27 September 21
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We are living in a moment of particular rancor, when anger, fear, and despair are widespread, and for good reason. We can see selfishness run amok, a selfishness that is proving deadly in a time of a pandemic and increasingly with our climate crisis. We can see cruelty towards others taking hold, fueled by a toxic brew of ignorance and hatred centuries in the making. We are witnessing lies weaponized into an assault on our ideals of a pluralistic democracy. We see women being denied agency over their own bodies. We see historical truths being denied and false narratives flourish.
In such a state it is natural to try to sort ourselves between “us” and “them.” It is understandable that we wish to castigate and ultimately defeat the purveyors of our societal ills. But from my limited understanding of Yom Kippur, what is asked of that day is not to dismiss or deny all that is wrong about the larger world, but to take a pause from looking outward and shift to the hard work of looking inward. With humility, we must understand that all of us are flawed and in need of improvement. And it is in that spirit that I wanted to create a space for our discussion today. With grave dangers afoot, it is too easy to absolve ourselves of our own actions, big and small, that harm others.
Writing in the New York Times in an essay entitled “A Rabbi’s Guide on Making Amends and Letting Those Grudges Go,” Rabbi David Wolpe outlined some of the many practices around Yom Kippur. I share a few here for the purpose of our examination, but I encourage you to read the entire piece.
“If you have caused offense or harm, Yom Kippur does not magically buy you absolution. But the traditions surrounding the day do offer guidance for seeking forgiveness. First, you must apologize to those you’ve hurt, sincerely, as many as three times. The apology should not come weighed down with justification, but rather should acknowledge the other person’s hurt and express sincere regret.
Second, serious, sustained reflection is required to try to change who you are. The Hebrew word for repentance, teshuvah, also means return. To repent is to return to what once was, what became hidden through coarseness or impulse. It is also to return to God and to the community. But slow, careful restoration takes time. The one who is sorry today and expects to stride right back, unblemished, is naïve or conniving.
Third, you must change your ways. The sage Maimonides teaches that one who says to himself, “I’ll sin and then, repent” cannot be forgiven. Sorrow is not a strategy. It is a vulnerability and it is a promise.
And what if you are the one who has been hurt? Jewish tradition urges us to consider why it is so hard to forgive. There is a savage self-righteousness to public shaming. If I forgive you, truly forgive you, then I must restore moral parity; I am no better than you. Accepting that steals the satisfactions of resentment, but it is essential: Jewish law insists that once someone has been forgiven, you must never remind the person of that fact. To do so is to re-establish a hierarchy that true forgiveness disavows.”
There is so much wisdom and cause for reflection in Rabbi Wolpe’s elucidation of the traditions of atonement at Yom Kippur. And one of the most powerful is that we all can try to open ourselves up to ask others for forgiveness and to also bestow forgiveness on those who have hurt us, if they sincerely seek it. To be sure, not all actions are forgivable and many who harm us will continue to do so without remorse. But what strikes me is that this is less about any one particular act than it is about forging a system for reconciliation and repentance. It is a hopeful belief that we all have the power to be better if we have the courage to consider our actions without the smokescreens of justification we build for ourselves.
We live in a time where the divides between us are stark and seem to be growing both wider and more inescapable. We are divided by politics, race, geography, occupations, and sexual identity, to name but a few. Often these divisions overlap. It has become easier and easier to predict how someone will think about a whole host of issues based on what we can tease out about their demographics. In these divisions, acts of reconciliation are more difficult. We operate in different spheres, and our isolation has only grown in the pandemic and the escalating attacks on our civic ways of life. That is why it is so essential that we do our part to lessen this separation, to understand our own actions that can create not only harm but the potential for help.
In recent years, I have been asked many times, often through heartfelt and sometimes tearful entreaties, what any one of us can do in the face of the powerful destructive forces arrayed against progress and hope. I recognize that the size of the problems we face requires broad and sustained global action. But a collective response is, by definition, powered by a collection of individuals. And what I have said to those who ask is that they, and I, should start by trying to do one small thing that makes our human and natural worlds better. Reach out to even one person who you know who may be lonely. Pick up some trash in a park as you walk through. Choose to end a hurtful line of discourse. From small actions, can come larger ones. Momentum can build. Join a local volunteer effort. See something that you feel can be improved and then start a small movement to fix it. Recognize that we all can do more. We all can choose at one of the countless inflection points of our lives to opt for positive action. Reflecting back on Yom Kippur, Jews gather on that day as a community but what they are wrestling with, what they are vowing, what they are beginning to act upon is a personal journey. It is a chorus of hope, but a chorus is a collection of individual voices.
Even while some people work hard on self-improvement there will always be others who flaunt their bad behavior. Sadly, many who should face consequences for their actions never will. Injustice is rampant. It always will be. But to be consumed by that at the detriment of one’s own obligations of atonement and outreach is to succumb to a cynicism that isn’t helpful. We can be angry at what we see. We can vow to work to make sure that those who are harming others at the greatest scale shall not have power. But at the same time we must do what we can to lessen our own spite and inflictions of injury.
Years ago I came across a story from the Jewish tradition that I want to share once more. It comes from the famed 19th Century Rabbi Israel Salanter who told of how he came across an old shoemaker late one night still hunched over in work even though it was late and the candle providing light was nearly burnt out. He asked the old man why he was doing such a thing, and the shoemaker replied, “As long as the candle is burning, it is still possible to make repairs." Rabbi Salanter was deeply moved by the great wisdom of this statement, and so am I.
