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FOCUS: Susan B. Glasser | The Trump Presidency Is Still an Active Crime Scene
Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker
Glasser writes: "There were so many books seeking to explain Trump and his times that the book critic of the Washington Post wrote his own book about all of the books."
It’s hard to consign the Trump years to the history books when we remain in the middle of the crisis that it sparked.
Every Administration produces a shelf full of memoirs, of the score-settling variety and otherwise. The first known White House chronicle by someone other than a President came from Paul Jennings, an enslaved person whose memoir of President James Madison’s White House was published in 1865. In modern times, Bill Clinton’s two terms gave us Robert Reich’s “Locked in the Cabinet,” perhaps the best recent exposé of that most feckless of Washington jobs, and George Stephanopoulos’s “All Too Human,” a memorable account of a political wunderkind that was honest—too honest, at times, to suit his patron—about what it was really like backstage at the Clinton White House. George W. Bush’s Presidency, with its momentous years of war and terrorism, produced memoirs, many of them quite good, from multiple deputy speechwriters, a deputy national-security adviser, a deputy director of the Office of Public Liaison, and even a deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. President Obama’s White House stenographer wrote a memoir, as did his photographer, his deputy White House chief of staff, his campaign strategists, a deputy national-security adviser, a deputy speechwriter, and even one of the junior press wranglers whose job it was to oversee the White House press pool.
There’s a few golden nuggets to be mined even from the most unreadable, obscure, and self-serving of such memoirs. Even before it ended, the Trump Administration produced a remarkable number of these accounts, as wave after wave of fired press secretaries, ousted Cabinet officials, and disgruntled former aides signed lucrative book deals. There were so many books seeking to explain Trump and his times that the book critic of the Washington Post wrote his own book about all of the books. Trump’s fired executive assistant—ousted because she claimed, at a boozy dinner with reporters, that the President had said nasty things about his daughter Tiffany—wrote a book. Trump’s first two press secretaries wrote books. First Lady Melania Trump’s former best friend wrote a book. Trump’s third national-security adviser, John Bolton, wrote an explosive book with direct-from-the-Situation-Room allegations of Presidential malfeasance that might have turned the tide in Trump’s first impeachment trial had Bolton actually testified in it. And none of those even covered the epic, Presidency-ending year of 2020.
Dozens of books have now been published or are in the works which address the COVID pandemic, the 2020 Presidential election, and the violent final days of Trump’s tenure. The history of the Trump Presidency that I am writing with my husband, Peter Baker, of the Times, already has eighty-nine books in its bibliography; many are excellent reported works by journalists, in addition to the first-person recollections, such as they are, by those who worked with and for Trump. This month, Stephanie Grisham became the third former Trump Administration press secretary to publish her account. Grisham, who has the distinction of being the only White House press secretary never to actually hold a press briefing, has written a tell-all that includes such details as the President calling her from Air Force One to discuss his genitalia. Still to come are promised memoirs by former Vice-President Mike Pence, former Attorney General William Barr, and the former White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, among others. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is writing an account of his Middle East peacemaking efforts. A book from the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, “The Chief’s Chief,” is due out in December; Trump promoted it the other day as “an incredible Christmas present” that will explain how his Administration “did things that no other administration even thought they could do.”
Trump, of course, meant this as a bragging point, not as an ironic commentary on all the norm-busting and lawbreaking that occurred during his four years in office. “Remember,” he said in the statement, “there has never been an administration like ours.” In that, he’s right. The rapidly accumulating pile of books on the history of the Trump Administration is different in a crucial respect: they are not helping to explain the past so much as they are attempting to explain a present and very much ongoing crisis. Meadows, for example, is a crucial witness in the investigation by the House select committee into the events of January 6th. The panel subpoenaed him and several other Trump advisers to give testimony and hand over documents, with a deadline of Thursday. Not one has done so, setting the stage for a new and potentially protracted series of court battles. The panel announced on Thursday that it will seek to hold Steve Bannon, Trump’s fired White House strategist (the two later reconciled), in criminal contempt; it said that it is still negotiating with Meadows and the former Pentagon official Kash Patel. How many months or years will we have to wait to find out what they and others knew, and did, as a pro-Trump mob tried to stop Congress from certifying Trump’s defeat?
The bottom line is that the story of the Trump Presidency still has important unanswered questions that the forthcoming pile of books cannot answer. And they have an urgency about them that unanswered questions about past Administrations usually don’t, given the ongoing threat to our democracy: Trump is not only preparing to run again but is determined to mold the G.O.P. into a single-issue Party, the ideology of which consists solely of disputing the legitimacy of the election that turned him out of office. The Trump Presidency is not yet, alas, simply a matter for booksellers and book writers; it’s an active crime scene.
Several of the more interesting new books come from participants in one of Congress’s earlier efforts to investigate and hold Trump accountable—his first impeachment, in 2019, for withholding several hundred million dollars in security assistance to Ukraine to force its President to conduct politically motivated investigations of Joe Biden and the 2016 election. Two of the trial’s witnesses, Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill, recently released memoirs that cover their roles in Trump’s National Security Council—which led them to unexpected public fame, given that Trump tried to stop their testimony. Hill’s book, “There Is Nothing for You Here,” is one of the most compelling to emerge from inside the Trump White House. She observes, at first hand, how Trump’s “autocrat envy” led not only to open admiration of anti-democratic figures such as Vladimir Putin and Victor Orbán but to Trump’s adoption of their anti-democratic agenda inside America.
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the lead impeachment manager, Adam Schiff, released his contribution to the Trump bookshelf this week, “Midnight in Washington,” the title of which comes from one of the many eloquent speeches that Schiff made during the first impeachment trial. In the proceedings, he presciently warned that a failure to convict and remove Trump from office would result in even worse abuses. His book ends with a new warning embedded in the subtitle: “How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.” The Washington Post, in its review, called it a “500-page closing statement on an era that has not yet closed.”
Schiff’s book is a valuable part of the historical record in part because it details how Democrats pursued impeachment—why they ruled out a broader set of charges, for example, and how they had to quickly investigate the Ukraine matter on their own, something that traditionally would have been handled by an independent prosecutor. But the main takeaway from the book, and the entire experience of the past few years, is that Congress, with one chamber controlled by Democrats and the other by Republicans who were unified in Trump’s defense, is not set up to investigate a rogue President like Trump—a disconcerting fact, considering the challenges still posed by the ongoing Trump crisis.
Throughout his Presidency, Trump and his aides flouted congressional subpoenas and demands for information; he is once again instructing them to do so with the January 6th investigation, even though he is out of office and it is unclear if any executive privilege would still apply. Schiff, a former federal prosecutor, is now a member of the January 6th select committee. The test, once again, he told me, is whether and how Congress can find a way of “enforcing the rule of law” and its own subpoenas. It is a great crisis, he said, if “a coequal branch of government cannot get the information it needs, both to legislate and to keep an Administration from becoming corrupt.” This is no wonky procedural matter but a test of American democracy’s ability to self-correct. The true history of the Trump Administration can’t be written without it.
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CONTINUE CHIDING US TO CONTRIBUTE — I truly don't believe enough have quite figured-out HOW much they need RSN … if they hope to see past the brain-washing of an a-moral, corporate-owned media oligopoly. Maybe I should just speak for myself, and say I need RSN in a major way. Seems like even our formerly-quite progressive NPR affiliate has now "gone lame" on us. By the way, the post-article "comments" becoming ever-more important to me, in recent months. They're often-times superb! Continue chiding us to contribute. I'm sure it's vitally necessary -- if not much fun. Thanks so much …
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Bess Levin | Trump Hopes No One Remembers He Pushed for a Full Afghanistan Withdrawal in June
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "As you've no doubt heard by now, the Biden administration's decision to leave Afghanistan has become an unmitigated disaster thanks to the shocking speed with which the Taliban have taken control of the country."
The 45th president is desperately trying to rewrite his own Afghanistan history.
s you’ve no doubt heard by now, the Biden administration’s decision to leave Afghanistan has become an unmitigated disaster thanks to the shocking speed with which the Taliban have taken control of the country. Obviously the situation isn’t solely the fault of Joe Biden; rather, it’s a 20-year scene in the making, started by a guy who would prefer to be associated with his painting career than with the deaths of thousands of Americans and two unending wars. As my colleague Eric Lutz noted earlier, though, it is the case that “what is happening in Afghanistan is precisely what Biden said, in no uncertain terms, would not happen,” from his insistence that the Afghan government would be able to hold the line against the Taliban to his claim that under no circumstances would we see “people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” which was almost exactly the case. Most heartbreaking, the administration had sworn it would protect Afghan nationals and other partners on the ground, but many have been left in a terrifying state of limbo.
Still, Biden’s three presidential predecessors aren’t exactly in a position to criticize. Of course, understanding why they should keep their thoughts on the matter to themselves at this time requires self-awareness—something Donald Trump was born without, hence his absurd call over the weekend for Biden to resign:
Former president Donald Trump Sunday called on President Biden to “resign in disgrace” over his handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal and other issues. “It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan, along with the tremendous surge in COVID, the border catastrophe, the destruction of energy independence, and our crippled economy,” the former president wrote in a statement.
Weirdly, Trump did not note in his statement that less than two months ago, he was bragging about how he started the Afghanistan-withdrawal process and claiming the Biden administration was powerless to stop it.
Or that someone on his team decided to delete from his website an April statement in which he said, “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do,” chastising Biden for not doing it sooner than September 11.
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General David Petraeus addresses RUSI members on 'The International Mission in Afghanistan,' at Royal United Services Institute, October 15, 2010, in London, England. (photo: Dan Kitwood/WPA/Getty Images)
We Can't Let the Generals Who Lied About the Afghanistan War Define Its Legacy
Sarah Lazare, In These Times
Lazare writes: "The horrific culmination of the 20-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan should be cause for sober reflection on the imperial hubris and bipartisan pro-war consensus that enabled such a ruinous military intervention to grind on for so long."
