Increasingly December is becoming a fundraising nightmare. Traditionally December was always considered a month where we would get a year-end boost. It’s not only no longer that, it’s rapidly becoming the worst month of the year.
A British appeals court on Friday ruled that Wikileaks cofounder Julian Assange could be extradited to the United States to face charges of espionage in the notorious Eastern District of Virginia federal court. A lower UK court had ruled that Assange should not be extradited because he was liable to commit suicide if he were to be sent to a US maximum-security penitentiary, to solitary confinement, or to a Communications Management Unit, which is similar to solitary confinement and which severely restricts a prisoner’s access to the outside world, and especially to the media. Assange’s UK attorneys have said that they will appeal the decision to the British Supreme Court and, if necessary, to the European Court of Human Rights.
The appeals process could take another two years, and during that period, Assange will continue to be stranded in London’s Belmarsh Prison, a cold, dank penitentiary on the outskirts of the city. For all intents and purposes, Assange already has been held in some form of incarceration since 2009, whether it has been house arrest, holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, or at Belmarsh. The prospects were he to be extradited to the US are no better.
The Justice Department has charged Assange with multiple counts of espionage for his work with Chelsea Manning in exposing US war crimes in Iraq. If extradited, he will not have an easy time of things in the Eastern District of Virginia. Judge Leonie Brinkema, a Reagan appointee, has long reserved national security cases for herself. She was the judge in my case and in CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling’s case, and she is the named judge in what would be an espionage case against Edward Snowden. And although Brinkema was initially named as the judge in the Assange trial, she was later scooped by a more senior judge with an even more troubling past. Judge Claude Hilton, the district’s senior judge, is another Reagan appointee who was also named by former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist as a member of the notorious Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, where he served from 2000-2007. Hilton is a hawk on national security issues, and Assange will have no friend in his court if the extradition takes place.
I’ve noted in the past that Assange will be subject to CIPA, the Classified Information Protection Act, that will prohibit him and his attorneys from raising myriad issues and from appropriately defending him against the government’s accusations. CIA attorneys will be in court every day to “protect Agency equities;” that is, to insist that the judge bar Assange and his attorneys from raising the notion that what Wikilkeaks did by publishing evidence of war crimes was whistleblowing. They also argue that Assange is neither a publisher nor a journalist. The fix is in. There’s no such thing as a fair trial in a national security case, especially in the Eastern District of Virginia, the home of the CIA and the Pentagon.
Even more importantly, in my mind, is the assertion by US prosecutors to the UK appeals court that Assange would not be sent to a maximum-security penitentiary, to solitary confinement, or to a Communications Management Unit. The promise is utterly disingenuous. It is not within the purview of Justice Department prosecutors to decide where a prisoner is incarcerated. That determination is made solely by the Bureau of Prisons, the largest (and arguably most corrupt) bureau within the Department. When I was sentenced after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, Judge Brinkema, after telling me that she wished she could give me the maximum sentence of 10 years (I received 30 months) ordered that I be sent to a minimum-security work camp. I was sent to a low-security prison instead. When Judge Liam O’Grady sentenced drone whistleblower Daniel Hale to 45 months, he ordered that Hale be sent to the low-security prison hospital at Butner, NC so that he could receive treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Instead, Hale was sent to the maximum-security penitentiary (and the Communications Management Unit) at Marion, Illinois. The bottom line here is that judges don’t get to say where a prisoner goes. Neither do prosecutors. It’s up to the Bureau of Prisons. And if they want to screw somebody, especially a high-profile prisoner like Julian Assange, they’ll screw him.
Julian’s extradition to the United States is not imminent. The case will now go to the British Supreme Court. Regardless of who wins there, it’ll likely end up at the European Court of Human Rights. That could take another two years. But in the meantime, don’t believe a single word that the Justice Department says. They’re liars. And they’ll do literally anything to win a national security case, especially against Julian Assange.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows sent an email saying the National Guard would be present to 'protect pro Trump people' in the lead up to the US Capitol insurrection, according to a new contempt report released by the January 6 committee Sunday night.
It was just one of several new details in the report about Meadows' actions before and during January 6, as well as his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election. The resolution comes after the panel informed Meadows last week that it had "no choice" but to advance criminal contempt proceedings against him given that he had decided to no longer cooperate.
The committee notes that in one email Meadows sent to an individual about January 6, he said that "the National Guard would be present to 'protect pro Trump people' and that many more would be available on standby," according to the report. The new documents come as Meadows' role is under renewed scrutiny following his decision to cease cooperating with the committee last week.
Committee chairman Bennie Thompson appeared to allude to this January 5 email about having the National Guard on standby in a letter to Meadows' attorney last week informing him that the panel would move forward with contempt proceedings.
Thompson also referred to a November 7, 2020, email discussing the appointment of alternate slates of electors as part of a "direct and collateral attack" and a January 5 email that had a 38-page PowerPoint briefing titled "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN" to be provided "on the hill."
Meadows, according to the report, "received text messages and emails regarding apparent efforts to encourage Republican legislators in certain States to send alternate slates of electors to Congress, a plan which one Member of Congress acknowledged was 'highly controversial' and to which Mr. Meadows responded, 'I love it.'"
"Mr. Meadows responded to a similar message by saying '[w]e are' and another such message by saying 'Yes. Have a team on it,'" the report said.
Additionally, the committee notes that Meadows "exchanged text messages with, and provided guidance to, an organizer of the January 6th rally on the Ellipse after the organizer told him that '[t]hings have gotten crazy and I desperately need some direction.'"
If Meadows was still cooperating, the committee also said it would inquire about a text exchange with a media personality "who had encouraged the presidential statement asking people to, quote, 'peacefully leave the Capitol,'" as well as a text sent "to one of— by one of the President's family members indicating that Mr. Meadows is, quote, 'pushing hard,' end quote, for a statement from President Trump to, quote, 'condemn this shit,' end quote, happening at the Capitol."
The committee has previously sought communications between Meadows and certain rally organizers as the panel remains focused on identifying any level of coordination with the Trump White House. The report goes on to note that Meadows was directly involved in efforts to overturn the election results in key swing states Trump lost and helped push unfounded claims about voter fraud.
"Mr. Meadows participated in meetings and calls during which the participants reportedly discussed the need to ''fight'' back against ''mounting evidence'' of purported voter fraud after courts had considered and overwhelmingly rejected Trump campaign claims of voter fraud and other election irregularities," it says.
"He participated in one such meeting in the Oval Office with Mr. Trump and Members of Congress, which he publicly tweeted about from his personal Twitter account shortly after. He participated in another such call just days before the January 6 attack with Mr. Trump, Members of Congress, attorneys for the Trump re-election campaign, and 'some 300' State and local officials to discuss the goal of overturning certain States' electoral college results on January 6, 2021," the report adds.
In response to the panel's push for criminal contempt proceedings, Meadows filed a lawsuit against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and select committee members, asking a federal court to block enforcement of the subpoena the committee issued him as well as the subpoena it issued to Verizon for his phone records.
Meadows alleges that the subpoenas are "overly broad and unduly burdensome," while claiming that the committee "lacks lawful authority to seek and to obtain" the information requested.
Still, prior to Meadows' decision to halt cooperation with the committee, he had turned over approximately 6,000 pages worth of documents. That includes information from his personal email account and personal cell phone that are relevant to the committee's investigation.
Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, center, lowered the level of authority to approve strikes to on-scene commanders, increasing the number of strikes. (photo: Mosa'ab Elshamy/AP)
An American strike cell alarmed its partners as it raced to defeat the enemy.
A single top secret American strike cell launched tens of thousands of bombs and missiles against the Islamic State in Syria, but in the process of hammering a vicious enemy, the shadowy force sidestepped safeguards and repeatedly killed civilians, according to multiple current and former military and intelligence officials.
The unit was called Talon Anvil, and it worked in three shifts around the clock between 2014 and 2019, pinpointing targets for the United States’ formidable air power to hit: convoys, car bombs, command centers and squads of enemy fighters.
But people who worked with the strike cell say in the rush to destroy enemies, it circumvented rules imposed to protect noncombatants, and alarmed its partners in the military and the C.I.A. by killing people who had no role in the conflict: farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers sheltering in buildings.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the former longtime chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says it's time to let Leonard Peltier go home. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The former Judiciary Committee chairman and longest-serving U.S. senator says it's time for the Native American activist to go home after 44 years.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the former longtime chair of the Judiciary Committee and the longest-serving member of the U.S. Senate, said Tuesday that it’s time for Native American activist Leonard Peltier to be released from federal prison and go home.
Without hesitation, Leahy, who is currently chair of the Appropriations Committee, answered yes to all of HuffPost’s questions about Peltier.