In life, as long as each of us has it, it is possible to mend - even when our candles have mostly burnt themselves out. This does not only hold true for individuals, but for societies, and movements, and our larger world. May it always be thus. And may more of us find the courage and conviction to fix what we can while we still have the light to do so.
Vladimir Putin. (photo: Alexey Druzhinin/Bloomberg)
“They did not want the public to know that the Russians were supporting Trump,” the whistleblower says
Brian Murphy, the former principal deputy undersecretary in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, filed a whistleblower complaint last year — as well as a handful of internal complaints and reports — that all painted a frightening picture of how things were running in the department tasked with keeping Americans safe. “From the outset, there were three things that I was told that we would look to manipulate intelligence on and bend the truth about,” Murphy told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week. “And I told them upfront that I wasn’t going to do it.”
On Russia, the border, and white supremacy, Murphy said he felt “intense pressure to try to take intelligence and fit a political narrative” — accusing administration officials of demanding information be manipulated to burnish Trump’s image and help his messaging
In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved efforts to denigrate Democratic candidates in order to benefit Trump, an intelligence community report from March found. Putin also authorized a campaign “undermining public confidence in the electoral process and exacerbating socio-political divisions in the U.S” — something that Trump and some of his closest allies readily embraced during and after the election by making repeated false claims of fraud.
In regards to the southern border, the former FBI agent alleged, the DHS took a similar approach: fabricating a terrorist threat and misleading Congress to improve the political conditions for Trump’s coveted border wall.
The pattern repeated when it came to white supremacists, particularly after white supremacists killed a counter protester, Heather Heyer, at a right-wing rally in Charlottesville in 2017. “After Charlottesville, it became a third-rail issue…within the department to talk about white supremacy in any meaningful way,” Murphy said.
In his whistleblower complaint, Murphy wrote that senior official Ken Cuccinelli demanded that he “modify the section on White Supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe.” But Murphy says he refused, because doing so “would constitute censorship of analysis and the improper administration of an intelligence program.”
Murphy’s reluctance to play along gave him a “target on his back,” he recalled.
Former DHS director Chad Wolf accused him of having a credibility problem, and removed him from his position last August, citing claims that he violated legal requirements regarding the collection of information about journalists during riots in Portland, Oregon. Murphy denied those claims.
In November 2003, John Hinckley Jr. arrives at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. Starting in 2003, restrictions on Hinckley gradually lessened. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Relatives and neighbors survey the damage to vehicles in Kabuli. (photo: Jim Huylebroek/NYT)
In the wake of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, among the many things barely mentioned or already long forgotten (if ever even noticed), were the wedding parties U.S. air power took out there. Since the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked by al-Qaeda’s four-plane air force in September 2001, the U.S. military has returned the favor in the distant lands where it’s fought its “war on terror.” In those years, that military proved to be, all too literally, a wedding crasher of the first order. Yes, American air power repeatedly wiped out weddings in Afghanistan and at least one each in Iraq and Yemen (where Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post headlined the story, ever-so-charmingly, “Bride and Boom!”).
From 2008 on, I tried to cover the slaughter of such wedding parties at TomDispatch. By 2013, I had counted eight such massacres in which brides, grooms, celebrants, even wedding musicians had been killed, sometimes en masse. In one of those Afghan slaughters, among 102 guests, only two women reportedly survived. In 2018, I noted a ninth wedding that had been devastated, also in Afghanistan, and suggested that when the U.S. finally departed from such wars we would leave behind “the equivalent of unending ‘towers’ of dead women and children in the Greater Middle East.” And there can be little question that I missed more such disasters.
As far as I could tell, however, few in this country gave a damn about such massacres. (Imagine the coverage and outrage if even one such event had ever happened here!) Nor, by the way, did our military high command bother to apologize for almost all of them and those slaughters were often barely noted in the news here. I don’t believe that any other media outlet even tried to keep track of them, though each was a kind of grim 9/11 for those involved.
So many passing mistakes, so many thousands of miles away, and here’s the sad truth of it: when Joe Biden finally withdrew those last American troops from Afghanistan (against the recommendations of his closest military advisers), even I had more or less forgotten about this country’s wedding slaughters and the record I had tried to keep of them. Fortunately, TomDispatch managing editor Nick Turse, in his latest one-of-a-kind piece, brought them all-too-sadly to my mind again.
You’ll see just why — and if what he’s written doesn’t take your breath away, well, join the crew in Washington. Despite CENTCOM commander General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr.’s recent pathetic and rare apology for our final drone assassination of seven Afghan children in Kabul, few in Washington have ever displayed the slightest sense of sorrow or remorse when it came to the staggering death toll this country caused in so many distant lands in response to one horror that befell us. That wedding record alone should have (but hasn’t) given “payback” new meaning.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Within two weeks, a New York Times investigation would dismantle that official narrative. Seven days later, even the Pentagon admitted it. Instead of killing an ISIS suicide bomber, the United States had slaughtered 10 civilians: Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group; three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; Ahmadi’s cousin Naser, 30; three children of Ahmadi’s brother Romal, Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2; and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya.
The names of the dead from the Kabul strike are as important as they are rare. So many civilians have been obliterated, incinerated, or — as in the August 29th attack — “shredded” in America’s forever wars. Who in the United States remembers them? Who here ever knew of them in the first place? Twenty years after 9/11, with the Afghan War declared over, combat in Iraq set to conclude, and President Joe Biden announcing the end of “an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” who will give their deaths another thought?