The U.S. architects of the ruinous war are getting the last word on its “lessons.”
he horrific culmination of the 20-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan should be cause for sober reflection on the imperial hubris and bipartisan pro-war consensus that enabled such a ruinous military intervention to grind on for so long. But instead of a reckoning, the very architects of the war are getting the final word on its legacy — a kafkaesque conclusion to a remarkably cruel chapter. This dynamic adds fresh insult to the disastrous conditions Afghans now face, as the Taliban seizes control of Afghanistan, and the United States implements callous closed-door policies toward people attempting to flee the country, leading to ghastly scenes at Kabul’s airport.
Chief among these figures is General David Petraeus, who is notable for the skill with which he has charmed and worked the media throughout his long career. He is putting that skill to use now, garnering headline after headline after headline braying for a continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. “This is an enormous national security setback and it is on the verge of getting much worse unless we decide to take really significant action,” he told the Rita Cosby Show on WABC Radio on August 13. That same day, in an interview with NPR, he advocated for the United States to reverse its withdrawal. “I certainly would do that in the short term, and I would certainly consider it for the mid and long term,” he said.
In that NPR interview, Petraeus cited his own role as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011 to illustrate his expertise. “Well, we weren’t contemplating a withdrawal when I was doing this,” he proclaimed. “We had 150,000 coalition forces when I was privileged to command, U.S. and all other forces in Afghanistan.”
The declaration is notable because Petraeus oversaw a particularly bloody chapter of the Afghanistan War. After replacing General Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus implemented an aggressive counterinsurgency strategy, and loosened the rules of engagement, giving U.S. troops a wider berth to fire artillery, and to destroy houses and buildings. He also significantly increased the notorious practice of conducting night raids on Afghan homes. As Michael Hastings noted of Petraeus in 2011 for Rolling Stone, “He drastically upped the number of airstrikes, launching more than 3,450 between July and November, the most since the invasion in 2001.”
But Petraeus didn’t just implement these policies. He also launched a charm offensive, holding interviews with numerous major media outlets championing his actions, and even publicly challenging the Obama administration’s planned withdrawal timeline. His rosy remarks in a July 2011 address at the Forum for New Diplomacy in Paris are worth noting. “Mr. Petraeus called the Afghan Army and police forces ‘increasingly credible,’” the New York Times reported. “He also described how they were steadily taking more responsibility from NATO allies as a gradual withdrawal of tens of thousands of U.S. troops looms.”
Such a statement gives pause, not only because it has been proven wrong, but also because it contrasts with reflections he has shared behind closed doors. In an August 16, 2017 government interview revealed in the Afghanistan Papers — a tranche of documents from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction published by the Washington Post in 2019 — Petraeus sounded a note of pessimism about the U.S. strategy. “I knew it was going to be a longer process,” he said. “I had no expectation that we would be able to flip Afghanistan.”
But this wasn’t the first time Petraeus ran P.R. for a disastrous war. Former President George W. Bush appointed Petraeus as commander of multinational forces in Iraq from 2007 to 2008, during which time he oversaw a “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops and the implementation of a counter-insurgency strategy rooted in protracted occupation. This strategy elicited protest, including from within Congress, as it marked a significant escalation of the war. Petraeus didn’t just implement the strategy — he publicly championed it, appearing at Congressional hearings in full uniform to declare that the surge was working, and to argue against pulling out of Iraq. “As a bottom line up front, the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met,” he said to Congress in September 2007. This was after he declared, in an April 2007 interview with Charlie Rose, that he was a “qualified optimist” about the surge.
It’s a particularly harsh irony that such an effective public ambassador of U.S. wars, who has his own reputation to sanitize, would emerge as a key commentator on the tragic consequences of a war he helped oversee. And unfortunately, he is not alone. Retired NATO general Wesley Clark, former head of U.S. Central Command Joseph Votel, three star Army general Douglas Lute, retired Admiral and former NATO supreme allied commander James Stavridis, and former U.S. Army captain Matthew Zeller, have all chimed in with their opinions in recent days. In their media quotes and appearances, these fellow war architects are broadly presented as good-faith observers — experts who are shining an important light on a complex situation.
Yet, the Afghanistan Papers show that, in private, military officials admitted to befuddlement, confusion and failure. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Lute told government interviewers in 2015. “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” Turning to the architects and enforcers of such a war to better understand what went wrong is like asking a police force to investigate itself for wrongdoing.
Perhaps most eyebrow raising among this gallery of militarists-turned-pundits is John Bolton, former national security advisor under Trump, who appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition on August 16 and delivered a blistering criticism of any withdrawal from Afghanistan while making the case for open-ended U.S. occupation. “What we’ve got to do, I think, is find ways to see if there’s not some way to reverse this disaster and get the Taliban out,” he said.
Bolton’s statement is consistent with his 17-month tenure as national security advisor for former President Trump, during which he made every effort to put the United States on more confrontational footing. Bolton helped bring the country to the brink of a disastrous war with Iran in 2019. And in May 2019, he declared that the U.S. military must be “ready to go” to support the coup attempt by Juan Guaidó in Venezuela. In 2018, Bolton threatened the International Criminal Court with sanctions for investigating U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, including torture at CIA-run “black sites.” And when the ICC dropped the investigation in 2019, citing the lack of cooperation from relevant parties, including the United States, Bolton was gleeful. “This is a vindication of the president’s support for American sovereignty and a rejection of the idea that there can be accountability for American citizens by any authority other than American constitutional institutions,” he said.
To be fair, NPR interviewer Noel King did try to push back on some of Bolton’s more jingoistic remarks. And not all of the military brass interviewed clamored for more war. Wesley Clark, for example, cited “20 years of American misjudgments, of poor prioritizations and failed policies.” But still, the message sent by amplifying the voices of so many of the war’s designers is that they still have credibility. The implication is that more deep-rooted critiques — that question the invasion in the first place, and demand accountability from those responsible — are out of bounds.
We mustn’t let the Boltons and Petraeuses of the world get the final say on what we have learned from the Afghanistan War, the horrors of which are still being born by people in Afghanistan. Instead, media bookers and writers seeking comment should perhaps seek out voices who didn’t lie about the war they’re now providing commentary on. Generals and commanders and pro-war national security advisors will only ever see the problem as not enough war, mistaking the occupation’s biggest indictment — that the Afghan government fell so quickly, lacking a shred of legitimacy or political will — as a sign that we need a protracted U.S. military presence.
There are plenty of other voices that could be weighing in on the U.S. withdrawal: The countless people around the world — including in Afghanistan — who have been marching and protesting against the war since September 12, 2001, warning that a 9/11-era revenge fever dream would never bring justice or peace. Rep. Barbara Lee (D‑Calif.), the only member of Congress who had the courage to vote against the authorization to go to war with Afghanistan. The advocates and organizers — and Afghan activists themselves — who are demanding that the United States end its unconscionable asylum policies and welcome in Afghan refugees right now (and not just those who can prove they supported the United States). The people demanding material reparations for the people of Afghanistan. And that’s just a quick list.
What we don’t need is to watch self-serving military brass rewrite history to make themselves and their defense contractor friends look like the heroes who no one listened to — when, in reality, they’re all we ever heard from.
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Mansoor Adayfi photographed in Belgrade, Serbia, Aug. 14, 2021. (photo: Nemanja Kneževic/The Intercept)
"They Believed Anything But the Truth" - 14 Years In Guantanamo
Cora Currier, The Intercept
Currier writes: "When Vacuum cleaners first showed up outside the cells at Guantánamo Bay, the men being held there were amused. Some of the detainees, poor farmers from Afghanistan or Yemen, had never seen such devices, and they started to joke that they resembled women."
Captured at the age of 18, Mansoor Adayfi describes coming of age at Guantánamo in his memoir, “Don’t Forget Us Here.”
hen vacuum cleaners first showed up outside the cells at Guantánamo Bay, the men being held there were amused. Some of the detainees, poor farmers from Afghanistan or Yemen, had never seen such devices, and they started to joke that they resembled women. “This is a very fine-looking lady!” one man remarked, according to Mansoor Adayfi, detainee number 441.
At that point, in the detention camp’s first few years, Adayfi lived in a block where the men could hear and see one another through their cage-like cells, and they had begun a tradition of singing together on Saturday evenings. The night of the vacuums’ arrival, one detainee asked another “to sing a song of celebration to welcome his lovely lady.” But all of a sudden, the guards plugged in the devices, beginning “a chorus of angry screaming that drowned out our own singing.” Ruining one small source of joy and solidarity the men had managed to create, the vacuums were left on for hours.
The next day, Adayfi was moved to solitary confinement, where a vacuum whined interminably in front of his door, “stabbing my brain.” The torture went on for months, causing wrenching pain and quite literally driving him to distraction. He damaged his ears trying to stuff them with toilet paper. An Afghan prisoner broke down entirely and was taken away by guards and the camp psychologist. (He later told Adayfi: “I tried to cut my veins with my teeth to let my soul out.”) Adayfi eventually decided to try to out-crazy his torturers and, during a move between cells, pretended to be passionately in love with his vacuum. “My beautiful lady with the beautiful voice,” he wailed, hurling himself to the ground and demanding to be reunited with her. Of course, the perplexed guards took the vacuum away.
“That’s the thing about the Americans,” Adayfi writes in “Don’t Forget Us Here,” his new memoir of Guantánamo. “They believed anything but the truth.”
That might make for a good epitaph for Guantánamo, when and if it is ever closed. Certain truths are undeniable: Twenty years after the CIA and U.S. military began transporting men and boys to the island detention camp — picked up in Afghanistan and around the world — 39 remain there. Most of them have never been charged with a crime. Of the roughly 780 people who were held at Guantánamo, a handful have written memoirs, creating a body of work that testifies to the inanity of the war on terror, the horrors of incarceration, and the resistance and resilience of the people detained.