Do you know who Peltier is? “Yes.”
The Native American activist who’s been in prison? For decades? “Yes.”
Is it time for him to be released? “Yes.”
It appears to be the first time Leahy has urged freedom for Peltier, making him the highest-ranked official in the U.S. government calling for his release. Leahy, who has announced he’s retiring from the Senate, is third in the line of succession to the presidency, just after Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
Peltier has been in prison for 44 years for a crime he says he didn’t commit. His trial was riddled with misconduct. Prosecutors hid key evidence. The FBI threatened and coerced witnesses into lying. A juror admitted she was biased against Peltier’s race on the second day of the trial but was allowed to stay on anyway.
There was never proof that he killed two FBI agents in a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. But the FBI needed someone to take the fall. It had just lost two agents, and Peltier’s co-defendants were all acquitted on grounds of self-defense. His trial was also happening as the FBI was trying to suppress the activities of the American Indian Movement (AIM), a grassroots group of activists focused on drawing attention to federal treaty rights violations, discrimination and police brutality targeting Native Americans.
Peltier, an AIM member, was there when the shootout occurred on June 26, 1975. So the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged him with murder based entirely on testimony from people who had been threatened and intimidated by the FBI, some of whom later recanted their testimony.
By all appearances, the FBI is simply waiting for Peltier to die in prison.
Peltier is 77 now and ailing in a Florida penitentiary. He is perhaps America’s longest-serving political prisoner. His story still moves hundreds of thousands of people to sign petitions urging his release. An astounding mix of human rights leaders have called for his release, including Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Coretta Scott King. Prominent artists including Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt and Rage Against the Machine have held concerts in his name. Elected tribal leaders and the National Congress of American Indians have passed resolutions urging clemency.
“I write today from a position rare for a former prosecutor: to beseech you to commute the sentence of a man who I helped put behind bars,” former U.S. Attorney James Reynolds said to Biden in a July letter. “With time, and the benefit of hindsight, I have realized that the prosecution and continued incarceration of Mr. Peltier was and is unjust. We were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”
With Biden in the White House, Peltier’s supporters say they feel a renewed sense of hope that Peltier may have a shot at living out his final years as a free man.
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Biden is considering clemency for Peltier.
Congressman poised to helm Trump’s media company is poster child for the notion that, in today’s politics, extreme partisanship pays
For the first and perhaps the only time in his pugnacious political career, the California congressman and noted Trump apologist Devin Nunes is inspiring some kind of unanimity across party lines.
When news broke on Monday that Nunes was retiring from Congress to become chief executive of the fledgling Trump Media & Technology Group, nobody on the left or the right doubted he’d landed where he belonged. After 19 years as a reliably rock-ribbed Republican legislator, Nunes told his supporters that he wasn’t giving up on fighting his political enemies, just “pursuing it by other means” – and for once those enemies took him at his word.
Even Kevin McCarthy, the top-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives and a fellow Californian, failed to raise any hackles when he said in a statement that nobody was better prepared than Nunes to lead an alternative to America’s tech and media giants. Nunes, after all, has spent years filing lawsuits against Twitter, the Washington Post, and a clutch of other media companies that he, and Trump, consider to be part of a “propaganda machine” for the Democrats.
In many ways, Nunes is embracing the role his detractors have long accused him of playing, as Trump’s ultimate yes man. Early in the Trump presidency, leading Democrats fumed that he was walking away from his grave responsibilities as chair of the House intelligence committee to be Trump’s “stooge” and “fixer”. Now, though, he is walking away from Congress to serve Trump, without pretending that anything else is at stake.
Both sides also broadly agree that Nunes’s surprise career move is a sign of the times. A generation ago, no politician of either party would have given up on the prospect of chairing the House ways and means committee, a job that would have been Nunes’s for the taking if the Republicans were to win next year’s congressional midterms. The position is often described as the best in Washington, because of the sweeping power it grants over a wide range of policy issues.
Nunes, however, appears to have calculated that in today’s Republican party the real power lies not in committee but in proximity to the former president, who remains the GOP’s undisputed kingmaker and may harbor ambitions to be more than that as the 2024 presidential election draws closer.
Nunes went out his way, while intelligence committee chair, to clear Trump of accusations of collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign and promptly turned around to investigate the FBI’s reasons for looking into the matter in the first place. Trump rewarded him with a presidential Medal of Freedom, praising his “fortitude to take on the media, the FBI, the intelligence community, the Democrat party, foreign spies, and the full power of the Deep State”.
Nunes, 48, is in many ways a poster child for the notion that, in today’s politics, extreme partisanship pays. While his unwavering allegiance to Trump and frequent spouting of freewheeling conspiracy theories caused his popularity in the agricultural district he represents in California’s Central Valley to nosedive – his margin of victory plummeted from 35 percentage points in 2016 to single digits in 2018 and 2020 – his Trump bona fides have made him a formidable fundraiser.
Ahead of last year’s congressional race, he raised a whopping $26.8m, the fourth-largest haul of any House member, and he used much of that money to outspend his spirited Democratic challenger, Phil Arballo, by a margin of four to one.
Like the man he is going to work for, Nunes has made a career out of divisiveness. He slams the Democrats as socialists and also as the party of the capitalist elite and doesn’t blink at the contradiction. A sampling of recent media appearances, many of them on his own podcast, has him accusing China of being “behind” the Covid-19 pandemic, lambasting the National Security Agency for mounting what he claims to be a political witch hunt against Republicans, and belittling Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as mere “avatars” for Barack Obama.
Some of that divisiveness, and the chaos that often erupts in its wake, is likely to greet him as he starts his new job. Two financial regulatory agencies are already investigating a $1.25bn business deal to take the Trump Media & Technology Group public. Nunes and Trump are spoiling for fights with Twitter, which banned the former president from its site in the wake of the 6 January Capitol riot, and a number of other social media platforms they accuse of censoring free speech.
That accusation is not without irony for Nunes, who has attempted to silence two detractors on Twitter with the spoof handles @DevinNunesCow and @DevinNunesMom. In a widely ridiculed 2019 lawsuit, he demanded $250m in damages from Twitter and the people behind the handles because, he said, they’d meant to cause him “immense pain”.
In California’s 22nd congressional district, the news of Nunes’ departure caused little detectable dismay among his supporters and was greeted by his detractors with both relief and frustration (relief because they say that he has long since placed his political ambitions above the interests of his constituents, frustration because local Democrats believed they had a decent shot at unseating him next year).
Nunes, his 2020 challenger Arballo tweeted, “is fleeing from Congress at the end of the month because he would rather cash out and take a cushy gig from Trump than face our movement in a tough reelection campaign.”
With California, and the rest of the country, redrawing district maps in the wake of the latest US census, Nunes was heading into a significantly tougher electoral environment. According to the latest provisional map, the 22nd would flip from one that voted to reelect Trump by five percentage points last year to one that voted for Biden by nine points.
Nunes had some options if he’d chosen to fight for reelection, since California law does not oblige candidates for office to live in their districts. He could have challenged a Republican incumbent in an adjacent district or contested an open seat further away.
Instead, Nunes has responded to the siren call of a man who once flattered him into thinking he “may someday be recognized as a Great American Hero”. Trump’s business ventures have rarely ended happily for those he has roped into helping run them, but his political fortunes have yet to run dry.
With 90 percent of ballots counted, 96 percent of voters had voted ‘No’ to independence, local media reports.
Residents of the Pacific territory of New Caledonia have voted overwhelmingly to remain part of France in a third referendum that was boycotted by pro-independence groups, local media reported.
Police reinforcements have been sent to the territory known as “the pebble”, which is of strategic importance to France and is part of a wider tussle for influence in the Pacific between Western countries and China.
Local television channel NC la 1ere reported that, with 90.23 percent of ballots counted, 96.32 percent of voters had voted “No” to independence in a result that will raise fears of unrest and questions about the legitimacy of the process.
French President Emmanuel Macron said that New Caledonia will remain French.
“Caledonians have chosen to remain French. They decided that freely,” Macron said in a televised address.
“We can’t ignore that the electorate remained deeply divided over the years … A period of transition is now starting,” he added.
The archipelago of about 185,000 voters, 2,000 kilometres (1,250 miles) east of Australia, was granted three independence referendums under a 1988 deal aimed at easing tensions on the islands.
Turnout on Sunday was only 41.60 percent by 5 pm local time (0600 GMT).
Having rejected a breakaway from France in 2018 and then again last year, the inhabitants were asked one last time: “Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?”
Pro-independence campaigners boycotted the vote, saying they wanted it postponed to September because “a fair campaign” was impossible with high coronavirus infection numbers.
The result could exacerbate ethnic tensions, with the poorer indigenous Kanak community generally favouring independence over the wealthier white community.