Americans have been killing civilians since before there was a United States. At home and abroad, civilians — Pequots, African Americans, Cheyenne and Arapaho, Filipinos, Haitians, Japanese, Germans, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, and Somalis, among others — have been shot, burned, and bombed to death. The slaughter at Sand Creek, the Bud Dajo massacre, the firebombing of Dresden, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the My Lai massacre — the United States has done what it can to sweep it all under the rug through denial, cover-ups, and the most effective means of all: forgetting.
There’s little hope of Americans ever truly coming to terms with the Pequot or Haitian or Vietnamese blood on their hands. But before the forever wars slip from the news and the dead slide into the memory hole that holds several centuries worth of corpses, it’s worth spending a few minutes thinking about Zemari Ahmadi, Benyamin, Hayat, Malika, Somaya, and all the civilians who were going about their lives until the U.S. military ended them.
Names Remembered and Names Forgotten
Over the last 20 years, the United States has conducted more than 93,300 air strikes — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — that killed between 22,679 and 48,308 civilians, according to figures recently released by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. The total number of civilians who have died from direct violence in America’s wars since 9/11 tops out at 364,000 to 387,000, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
Who were those nearly 400,000 people?
There’s Malana. In 2019, at age 25, she had just given birth to a son, when her health began to deteriorate. Her relatives were driving her to a clinic in Afghanistan’s Khost Province when their vehicle was attacked by a U.S. drone, killing Malana and four others.
And Gul Mudin. He was wounded by a grenade and shot with a rifle, one of at least three civilians murdered by a U.S. Army “kill team” in Kandahar Province in 2010.
Then there was Gulalai, one of seven people, including three women — two of them pregnant — who were shot and killed in a February 12, 2010, raid by Special Operations forces in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province.
And the four members of the Razzo family — Mayada, Tuqa, Mohannad, and Najib — killed in a September 20, 2015, airstrike in Mosul, Iraq.
And there were the eight men, three women, and four children — Abdul Rashid as well as Abdul Rahman, Asadullah, Hayatullah, Mohamadullah, Osman, Tahira, Nadia, Khatima, Jundullah, Soheil, Amir, and two men, ages 25 and 36 respectively, named Abdul Waheed — who were killed in a September 7, 2013, drone strike on Rashid’s red Toyota pickup in Afghanistan.
Then there were 22-year-old Lul Dahir Mohamed and her four-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilo Muse, who were killed in an April 1, 2018, airstrike in Somalia.
And between 2013 and 2020, in seven separate U.S. attacks in Yemen — six drone strikes and one raid — 36 members of the al Ameri and al Taisy families were slaughtered.
Those names we know. Or knew, if only barely and fleetingly. Then there are the countless anonymous victims like the three civilians in a blue Kia van killed by Marines in Iraq in 2003. “Two bodies were slumped over in the front seats; they were men in street clothes and had no weapons that I could see. In the back seat, a woman in a black chador had fallen to the floor; she was dead, too,” wrote Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine in 2003. Years later, at the Intercept, he painted an even more vivid picture of the “blue van, with its tires shot out and its windows shattered by bullets, its interior stained with blood and smelling of death, with flies feasting on already-rotting flesh.”
Those three civilians in Iraq were all too typical of the many anonymous dead of this country’s forever wars — the man shot for carrying a flashlight in an “offensive” manner; the children killed by an “errant” rocket; the man slain by “warning shots”; the three women and one man “machine-gunned” to death; and the men, women and children reduced to “charred meat” in an American bombing.
Who were the 11 Afghans — four of them children — who died in a 2004 helicopter attack, or the “dozen or more” civilians killed in 2010 during a nighttime raid by U.S. troops in that same country? And what about those 30 pine-nut farm workers slaughtered a year later by a drone strike there? And what were the names of Mohanned Tadfi’s mother, brother, sister-in-law, and seven nieces and nephews killed in the U.S. bombing that flattened the city of Raqqa, Syria, in 2017?
Often, the U.S. military had no idea whom they were killing. This country frequently carried out “signature strikes” that executed unknown people due to suspicious behavior. So often, Americans killed such individuals for little or no reason — like holding a weapon in places where, as in this country, firearms were ubiquitous — and then counted them as enemy dead. An investigation by Connecting Vets found that during a 2019 air campaign in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, for example, the threshold for an attack “could be met by as little as a person using or even touching a radio” or if an Afghan carrying “commercially bought two-way radios stepped into a home, the entire building would sometimes be leveled by a drone strike.”
Targeted assassinations were equally imprecise. Secret documents obtained by the Intercept revealed that, during a five-month stretch of Operation Haymaker — a drone campaign in 2011 and 2013 aimed at al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders along the Afghan-Pakistan border — 200 people were killed in airstrikes conducted to assassinate 35 high-value targets. In other words, nearly nine out of 10 people slain in those “targeted” killings were not the intended targets. So, who were they?
Even if targeting was ordinarily more accurate than during Operation Haymaker, U.S. policy has consistently adhered to the dictum that “military-age males” killed in airstrikes should automatically be classified as combatants unless proven innocent. In addition to killing people for spurious reasons, the U.S. also opted for allies who would prove at least as bad as, if not worse than, those they were fighting. For two decades, such American-taxpayer-funded warlords and militiamen murdered, raped, or shook-down the very people this country was supposedly protecting. And, of course, no one knows the names of all those killed by such allies who were being advised, trained, armed, and funded by the United States.