To those books we now can add Adayfi’s chronicle of the 14 years he spent there beginning at the age of 18, which comes out on Tuesday. Its closest predecessor, Mohamedou Slahi’s best-selling “Guantánamo Diary” (reissued as “The Mauritanian” after it was made into a film produced by Topic Studios, which is part of First Look Media, along with The Intercept) was written in 2005. Adayfi, by contrast, relates how he grew up in Guantánamo among the general population, a persistent “smiley troublemaker” (the camp authorities’ nickname for him, which he embraced), a witness to each era of Guantánamo’s evolution.
I first spoke with Adayfi in 2018, after his release to Serbia, the only place that would take him; the U.S. would not send detainees to Yemen, where Adayfi is from, citing the security situation there. He had written a book while in detention — actually several books — but they had been confiscated. As his English improved, he wrote more and more, hundreds of pages which he sent in the form of letters to his lawyers and then, upon his release, continued to type up. A few years ago I was able to read an early version, a raw and wild tome of anecdotes of prison life that has now become a polished memoir with the help of editor Antonio Aiello. Adayfi’s goal, he told me when we caught up again last month over Zoom, was not just to document what happened, but also to reflect how Guantánamo still marks everyone who was held there. That aim is there in the title, “Don’t Forget Us Here.” The “here” is where Adayfi still lives along with other former prisoners, even years after their “release.”
“The U.S. government should acknowledge what happened at Guantánamo, and they should apologize, and they should at least compensate those detainees,” he told me. Across my screen glowed the orange scarf he wears in remembrance of the men still inside. “This is the least you can do.”
Classified Memories
The story of Guantánamo is the story of unreliable narration. The government’s version of events is suspect, filtered through doublespeak diktats and an absurd classification regime that maintains that detainees’ own memories of their torture are classified. Lawyers cannot speak freely even to their clients about the intelligence against them because they also must maintain security clearance. Meanwhile, those who have been held at Guantánamo must contend with the volume of conflicting information about them that circulates in once-classified threat assessments, many of which were derived from torture.
The insinuations about Adayfi live on the internet: They must be repeated in every story about him, justify continued surveillance by authorities in Serbia, and make his life there uncertain and travel anywhere else a nonstarter. There is no end to suspicion. So for Adayfi, the process of preparing his book for the general public at times recalled the torturous cycles of questioning he had endured at Guantánamo. “It’s this fine line of, Is this another interrogation?” said Aiello, his editor. “He had told his story to so many people already, and everything we talked about he had already said.”
Adayfi grew up in Yemen to a poor but happy family; his father wanted all of the children, including the girls, to get an education. He spent his childhood chasing goats and sheep in the mountains. He recounts the first time he saw electricity, when he went to Sanaa to study. He says he was sent to Afghanistan to do research for a sheikh at a Yemeni Islamic institute and that he was captured by a warlord and handed over to the Americans. This early biography, and the details of what exactly he was doing in Afghanistan, are secondary: This is a narrative about the collective experience of Guantánamo and the “brotherhood” it engendered, even as it tells one man’s coming-of-age story.
About a year after he arrived in Guantánamo, Adayfi was brought to an interrogation room with a two-way mirror; he could see shadows moving behind it. “I opened my mouth and inspected my teeth,” he writes. “I looked under my arms at the new hair that had grown. I laughed at my wild hair and beard. I made funny faces, wondering, What would my mother think of such a messy boy?” Aiello told me that as they edited this scene together, Adayfi acted out his expressions over Skype. “It was one of those moments where I was like, holy shit, he was a kid. … Imagine being 18 years old and being told you were responsible for the biggest attack on American soil.”
Many Guantánamo narratives — including the film version of “The Mauritanian,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker story about Slahi, and the WNYC series about Abdul Latif Nasser — are animated by the question of whether a detainee was in fact who the U.S. government said he was: hardened Al Qaeda operative or hapless bystander sold to the CIA by Afghan warlords? Adayfi’s book is not really about proving anything about himself, though it is clear the allegations that he was a high-level Al Qaeda “general” make no sense, given his youth and background (the military eventually walked back those claims, saying he had never been identified as a member of the group). Guilt and innocence are two words that have never had much meaning in the Guantánamo context. The U.S. government has justified the continued detention of people at Guantánamo on the basis of whether they pose a threat to the United States. The prosecution of the alleged 9/11 plotters in the legally suspect military tribunal system has yet to even reach the trial stage, in large part because the proceedings are tainted by torture.
Summoning Demons
Adayfi’s book is a brutal, sometimes airless account of prison struggle by a young idealist. It begins in an endless cycle of confrontation and abuse: “Pray. Eat. DRINK WATER!” he recalls. The camp administration and interrogators were obsessed with keeping the detainees hydrated, even as they tortured them, so they would stay alive; it is the first of many times when Adayfi will find himself bewildered, and almost amused, by the American insistence on abiding by rules while breaking the laws of human decency. “Arrange items in a row. Go to interrogation. Repeat your Internment Serial Number, your ISN.”
Where the men were held together in cage-like cells was loud, the lights were bright, the toilets smelled. It was overwhelming: “metal carts squeaking, bean holes banging, chains jangling, guards barking, detainees shouting, ventilators rumbling.” It did mean, however, that they could speak to one another and glean some information about where they were; some of the newer arrivals had even seen news of Guantánamo on Al Jazeera before they arrived there. The heat though drove some detainees to try to get sent back to solitary, “because it was the only place that had air conditioning and some peace from the chaos of the open cages.”
The years roll on in indignities, followed by protest — prompting beatings, pepper-spray, and solitary confinement — and culminating in hunger strikes and other acts of desperation. There are lulls when some compromise between jailers and prisoners was achieved. There are mass suicide attempts (“Code Snowball,” the guards yelled out as they ran in to cut down men who had hung themselves by their sheets, pepper-spraying the men “before cutting them down.”) There are riots orchestrated by breaking toilets, soaping the floor to make it harder for the guards to catch them. This book is the most comprehensive inside account to date of force-feedings, cell extractions, medical abuse, and other horrors of the detention camp that the government has, over the years, sought to keep secret.
Yet Adayfi is also a charming, exuberant soul, and his humor and flights of fancy come through in even the book’s most hard-to-read moments, like the lady vacuums: images of surrealist dissociation that help us understand how a human endures the worst. Adayfi’s first published writings were about the “lighter” side (if that word can be used) of life at Guantánamo, like the animals he encountered in the rec yard and his friendship with an iguana, which he wrote about for the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column. There is literal toilet humor, and the time when he convinced an Afghan man that Ensure nutrition drinks (which they were fed during hunger strikes) was in fact milk from the breasts of American women. Other pranks speak to the aura of inhuman power the military ascribed to the men there. Once during a storm, guards gathered to watch a detainee who had “covered himself with a sheet and was holding a water bottle to his lips and whispering.” The guards asked what he was doing, and Adayfi and others told them that the man was summoning a jinn, or demon, who makes it thunder — and indeed, a storm had approached Guantánamo, and the thunder increased as the man continued to mumble above his bottle. One guard became hysterically afraid, screaming at them to make him stop.
Art has long been an escape from the inhumanity of prison, and Guantánamo may have produced one of the most singular bodies of art in contemporary history: poetry, memoirs, paintings, and sculptures, like the exquisite tiny gondolas and sailing vessels crafted by Moath al-Alwi. Adayfi’s voluble personality is the opposite of the stoic nature of much of the art by or about Guantánamo prisoners, like the dignified but anonymizing from-the-back portraits of former guards and detainees taken by Debi Cornwall or pictures of their homes by Edmund Clark. Adayfi’s idiosyncratic, humorous style is something else, even if it also communicates, as Siddhartha Mitter has put it, Guantánamo’s signature combination of “the sinister and the mundane.” Still, as a spokesperson for others, Adayfi portrays the remarkable community that the men created as well as the faith that carried them through. Once, a hurricane bore down on Cuba, and the guards and staff evacuated. Due to high winds, they removed the tarps from the fencing that normally blocked the view from inside:
For the first time, our blocks quieted down. No guards, no chains, no banging and clanking. The song of our daily lives changed that day so that the wind could sing to us. Without the green tarps, we looked out our windows and saw the sea, the vast and beautiful sea, dark and angry, and the sea saw us, too, and raged at what it saw: hundreds of men in metal cages.
“Allahu Akbar!” an Afghani brother called out when he saw the sea for the first time. “Allahu Akbar!” brothers called out, thanking Allah for the wonder of this beautiful sea.
Adayfi’s principles, cleverness, and rage often hurt his own cause. At his first hearing in front of a George W. Bush-era panel meant to evaluate detainees as a threat to the U.S., he read out a statement in which he “told them again that I was not al Qaeda, but after what they had done to me, done to us, I would join if they would have me.” Once, later on, when the detainees were occasionally allowed a phone call with their family, a censor ended a call to his mother because he mentioned a hunger strike — classified information. He went berserk and “activated that beast within me, 441. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. I broke everything I could get my hands on.” He was subdued by guards and once again labeled as a dangerous detainee. “I had never been categorized as compliant,” he notes. He worried about what compliance would mean: “Would better living conditions just distract us from fighting for what we really wanted, which was to be released?”
But better conditions did help. The men were given access to art supplies and classes, video calls, PlayStation consoles, and a microwave that one detainee liked to use to warm up his boxer shorts. They were allowed to keep books and other belongings in their cells. A pen and paper, a clock, a watch — such items gave Adayfi “power over my life.” He made a business plan for a cooperative milk and honey farm in Yemen with other detainees and began to write his memoirs.