The main indigenous pro-independence movement, the Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), had called the government’s insistence on going ahead with the referendum “a declaration of war”.
“This referendum does not make too much sense because half the population has decided not to vote,” Cathy, a bookseller who gave only her first name, told AFP news agency at a polling booth in the capital Noumea.
“I came out of civic-mindedness, what interests me is the society we are going to build afterwards,” she told AFP.
Jacques Reland, senior research fellow at the Global Policy Institute told Al Jazeera he believes the vote will be challenged by those who seek independence.
“The result is striking – 96.5 percent were against independence but the turnout was only 44 percent. In the two previous referendums, the turnout was above 80 percent and the vote against independence had fallen from 56 percent to 53 percent in 2020,” Reland said.
“The big question is, will [the independence movement] accept this result? What will their strategy be now because the French government considers it as a clear vote against independence and that New Caledonia will remain France.
“Some people voted with their heart, but many with their head. The COVID-19 crisis, the sanitary crisis has shown the importance of having the backing of the French government which helped New Caledonia with vaccines as well as all the social and economic measures to boost the economy during this health crisis,” Reland said.
One of five island territories spanning the Indo-Pacific held by France, New Caledonia is the centrepiece of Macron’s plan to increase its influence in the Pacific.
Snow Cone, with fishing rope dragging from her mouth, and her newborn calf on Dec. 2. (photo: Georgia Department of Natural Resources/NOAA Permit #20556)
A female North Atlantic right whale who has been entangled in fishing gear for months has given birth to a healthy calf, but scientists fear for the small family’s welfare in the long term.
More attempts were made to free her in May and June, but Snow Cone resisted their efforts and was “evasive and strong,” Mackie Greene of the New Brunswick-based Campobello Whale Rescue team told CBC News.
No one knew at the time that Snow Cone was pregnant. But earlier this month, scientists spotted Snow Cone ― still dragging thick, heavy rope from her mouth ― with a newborn calf off the coast of Georgia.
NOAA scientists were both “surprised and concerned” that Snow Cone had managed to give birth while entangled, the agency’s statement said.
The calf is healthy, uninjured and not caught in the rope, but scientists fear the baby could get entangled, too.
“My concern is [Snow Cone’s] still got two pieces of rope, about 20 feet, coming out from the left side of her mouth,” Clay George, a biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources biologist told the Associated Press. “If those two pieces of rope ended up getting knotted around each other and there’s a loop, you could imagine that calf could end up becoming entangled.”
Even if that doesn’t happen, the stress of the situation still poses a major threat to both the calf and Snow Cone’s health.
“Entanglement alone is a costly energetic drain and so is nursing a calf,” Barb Zoodsma, a large whale recovery coordinator at NOAA, said in the release. “The severity of her mouth and head injuries are also disconcerting. For these reasons, Snow Cone may be facing her biggest challenge yet in the upcoming months.”
She noted, however that Snow Cone’s perseverance ― her previous calf was killed in a boat collision last year ― shows that the mother whale “clearly” has “game.”
In the meantime, scientists say that, while her newborn is close by, it’s too risky to get close to Snow Cone to try again to disentangle her.
North Atlantic right whales are critically endangered, and both fishing gear entanglements and collisions with ships are major threats to the species. According to NOAA, there are fewer than 350 of the whales left, and they’re currently dying out faster than they can reproduce.
This is an organization/publication that can literally be funded and sustained by 1% of its Reader-Supporters responding to the fundraising appeals each month. “1%” and we can’t even get that? Super frustrating.
We love you folks but we need a more serious effort.
The FBI throughout its history has had a lot of problems, from gunning down bank robbers like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson without the benefit of trial to forcing the execution of Ethel Rosenberg to illegally spying on Americans through COINTELPRO to framing “domestic terrorists” to pad arrest and prosecution numbers in the post-9/11 era. But one thing the FBI has long been proud of is that it did not—would not—participate in the CIA’s illegal and immoral torture program. That program, based at secret CIA prisons around the world after the 9/11 attacks, was so controversial inside the rarefied counterterrorism circles of the Intelligence Community that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller famously withdrew all FBI personnel from the country where the torture was taking place, lest his people be tainted with its stink. Mueller took the high road, he later told Congress. Unfortunately, though, that was a lie.
The New York Times reported last week that around the same time Mueller was saying that no FBI personnel would be permitted to remain in the same country where CIA torture was taking place, he was approving the “temporary transfer” of nine FBI agents to the CIA so that they could participate in the program, including in the interrogations that later became infamous for their brutality. This revelation is not speculation, rumor, or a wild accusation. It’s a fact that was revealed in pre-trial proceedings in the Guantanamo death penalty case of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad (KSM), the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. One of the military prosecutors confirmed in open court that some of the interrogations carried out under torture were done by FBI agents, rather than CIA officers, and that they included torture. This is a very big problem for prosecutors.
KSM was captured in Pakistan in 2002. He was targeted because the CIA was certain that he conceived of and implemented the 9/11 attacks. Once he was captured, he was sent to a series of secret CIA prisons and forced to undergo torture, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, forced hypothermia, and regular beatings. He “confessed” to everything the CIA wanted him to confess to. He was almost certainly guilty. But the CIA and FBI’s own criminal activity has put KSM’s prosecution in jeopardy, at least theoretically. Nothing that KSM said under torture is admissible in the case against him and it can’t be used against him, even while the CIA holds him indefinitely.
I’m certainly no fan of the FBI. But this revelation does damage not to just the Bureau, but to the country. As a nation, we now have to have the same conversation about the FBI that we had about the CIA after revelations in 2007 that the Agency was torturing its prisoners. Did the FBI’s participation in the torture program go all the way up to Mueller? Who else knew about it? Did somebody at the White House approve the FBI’s participation? Did the President? Where were the Congressional oversight committees in all this? Did they know? If not, why not? If they did, who on Capitol Hill approved the operation? How was it funded? If members of Congress weren’t briefed, but found out about it later, why was nobody at the FBI disciplined?
At the risk of sounding even more cynical than perhaps I usually am, this seems like the final nail in the coffin of government national security accountability, to say nothing of transparency. Is there no one in government whom we can trust? Is there no one who can set an example for trustworthy representative government? And what about our elected officials? Are they all a part of the cover-up? Where is the accountability? Where is the outrage? Why did it take 19 years for this information to finally hit the press?
The final insult in this story is the fact that it was reported only by the New York Times and Yahoo News. The Washington Post was silent, as were CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Apparently, the story wasn’t important enough for them to cover it more broadly. And even in the vaunted Times, is was worthy only of an appearance on page 11. That’s where we find ourselves 20 years after the 9/11 attacks. Developments barely warrant a mention.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Noam Chomsky speaking at the International Forum for Emancipation and Equality in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 12, 2015. (photo: Augusto Starita/Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación)
Noam Chomsky talks about US hypocrisy in stoking needless conflict with China, the unnecessarily bloody and grinding war in Afghanistan, and why the United States could easily solve climate change.
Chomsky spoke with Poyâ Pâkzâd and Benjamin Magnusson from the Danish magazine Eftertryk in October 2021 about the war in Afghanistan, ongoing US-instigated conflicts with China, climate change, and anarchism. You can watch the conversation on YouTube here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
On Afghanistan
PP: The war in Afghanistan has been dubbed “the good war,” usually in contrast to the war in Iraq. I know you have an alternative view of what the war in Afghanistan was.
NC: Let’s go back twenty years [to] 9/11. It’s important to recognize first that the United States didn’t know who was responsible for 9/11. In fact, eight months later, the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, had his first major press conference. He was asked, “Who was responsible for 9/11?” This is now after the most intensive multinational investigation, probably, in human history. He said, “We presume that the perpetrators were al-Qaeda and [Osama] bin Laden, but we haven’t been able to establish it.” That’s eight months after the invasion.
What was the motivation for the invasion itself? I think the best answer to this was given by the leading figure in the anti-Taliban Afghan resistance, Abdul Haq, a highly respected Afghan leader [who was] leading the resistance to the Taliban from within. He had an interview in October 2001, right after the bombing started, with a leading Central Asia scholar, Anatol Lieven, who asked him, “What do you think about the invasion?”
[Abdul Haq] said, “The invasion will kill many Afghans, [and] it will undermine our efforts to overthrow the Taliban-regime from within.” He laid out those efforts and thought they were promising. This [the invasion] will undermine them. “But the Americans don’t care about the Afghans, and they don’t care about overthrowing the Taliban. What they want to do is show their muscle and intimidate everyone in the world.”
That was pretty much repeated, in different words, by the American secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who was one of the main agents of the invasion. The Taliban very quickly offered to surrender. They would just go back to their villages and be left alone, and the United States could take over. Of course, [the United States] could then have Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in their hands.