Who, for instance, were the two men tied to the rear fender of a Toyota pickup truck in southeastern Afghanistan in 2012 by members of an Afghan militia backed by U.S. Special Operations forces? They were, wrote reporter Anand Gopal, dragged “along six miles of rock-studded road” until they were dead. Then their “bodies were left decomposing for days, a warning to anyone who thought of disobeying Azizullah,” the U.S.-allied local commander.
Or what about the 12 boys gunned down by CIA-backed militiamen at a madrassa in the Afghan village of Omar Khail? Or the six boys similarly slain at a school in nearby Dadow Khail? Or any of the dead from 10 raids in 2018 and 2019 by that same militia, which summarily executed at least 51 civilians, including boys as young as eight years old, few of whom, wrote reporter Andrew Quilty, appeared “to have had any formal relationship with the Taliban”?
How many reporters’ notebooks are filled with the unpublished names of just such victims? Or counts of those killed? Or the stories of their deaths? And how many of those who were murdered never received even a mention in an article anywhere?
Last year, I wrote 4,500 words for the New York Times Magazine about the deteriorating situation in Burkina Faso. As I noted then, that nation was one of the largest recipients of American security aid in West Africa, even though the State Department admitted that U.S.-backed forces were implicated in a litany of human-rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings.
What never made it into the piece was any mention of three men who were executed in two separate attacks. On May 22, 2019, uniformed Burkinabe troops arrived in the village of Konga and took two brothers, aged 38 and 25, away in the middle of the night. The next day, a relative found them on the side of the road, bound and executed. Most of the family fled the area. “The Army came back a week later,” a relative told me. “My uncle was the only one in our family who stayed. He was shot in broad daylight.” Such deaths are ubiquitous but aren’t even factored into the 360,000-plus civilian deaths counted by the Costs of War project, which offers no estimate for those killed in America’s “smaller war zones.”
Build the Wall!
We live in a world filled with monuments celebrating lives and deaths, trailblazers and memorable events, heroes and villains. They run the gamut from civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and Women’s Rights Pioneers to the chieftains of the American Confederacy and Belgium’s King Leopold.
In the United States, there’s no shortage of memorials and monuments commemorating America’s wars and fallen soldiers. One of the most poignant lists the names of the American military dead of the Vietnam War. Initially derided by hawkish veterans and conservatives as a “black gash of shame” and a “nihilistic slab,” it’s now one of the most celebrated monuments in Washington, D.C. More than 58,000 men and women are represented on the visually arresting black granite walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Vietnam itself has no shortage of monuments of its own. Many are Soviet-style memorials to those who died defeating the United States and reuniting their country. Others are seldom-seen, tiny memorials to massacres perpetrated by the Americans and their allies. No one knows how many similar cenotaphs exist in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other forever-war countries, but in 2017, journalist Emran Feroz found just such a memorial in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province — a remembrance of five civilians slain in drone strikes during 2013 and 2014.
There have been other attempts to memorialize the civilian dead of the forever wars from art installations to innovative visual protests to virtual commemorations. In 2018, after then-President Trump signed a bill approving the construction of a Global War on Terrorism Memorial, Peter Maass proposed, even if only half-seriously, that the bullet-riddled blue Kia van he saw in Iraq should be placed on a pedestal on the National Mall. “If we start building monuments that focus our attention on the pitiless killing of civilians in our wars,” he wrote, “maybe we would have fewer wars to fight and less reason to build these monuments.”
A blue Kia on the National Mall would be a good starting point. But if we’re ever to grasp the meaning of the post-9/11 wars and all the conflicts that set the stage for them, however, we may need a wall as well — one that starts at the Kia and heads west. It would, of course, be immense. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial spans a total of 400 feet. The celebrated Vietnam War photographer Philip Jones Griffiths observed that a wall for the Vietnamese dead, counting combatants, of the American War would be nine miles long.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is arrayed in a unique chronological format, but the Civilian Deaths Memorial could begin with anyone. The last civilians killed by the United States as part of its 2001 to 2021 Afghan War – Zemari Ahmadi, Zamir, Faisal, Farzad, Naser, Arwin, Benyamin, Hayat, Malika, and Somaya – could lead it off. Then maybe Abdul Rashid and the 14 passengers from his red pick-up truck. Then Malana, Gul Mudin, Gul Rahim, Gulalai, Mayada, Tuqa, Mohannad, Najib, Lul Dahir Mohamed, and Mariam Shilo Muse. Then maybe Ngo Thi Sau, Cao Muoi, Cao Thi Thong, Tran Cong Chau Em, Nguyen Thi Nhi, Cao Thi Tu, Le Thi Chuyen, Dang Thi Doi, Ngo Thi Chiec, Tran Thi Song, Nguyen Thi Mot, Nguyen Thi Hai, Nguyen Thi Ba, Nguyen Thi Bon, Ho Thi Tho, Vo Thi Hoan, Pham Thi Sau, Dinh Van Xuan, Dinh Van Ba, Tran Cong Viet, Nguyen Thi Nham, Ngo Quang Duong, Duong Thi Hien, Pham Thi Kha, Huynh Van Binh, Huynh Thi Bay, Huynh Thi Ty, Le Van Van, Le Thi Trinh, Le Thi Duong, and Le Vo Danh and her unborn child, all slaughtered in the tiny South Vietnamese village of Phi Phu by U.S. troops (without any of the attention accorded to the My Lai massacre). They could be followed by the names of, or placeholders for, the remaining two million Vietnamese civilian dead and by countless Cambodians, Laotians, Afghans, Iraqis, Somalis, and Yemenis.