By 2012 or 2013, things turned ugly again: The camp administration changed, privileges were revoked, and the men responded with more hunger strikes. Profound despair settled in as they realized that President Barack Obama would not simply close Guantánamo and set them free. The detainees aging and suffering from the compound effects of malnutrition and abuse were echoed in the fraying and rusting of the facility itself, in repairs and renovations that belied the goal of closure.
Adayfi comes of age inside, he changes, he learns how to moderate his anger, how to better advocate for himself and his brothers without compromising his values. The war on terror comes of age outside too. No one truly believes in what Guantánamo was purported to be — and yet it continues to exist.
In the final parole-style review before his release, Adayfi’s attorney reads out statements from family and villagers who had known him as a boy. “The evidence before you indicates that the good boy they knew has grown into a good man,” she says.
That he did so under the conditions of Guantánamo is a tragedy, and incredible.
Guantánamo 2.0
Adayfi called me over Zoom in July from the studio apartment where he now lives in a suburb of Belgrade. Pandemic lockdowns, he said, did not affect him much more than the already profound isolation he feels living in Serbia.
“I live in Guantánamo 2.0,” he said. “I have been detained, beaten, arrested, and they have my friends harassed, interrogated. … I found a woman I wanted to marry, but she married [someone else] because I couldn’t get a travel document.” He worries constantly about his family in Yemen, still wracked by war and famine, and has little hope of going there either.
He has residency papers but is not supposed to even leave the city without checking with his Serbian government minders. Serbia is not known for its friendliness toward Muslims, and his terror-suspect label means he is still under constant surveillance from security services. He has received periodic warnings that the housing support he gets from the government of Serbia could be cut off at any time. (Former detainees have gotten hugely variable treatment from the countries that took them in: Britain, for instance, paid them reparations; the United Arab Emirates imprisoned them.) Adayfi has chronic kidney stones, teeth problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, migraines, and trouble focusing — all lasting effects of Guantánamo.
Yet, as he did in detention, he has turned his despair toward study and writing. He just finished coursework for a bachelor’s degree in business administration and is writing his thesis on the economic integration of former detainees. The work with Aiello has given him a political and creative outlet: The two of them are writing a TV show based on his memoir, and Adayfi turned his computer around to show me the makings of his next book, “Life After Guantánamo,” which currently exists in the form of index cards and Post-it notes tacked up on the wall. He’s in touch with over 100 former detainees through WhatsApp and Facebook. He helps translate for them and their families via advocacy organizations like CAGE. I asked how he tracked them down. “Have you heard of the internet?” he said, laughing. Only a few of the people he has reached out to don’t want to be included in his endeavors, which he says he understands. “I am one of the most social people. Some people don’t want to talk, and I respect their privacy. But we have a really strong brotherhood.”
He has sent copies of his book to Guantánamo. He gave me a letter he had written to accompany them, addressed to the book itself. “I don’t know how the camp administration will receive you; they might deny you from visiting your birthplace and visiting the brothers there, they might ban you from the camp library and classify you as a threat,” he wrote.
It continued: “This time they can’t detain you or harm you, they can’t stop you. … I’m sure you have a lot to tell them.”
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Asylum-seekers disembark from a bus in front of Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen. A federal judge recently ruled that the Biden administration must reinstate former president Donald Trump's 'remain in Mexico' policy for many migrants. (photo: Sophie Park/The Texas Tribune)
Judge Orders Biden to Revive Trump's "Remain in Mexico" Program
Orlana Gonzalez, Axios
Gonzalez writes: "A federal judge late Friday ordered the Biden administration to revive a Trump-era policy requiring immigrants seeking asylum at the southern border to wait in Mexico while their applications are pending."
federal judge late Friday ordered the Biden administration to revive a Trump-era policy requiring immigrants seeking asylum at the southern border to wait in Mexico while their applications are pending.
State of play: U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by former President Trump and based in Amarillo, Texas, said the Biden administration "failed to consider several critical factors" before terminating the program. Texas and Missouri had sued the administration, claiming the program's suspension worsened border conditions.
- Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas officially halted the program — which forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico in often dangerous conditions — this June.
- Mayorkas at the time argued the policy did not "adequately or sustainably enhance border management in such a way as to justify the program’s extensive operational burdens and other shortfalls."
What they're saying: The judge said Mayorkas failed "to show a reasoned decision" for ending the program and added he did not address "the problems created by false claims of asylum," per Bloomberg.
- “Since [its] termination, the number of enforcement encounters on the southwest border has skyrocketed,” Kacsmaryk wrote.
- He noted that the secretary should have considered that asylum seekers are "found non-meritorious by federal immigration judges."
What to watch: The judge ordered the Biden administration to resurrect the program but stayed his decision for one week to give the government a chance for appeal.
Of note via the Wall Street Journal: "It is not clear whether it is possible to restart the program as it would require the cooperation of the Mexican government."
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Student debt is so inescapable that even those who made payments during the pandemic freeze still owe more money than they originally borrowed. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Rebecca Gordon | Debt and Disillusionment: How College Is Like the Airplane Game
Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
Gordon writes: "For the last decade and a half, I've been teaching ethics to undergraduates. Now - admittedly, a little late to the party - I've started seriously questioning my own ethics. I've begun to wonder just what it means to be a participant, however minor, in the pyramid scheme that higher education has become in the years since I went to college."
My parents certainly had college dreams for me. After all, they wanted me to move up in life, big time. Where exactly “up” was seemed less than clear to me then. But after a great fight — I wanted to go to Cornell (girls!) — I lost and, in 1962, ended up just where they wanted me to be, at Yale. Even in those days, it cost a significant pile of dough to go there, a major strain for my parents at the time. (Now, it’s more than $75,000 a year!) Still, there was no question about it. It was, after all, simply a part of my destiny as they saw it.
So, there I found myself, on campus in those years with George W. Bush and John Kerry (not that I knew either of them or much of anyone else either), a Jew at Yale just after that school removed its Jewish quotas. Unrushed by fraternities amid all those WASP-y boys from another universe, I felt as if I were waiting for life to begin someday on a distant planet I could barely imagine. Then, in my sophomore year, I walked into a Chinese history class taught by the husband-and-wife duo Arthur and Mary Wright. (She was the first woman given tenure and a professorship at the college!) He covered ancient China; she, the more modern eras; and I was stunned by it all, by worlds I had known nothing about. The next thing I knew I was launched on my future career (not faintly the one my parents had ever imagined) as a historian of China.
Admittedly, swept away during the Vietnam era while in graduate school at Harvard in Chinese history, I never became a Sinologist. Still, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon suggests today, at its best, college had indeed given me “a lifelong curiosity about the world and some tools to help… satisfy it.” And I thank my parents for that.
Otherwise, I would say that my school years prepared me in none of the obvious ways for my future life as, first, a printer (and a lousy one at that), then a journalist, next a book editor, and finally the guy who runs TomDispatch. So, I’ve read Gordon’s piece today with amazement, trying to imagine myself 60 years younger and heading into what she describes in a devastating fashion as a modern pyramid scheme of higher education. When you’re done, you’ll be amazed at just how low “higher education” can really get. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Debt and Disillusionment
How College Is Like the Airplane Game
or the last decade and a half, I’ve been teaching ethics to undergraduates. Now — admittedly, a little late to the party — I’ve started seriously questioning my own ethics. I’ve begun to wonder just what it means to be a participant, however minor, in the pyramid scheme that higher education has become in the years since I went to college.
Airplane Games
Sometime in the late 1980s, the Airplane Game roared through the San Francisco Bay Area lesbian community. It was a classic pyramid scheme, even if cleverly dressed up in language about women’s natural ability to generate abundance, just as we gestate children in our miraculous wombs. If the connection between feminism and airplanes was a little murky — well, we could always think of ourselves as modern-day Amelia Earharts. (As long as we didn’t think too hard about how she ended up.)
A few women made a lot of money from it — enough, in the case of one friend of mine, for a down payment on a house. Inevitably, a lot more of us lost money, even as some like me stood on the sidelines sadly shaking our heads.
There were four tiers on that “airplane”: a captain, two co-pilots, four crew, and 8 passengers — 15 in all to start. You paid $3,000 to get on at the back of the plane as a passenger, so the first captain (the original scammer), got out with $24,000 — $3,000 from each passenger. The co-pilots and crew, who were in on the fix, paid nothing to join. When the first captain “parachuted out,” the game split in two, and each co-pilot became the captain of a new plane. They then pressured their four remaining passengers to recruit enough new women to fill each plane, so they could get their payday, and the two new co-pilots could each captain their own planes.
Unless new people continued to get on at the back of each plane, there would be no payday for the earlier passengers, so the pressure to recruit ever more women into the game only grew. The original scammers ran through the game a couple of times, but inevitably the supply of gullible women willing to invest their savings ran out. By the time the game collapsed, hundreds of women had lost significant amounts of money.
No one seemed to know the women who’d brought the game and all those “planes” to the Bay Area, but they had spun a winning story about endless abundance and the glories of women’s energy. After the game collapsed, they took off for another women’s community with their “earnings,” leaving behind a lot of sadder, poorer, and perhaps wiser San Francisco lesbians.
Feasting at the Tenure Trough or Starving in the Ivory Tower?
So, you may be wondering, what could that long-ago scam have to do with my ethical qualms about working as a college instructor? More than you might think.
Let’s start with PhD programs. In 2019, the most recent year for which statistics are available, U.S. colleges and universities churned out about 55,700 doctorates — and such numbers continue to increase by about 1% a year. The average number of doctorates earned over the last decade is almost 53,000 annually. In other words, we’re talking about nearly 530,000 PhDs produced by American higher education in those 10 years alone. Many of them have ended up competing for a far smaller number of jobs in the academic world.