Rumsfeld’s response to this offer was “We do not negotiate surrenders.” It was then seconded by the president, George W. Bush, who said the same thing: “We do not negotiate surrenders, we just use force.” He was asked questions about al-Qaeda and [Osama] bin Laden. He said, “I don’t know anything about them. We don’t really care about them. We have a bigger game in mind.”
The “bigger game in mind” was, of course, outlined publicly. It was not a secret. They wanted to go after Iraq — that’s the real prize. Afghanistan is nothing. [They wanted to] go after Iraq, the major prize, and then use that as a base for going on to other countries in the region. That was the plan.
In fact, if the United States had wanted to capture [Osama] bin Laden — who was then a suspect, remember, not guilty — it wouldn’t have been very difficult. [They] could have done it with a small police action, which probably would have been supported by the Taliban. They would have been happy to get rid of him. He was a nuisance for them. [The Taliban] couldn’t just throw him out because of tribal rules — you don’t throw out somebody who’s taken refuge. That’s important for the Pashtun conception of proper behavior. But they wouldn’t have offered any opposition if the United States wanted to send in a police action.
[But] that’s no good. We have to show our muscle and intimidate everyone.
What happened after that is, the Taliban went back to their villages. The United States came in, its allies came in. There are very good reporters who have been following this on the ground from the beginning. The best is Anand Gopal. [He] has a recent article about it in the New Yorker repeating it. Others have reported the same thing. A recent report in the Washington Post is saying basically the same thing, from another one of the few reporters who was actually in the rural areas — that’s where Afghanistan is.
They all say the same thing: at the beginning, the Afghan rural population was relieved that the fighting was over. They could have some peace. And they had this idea — they didn’t know much of the United States — that many people in the world have: “Here’s this superrich country, which can do all kinds of good things for us.” They hoped that the United States would somehow come in and deal with their problems with poverty and so on.
That didn’t last very long. As soon as the US forces came in, they started attacking Afghans. A bomb could be aiming at somebody they thought was Taliban, but it could hit a wedding party and kill forty people. So now [the Taliban] could recruit the relatives. [US] Special Forces break into people’s houses during the night, humiliate them, send them to a torture chamber. You have created more Taliban. This continued to go on until you had a substantial resistance in the countryside.
How did the United States deal with it? Intensifying the violence. Either itself or the Afghan army that had mobilized, which used the same tactics [as the United States]. What they say now, the same reporters, is “everyone hated the Americans, including the Afghan army.” For pretty good reasons.
Meanwhile, something else was happening. The United States, when it came in, didn’t know anything about Afghanistan. So they looked for people who could carry out their orders. Who were they? The warlords. The monsters who were running the place. There, the ones who were savvy could put themselves forth, saying, “I’ll work for you.” But they’re not stupid. One warlord could approach the Americans and say, “In this village over here, there’s some Taliban” — namely, one of his enemies. Then the Americans would come in and smash up that village and create more Taliban recruits.
This went on through twenty years. By the end, there was a huge resistance. A popular resistance. Actually, the Taliban originally were based in the Pashtun — it’s the largest of the ethnic groups [in Afghanistan] — but it’s extended. One of the few surprises, very few surprises, in the last few weeks was that the warlords in the Tajik and Uzbek areas immediately moved to the Taliban. That was unexpected. Everything else was perfectly well expected.
It was obvious that the government would collapse. The government is just a morass of corruption, [for] which there’s no support. The Afghan army — half of it was just on paper, ghost soldiers. Others were soldiers who didn’t get paid, didn’t have ammunition. The corrupt leaders and officials were stealing everything. They weren’t going to fight for the Americans, so they just disappeared.
All of that was plain. I wrote about it in advance, [and] others did [as well]. Now, the only people who didn’t seem to understand it were the people who had access to intelligence. Intelligence had a different story. That’s one of the ways in which intelligence gets distorted. But if you looked at the facts on the ground, it was plain what was going to happen. The surprise was the joining of the Taliban by their former enemies, the warlords in Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, and others — that’s how it was unexpected. So, now it’s apparently a multiethnic-ruled organization.
What about the withdrawal? This goes back to President Donald Trump. In February 2020, Trump made a deal with the Taliban. He didn’t even bother to inform the Afghan government, [because] they’re nothing. Afghan people, of course, don’t count at all. [Trump] made a deal with the Taliban that American troops would withdraw in May 2021 — the worst possible time. The onset of the fighting season. No opportunity to accommodate, to make local arrangements. “We will pull out, and you can do anything you like,” he said. He imposed no conditions. He just had one condition: “Don’t fire at American soldiers, which wouldn’t look good for me. But anything else is your business.”
It’s interesting to see the reaction of the Republican Party, which hailed this as a historic achievement by our great leader President Trump. It was featured on the Republican Party web page, and it stayed there, up until when the debacle began. Actually, Joe Biden slightly improved on Trump’s conditions: he delayed it a couple of months, so there was a little more time, [and he] added some conditions on the Taliban. [Joe Biden] carried out an improved version of what they were hailing as a marvelous historic achievement by the genius Trump.
As soon as the debacle began, they pulled it off their web page and turned to attacking the Democrats and the army for the disaster. You may have seen the Senate hearing, where General Mark Milley and others were called to account by Republicans who, a month earlier, were hailing the historic achievement, now denouncing the military for following what they had hailed. This carries shamelessness to a higher level — but that’s the Republican Party.
Now comes the next stage. Now, there’s a split in the international community about how to deal with the situation. One approach was advocated by the China-based regional powers — it’s basically the Shanghai Cooperation Organization [SCO] — China, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, India, and Pakistan. Their approach is to accommodate somehow the Taliban regime. It’s a miserable situation in Afghanistan. A mass of people is starving, [and] the economy [has] collapsed, so their approach is, “Let’s give them some aid and support for the population, engage with them, and make an effort to make their government more inclusive, less repressive, and shift the economy from opium production to the export of minerals and their other resources.” That’s one approach.
There’s another approach, which is led by the United States and includes India, a US ally. In the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, India opposed this, preferring the US approach, which is to deprive Afghans of any aid and assistance. To hold their resources — [their] treasury resources happen to be in US banks — and pressure the IMF and the World Bank not to offer them assistance. Just punish the Afghans as much as possible. This doesn’t punish the leadership — sanctions hurt the population. They usually make the leader stronger, as the population has to huddle under the leader’s umbrella just to survive.
The United States is the only country that can impose sanctions. Others go along sometimes, but if they try to do it on their own, nobody would pay the slightest attention. When the United States imposes sanctions, everyone has to obey — even if you oppose them.
Take the sanctions against Cuba, the oldest ones. The entire world opposes them. The vote at the United Nations, the last one, was 184 to 2. Israel goes along with the United States — it’s a client state, so it has to. The rest of the world says no, but they all abide by the sanctions, because US sanctions are third-party sanctions. They tell others, “If you don’t abide by them, we throw you out of the international financial system.” And you have other punishments. The world is basically the mafia, and the Godfather gives the orders, and others obey, whether they like it or not. It’s reality, [it’s] not political science.
So, if the United States imposes sanctions, like on Afghanistan, like it or not, the rest of the world has to obey. Maybe not China. They won’t. That’s one of the reasons China is an enemy: they don’t just follow orders. It’s not tolerable. But maybe the Central Asian states will go along with China. In fact, they have been shifting — they have kicked out the American bases and are moving toward the China-based Eurasian system, the Belt and Road Initiative, the investment system that China’s been carrying out. So that seems to be the way it’s developing.
On China and AUKUS
PP: China is portrayed as a threat to the West — namely Europe and the United States — and recently there has been this new alliance, which seems to be a weapons-sale alliance. And we have a big reaction from Emmanuel Macron in France, because he is losing market share. What do you make of it?
NC: AUKUS. First of all, why is China a threat? A good recent statement about this [was made] by the distinguished international diplomat, former prime minister of Australia Paul Keating. He said, “What’s the China threat? Well, here’s a country that raised 20 percent of the world’s population from poverty moving on to become a functioning state.” It’s moving forward in the economy, [but] it’s independent of the United States — that’s the China threat. The China threat, he said, is China’s existence. That can’t be tolerated.
Let’s go back to the mafia. The Godfather does not accept centers of power that don’t follow the rules, so China’s a threat. It’s not a military threat. The military threat is against China. China is ringed with US bases with nuclear armed missiles, right offshore, aimed at China. It’s China that’s under threat, not the United States. The United States is under threat from a potential rival that doesn’t follow orders. That’s the threat.