The Civilian Wall could be built in a zig-zag fashion across the country with the land in its way — homes and businesses, parks and roadways — seized by eminent domain, making Americans care about civilian deaths in ways that news articles never could. When you lose your home to a slab of granite that reads “Pequot adult, Pequot adult, Pequot child…” 500 times, you may actually take notice. When you hear about renewed attacks in Iraq or drone strikes in Somalia or a Navy SEAL raid gone awry in Yemen and worry that the path of the wall might soon turn toward your town, you’re likely to pay far more attention to America’s conflicts abroad.
Obviously, a westward-traveling wall memorializing civilian carnage is a non-starter in this country, but the next time you hear some fleeting murmur about a family wiped out by a drone strike or read a passing news story about killings by a U.S.-backed militia, think about that imaginary wall and how, in a just world, it might be headed in your direction. In the meantime, perhaps the best we can hope for is Maass’s proposal for that blue Kia on the Mall. Perhaps it could be accompanied by the inscription found on a granite slab at the Heidefriedhof, a cemetery in Dresden, Germany, the site of a mass grave for civilians killed in a 1945 U.S. and British fire-bombing. It begins: “How many died? Who knows the number?”
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.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.
In prison, mail is about more than just reading a letter. (photo: Sharon McCutcheon/Unsplash)
“It’s just like receiving a fake dollar bill,” Joe told The Intercept in an email through a prison communications system. The Intercept is using a pseudonym because Joe fears retaliation from prison staff.
Over the past two years, dozens of facilities across the Federal Bureau of Prisons, or BOP, which oversees approximately 156,000 people and 122 facilities, have adopted policies of photocopying mail and withholding the originals from their recipients. Prison officials say the change is an effort to stop drugs that are entering facilities by being sprayed on mail, which officials claim is affecting staff, though there is scant evidence of this phenomenon.
USP Canaan is one of 33 federal facilities in 18 states using prison staff to scan mail in-house, according to an informal survey of incarcerated people’s loved ones conducted by The Intercept. And the Pennsylvania prison was one of two BOP facilities that participated in a recent pilot program to outsource the scanning of mail to a private company. BOP union heads told The Intercept that they are pushing for the bureau to enroll all of its facilities in the private service, known as MailGuard, whose creators boast that it can “gain huge secret intelligence into the public sender of postal mail.”
The BOP did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about plans to expand MailGuard or details of prisons scanning mail in-house, though a spokesperson told Slate in August that the bureau is “considering the expansion of mail scanning pending funding.”
Advocates for incarcerated people warn that MailGuard, which is also being used in county jails and state prisons, is chilling communications between incarcerated people and their loved ones. “It’s surveillance on a scale that we haven’t really seen before in prisons,” said Quinn Cozzens, an attorney with the Abolitionist Law Center, which sued the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections over its use of the service for legal mail.
Postal mail was the last means of communication that was not heavily monitored by the BOP. The bureau’s transition to mail scanning, coupled with its refusal to release details of the program’s operations to the public, presents novel privacy concerns for incarcerated people and the people who send them mail.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University has sued the BOP in an effort to publicize some of those details, such as its record retention policy and rates of drug introduction through the mail.
Stephanie Krent, an attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute, said the programs’ retention policies will be key to understanding the scope of the surveillance. “The overarching problem is the same, which is that instead of looking at a letter quickly, to determine whether or not anything in the letter could pose a safety threat,” Krent said, “you are potentially creating a record that lives on far longer than the amount of time that that letter is in the scanner.”
Prison mail has long been subject to inspection, albeit through an analog process. Before scanning, staff in the prison mailroom were responsible for opening and browsing the mail for contraband or inappropriate communications. Mail that passed this test was then distributed to its recipient. An exception was made for privileged communications, such as legal mail, which were supposed to only be opened in the presence of its recipient.
Federal prisons in Illinois, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Alabama, North Carolina, Kentucky, California, Georgia, Texas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Colorado, West Virginia, Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, New York, and New Jersey are now scanning mail in-house, The Intercept found. This list is not exhaustive, and the BOP did not answer questions about the numbers and locations of facilities using scanning.
Some have been scanning mail for more than a year, while others have changed their policies over the last few weeks. At those prisons, two to four mailroom staff open the mail then digitally scan it, making photocopies to deliver to incarcerated people, according to Jose Rojas, the southeast regional vice president for Council of Prison Locals C-33, the union that represents federal corrections officers. It is unclear whether the BOP stores digital copies of the mail scans in a database.
While the workload in the mailrooms has increased, staffing has not, Rojas said. Causing further delays with scanning, he said, mailroom staff are sometimes reassigned to the housing units under the BOP’s practice of augmentation that requires staff such as nurses and cooks to step in as corrections officers when staffing shortages arise.
Several incarcerated people told The Intercept that their legal mail has been opened, and sometimes copied, before it reaches them.
