rates under the social forestry program, the researchers said.
Mixed results
Fuss said she wasn’t surprised by the findings because anecdotal evidence points to very mixed results for the performance of the social forestry program in slowing deforestation.
A 2020 study by research organization Article 33 Indonesia analyzed the impact of the social forestry program on the island of Sulawesi using data from 2014 to 2018. It found that while the program succeeded in improving the welfare of the communities there, it also saw a significant increase in the deforestation rate at the same time.
A case study by the World Resources Institute (WRI) Indonesia of two separate social forestry titles found mixed results. According to the study, the deforestation rate in a community forest in Jambi province on the island of Sumatra saw the deforestation rate drop from 5.47 hectares per year to 1.01 hectares (13.52 to 2.50 acres per year). But in a village forest in neighboring West Sumatra province, the deforestation rate doubled from 0.66 to 1.33 hectares per year (1.63 to 3.29 acres per year).
Rizky Haryanto, a researcher at WRI Indonesia, said one of the reasons for the latter trend was the lack of funding for that particular village forest, which meant villagers couldn’t patrol their forest as effectively.
“If we compare that with our study in [Jambi province], we found the operational fund to patrol forest area there to be fully supported by the village fund,” he told Mongabay.
A 2017 study published in the journal Global Environmental Change, meanwhile, found that forest loss declined in a sample of early social forestry areas, in particular village forests. But the study noted that performance varied substantially between study sites and between years.
Fuss said her study didn’t do an extensive comparison with previous research, but added the differences might be because the areas investigated in prior studies were particularly well run or received additional support.
“Sometimes government or NGO programs are implemented first in those places, where they will work best,” she said.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that under favorable conditions, the social forestry program can reduce deforestation, the researchers noted.
Ingredients for success
To determine what conditions are needed to achieve this success, more studies will be needed, Fuss said.
“Our paper is a very early impact evaluation of the program on aggregate,” she said. “It might be that the program will start showing stronger impacts over time. However, it may make sense to have a closer look and ask communities systematically about what is working and what isn’t. We see a lot of heterogeneity between areas, there should certainly be a lot to learn there!”
Rizky echoed Fuss’s view, calling for observations into “what factors could reduce forest cover loss rate in village forests, such as what we explained in our study, that are also found in those locations.”
Based on his observations, Rizky said, there are at least three possible factors affecting deforestation rate on titled lands under the social forestry program. The first is the availability of alternative livelihoods that don’t involve clearing the forest, especially in areas where the contribution of non-timber forest products to the locals’ livelihoods is minimal.
The second possible factor is the presence of advisers who actively guide locals in developing their livelihoods, while the third is synergy between all stakeholders in maximizing resource use for monitoring the forest area.
Ahmad said the social forestry program should take into account the heterogeneity of local and Indigenous communities in Indonesia.
“Before granting social forestry permits, we need to do a thorough assessment,” he said. “We need to look at what the communities need, what are their objectives in managing their forests. And then they also have to have their capacity increased.”
Lastly, the government needs to monitor social forestry areas more closely, Ahmad added.
“There needs to be continuous monitoring so when there are problems like deforestation, they can be detected immediately,” he said. “So don’t let deforestation happen on a large scale before detecting it. It should be detected from the very beginning.”
Other experts, however, have questioned the methodology behind the new study. Hariadi Kartodihardjo, a lecturer in forestry policy at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), said the researchers had failed to explain the details of how they measured deforestation. He said the locations of the forests they analyzed, and when they did so, were not clear.
Hariadi also noted that some social forestry titles had been granted decades ago, while others were far more recent. These differences could account for the disparities in deforestation rates, he said.
This article was originally published on Mongabay
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