Let’s take a look at AUKUS. What’s portrayed in the press and the governments is [that] it’s a problem of freedom of navigation. [But] there is no problem of freedom of navigation. Actually, one of Australia’s leading strategic analysts just wrote an important article about this. He said, “[There’s] no threat to navigation.” And there is none. There’s none that’s been raised. The problem is what are called the “exclusive economic zones.” The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982 established what are called “exclusive economic zones.” Two hundred miles offshore, there has to be complete freedom of navigation. But there should be no “threat or use of force.”
Now, that’s interpreted by China and India to mean no military intelligence operations. The United States disagrees. [They] say that the United States has the right to carry out military and intelligence operations in the exclusive zone, which they recently did, just a couple of weeks ago, in the Indian zone. India protested vigorously, but [they], of course, can’t do anything about it.
Well, China also protests, and they can do something about it. That’s the contention: Can there be US military intelligence operations in China’s exclusive economic zone? The wording again is “no threat or use of force.”
I should mention on the side that the United States is the only maritime power that does not ratify the Law of the Sea. [The] United States doesn’t ratify international conventions — that’s an interference with its sovereignty. Because the Godfather doesn’t accept that.
So the issue is kind of a technical one: How do you interpret the Law of the Sea with regard to the question “Does rule of force bar military intelligence operations?” That’s the issue. The United States on one side, China and India on the other. [It’s an] obvious place for diplomacy to move in. [But] the United States does not pursue sissified things like “diplomacy.”
We can go back to Afghanistan. When the Taliban surrendered, the answer was, “We don’t do negotiations. We use force.”
Now, let’s come to AUKUS. The United States made a deal with Australia to send them a fleet of advanced hunter-killer submarines with nuclear weapons. China has none of these, [and] this is the South China Sea. China has four submarines. Old submarines [that are] noisy, nonnuclear, easily detected and hemmed in the South China Sea. They can’t go anywhere. That’s China. [The] United States ,of course, has [a lot]. Take a look at the nuclear submarines in the United States. There’s a fleet of advanced submarines. Each one of them — a single one — has, I forgot how many, Trident missiles. Each Trident missile has many warheads. Each US submarine can attack about two hundred cities all over the world. That’s the balance of submarines in the South China Sea.
To correct this, the United States is sending more nuclear submarines to Australia — which Australia pays for, but then they’re folded into the US naval command. It’s a very serious threat to China. There’s no strategic purpose. These subs won’t even be in operation for probably fifteen years. By that time, of course, China will have built up its military forces to counter this new threat — so we get an escalation. Again, we show our muscle, show that we intend to dominate the world.
Same with France. France had already made a deal with Australia to send conventional submarines. The United States did not even notify France that it was being abrogated by the US-Australia deal to send advanced nuclear submarines. So, naturally, [Emmanuel] Macron was pretty upset. It’s a blow to French industry, a serious blow. They weren’t even informed. There’s a message there. It tells the European Union, “Here is your role in world affairs. If we need you, we’ll ask you to do something. If we want to do something, we won’t even bother notifying you. You’re vassals.”
France withdrew its ambassadors in protest. The ambassadors to Australia and the United States didn’t bother withdrawing their ambassador from England, because everybody knows that England is just a vassal state. Don’t bother with them. But that’s how world affairs are shaking up. That’s the AUKUS deal. It’ll escalate to crisis. It’s very tense. There’s a mutual escalation.
So the United States escalates tensions off the China coast. China sends warplanes into Taiwan’s protected area. Those are the “tit for tat” actions. They expand. They can lead to war, [and] a war between China and United States means we’re finished. It’s over. Not just them — everybody. You can’t have a war between nuclear powers. China doesn’t have much of a nuclear system — nothing like the United States — but enough to attack the continental of the United States from the mainland [of China].
On Climate Change
BM
To change subjects: What do you see as the greatest obstacle in solving the climate crisis?
NC: There are two major obstacles. One is, of course, the fossil fuel companies. Second is the governments of the world, including Europe and the United States. We have just seen that very dramatically over the summer. On August 9, 2021, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] issued its last analysis of the climate situation. It was a very dire warning — much more than before.
The message basically was, “We have two choices.” We can either start right now cutting back on fossil fuel use, [and] do it systematically every year, until we phase them out by mid-century. That’s one choice. The other choice is cataclysm. The end of organized human life on earth. Not immediately — we’ll just reach irreversible tipping points, and it goes on to disaster. Those are the options.
How did the great powers react? The day after the IPCC report, Joe Biden issued an appeal to the OPEC cartel [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] to increase production. Europe chimed in by calling on all producers, including Russia, to increase production. Increase production. This is a response to the IPPC warning that we have to start reducing right now.
That’s for political reasons, for profit for the oil companies. [The] political reason is that they want the price reduced. It’s better for them. [For] Joe Biden, if the gas prices are high, it harms his electoral prospects. [If] you read the major business press right now, [there’s] a big discussion going on: What’s the best way to increase production? Is it through the American shale oil — the fracking industry — or is it through OPEC? But how do we increase production best? That’s the business press. Turn to the petroleum journals. [They are] euphoric: “We just found new fields to exploit. Demand is going up. It’s great.”
Let’s go to the US Congress. The Biden program — under pressure from young activists, the Bernie Sanders movements, and so on — is actually a big improvement on any previous ones, on paper. It’s not wonderful, but it’s much better than anything else. Well, the [previous] negotiations in Congress over the “reconciliation bill,” initiated by Bernie Sanders, cut back very sharply from Sanders’s proposals. It’s a very valuable bill. It somewhat reverses the huge assault on the population during the neoliberal era.
The Republicans are 100 percent opposed. Nothing. [They] won’t accept anything. The Democrats do have a swing vote. The so-called moderate Democrats, who should be called “ultra-reactionaries,” are the swing vote. One of them is the chair of the Senate Energy Committee, [who] also happens to be the champion in Congress of receiving funding from the fossil fuel industry — which is quite an achievement, because they pay off everyone — but he’s the champion. His name is Joe Manchin. He has a policy — he’s made it explicit — that’s taken from the playbook of the oil companies. He made it very clear; he said: “No elimination, only innovation.” So, no cutbacks on the use of fossil fuel. If you can make up something new, it’s okay. So, he’s blocking it. There are climate change provisions in it. They’re already out. Blocked.
In Europe, it varies. There are some countries, like Denmark, for example, that are moving toward renewable energy pretty significantly. Others vary. But when it comes to the crunch, telling the oil companies and the producers right now what to do, Europe is, as far as I know, unified in saying, “Increase production” — right after the warning that we have to decrease production. That’s the world we live in.
BM
Considering this, do you think it’s possible to find solutions at the scale and time we need within the capitalist system?
NC: It’s very simple. Straightforward. There are very careful and detailed proposals that have been worked out. Even by the International Energy Agency [IEA], which is a producer-based group. There are detailed proposals, others by a number of economists, very good economists. One of them is my coauthor Robert Pollin, another is Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia. Using different models, they all come up with the same results. There are perfectly feasible measures to meet the IPPC goals and, at the same time, make a better world. Better jobs, better living conditions, [and] improvement of the nature of society. It’s all possible.
The leaders in Europe who are calling for increased production know it perfectly well — if they’re literate. And it’s within maybe 2 to 3 percent of the GDP — easily manageable. It’s actually less than what the US Treasury spent to bail out the financial institutions during the current crisis. Easily within range. [It is a] tiny fraction of what was spent during World War II.
But the problem is: Can you get the will to do it? It’s not going to come from the leadership. It has to come from mass popular action. And the scandal and tragedy is that that’s coming only from young people. The climate strike earlier this year — young people. The “Sunrise Movement” in the United States, which impelled the Biden administration to at least adopt a reasonable proposal on paper — it’s young people. When Greta Thunberg stands up at the Davos meeting and says, “You have betrayed us,” she’s exactly right. She got a light applause, and then they said, “Nice little girl, why don’t you go back to school? We’ll take care of it.” It can be done. But it’s going to take plenty of effort and energy.
There are major problems. Actually, last month, an IMF [International Monetary Fund] study tried to estimate the subsidies that are being given to the fossil fuel companies. Their estimate is around $11 million a minute in subsidies, mostly by the rich countries to the fossil fuel industry. Some of them are direct, others are indirect, like by underestimating the cost of the use of fossil fuel. That’s a pretty significant sum. It’s going on every day.
The whole neoliberal period was basically class war. It had nothing to do with the markets or anything else. Just class war. This is another form. Do we want to hand the future of our children and grandchildren to elements that want to make as much profit as possible and then don’t care what happens tomorrow? That’s one choice. The other choice is to move onto a livable and better world.
On Anarchism and Classical Liberalism
BM
Let’s move on to anarchism. I think it’s a term that’s greatly misunderstood. A lot of people believe that anarchism has to do with a chaotic society without any rules, which is quite different from the anarchism that you speak of. Could you briefly try to explain what you mean, when you speak of anarchism?