The shift to scanning has resulted in extended wait times for mail delivery, and once it is delivered, the scans can be hard to read, said incarcerated people and their loved ones. Photos and cards appear blurred, pages go missing, and parts of the letters get cut off, they said. Joe shared a photocopy of a letter he received with The Intercept that had been clipped on the margin during the scanning process, making some words illegible.
Joe’s girlfriend, who asked not to be named because she fears retaliation from prison staff, said she writes to him daily. It used to be one of their most reliable means of communication, especially with visits suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic and long lines to use phones inside the prison. Now, she said, she sometimes doesn’t receive his letters for a week. “You’re left wondering, ‘Is he safe? Is he in quarantine because of corona?’ It’s very nerve-wracking,” she said.
Lynn Espejo, a formerly incarcerated leader of the advocacy group Inside the Walls and Beyond, said she’s heard stories about women not receiving Christmas cards until March because of delays at facilities doing scanning. “It’s confusing to me why they think this is good,” she said.
In February 2020, the Bureau of Prisons issued a request for information on mail scanning services aimed to “reduce costs, streamline BOP operations, eliminate contraband and provide a whole new field of valuable investigative intelligence not currently available.” The ability to retain a “searchable database for each registered sender and all correspondence received” and to store all hard copies of mail for at least 45 days were among the services the BOP sought.
The following month, the bureau enlisted the services of Smart Communications, a Florida-based prison communications company, to do the job. Two prisons, USP Canaan and Federal Correctional Institution Beckley in West Virginia, piloted its MailGuard program from March 2020 to June this year. In practice, this involved people sending mail to Smart Communications’ offices in Florida, where civilian staffers scanned the mail then sent photocopies to the prisons.
What little is known about the service comes from Smart Communications’ proposals to other correctional systems. Roughly 100 prisons and jails across the country use MailGuard, including the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, according to a proposal to the Massachusetts Department of Corrections last year obtained by The Intercept under the Freedom of Information Act. Records show that MADOC officials signed a yearlong contract with Smart Communications in October 2020 then terminated it in May. It is unclear why MADOC ended the contract early; reached for comment, an agency spokesperson did not respond to questions about it. Smart Communications did not respond to requests for comment or a list of questions from The Intercept.
The proposal outlines various services the company can offer, including a review process that allows authorized people to access digitized scanned copies of mail and information on each sender through a database. Smart Communications says this data can be useful to investigators, who have the option to receive “real time text or email alerts and be instantly sent a copy when an inmate receives mail.” For legal mail, the company offers a machine for use within prisons where individuals can open and scan their mail in the presence of prison staff.
MailGuard takes surveillance a step further with its “Smart Tracker” system that not only allows senders to track the status of their mail, but also for corrections agencies to “gain huge secret intelligence into the public sender.” This includes people’s email address, home address, IP address, GPS location tracking, the names of devices used to access Smart Tracker, and any other accounts they use, according to the proposal. MailGuards creators say the system will store a list of all incarcerated people the sender has communicated with and save all of their mail in a profile for up to seven years after their release.
The company has indicated the timeline could be even longer. “To be honest [in] almost 10 years of business Smart Communications has never lost or deleted records or any data from our database. There are hundreds of millions of data records stored for investigators at anytime,” Smart Communications CEO Jon Logan told Mother Jones.
Corrections departments can choose whether they want to install kiosks and distribute tablets to go completely paperless or to administer the mail through photocopies. Electronic communications to and from people in prison are monitored in a similar way as MailGuard, but according to Krent, of Knight First Amendment Institute, “the bigger problem is that programs like MailGuard force writers to leave a lasting digital footprint of their words, even if they opted to send physical mail because they preferred greater privacy.”
In its proposal to MADOC, Smart Communications said the price tag for five years of the services throughout 16 facilities would cost $8.11 million. The company also told the agency that it would foot the bill for legal costs associated with lawsuits over the introduction of the service by advocates, a document obtained by The Intercept shows. The size of the company’s contract for the pilot program with the BOP is unclear, but one union leader from Pennsylvania, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said he’s heard that it would cost around $50 million to expand throughout the bureau.
He, and other BOP union heads, lauded the service and said that they are pushing the Biden administration to allocate funding for its expansion. “We really pushed back against the agency to keep it going and the agency just stated they had no money for it,” said the Pennsylvania union representative. They said they are working closely with Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Pa., who is chair of the House Committee on Appropriations for Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies. Cartwright and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who is the head of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees the BOP, did not return a request for comment from The Intercept on the program.
Corrections officers have described mail scanning as essential to stopping drugs from entering prisons and jails, but data is scarce, and the evidence that exists belies those claims. Despite MailGuard’s promise to stop contraband from entering facilities, drug positivity rates in Pennsylvania prisons increased after the service was implemented, reported The American Prospect. There have been numerous reports confirming that corrections officers are the primary source of drugs and other contraband in prisons and jails — a trend that was identified by the Justice Department as far back as 2003.
Rojas, the southeast union head, said some prison staff have gone to the hospital with headaches and increased heartbeats, after they thought they were affected by drugs sent in through letters and books. K2, a synthetic cannabinoid, had become a primary concern after staff thought they inhaled it while sorting mail. “It’s tough, it goes into your lungs,” said Rojas.
There is no publicly available data on drug positivity rates for BOP prisons, and BOP did not respond to questions about those figures or its methods for testing mail suspected to contain drugs. Dr. Ryan Marino, medical director of toxicology and addiction at the University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, challenged assertions that mail staff were absorbing K2 through their skin or by inhaling it. “You would need to smoke it to inhale it afterwards,” he said. “These compounds don’t just get into the air and don’t just cause effects at room temperature from touching them, which is why people don’t do drugs that way.”