It’s true that most PhDs in science or engineering end up with post-doctoral positions (earning roughly $40,000 a year) or with tenure-track or tenured jobs in colleges and universities (averaging $60,000 annually to start). Better yet, most of them leave their graduate programs with little or no debt.
The situation is far different if your degree wasn’t in STEM (science, technology, engineering, or mathematics) but, for example, in education or the humanities. As a start, far more of those degree-holders graduate owing money, often significant sums, and ever fewer end up teaching in tenure-track positions — in jobs, that is, with security, decent pay, and benefits.
Many of the non-STEM PhDs who stay in academia end up joining an exploited, contingent workforce of part-time, or “adjunct,” professors. That reserve army of the underemployed is higher education’s dirty little secret. After all, we — and yes, I’m one of them — actually teach the majority of the classes in many schools, while earning as little as $1,500 a semester for each of them.
I hate to bring up transportation again, but there’s a reason teachers like us are called “freeway flyers.” A 2014 Congressional report revealed that 89% of us work at more than one institution and 27% at three different schools, just to cobble together the most meager of livings.
Many of us, in fact, rely on public antipoverty programs to keep going. Inside Higher Ed, reflecting on a 2020 report from the American Federation of Teachers, describes our situation this way:
"Nearly 25% of adjunct faculty members rely on public assistance, and 40% struggle to cover basic household expenses, according to a new report from the American Federation of Teachers. Nearly a third of the 3,000 adjuncts surveyed for the report earn less than $25,000 a year. That puts them below the federal poverty guideline for a family of four.”
I’m luckier than most adjuncts. I have a union, and over the years we’ve fought for better pay, healthcare, a pension plan, and a pathway (however limited) to advancement. Now, however, my school’s administration is using the pandemic as an excuse to try to claw back the tiny cost-of-living adjustments we won in 2019.
The Oxford Dictionary of English defines an adjunct as “a thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part.” Once upon a time, in the middle of the previous century, that’s just what adjunct faculty were — occasional additions to the full-time faculty. Often, they were retired professionals who supplemented a department’s offerings by teaching a single course in their area of expertise, while their salaries were more honoraria than true payments for work performed. Later, as more women entered academia, it became common for a male professor’s wife to teach a course or two, often as part of his employment arrangement with the university. Since her salary was a mere adjunct to his, she was paid accordingly.
Now, the situation has changed radically. In many colleges and universities, adjunct faculty are no longer supplements, but the most “essential part” of the teaching staff. Classes simply couldn’t go on without us; nor, if you believe college administrations, could their budgets be balanced without us. After all, why pay a full-time professor $10,000 to teach a class (since he or she will be earning, on average, $60,000 a year and covering three classes a semester) when you can give a part-timer like me $1,500 for the very same work?
And adjuncts have little choice. The competition for full-time positions is fierce, since every year another 53,000 or more new PhDs climb into the back row of the academic airplane, hoping to make it to the pilot’s seat and secure a tenure-track position.
And here’s another problem with that. These days the people in the pilots’ seats often aren’t parachuting out. They’re staying right where they are. That, in turn, means new PhDs find themselves competing for an ever-shrinking prize, as Laura McKenna has written in the Atlantic, “not only with their own cohort but also with the unemployed PhDs who graduated in previous years.” Many of those now clinging to pilots’ seats are members of my own boomer generation, who still benefit from a 1986 law (signed by then-75-year-old President Ronald Reagan) that outlawed mandatory retirements.
Grade Inflation v. Degree Inflation?
People in the world of education often bemoan the problem of “grade inflation” — the tendency of average grades to creep up over time. Ironically, this problem is exacerbated by the adjunctification of teaching, since adjuncts tend to award higher grades than professors with secure positions. The reason is simple enough: colleges use student evaluations as a major metric for rehiring adjuncts and higher grades translate directly into better evaluations. Grade inflation at the college level is, in my view, a non-issue, at least for students. Employers don’t look at your transcript when they’re hiring you and even graduate schools care more about recommendations and GRE scores.
The real problem faced by today’s young people isn’t grade inflation. It’s degree inflation.
Once upon a time in another America, a high-school diploma was enough to snag you a good job, with a chance to move up as time went on (especially if you were white and male, as the majority of workers were in those days). And you paid no tuition whatsoever for that diploma. In fact, public education through 12th grade is still free, though its quality varies profoundly depending on who you are and where you live.
But all that changed as increasing numbers of employers began requiring a college degree for jobs that don’t by any stretch of the imagination require a college education to perform. The Washington Post reports:
“Among the positions never requiring a college degree in the past that are quickly adding that to the list of desired requirements: dental hygienists, photographers, claims adjusters, freight agents, and chemical equipment operators.”
In 2017, Manjari Raman of the Harvard Business School wrote that
“the degree gap — the discrepancy between the demand for a college degree in job postings and the employees who are currently in that job who have a college degree — is significant. For example, in 2015, 67% of production supervisor job postings asked for a college degree, while only 16% of employed production supervisors had one.”
In other words, even though most people already doing such jobs don’t have a bachelor’s degree, companies are only hiring new people who do. Part of the reason: that requirement automatically eliminates a lot of applicants, reducing the time and effort involved in making hiring decisions. Rather than sifting through résumés for specific skills (like the ability to use certain computer programs or write fluently), employers let a college degree serve as a proxy. The result is not only that they’ll hire people who don’t have the skills they actually need, but that they’re eliminating people who do have the skills but not the degree. You won’t be surprised to learn that those rejected applicants are more likely to be people of color, who are underrepresented among the holders of college degrees.
Similarly, some fields that used to accept a BA now require a graduate degree to perform the same work. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that “in 2015–16, about 39% of all occupational therapists ages 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree as their highest level of educational attainment.” Now, however, employers are commonly insisting that new applicants hold at least a master’s degree — and so up the pyramid we continually go (at ever greater cost to those students).
The Biggest Pyramid of All
In a sense, you could say that the whole capitalist economy is the biggest pyramid of them all. For every one of the fascinating, fulfilling, autonomous, and well-paying jobs out there, there are thousands of boring, mind- and body-crushing ones like pulling items for shipment in an Amazon warehouse or folding clothes at Forever 21.
We know, in other words, that there are only a relatively small number of spaces in the cockpit of today’s economic plane. Nonetheless, we tell our young people that the guaranteed way to get one of those rare gigs at the top of the pyramid is a college education.
Now, just stop for a second and consider what it costs to join the 2021 all-American Airplane Game of education. In 1970, when I went to Reed, a small, private, liberal arts college, tuition was $3,000 a year. I was lucky. I had a scholarship (known in modern university jargon as a “tuition discount”) that covered most of my costs. This year, annual tuition at that same school is a mind-boggling $62,420, more than 20 times as high. If college costs had simply risen with inflation, the price would be about $21,000 a year, or just under triple the price.
If I’d attended Federal City College (now the University of D.C.), my equivalent of a state school then, tuition would have been free. Now, even state schools cost too much for many students. Annually, tuition at the University of California at Berkeley, the flagship school of that state’s system, is $14,253 for in-state students, and $44,007 for out-of-staters.
I left school owing $800, or about $4,400 in today’s dollars. These days, most financial “aid” resembles foreign “aid” to developing countries — that is, it generally takes the form of loans whose interest piles up so fast that it’s hard to keep up with it, let alone begin to pay off the principal in your post-college life. Some numbers to contemplate: 62% of those graduating with a BA in 2019 did so owing money — owing, in fact, an average of almost $29,000. The average debt of those earning a graduate degree was an even more staggering $71,000. That, of course, is on top of whatever the former students had already shelled out while in school. And that, in turn, is before the “miracle” of compound interest takes hold and that debt starts to grow like a rogue zucchini.
It’s enough to make me wonder whether a seat in the Great American College and University Airplane Game is worth the price, and whether it’s ethical for me to continue serving as an adjunct flight attendant along the way. Whatever we tell students about education being the path to a good job, the truth is that there are remarkably few seats at the front of the plane.
Of course, on the positive side, I do still believe that time spent at college offers students something beyond any price — the opportunity to learn to think deeply and critically, while encountering people very different from themselves. The luckiest students graduate with a lifelong curiosity about the world and some tools to help them satisfy it. That is truly a ticket to a good life — and no one should have to buy a seat in an Airplane Game to get one.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
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Women and children collect water at a camp for internally displaced people on July 30, in Kandahar, Afghanistan. (photo: Lorenzo Tugnoli/WP)
Europe Is Shamefully Shutting the Door to Afghan Refugees
Nathan Akehurst, Jacobin
Akehurst writes: "After the Taliban seized Kabul, Emmanuel Macron led EU governments in declaring the need to 'protect ourselves' from a fresh wave of refugees. The West's intervention fueled chaos in Afghanistan. Now, it is punishing the victims."
On the picturesque Aegean island of Limnos, a new surveillance system is being field-tested this week. If effective, its thermal sensors, camera balloons, ship transponders, and satellite links will provide a 15,000-square-mile panopticon view of approaching boats. In another world, this could be an aid for rescuing people adrift at sea. But in this world, the European Union agency operating the system works to do exactly the opposite.
The agency in question, known as Frontex (European Border and Coast Guard Agency), is currently the subject of a complaint in the Rome prosecutor’s office that makes for grim reading. When NGOs desperately tried to draw authorities’ attention to an ailing refugee boat over a twenty-four-hour period on April 22, they were ignored. The result was that 130 people lost their lives.
The Aegean tests have been planned for some time. But now they have taken on a new context, with the Taliban capture of Kabul sparking a new and dire refugee emergency. More than 2 million Afghans have already had to flee. Neighboring countries will absorb most of them, but many will be pushed further afield. Already last year, 44,000 Afghans pleaded for asylum in Europe. Now, far more people need help — and a place to live.