NC: Well, I mean, anarchism covers a very wide range. There are all sorts of things. But even the ultraright calls itself anarchist — meaning they want power to shift from government to private tyranny. But the mainstream has been based on a very simple principle: any form of hierarchy and domination is illegitimate, unless it can justify itself. It has a burden of proof. Sometimes that burden of proof can be me — very rarely. If it can’t be met, dismantle it, and turn it into a more free, participatory, cooperative society.
An anarchist system could very well have hierarchy, as long as it’s controlled from below. Like, if I need surgery, I go to a doctor, not a carpenter. That’s hierarchy. But I chose it — he’s a doctor by virtue of my decision, our decision collectively, that some group of people can gain skills that the community needs. So, as long as responsibility is vested in the democratic participatory community in every institution, in the workplace, in communities everywhere, then we’re moving toward a free and just society.
It will be a highly organized society. There can be a lot of planning about how we should distribute resources, what our policies ought to be. It could be, or should be, international in scope. So, a rich and complex organization based on popular and democratic control, meeting the condition that any form of hierarchy that can’t justify itself has to be dismantled in favor of more freedom. Then you can spell that out in many detailed ways.
PP: I suppose that the practical realization of this philosophy, in economic terms, would be to do something about those private tyrannies.
NC: Well, there are many things that can be done and, in fact, are being done. One thing that should be done is the classic position of the workers’ movements and the farmers’ movements back in the nineteenth century — in fact, it has its roots in classical liberalism: “Those who work in an enterprise should own and manage it.” We should move toward what radical farmers called a cooperative commonwealth, where the farmers themselves organized collectively [and] freed themselves from the rule of the Northeastern bankers and market managers [and instead] did it themselves. That was the populist movement in the United States in the nineteenth century. They were beginning to link up with the growing workers’ movement, which held that “those who work in the mill should own them. No one has the right to expropriate the labor of someone else.”
This is, actually, classical liberalism. Go back to someone like Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the main founders of classical liberalism, who said that “the peasant who works the fields has more right of ownership than the landlord who sits in some palace somewhere.” That’s classical liberalism. Abraham Lincoln in the United States was a classical liberal. For him, and indeed for the Republican Party, what they called “wage slavery” — subordination to a master — is just like slavery, except that it’s temporary, until you can free yourself. Now, there’s a little difference. He talked about individual freedom, [and] the farmers and workers talked about collective freedom — a cooperative commonwealth. But other than that, the roots are in the classical idea, [which] goes way back to the Romans — that subordination to a master is a fundamental attack on basic human dignity and human rights. That’s been beaten out of people’s heads by a century of propaganda.
Now it’s supposed to be a wonderful thing if you can subordinate yourself to a master for most of your working life. It’s called “getting a job.” It was considered a horrible attack on human dignity for millennia. Millennia, literally, up through the nineteenth century. It’s taken a lot of work to impose on people the idea that it’s a wonderful thing to spend your waking hours following somebody else’s orders.
And doing it in a way that is actually more extreme than totalitarian states! Like, Stalin couldn’t tell you “You’re allowed to go to the bathroom for fifteen minutes at 3 p.m.” He couldn’t do that. That’s what’s called “getting a job” — [someone telling you] what kind of clothes to wear [and], if you’re working at an Amazon warehouse, what kind of path to take between two spots. If you’re working for a delivery company, you’re not allowed to stop for coffee for fifteen minutes, and we control you because we have a surveillance system in the truck. If you do that, you get a demerit, and if you get a couple of them, you’ll get thrown out. That’s called “getting a job.” Subordinating yourself to a master.
Well, not only the anarchists but even the socialist movement took that as a slogan. “Workers’ control of enterprises” was the basis for the traditional socialist movement, [but] it’s long changed from that. But I think all these ideas can be reconstructed quickly — they are [already], to a certain extent. There are worker-controlled enterprises, cooperatives, localist initiatives developing, which are pieces of a more free and just society, which would follow general anarchist principles.
Unfortunately, this cannot happen in time to deal with our immediate crises. The timescales are wrong. The immediate crises [are] crises of survival [and] will have to be dealt with within more or less the existing institutions. They can be modified, but they are not going to be fundamentally changed in time to deal with the crises. That doesn’t mean that you stop working on the long term. You do it, and it changes consciousness, changes understanding, and builds elements of freedom within a highly repressive society. It can be done. But the immediate crises are going to require working with the institutions that exist. We’re stuck with that.
New UNDP report projects that the number of those killed as a result of Yemen’s war could reach 1.3 million by 2030.
A new United Nations report has projected that the death toll from Yemen’s war will reach 377,000 by the end of 2021, including those killed as a result of indirect and direct causes.
In a report published on Tuesday, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimated that 70 percent of those killed would be children under the age of five.
It found that 60 percent of deaths would have been the result of indirect causes, such as hunger and preventable diseases, with the remainder a result of direct causes like front-line combat and air raids.
“In the case of Yemen, we believe that the number of people who have actually died as a consequence on conflict exceeds the numbers who died in battlefield,” UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner said.
Yemen has been mired in conflict since 2014, when the Houthi rebel movement seized much of the northern part of the country, including the capital, Sanaa, as the government fled. In March 2015, a coalition of Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia intervened in the war with the aim of restoring the government.
The conflict has been deadlocked for years, with Yemen teetering at the brink of a famine, and tens of thousands of people killed. The situation in the country has been described by the UN as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. At least 15.6 million people are living in extreme poverty.
The report projected grim outcomes in the near future should the conflict drag on.
It said some 1.3 million people would die by 2030, and that 70 percent of those deaths would be the result of indirect causes such as loss of livelihoods, rising food prices, and the deterioration of basic services such as health and education.
The report also found that the number of those experiencing malnutrition would surge to 9.2 million by 2030, and the number of people living in extreme poverty would reach 22 million, or 65 percent of the population.
Scenarios if war were to end now
The report also projected that extreme poverty could disappear in Yemen within a generation if the conflict were to end immediately.
Using statistical modelling to analyse future scenarios, the UNDP report said if peace were reached by January 2022, Yemenis could eradicate extreme poverty by 2047.
“The study presents a clear picture of what the future could look like with a lasting peace including new, sustainable opportunities for people,” said Steiner.
If the conflict ends, the report estimated economic growth of $450bn by 2050, in addition to halving malnutrition – currently affecting 4.9 million people – by 2025. Further projections showed that focused efforts on empowering women and girls across Yemen could lead to a 30 percent boost of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050, coupled with a halving of maternal mortality by 2029.
However, the UNDP noted that the war “continues to propel in a downward spiral”.
“The people of Yemen are eager to move forward into a recovery of sustainable and inclusive development,” said Khalida Bouzar, Director of the UNDP Regional Bureau for Arab States. “UNDP stands ready to further strengthen our support to them on this journey to leave no one behind, so that the potential of Yemen and the region can be fully realised – and so that once peace is secured, it can be sustained.”
The report emphasises that the upward trend for development and wellbeing must be supported not just by peace efforts, but also by regional and international stakeholders to implement an inclusive and holistic people-centred recovery process that goes beyond infrastructure.
Investments focused on agriculture, women’s empowerment, capacity development, and effective and inclusive governance were projected to have the highest return on development.
Reuben Hatcher, the jailer at left, stood with Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, three of the four men known as the Groveland Four, in August 1949. At right is Sheriff Willis McCall, who later shot Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Irvin. (photo: Gary Corsair)
Thurgood Marshall Sr., then with the NAACP, represented Irvin during his second trial, but an all-white jury again convicted him and he was sentenced to death. Irvin narrowly escaped execution in 1954 and Gov. LeRoy Collins commuted his sentence to life with parole. Greenlee, also sentenced to life, was paroled in 1962 and died in 2012. Irvin died in 1969, one year after he was paroled.
King said having the men exonerated in the same building where the trials were held was “of significant importance because upstairs there was a courtroom where 72 years ago (an) abomination of justice took place." He praised Gladson for pursuing justice.
“He could have easily kicked this case down the road and let someone else deal with it,” King said. “Even when it got frustrating and he felt there was no path toward this day, he dug in harder.”
Marshall Jr. said that, perhaps more than any other case, the Groveland Four “haunted” his father.
“But he believed better days were ahead,” Marshall Jr. said.
The Florida Legislature in 2017 formally apologized to the men's families. Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s three-member Cabinet granted posthumous pardons more than two years ago. In 2018, then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi directed the state Department of Law Enforcement to review the case. Earlier this year, the agency referred its findings to Gladson for his review.