What is indisputable is that the introduction of scanned mail has made incarcerated people and their loved ones uneasy. Some have stopped sending certain types of mail, like pictures, altogether. “It makes me uncomfortable because it’s a violation of my privacy,” Sharon, who has a loved one incarcerated at a federal prison using mail scanning, told The Intercept. (She asked to be referred to only by her first name because she feared retaliation.) “I understand that they are in prison, and I’m sure the mail gets scanned or read at some point to make sure that no crime is being committed but to know that my letters are sitting there with my personal private information — you don’t know what the corrections officers are doing with it.”
The case of Ayotzinapa's 43 disappeared students sparked protests in Mexico and beyond. (photo: Atoq Wallpa Sua)
"For us, it is outrageous to see the parents who suffer day after day to know where their children are if they are well if they are alive," activists said.
"As long as they do not hand over our comrades safe and sound, we will not be silent, and we will continue to be here in a state of struggle supporting the parents who have not given up," activists said.
The investigation of the Iguala Special Prosecutor's Office has made no progress in accrediting the participation of members of the Federal Police and the Guerrero Ministerial Police.
There are 30 new arrest warrants to be executed against those allegedly involved in the events; however, over 50 accused people during the ex-President Enrique Peña Nieto's administration (2012-2018) have been released by Court decision.
Among those released are 24 local police officers from different municipalities of Guerrero, including 13 police officers from Iguala.
"For us, it is outrageous to see the parents who suffer day after day to know where their children are if they are well if they are alive," the Aguascalientes rural teacher delegation said.
According to the official version, corrupt police officers from Iguala detained Ayotzinapa's students on the night of Sept. 26, 2014, when they took buses to go to a march on Oct. 2 in the capital.
The agents handed the students over to the "Guerreros Unidos" cartel, which murdered and incinerated them in a garbage dump in the Cocula municipality after an attack that left six dead in addition to the 43 missing students.
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Yan Yu Lin in front of her apartment building, where she struggles with substandard plumbing, in San Francisco's Chinatown on 2 August 2021. (photo: Max Whittaker/Guardian UK)
Renters and people of color are most likely to be living without water or flushing toilets in some of America’s wealthiest cities, new research shows
Along the back wall of the room is a plastic potty – the kind designed for toilet training toddlers. The shared bathrooms are out of order so often, so rank and unhygienic, that Lin has her daughter use the plastic potty instead. “It’s safer,” she said.
This Dickensian-sounding living situation is more common in the US than most would think.
Almost half a million American households lack basic indoor plumbing, with renters and people of color in some of the country’s wealthiest and fastest growing cities most likely to be living without running water or flushing toilets, new research reveals.
While some rural and indigenous communities have never had indoor plumbing, the vast majority of unplumbed Americans are in fact found in urban areas, with one in three affected households living in just 15 cities, according to research by the Plumbing Poverty Project (PPP), a collaboration between King’s College London (KCL) and the University of Arizona.
The full analysis, based on data from annual community surveys by the US Census Bureau, is published today in collaboration with the Guardian as part of our long-running series exposing America’s water crisis.
It reveals how so-called plumbing poverty has gotten markedly worse in San Francisco and Portland – two booming ostensibly progressive west coast tech hubs with a growing wealth gap and homelessness crisis.
In San Francisco, which has the third most billionaires of any city in the world, almost 15,000 families live in homes without proper plumbing. Median house prices have tripled since 2000 while the number of families in substandard housing with incomplete plumbing increased by 12%.
Plumbing poverty, like all hardships in the US, is racialized: as of 2017, Black people made up 9% of San Francisco’s population but accounted for 17% of households without indoor plumbing.
“The story of plumbing poverty in San Francisco is inextricably tied to unaffordable housing, declining incomes, post-recession transformations in the California rental sector, and racialized wealth gaps, fueled by a kind of ‘anti-Black urbanism’ that has either driven Black San Franciscans into more precarious housing conditions or out of the Bay entirely,” said Katie Meehan, lead researcher of the PPP and professor of environment and society at KCL.
The problem is nationwide.
Even though plumbing poverty appears to have declined in several major cities including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago over the past two decades, tens of thousands of residents continue to rely on public restrooms, school showers and chamber pots.
In 2017, after a period of sustained economic growth following the Great Recession, at least 28,000 households in New York and 19,000 in LA still lacked basic indoor plumbing. And the progress made could actually be inflated due to the Census Bureau eliminating one of the three survey plumbing questions in 2015.
Meanwhile other cities including Milwaukee, San Antonio, Phoenix, Nashville, Seattle, and Cleveland made little or no progress in tackling plumbing poverty between 2000 and 2017. The stagnation reflects a combination of factors including the legacy of historic racist housing policies, decades of underinvestment in water and sanitation infrastructure, and widening income inequalities since the Great Recession.
In Phoenix, one of the fastest growing sunbelt cities in the south-west, renters are earning less and paying more to live in homes without running water compared to two decades ago. In 2017, unplumbed renters on average spent 43% of their monthly income on rent compared to 25% in 2000.
Overall, progress to eradicate plumbing poverty remains slow: in 2017, there were still enough Americans living without piped water to fill the nation’s seventh-largest city.