Yet Europe’s response has been to raise up the drawbridge. Six EU member states have written to the European Commission demanding that deportations of Afghan refugees proceed, despite the Taliban advance. These are people who have suffered under decades of largely foreign-sponsored violence, from the internal conflict that spiraled into a US-Soviet proxy war in the 1980s to the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, NATO’s long war, and now the prospect of renewed Taliban rule. And many of them will now face another armed force in Frontex itself — a European army by any other name, set to become the bloc’s largest agency in the next few years.
“No One Forced Them”
Frontex replied to this latest crisis with a dour statement. For the EU’s border guard, “Of course we are observing and following the developments specifically in Afghanistan and Tunisia which might have an effect on migratory flows towards the European Union.” What this means in practice is that they are preparing to repel people by any means necessary, using a complex and lethal system that has already claimed two thousand lives in the last year. Much like the Afghan and Iraq wars, these border wars are a profit bonanza for arms and tech companies that benefit from and lobby for harsh security measures — and spread misery for everyone else.
As desperate Afghans fall from the wheels of departing aircraft in heartbreaking scenes, the nations that occupied the country for supposedly humanitarian reasons remain cold-eyed and hard-nosed. The UK and the United States have consistently and stubbornly attempted to dodge their obligations, even to their own Afghan staff seeking help and safety. A spokesperson for the German military succinctly dropped all responsibility for the Afghan translators now at risk of reprisals: “No one forced them to work for us.”
France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has pledged to “protect” Europe against Afghans, presumably hoping to outflank his far-right opponent Marine Le Pen in next spring’s elections.
Across the Channel, the UK’s Home Office is sitting on some three thousand outstanding asylum applications. Many of these will be long-standing; the system is intentionally labyrinthine and arduous, and it has gotten worse, logjammed not because of increasing numbers but because of the same combination of callousness and incompetence that produced Britain’s Windrush scandal. This week, the Home Office has removed its online guidance for Afghans seeking to submit an asylum application. This is apparently pursuant to the approval of a new resettlement scheme, but for now, British Afghans trying to aid their friends and families remain in confusion and limbo.
The UK has deported 15,000 Afghans in recent years, sitting at the top of a European total of 70,000. With nearly a quarter of a million war deaths, weak institutions, and rising extreme poverty, the country has never been safe — and most European powers have formally, if quietly, acknowledged this. But the deportation machine was still able to serve as part of the illusion of security reflected in political and military institutions that crumpled within days of their foreign scaffolding being removed.
Under first Donald Trump then Joe Biden, Washington chose to withdraw from Afghanistan for its own pragmatic reasons. It acknowledged what many military figures — and hardly just the antiwar left — have been telling it for a long time: namely that there are no viable military answers in this country. Yet, like guerrillas in the hills, holdouts of interventionists remain on both sides of the political mainstream. They are prepared to commit to wars of infinite lengths and costs — with Washington Post commentator Max Boot even making a comparison to the murderous, three-century-long “Indian Wars.”
That such viewpoints coexist with a complete lack of enthusiasm for even a much lower-cost operation to protect refugees is a horrifying display of the West’s political assumptions.
Taking Responsibility
The War on Terror and its social, political, and economic wreckage is now twenty years old. It’s lasted twice as long as my adult life. It saw the world’s last remaining superpower usher in a new century by trying to measure problems in terms of the tonnage of ordnance it could drop on them. Now — in a world ravaged by an ongoing pandemic, in which just last week the international body of climate scientists declared a code red for humanity — it is surely time to pursue approaches to humanitarian emergencies based on something better than endless militarization.
Concerted effort to prevent a refugee emergency on the scale of the 2015–17 Mediterranean crisis is the most important demand we can make now. And this is the very least that countries largely responsible for the current situation can do. Every major country should accept its fair share of fleeing Afghans, starting with but not limited to those who it has direct responsibilities to protect. High-tech coastal infrastructure should be used to facilitate, not deny, safe passage to human beings. And a significant international relief package must be assembled to ensure Afghanistan’s neighbors can manage the influx of refugees and support people fleeing terror.
None of this can undo the damage done over the past two decades. But, at the very least, the coda to this dismal affair could be genuine action to help suffering human beings.
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David Michaels (right), then the assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, who oversaw OSHA, attends a committee hearing in 2010. (photo: Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)
Heat Is Killing Workers in the US - and There Are No Federal Rules to Protect Them
Julia Shipley, Brian Edwards, David Nickerson, Robert Benincasa, Stella M. Chavez and Cheryl W. Thompson, NPR
Excerpt: "As the temperature in Grand Island, Neb., soared to 91 degrees that July day in 2018, two dozen farmworkers tunneled for nine hours into a thicket of cornstalks, snapping off tassels while they crossed a sunbaked field that spanned 206 acres - the equivalent of 156 football fields."
s the temperature in Grand Island, Neb., soared to 91 degrees that July day in 2018, two dozen farmworkers tunneled for nine hours into a thicket of cornstalks, snapping off tassels while they crossed a sunbaked field that spanned 206 acres — the equivalent of 156 football fields.
When they emerged at the end of the day to board a bus that would transport them to a nearby motel to sleep, one of the workers, Cruz Urias Beltran, didn't make it back. Searchers found the 52-year-old farmworker's body 20 hours later amid the corn husks, "as if he'd simply collapsed," recalled a funeral home employee. An empty water bottle was stuffed in his jeans pocket. An autopsy report confirmed that Beltran died from heatstroke. It was his third day on the job.
Beltran is one of at least 384 workers who died from environmental heat exposure in the U.S. in the last decade, according to an investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations, the investigative reporting unit of Columbia Journalism School. The count includes people toiling in essential yet often invisible jobs in 37 states across the country: farm laborers in California, construction and trash-collection workers in Texas and tree trimmers in North Carolina and Virginia. An analysis of federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the three-year average of worker heat deaths has doubled since the early 1990s.
CJI and NPR reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, including workplace inspection reports, death investigation files, depositions, court records and police reports, and interviewed victims' families, former and current officials from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, workers, employers, workers' advocates, lawyers and experts.
CJI and NPR also analyzed two federal data sets on worker heat deaths: one from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the other from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both are divisions within the U.S. Labor Department.
Among the findings:
- The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), whose primary responsibility is to protect workers from hazards, has failed to adopt a national heat standard to safeguard workers against rapidly rising temperatures, resulting in an enforcement system rife with problems.
- For at least a dozen companies, it wasn't the first time their workers succumbed to heat. One worker collapsed and died after repeatedly complaining about the heat; another died after hauling 20 tons of trash for nearly 10 hours. In some instances, employees died after not having ample water and scheduled shade breaks. Many died within their first week on the job.
- OSHA officials often decide not to penalize companies for worker deaths. When they do, they routinely negotiate with business owners and reduce violations and fines.
- In some cases, OSHA doesn't follow up after a worker's death from heat exposure to ensure that the company is complying with the measures the agency imposed to prevent future fatalities.
- Workers of color have borne the brunt: Since 2010, Hispanics have accounted for a third of all heat fatalities, yet they represent a fraction — 17% — of the U.S. workforce. Health and safety experts attribute this unequal toll to Hispanics' overrepresentation in industries vulnerable to dangerous heat, such as construction and agriculture.
- OSHA's record-keeping on heat fatalities is so poor that there's no way to know exactly how many workers have died from heat.
Current and former OSHA officials acknowledge that the known death tally is a vast undercount. The agency mostly relies on companies to report worker fatalities after they occur, but not all do so.
CJI and NPR reporters analyzed worker heat deaths recorded by OSHA between 2010 and 2020 and compared each incident day's high temperature with historical averages over 40 years. Most of the deaths happened on days that were unusually hot for that date. More than two-thirds occurred on days when the temperature reached at least 90 degrees.
Yet no worker should die from heat, said Ronda McCarthy, an occupational health specialist who directs medical services at the health care provider Concentra, in Waco, Texas. McCarthy spent seven years educating her home state's municipal workers about heat, which reduced cases of worker heat exhaustion and similar conditions there.
"Heat illness should be considered a preventable illness," she said.
No federal heat standard
OSHA has known about the dangers of heat — and how to prevent deaths — for decades. In 1972, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studied the effects of heat stress on workers in the U.S. and recommended criteria for an OSHA heat standard. Under the proposal, employers would have had to give employees one break every hour and offer ready access to water. New workers would have received extra breaks so they could acclimate to strenuous activity in the heat.
NIOSH has refined these safety measures — first in 1986 and, again, in 2016 — but OSHA has not acted on them because of other regulatory priorities. This year, for the first time, OSHA is officially considering a heat standard by putting it on its regulatory agenda. James Frederick, OSHA's acting director, said it's a "priority" for the Biden administration.
"Occupational exposure to heat remains a very important topic," Frederick said in an interview with CJI and NPR. "We're focused on improving our efforts to protect workers moving forward."
Absent a heat standard, OSHA must rely on a 50-year-old regulation guaranteeing workers a "hazard-free workplace." OSHA does require companies to provide adequate water but not other heat-safety measures.
OSHA's own research shows relying on this general rule hasn't worked. A 2016 study by agency scientists found that some employers whose workers got sick or died from heat hadn't met basic water provisions. Most companies never offered rest breaks. Only one out of 84 total employers had a plan for building up its workers' tolerance for laboring in heat.
In 2011, four labor and public interest organizations, including Public Citizen, a consumer rights advocacy group, petitioned OSHA to issue a heat standard. They asked the agency for an emergency temporary standard because a new rule, the petition stated, "could potentially take many years before it's finalized and implemented."
David Michaels, then the assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, who oversaw OSHA, denied the petition, arguing in a January 2012 letter to petitioners that workers weren't dying from heat at a rate that would justify a legal standard. Recognizing extreme heat's threat, he said most workers can "recover fairly quickly when the appropriate measures are taken."