Gladson and an investigator interviewed the grandson of Jesse Hunter, the now-deceased prosecutor of two of the Groveland Four defendants. According to the grandson, Broward Hunter, his grandfather and a judge in the case knew there was no rape.
The grandson also suggested to Gladson, based on letters he found in his grandfather’s office in 1971, that Willis may have shot Shepherd and Irvin because of the sheriff’s involvement in an illegal gambling operation. Shepherd was believed to be involved with the gambling operation too, and Willis might have seen a rape case as a “a way to get some people that were on his s— list,” Hunter told the prosecutor and investigator.
Gladson also said that James Yates, a deputy who served as a primary witness, likely fabricated evidence, including shoe casts.
The prosecutor also had Irvin’s pants sent to a crime lab in September to test for semen, something that was never done at Irvin’s trial, even though jurors were given the impression that the pants were stained. The results showed no evidence of semen, the motion said.
“The significance of this finding cannot be overstated,” Gladson said in his motion.
Not long after Patricia Turner and a handful of Black students desegregated Norview junior high school in Norfolk, Virginia, she realized a big difference between her new white school and her former Black school. That February of 1959, she didn’t have to wear a coat in class to stay warm, because Norview was heated.
She hadn’t noticed the difference earlier because of the steady volley of racism directed at her, Turner said. A teacher put her papers in a separate box and returned them wearing rubber gloves. (He later wrote her an apology letter.) And her fellow students spat on her.
“I had my mother, my dad, my church, my pastor, my God,” Turner said, explaining how she survived the daily assaults on her body and spirit.
Turner and 16 other Black students who attended six white schools under court-ordered desegregation were called the Norfolk 17, the young foot soldiers in the campaign against Virginia’s “Massive Resistance”, a state policy to oppose school desegregation. Rather than desegregate public schools after the 1954 US supreme court decision in Brown v Board of Education, which declared segregated education unconstitutional, Virginia officials closed some of them.
Massive Resistance was in place from 1956 to 1959. But in some places, schools weren’t desegregated until a decade after the Brown decision, longer than in any other state in the US south, making Virginia notorious, at the time, among civil rights advocates. The period is so seminal to its history that public school students are required to learn about it beginning in the fourth grade.
Since long before Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia, deploying rhetoric that tapped white fears over teaching about race and racism in public schools, race and education have been an incendiary combination, especially in southern politics. Black demands for educational equality as part of the civil rights agenda historically have been met with white rejoinders of states’ rights and other, more naked justifications for segregation. In Virginia, the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties was chartered after the Brown decision to preserve “racial integrity”, “racial separateness” and “the precious heritage handed down to us by our forefathers”. And the slow erosion of public education post-Brown and its replacement with “choice” and private schools are rooted in the battles over white children and Black children attending the same schools.
In a 1958 letter to Virginia school superintendents, Governor J Lindsay Almond Jr wrote: “I am solemnly and irrevocably committed to do everything within my power to defend and preserve public education for all of the children of the Commonwealth. Irrefutable evidence abundantly abounds that the mixing of the races in our public schools will isolate them from the support of our people, produce strife, bitterness, chaos and confusion to the utter destruction of any rational concept of a worthwhile public school system.”
Black students left to fend for themselves
While the Brown decision was the catalyst for Massive Resistance, the ruling joined four other cases, including a 1951 Virginia lawsuit, Davis v Prince Edward county. In April 1951, 16-year-old Barbara Johns led a walkout in protest of the substandard conditions in her Black high school compared with the white high school in Farmville in Prince Edward county.
“There had already been other protests and movement activity in Farmville by community leaders. In fact, the Reverend Vernon Johns, a major civil rights leader, was Barbara’s uncle. She had learned so much about the broader civil rights movement, community resistance activity and the art of protest from her family and community,” said Colita Fairfax, a professor of social work at Norfolk State University who has served on state and federal historic commissions.
Johns’ actions attracted the NAACP, which sued the county, sparking legal sparring over desegregation that prompted white officials to shut down the public school system in 1959. That year, Massive Resistance ended in most of Virginia, but opposition to school desegregation intensified in Prince Edward county.
Robert Hamlin Sr was a senior in high school who had grown up in the shadow of the school desegregation battles. His parents, members of the Nation of Islam, encouraged his education; his first instruction was in a three-room schoolhouse in the county with a potbelly stove for heat and an outside pump for water. When he began attending Robert Russa Moton high school, where Johns had led the walkout eight years earlier, Hamlin was thrilled because it had indoor heating and water.
“I thought, ‘Wow,’” he said.
Later, he attended a new Moton high school, which was built in 1953 and included facilities that white students in the community took for granted such as a cafeteria and a gymnasium.
Before he could graduate, county officials shuttered the schools to avoid desegregating them, using a tactic to evade the law: they refused to appropriate taxes to pay for the school year. A foundation was created to support private education for white students; later tuition grants were offered. The Black students were on their own.
Hamlin had promised his mother, who had only completed the sixth grade, that he would graduate high school. “So, when schools closed and I’m going into the 12th grade, that was the one thing that stuck with me most, my mom’s desire for me to graduate high school,” he said. “And now, all the sudden, through no fault of our own, it appears that I wasn’t going to be able to do that.”
From 1959 to 1964, Black students didn’t receive a formal education in Prince Edward county.
“That story is unique among the south. There’s no other locality that closes its schools for such an extended period of time in order to avoid school desegregation,” said Brian Daugherity, an associate history professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who has written books about Virginia’s desegregation battles.
The US senator Harry Flood Byrd Sr of Virginia galvanized white resistance in the state. An ardent segregationist, he was an author of the southern manifesto, a declaration of states’ rights and a defense of Jim Crow laws, written in response to the Brown decision. With Byrd’s support, the then governor, Thomas B Stanley, created a special commission in 1954, which engineered many of the plans to oppose desegregation that were approved by the Virginia general assembly.
Lawmakers made school attendance optional and offered white parents tuition support for private schools. And to ensure that school districts toed the line, lawmakers threatened to strip them of state funding if they integrated under court pressure. The assembly also passed laws that made it harder for Black students to attend white schools, even if the schools were closer to their homes than Black schools. In Norfolk, one of three communities under a court order to desegregate at the time, Black students had to take multiple tests to be eligible to attend white schools.
Fairfax said a series of local court case delays, pupil placement exams, intimidation tactics and harassment were designed to thwart desegregation efforts.
‘You’re doing this for the future’
In Norfolk, of the 151 Black students who were eligible, based on where they lived, to attend white schools, only 17 enrolled, including Patricia Turner and her brother James, Turner said. They were close enough to the white junior high school to walk there. In an archival photo, a 14-year-old Turner poses in a dress, coat and bobby socks with other members of the Norfolk 17.
When she entered Norview junior high school, she had been required to pass eighth-, ninth -and 10th-grade tests, she said.
“They wanted the best of the best,” Turner said, recognizing the double standard applied to Black students.
In the months before entering Norview, she prepared for eighth grade and “how to react if someone spits in your face”, she said. She was told to “wipe it off because it was just water”.
“They told us, ‘You are not only doing this for you, you’re doing this for the future,’” she said, referring to the instructions from elders to her and other Black students assigned to white schools in early 1959.
In the last months of 1958, they attended classes in the basement of a local Black church because the white schools they were assigned to were closed. The pastor, teachers and others in the community volunteered to teach them until a wealthy Black patron financed the impromptu school.
While they were being educated, 10,000 white students in Norfolk were still shut out of public schools as a result of Massive Resistance. In an effort to stall desegregation, officials had closed the white schools, but left the Black schools open.
“This has always puzzled me,” said Turner, a retired educator who still works with children. “That means the Black students were being educated; the white students were out of school because of 17 Blacks.”
In the end, a campaign to defend the education of white children in separate schools faltered because they weren’t in school. In addition to the activism by the Black community and organizations such as the NAACP, opposition by weary and some well-meaning white parents helped bring Massive Resistance to an end. In Norfolk, a group of white parents and community and business leaders successfully sued to reopen the schools. In a letter to Governor Almond, the Norfolk Committee for Public Schools wrote: “We believe that Massive Resistance was never intended to punish the white school children of the state. It was never intended to punish the entire populace economically. Because of federal court decisions, however, it is powerless to do otherwise than punish those who least deserve it …
We believe that the Supreme Court is no more likely to reverse its school desegregation decisions than it is to reverse the decision of Appomattox. Virginia must therefore face the realities of the situation, as it did in 1865, and proceed courageously along the best and most realistic lines available.”
‘Everything is cyclical’
In Farmville, Hamlin also found support in the Black church. He was able to graduate high school, not in Virginia, but in North Carolina, 125 miles from home.
While white resistance crumbled in Norfolk, it escalated in Farmville with the school closures. Two Black ministers used their connections at Kittrell Community College in Henderson, North Carolina, to help Hamlin and other students graduate high school. During his senior year, he lived in a college dorm.