“It’s not only that the gap between the water-rich and the water-poor is widening in America, it’s also that it’s driven by a housing sector that lacks any safety net for working families, especially households of color, that cannot afford the astronomical prices of San Francisco, Seattle, or now even Portland,” added Meehan.
The PPP white paper, which focuses on the 15 worst cities, is intended as blueprint for lawmakers to tackle gaps in research and infrastructure funding to end plumbing poverty – which is essential if every American household is to one day have access to affordable water and sanitation.
Clean, safe, affordable water and sanitation are essential for human health, economic prosperity and environmental justice. Yet when Covid struck and public health experts recommended regular hand washing to curtail the spread, an estimated quarter of the world’s population, 2bn people, lacked clean running water, while almost half did not have access to proper sanitation, according to UN figures.
While the vast majority live in developing countries, at least 1.1m people in the US, ostensibly the richest country in the world, also suffer the indignity of living in homes without running water, an indoor shower or bath, or flush toilet – because of incomplete plumbing. An additional 16m people or so lose access every year when disconnected due to unaffordable, unpaid water bills.
‘There was nowhere for me to go’
Before the pandemic, when schools were open for in person classes, Lin’s daughter knew to use the toilets before coming home. After schools, businesses and even park amenities closed down, and families without plumbing like Lin’s were increasingly forced to rely on bottled water, wipes, potties and commodes.
Lin recalled one occasion last year when she fell ill with an upset stomach and the bathroom on her floor was out of order. She rushed down one floor, but the bathroom was occupied, as was the one on the next floor. “You can imagine how embarrassing that was,” she said. “I was ashamed. And I couldn’t even clean myself up afterwards – there was nowhere for me to go.”
Her landlord usually patches up the problem within a day or two, by pumping out the drains or tightening leaky faucets, but the ancient plumbing keeps giving out, week after week.
The situation is difficult for her to talk about. When she moved to San Francisco from China, Lin never imagined living like this. “When I speak to my dad back home, I try not to give him too many details about my life here,” she said. “I don’t want to make him upset.”
She is not alone. Renters make up fewer than half of households in the San Francisco metro area, but account for almost 90% of its plumbing poverty.
Yet often, those without plumbing spend more on rent than those with running water and flush toilets. In 2017 the average unplumbed renter in San Francisco spent 44% of their monthly income to live in a home without piped running water, while the typical city resident spent 32% on a home with full plumbing.
In other words, renters with incomplete plumbing are a growing subclass in one of the richest and so-called progressive US cities, according to the PPP analysis.
The new data reinforces earlier findings, including a 2019 report by the non-profit Pacific Institute that estimated 140,000 people in California had incomplete plumbing. The true number is undoubtedly much higher, as excluded from the count were the growing number of Bay Area residents living in mobile homes without water hookups and families who informally rent garage units or sheds.
“Lots of people were using chamber pots,” said Laura Feinstein, who co-authored the report.
In cities like San Francisco and New York, the problem is particularly marked in single room occupancy buildings – housing units with shared bathrooms like Lin’s, which are concentrated in neighborhoods mostly populated by poor and working class families of color.
Nationwide, plumbing poverty is usually clustered in small pockets, reflecting historical racist housing and infrastructure policies which have long discriminated against communities of color and tribes.
“It’s a confluence of forces and the underlying causes will depend on where you live, but the social safety net – including infrastructure spending – being hollowed out over the last 40 to 50 years, has impacted people everywhere. The role of race and structural racism is enormous,” said Stephen Gasteyer, associate professor of sociology at Michigan State University who researches water access.
Overall, federal funding for water and wastewater infrastructure has declined steadily since its peak in 1977, making it harder for underserved communities to get financial support to build and maintain systems.
As investment stagnated, new problems converged with old ones. In addition to installing indoor plumbing in homes across the country, millions of lead lines still need to be replaced, meanwhile new contaminants like PFAS and microplastics have emerged as significant health hazards.
“It’s solvable, but we’ve spent decades creating this crisis so getting out of it will take some time, money and creativity to rethink how we do infrastructure so that we can deal with emerging contaminants and deliver affordable water to everyone,” said Gasteyer.
The Bipartisan Plan that passed the Senate included $48.4bn – less than half what Biden proposed – for water programs over five years, including $15bn for lead and $15bn for PFAS, as well as $3.5bn for sanitation projects on indigenous lands.
It’s simply not enough, and means millions of Americans will continue to live without clean, safe affordable water for years to come.
Until recently Rosa Ramiréz and her two daughters lived in a studio apartment without a working bathroom in San Francisco’s Mission District, a historically working class Latino neighborhood that has rapidly gentrified, sending rents sky high. The sink spewed yellow colored water, and the toilet wasn’t properly connected to the building’s plumbing system. Ramiréz’s rent was $2,300 a month.
For two years, whenever she and her daughters needed to use the toilet or wash up, they relied on restrooms at the local donut shop, cafe or taqueria.
When the pandemic hit, the situation became untenable. With schools shut down, her daughters aged eight and 15 could no longer use the facilities on campus. “It was unbearable,” said Ramiréz, 49, who works as a cleaner. “The hardest part was when one of us had a stomach ache and none of the restaurants wanted to lend me their restroom.”
The landlord refused to fix the bathroom, and it took months for Ramirez to find another studio as rents have become so unaffordable in the neighborhood. “It has been increasingly difficult to live here,” said Ramiréz. “The conditions now are inhumane.”
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