Instead, Michaels launched a voluntary awareness campaign distributing posters and flyers that instructed employees on how to protect themselves. OSHA incorporated these precautions into a free bilingual phone app featuring government-issued heat alerts and advisories. The agency continued this campaign through 2013. Its principle message remains on OSHA's website today.
Michaels touted the campaign as a success at the time. The numbers are less clear. The number of workers who succumbed to heat topped 61 cases during the campaign's inaugural year, in 2011 — an all-time high. Another 65 workers would die from heat exposure in the ensuing two years, closer to the annual average for the decade, while the campaign remained an agency priority.
Six years after his petition denial letter, and after leaving OSHA's top post, Michaels changed his approach. In 2018, he joined Public Citizen and 131 additional groups in a second petition asking the agency to enact a heat standard. This time, petitioners cited NIOSH's updated guidelines and warned that "this warming trend will not only continue but accelerate."
In a recent interview, Michaels, now a public health professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., said the agencywide consensus was that climate change would worsen the problem. But the rule-making process at OSHA is "so difficult" and the industry opposition so formidable that adopting a heat standard "became a bridge too far," he said. He has come to believe a standard is essential.
"We know that heat kills," Michaels said. "And if we don't have requirements, heat will kill more workers."
Search and rescue
A standard that included water, rest, shade and acclimatization could have saved Beltran, an experienced farmworker who traveled more than 1,300 miles from San Luis, Ariz., to the heart of America's Corn Belt to pull tassels off corn plants for Rivera Agri Inc.
The day he went missing in the fields on the outskirts of Grand Island, the temperature — with humidity — felt like 100 degrees. Joseph Rivera, the company's owner, placed an emergency call to authorities shortly after 5 p.m. Beltran was in the field but didn't come out with the other workers, he told the 911 operator.
The call set off an elaborate search-and-rescue mission in the central Nebraska city of 51,000. One volunteer flew a Piper Cub airplane low and slow, on the lookout for the orange safety hat atop Beltran's salt-and-pepper hair. Another manned a helicopter circling the sea of stalks until the chopper ran low on fuel. At sunset, a Nebraska State Patrol plane with thermal-imaging equipment scanned for a sign of Beltran's body temperature, but since the plants and soil also were emanating heat, he went undetected.
The following morning, as the temperature hovered in the 90s, the Red Cross opened a temporary cooling station with air conditioning for the 100 volunteers who joined the search. Shortly after noon, someone spotted Beltran's body, facedown in the husks.
Two months after Beltran's body was shipped to his family's home in Mexico's Sonora state, an OSHA inspector visited Rivera Agri as part of the agency's investigation into the death. OSHA inspection records show the company didn't deploy the kind of preventive measures that a heat standard would have required. Rivera Agri did not ensure that employees took enough rest breaks in shade, drank sufficient amounts of water and adapted to their grueling work, the records show.
"These actions were left to the employees to manage themselves," the inspector wrote in a nine-page citation.
OSHA found that the "moderate lifting and bending" and "pushing and pulling" that Beltran had performed in the heat had contributed to his death. It cited Rivera Agri for a violation and proposed fines totaling $11,641. The agency also ordered the company to train employees on the symptoms of heat illness, among other safety measures. Rivera Agri agreed to OSHA's conditions, and the fines were reduced to $9,500, records show.
Angela Rivera, who runs the farm labor contracting business with her father, Joseph, said the company has worked to fulfill the agreement. Today, it contracts with a farmworker-rights group to educate employees on how to respond to heat emergencies. Near the cornfield, it sets up extra water stations and has canopies for emergency shade.
"We've been in this business for a long time," said Angela Rivera, who calls Beltran's death "an unfortunate thing."
"Every year we try to step it up," she said.
Joseph Rivera said supervisors now monitor the heat on their cellphones and pull detasselers from the cornfields whenever it gets too hot — part of a heat-stress plan the Riveras created after Beltran's death. They hand out brochures explaining the new policy to every farmworker on their bus.
Not the first death
Beltran was not Rivera Agri's first heat-related fatality. In July 1997, a 39-year-old detasseler died of heatstroke under similar circumstances. Like Beltran, it was his third day on the job, and the temperature had spiked to 95 degrees. When he collapsed, the crew found him within two hours. But his core body temperature was 108 degrees — hot enough for the brain, liver and kidneys to shut down.
OSHA investigated his death but didn't impose penalties because then-OSHA Area Director Ben Bare determined there was no applicable standard. The lack of a standard leaves individual OSHA officials to decide whether a general violation applies to each death, creating a pattern of uneven enforcement in worker heat-death cases, records show.
CJI and NPR's analysis of worker heat deaths shows that, like Rivera Agri, 11 other companies have lost more than one employee. In five of the cases, OSHA investigated the first fatality and issued citations, only for another employee to die from heat. One of those cited was Texas-based Hellas Construction, which builds publicly and privately funded stadiums and other sports infrastructure projects across the country.
In July 2018, the week before Beltran died in a Nebraska cornfield, Karl Simmons signed on as a laborer for Hellas. At 30, with long braided hair and a shoulder tattoo bearing his mother's name, Simmons arrived at the sprawling Gateway Park in Fort Worth, Texas, ready to install turf.
On his second day on the job, Simmons, who had served in the U.S. Navy, took a lunch break and fielded a call from his wife, Precious. "It's just hot," he complained, according to a deposition she gave in a lawsuit filed by the family against Hellas. The five-person crew had already drunk all the water. Simmons returned to preparing the mixture to attach to the turf, shoveling gravel and adhesive chemicals into a mixer.
That afternoon — as the temperature topped 96 degrees — Simmons told his supervisor he felt hot, according to OSHA records. He complained about the heat two more times that day. Each time, he said he felt sick. At one point, he sought shade under a tree while his supervisor drove to a store to get water.
A passerby eventually spotted Simmons sprawled on the ground, facedown, and alerted the crew. His brother-in-law, Michael Spriggins, who worked alongside Simmons as a Hellas laborer, sprinted to his aid. He found Simmons gasping for breath, bleeding from his nose and mouth.
"It was a sight I ain't going to never forget," Spriggins said in an interview with CJI and NPR.
He called 911 and then placed a cool towel under Simmons' neck at the dispatcher's instructions. Simmons opened his eyes.
"It looked like he's gonna pull through this," Spriggins recalled.
Two hours later, Simmons was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Heatstroke, the autopsy report confirmed. He was one of at least 53 workers who have been fatally stricken by heat in Texas since 2010, CJI and NPR's analysis shows.
The next day, Jason Davidson, Hellas's chief safety officer, emailed more than 340 company employees, addressing the perils of laboring in extreme heat. It was at least the fourth written warning he sent in the summer of 2018, when 11 additional Hellas employees were diagnosed with heat-related illnesses requiring medical attention.
Dean Wingo, who oversaw the OSHA regional office that includes Texas from 2007 to 2012, said Hellas' hospitalization numbers suggest a worrying pattern. Serious heat-related illness involves everything from a heat rash to uncontrolled bleeding, according to medical experts. In its most severe form, heatstroke can cause multisystem organ failure that has lasting adverse effects. Wingo said he believes Hellas' record on workplace heat safety shows "poor" company management.
Hellas officials declined a dozen interview requests for this story and didn't respond to a list of 20 written questions from CJI and NPR. In its response to a wrongful-death lawsuit filed in July 2019 by Simmons' wife, the company denied that its conduct "rose to a level of gross neglect" or that it failed to provide a safe workplace.
But in December 2018, OSHA found that Hellas hadn't provided Simmons a workplace "free from recognized hazards" and cited the company for two violations, including failing to record Simmons' death in OSHA logs, records show. OSHA proposed a fine of $14,782 against Hellas for Simmons' death. The company earned more than $150 million in revenue that year.
As part of a settlement, Hellas agreed to implement "a more robust/detailed training program ... to prevent heat exhaustion and heat stress injuries." OSHA lowered the fine by nearly $2,000, to $12,934. That's higher than the national average fine of $7,314 for employers in such cases, according to a CJI and NPR analysis.
Hellas executives did not carry out the safety measures, records show. And OSHA never showed up at a work site to see whether the company was following the terms of the settlement agreement.
OSHA's regional office in Dallas, which investigated Simmons' death, declined to discuss the case.
OSHA data shows the agency reduced heat-related sanctions nationally by 31%, on average, after settlements. It cut the penalties in more than half of the 246 heat-death cases in which OSHA had proposed them.
Wingo said the only way OSHA can ensure that companies like Hellas keep their promises is to conduct follow-up inspections in person.
"I don't think it's excusable," he said. "When you've had a fatality, you go back."
On July 19, 2019, a year after Simmons' death, a second Hellas worker succumbed to heat — this time in Hondo, Texas, 42 miles west of San Antonio. At 6 a.m. that day, forecasters were promising a scorcher. The temperature would soar to 99 degrees, 3 degrees hotter than the 40-year average, the CJI and NPR data analysis shows.
Pedro Martinez Sr., 49, had been employed by Hellas for more than a year when he arrived for work at McDowell Middle School with his 22-year-old namesake. The father had gotten the son a summer job. At the time, Pedro Jr., also known as "Bruno," was between semesters at a college in his home state of Zacatecas, Mexico.
On the third day, the pair did cement work on the school's athletic field. They pulled out vertical rebar stakes using a device called a JackJaw, pumping a handle to wrench the stakes from the ground. As in the Simmons case, an OSHA inspection would later confirm that the area had little shade. Records show that the younger Martinez toiled for 10 hours before taking a lunch break at 4 p.m.
Nearly two hours later, he was working beside his father when he became overheated and ran off, hit a fence and collapsed. The father rushed his son to a local hospital's emergency room, where nurses placed ice packs around his body. But his core temperature was already 108 degrees, according to a police report. The official cause of death was heatstroke.