Prince Edward public schools reopened in 1964 following the US supreme court decision in Griffin v School Board of Prince Edward county. By them, Hamlin was long gone. After graduating high school in North Carolina, he eventually enrolled in the air force. He didn’t move back to Prince Edward county until 1999; 40 years had passed since the school closures.
“I was quite pleasantly surprised by how it had advanced and changed,” said Hamlin, who stayed away because there were no opportunities. After returning, he landed a position as deputy director for youth programs at a workforce development agency serving south central Virginia.
Today, Farmville is called “the birthplace of America’s student-led civil rights revolution”. The original Moton high school, which ignited the commonwealth’s school desegregation battle, was named a national historic landmark in 1998 and converted into a museum in 2001. Hamlin served on the museum board for five years, including a stint as chairperson. In 2003, the Virginia assembly apologized to the students who lost five years of education.
Today’s opposition to teaching race in schools could deny students the lessons of Virginia’s education history. During his run, Youngkin’s appeals to parents with slogans like “parents matter” wasn’t just part of a campaign, but a movement, he said. Youngkin has pledged to end the teaching of critical race theory, a legal theory that explores how racism is embedded in US laws and policies, in Virginia schools, though it isn’t taught in kindergarten through 12th grade schools there. The crux of the issue, Youngkin has said, is that schools shouldn’t teach children “what to think as opposed to how to think”.
Colfax says teaching the history of Massive Resistance will help students become critical thinkers. Massive Resistance was one of several issues many white Virginians were responding to in the 1950s. They were also reacting to “the Black community’s resistance activities in forms of protest, agitation, voting”, she said. “When narratives such as these are not taught in public schools, it means that schoolchildren aren’t learning about the beauty, strength, resilience, contributions of Black people. They are not learning to ask questions for themselves about citizenship, fairness, privilege, hate, white supremacy.’’
Reflecting on his place in state history and the current issues in Virginia education, Hamlin said: “I have learned along the way that you need to know your history, you need to know the past because it will come back again. Everything is cyclical. And so, it may show up a little differently, but it will show up again.”
Lyrics Creedence Clearwater Revival, Who'll Stop The Rain. Written by, John Fogerty. From the 1970 album, Cosmo's Factory.
Long as I remember the rain been comin' down Clouds of mystery pourin' confusion on the ground. Good men through the ages tryin' to find the sun. And I wonder still I wonder who'll stop the rain.
I went down Virginia seekin' shelter from the storm Caught up in the fable I watched the tower grow Five year plans and new deals wrapped in golden chains. And I wonder still I wonder who'll stop the rain.
Heard the singers playin', how we cheered for more. The crowd had rushed together tryin' to keep warm. Still the rain kept pourin', fallin' on my ears And I wonder, still I wonder who'll stop the rain.
In an effort to boost revenue and protect the environment, the Biden administration on Friday laid out plans to make fossil fuel companies pay more to drill on federal lands and waters.
The 18-page Interior Department report describes an “outdated” federal oil and gas leasing program that “fails to provide a fair return to taxpayers, even before factoring in the resulting climate-related costs.”
The document calls for increasing the government’s royalty rate — the 12.5 percent of profits fossil fuel developers must pay to the federal government in exchange for drilling on public lands — to be more in line with the higher rates charged by most private landowners and major oil- and gas-producing states. It also makes the case for raising the bond companies must set aside for cleanup before they begin new development.
Though Friday’s report focuses on the fiscal case for updating the leasing program, Interior officials say they will also consider how to incorporate the real-world toll of climate change into the price of permits for new fossil fuel extraction. The Biden administration this year set its “social cost of carbon” at $51 per ton of emissions, but suggested the number could go even higher as researchers develop new estimates of the damage caused by raging wildfires, deadly heat, crop-destroying droughts and catastrophic floods.
“The direct and indirect impacts associated with oil and gas development on our nation’s land, water, wildlife, and the health and security of communities — particularly communities of color, who bear a disproportionate burden of pollution — merit a fundamental rebalancing of the federal oil and gas program,” the report says.
But many activists were dissatisfied with the document, which they say breaks President Biden’s campaign promise to ban new oil and gas leasing on public lands.
“We are destroying life on Earth by extracting fossil fuels,” said Randi Spivak, public lands program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The process needs to end, not be reformed.”
Economic analyses suggest the changes to royalty and bonding rates will increase revenue, but they will not significantly curb carbon emissions.
The American Petroleum Institute’s Frank Macchiarola criticized the proposal for increasing the cost of fuel development in the United States.
“During one of the busiest travel weeks of the year when rising costs of energy are even more apparent to Americans, the Biden Administration is sending mixed signals,” Macchiarola, API’s senior vice president for policy, economics and regulatory affairs, said in a statement.
The long-awaited Interior Department report comes just days after Biden released 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to combat rising gasoline prices. Earlier this month, Biden also approved the largest sale of offshore oil and gas leases in U.S. history, which a government analysis said could generate up to 1.1 billion barrels of oil and 4.42 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the coming decades.
The report also coincides with efforts from congressional Democrats to pass a suite of oil and gas leasing changes included in the Build Back Better budget deal. The version of the bill passed by the House last month includes provisions that would raise the minimum royalty rate for onshore drilling for the first time in a century, shorten the length of leases from 10 to five years and eliminate a noncompetitive program that lets speculators buy leases for as little as $1.50 per acre.
That legislation now rests in the hands of the Senate, where Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) — a powerful Democrat from a fossil fuel-producing state — has said he wanted to review the Interior Department’s leasing report before agreeing to new laws.
The Interior Department is able to increase royalty and bonding rates on its own. But enshrining the higher rates in legislation would shield the policies from the court battles that have held up other environmental initiatives.
In a statement, House Natural Resources Committee chairman Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) called the current leasing program a “public subsidy for oil and gas drilling and extraction” and said the Interior report helps make the case for congressional action.
Friday’s report does not propose a new royalty rate, though officials have expressed openness to higher rates like those required by most oil- and gas-producing states, including North Dakota and Texas.
Raising the royalty rate to 18.75 percent — the rate charged for drilling in deep waters offshore — would generate an additional $1 billion per year between now and 2050, according to research by Brian Prest, an economist at the think tank Resources for the Future. A royalty rate of 25 percent for both on- and offshore drilling would double that number to nearly $2 billion annually. Neither policy would significantly impact energy prices for U.S. households.
But nor would they make much of a dent in greenhouse gas emissions, Prest said in testimony before the House Natural Resources Committee this spring. Less than 10 percent of oil and gas produced in the United States comes from Interior-controlled land, and cuts to U.S. production will be partly offset by increases in other countries. Prest estimated that the reductions from raising the onshore royalty rate to 18.75 percent would amount to just 0.1 percent of U.S. annual emissions.
Changing the bonding rate could have a more significant environmental impact, according to University of Chicago economist Ryan Kellogg.
The Interior Department said its lands contain scores of “orphaned wells” — abandoned oil and gas infrastructure the owners of which have disappeared, gone bankrupt or been lost to history. These facilities can continue to leak pollution for years, but the current minimum bond rate — just $25,000 for all a company’s facilities across an entire state — is not enough clean up even one shuttered well.
“Each one of these wells is a little time bomb in the ground that is ultimately going to leak methane” — a potent greenhouse gas, Kellogg said.
Raising the bonding rate ensures that funds for plugging old wells are dedicated ahead of time, rather than as an afterthought, he said.
The Interior Department document also calls for policy changes to discourage speculation and give communities more input in the leasing process.
Currently, there is no requirement that bidders on leases be publicly identified. Leases that don’t get sold at competitive auctions are put into a “noncompetitive” pool from which companies can rent land for a small administrative fee. This leads to firms buying and reselling leases at a higher price, the agency says — generating profits for speculators, rather than taxpayers. And it creates an incentive for companies to purchase leases even if they have no plans to develop, preventing that land from being used for recreation, habitat restoration or other purposes.
Many of these shortcomings have been identified in decades of reports from the Government Accountability Office and the Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General.
Mark Meadows. (photo: Yuri Gripas/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, center, lowered the level of authority to approve strikes to on-scene commanders, increasing the number of strikes. (photo: Mosa'ab Elshamy/AP)
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the former longtime chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says it's time to let Leonard Peltier go home. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) at the Capitol on March 6, 2019, in Washington, DC. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
A volunteer empties a ballot box in a voting station of Noumea, New Caledonia. (photo: Mathurin Derel/AP)
Snow Cone, with fishing rope dragging from her mouth, and her newborn calf on Dec. 2. (photo: Georgia Department of Natural Resources/NOAA Permit #20556)