In December 2019, OSHA cited Hellas for a willful violation, the most serious category. The citation would have placed Hellas on a public list of "severe violators," reserved for repeat offenders. The agency proposed a penalty of $132,598 — the maximum amount OSHA could levy at the time.
One month later, Hellas challenged the citation, arguing it should be dismissed because OSHA didn't prove "the necessary elements of its claims." The Labor Department settled with Hellas in April 2020, cutting the fine in half and reclassifying the willful violation as five "serious" ones. This kept Hellas off the severe violators list. A revised settlement agreement required the company to create a heat-illness prevention plan, among other things. It's unclear whether Hellas followed through.
By May of last year, Hellas had paid the fine, and OSHA resolved the case. The agency's regional office in San Antonio, which investigated Martinez's death, declined two requests to discuss the case.
A state standard falls short
Besides Texas, the states of California, Florida and Arkansas have each recorded at least 14 worker heat deaths since 2010, according to CJI and NPR's analysis. Unlike most states, however, California has its own heat standard. Passed in 2005, the standard was later named after a 17-year-old pregnant farmworker, Maria Jimenez, who died from heat exposure while pruning grapes. The standard was the first to uphold the pillars of heat safety: water, rest, shade and acclimatization.
In 2015, after the United Farm Workers sued California's state version of OSHA, the agency tightened its standard. Cal/OSHA lowered the heat safety limit from 85 to 80 degrees and required companies to prepare for extreme heat threats on days hotter than 95 degrees. It also allocated more money and staff to enforcement.
Today, California's rule is widely viewed as the gold standard. The Labor Department should emulate it, said John Newquist, who served as assistant administrator in OSHA Region 5 in the Upper Midwest from 2005 to 2012.
"It's easy with California already adopting this thing for years," he said. "If you follow these guidelines, that works."
But OSHA data on worker heat deaths suggests the state's standard can fall short. The rule has led to a rise in heat-related enforcement actions by the state's Division of Occupational Safety and Health, known as Cal/OSHA, every year but 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic affected such activities across the board. In 2019, for instance, the agency conducted more than 4,000 heat inspections and cited workplaces in nearly half of them. Still, the CJI and NPR analysis shows that California's yearly tally of worker heat deaths has remained steady over the past decade.
Some critics say the agency has yet to curb worker heat illnesses and deaths because of lax and uneven enforcement.
Garrett Brown, a Cal/OSHA inspector from 1994 to 2014, has investigated dozens of heat deaths and worked as a special advisor for a former Cal/OSHA secretary and as a part-time inspector until this year. He believes the agency can't "do what it needs to do" to protect the state's workers because of its chronic understaffing. Brown has documented staffing levels for years, charting the data on his blog, Inside Cal/OSHA. The figures reveal a tiny workforce — about 190 inspectors for 1 million employers responsible for 18 million workers. That's one inspector for roughly every 5,200 companies.
Brown said mismanagement and the state's inability to fill inspector positions have exacerbated the problem. As of July 31, at least 25% of nearly 250 Cal/OSHA inspector positions remained vacant. And that can make for dire consequences on the ground.
A firefighter's death
In California, where fires have been raging, the victims of heat-related deaths are sometimes firefighters.
In April 2015, just two months before California's standard was tightened, Raymond Araujo, one of 4,000 inmates who then served as firefighters for the state's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection — known as Cal Fire — was on a 2-mile hike in Banning, Calif., about 30 miles from Palm Springs. Winding through steep, often shadeless hills, the trail was part of the department's required cardiovascular training. On that day, the temperature climbed to 81 degrees, 10 degrees hotter than the 40-year average.
As the 12-member group neared the end of the exercise, Araujo stumbled and fell to his knees. His supervisor told his colleagues to help Araujo stand up and remove his fire gear so he could finish the hike. He walked another 30 feet and eventually collapsed.
The fire captain called for medical assistance, and a helicopter transported Araujo back to a nearby base camp, where he was pronounced dead, the records show.
While the Cal/OSHA inspection report named heat as a contributing factor in Araujo's death, the cause was "hypertensive cardiovascular disease," according to the autopsy report. As a result, Cal/OSHA deemed his death an accident.
Brown, the former Cal/OSHA inspector, reviewed the agency's report and said it was impossible for him to know why officials declined to investigate. He said the incident resembled many cases he had investigated — where workers suffered heart attacks because of the heat. Were he leading the charge, Brown said, he would have wanted to talk to eyewitnesses because the incident had all the hallmarks of a heat illness violation.
"One way to invalidate a fatality report is to decide that it's natural causes," he said, explaining that Cal/OSHA managers can look for ways to lessen understaffed inspectors' workloads.
Cal/OSHA declined CJI and NPR's requests to interview key officials for this story. But an agency spokesman defended Cal/OSHA's handling of Araujo's death, noting that the agency followed the Cal/OSHA medical unit's assessment in determining a cause of death.
Asked about the effectiveness of the heat standard, the agency said it regularly looks to enhance enforcement activities.
"We continue to evaluate the effectiveness of our programs and consult with various subject matter experts to determine what changes, if any, are necessary to improve health and safety," spokesman Frank Polizzi said in an email.
"It pays not to comply"
Just before 8 a.m. on July 28, 2019, Cal Fire firefighter Yaroslav "Yaro" Katkov set out with a fellow employee and a fire captain on a hike similar to the one that Araujo had made. The 28-year-old Ukrainian immigrant, who lived in Murrieta, Calif., a bedroom community near San Diego, had served as a reserve firefighter before being hired by Cal Fire in a seasonal role a year earlier.
On a standard training exercise, Katkov was asked to complete a 1.45-mile loop at Cal Fire's rural Station 16 in Fallbrook, a remote mountainous area halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. As they traversed the loop, the captain and the co-worker noticed Katkov lagging behind the required 30-minute deadline to finish the hike. The two stopped on several occasions to allow Katkov to catch up, delaying their end time by 10 minutes. The temperature would climb to 88 degrees that day — 5 degrees hotter than the 40-year average.
The captain, Joe Ekblad, recognized that Katkov hadn't given his body enough of a rest yet but ordered the firefighters to repeat the exercise, according to the Cal/OSHA records. On the way up the steepest incline of the loop, Katkov stumbled and told his supervisor he felt exhausted — two telltale signs of heat stress. He collapsed on the hilltop, was airlifted to a hospital nearly two hours later and died of heat illness the next day.
"He loved the idea of being like a wildland firefighter," said Ashley Vallario, Katkov's fiancée. "It made him happy."
This time, Cal/OSHA investigated Katkov's death, interviewing eyewitnesses. The inspector detailed extensive failures by the captain, which led to his demotion. The agency found that Cal Fire had failed to stop the hike and seek emergency medical treatment even after Katkov had exhibited heat-related symptoms. Regulators levied a fine of $80,000 — almost five times the average Cal/OSHA fine of $17,000 in these cases.
Neither Cal Fire nor Ekblad responded to requests for comment.
Such a large penalty shows what a fully enforceable heat standard can do, some experts say. But Cal/OSHA records suggest the regulators' stick has not come soon enough. Since 2012, at least four other firefighters have died during Cal Fire training hikes. All the firefighters but Katkov were inmates. No other case yielded sanctions.
Cal Fire's training processes, meanwhile, continue to put firefighters at risk. In 2020, almost a year after Katkov's death, another department firefighter was sickened by heat during a hike. That firefighter was rushed to the hospital and survived.
Ellen Widess, head of Cal/OSHA from 2011 to 2013, said she sees an unsettling pattern: Employers can brush off the cost of an agency fine. In many cases, she said, penalties have no effect.
"We've seen that the costs of [non]compliance are so cheap," Widess said. "It pays not to comply."
"It's going to be like this every year"
In the three years since Public Citizen renewed its petition for an OSHA heat standard, political pressure for such action has grown. In March, Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., authored legislation that would require OSHA to create a national heat standard based on NIOSH criteria and mandate employer training "to prevent and respond" to heat illnesses. The bill, co-sponsored by at least 57 House Democrats, is pending in committee. It marks the second attempt by federal lawmakers to establish a rule since 2019.
OSHA, meanwhile, said it will take the first step toward issuing a rule this fall. In October, the agency plans to publish a request for information from employers, occupational health specialists, climate scientists and workers on the viability of a standard. Frederick, OSHA's acting director, said the input could help the agency develop a regulation that applies to any industry in the United States.
"Heat hazards exist in many, many industries," he said. "We know that we have work to do with almost every industry to understand ... what the effect of heat hazards in their workplace is and how best they are putting in practices and controls to mitigate those hazards."
Already, former OSHA officials are anticipating industry pushback, particularly from construction groups.
"Every time OSHA proposes a standard, [the] industry accuses OSHA of killing jobs and destroying whatever industry is going to be regulated," said Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant labor secretary who helped shepherd two chemical-exposure standards through protracted rule-making processes. "That would probably follow with a heat standard."
Some states have decided not to wait. In June, as an unprecedented heat wave blanketed the Pacific Northwest, Sebastian Francisco Perez moved irrigation pipes at a nursery in Willamette Valley, Oregon. Perez was found dead at the end of his shift. Preliminary information suggests the incident was heat related, but Oregon Occupational Safety and Health (Oregon OSHA) has yet to make a determination, according to Aaron Corvin, a spokesman for Oregon OSHA. Ten days later, the state enacted an emergency heat standard.
Back in Grand Island, Neb., where the average high temperature has increased 2 degrees since the 1990s, the intensifying heat is not lost on Joseph Rivera. As a younger man in the fields, he remembers there were hot and humid days. But now the heat is so extreme, he said, "you get these hot days that just come up over you."
"With climate change, you hit 112 in Nebraska the other day," Rivera said, explaining why he's amenable to a federal heat standard. "It's going to be like this every year."
