Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
had the honor this week of showing my support for drone whistleblower Daniel Hale by attending his sentencing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, the so-called “espionage court.” I’ve known Daniel for a few years, and I consider him a friend. I also believe that he’s a bona fide American hero.
Daniel was arrested in 2013 after telling Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept that, as a drone operator, he had participated in the murder of an unknown number of civilians who were later reported to be legitimate attacks on “enemy combatants.” He provided Scahill with some 150 pages of documents related to the drone program, appeared on stage with the Intercept co-founder, and sat for an interview in the highly-acclaimed documentary National Bird. The Justice Department’s National Security Division didn’t like that very much, and Daniel was charged with five counts of espionage.
The case dragged on for years. But over all those years, Daniel was consistent in his message. He said that the military and its drone policy had turned him into a mass murderer, a child killer who committed his crimes remotely from the comfort and safety of an air force base in Afghanistan.
Daniel told me a story, which he repeated in court, that sent chills up my spine and that humanized the drone program. He said that he was ordered to launch a strike on a car in Afghanistan being driven by a man and with a woman in the passenger’s seat. The man was rapidly approaching a US military roadblock, and Daniel was given the order to fire. Daniel could see that the woman kept turning around as if to speak to somebody in the back seat. He told his commanding officer that he believed somebody else was in the car. The commander reiterated the order to fire. Against his better judgment, Daniel fired a rocket at the car, killing the man and woman instantly. When a ground patrol unit finally got to the car, villagers had already taken the bodies of the man, the woman, and their five- and seven-year-old daughters, who had been in the back seat, and had thrown them into a garbage dumpster. One of the girls was barely alive and was severely wounded.
Daniel said that that incident, coupled with other similar strikes, caused him “moral injury” that he was unable to cope with. He sought therapy, was treated for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety. He was unable to hold a job and finally found work as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Tennessee. Rather than worry about himself, however, he worried about all the other innocent civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, whom the US military was murdering every day. He resolved to tell his story and to reveal US military crimes, even if it cost him his freedom.
Sentencing was not such an easy proposition. Daniel decided, with the advice of his outstanding federal public defenders, that he would plead guilty to one count of espionage, with the hope that the Justice Department would dismiss the other four counts. Prosecutors said that they would decide at some later date whether to dismiss the other charges, depending on the severity of Daniel’s sentence. They asked Judge Liam O’Grady to sentence Daniel to nine years in federal prison. If he got the full nine, years, they would consider dropping the other charges. But that’s not the way things worked out in court on July 27.
The scene in the courtroom was tense and dramatic. Just minutes into the hearing, the prosecutors asked Judge O’Grady to clear the courtroom, saying that a letter that Daniel had written to the judge several days earlier, and which was covered in The Washington Post and The New York Times, demanded a classified response. The judge ordered all in attendance to leave, while the prosecutors argued that Daniel’s letter to the judge proved that he wasn’t remorseful for his actions. They said that he leaked the information to The Intercept to curry favor with Scahill and to ingratiate himself with other journalists. His guilty plea should be thrown out, they said. He should be forced to go to trial on all five counts.
The judge allowed us back into the courtroom an hour and a half later. He wouldn’t vacate the guilty plea, he said. And he believed that Daniel was indeed remorseful. The prosecutors acted as though this was a personal affront against them.
The two sides then began to argue about the eventual sentence. Prosecutors reiterated their position that Daniel deserved nine years in prison. They raised my own case, saying that they had made a mistake in 2012 when they agreed that I would get 30 months after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. “Kiriakou set a bad example,” the prosecutor said. “The sentence was too short, and then it led to a sentence that was too short for [Jeffrey] Sterling.” The prosecutor went on to say that a more appropriate sentence was the five years and four months that Reality Winner got for providing The Intercept with one over-classified document. Using that as a guideline, Daniel should get the full nine years.
Daniel’s attorneys jumped at the point. Kiriakou and Sterling, they said, were in the Eastern District of Virginia. Winner was in the Northern District of Georgia. If the prosecution wanted to bring outside cases into the mix, they should talk about David Petraeus. Petraeus, the former CIA director, had provided some of the most highly-classified information in existence to his adulterous girlfriend and was only charged with a misdemeanor in the Western District of North Carolina. He was eventually sentenced to 18 months of unsupervised probation. The prosecution conceded the point.
Judge O’Grady then asked if Daniel had anything to say before he passed sentence. Daniel, who is painfully introverted and has difficulty speaking before crowds, took to the podium and delivered one of the finest and most impassioned defenses of personal morality and ethics I have ever heard. He told the judge how his ancestor Nathan Hale had been caught by the British and sentenced to death for espionage. His final words, as every schoolchild knows, were “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Daniel said that he took strength from his ancestor. And like his ancestor, Daniel was a patriot. It was his love of country that compelled him to speak out against the government’s illegal activities. He was sorry he broke the law, he said. But he could not condone murder.
The judge was finally ready to pass sentence. He began by saying that Daniel had broken the law and he had to be punished for it. But he believed that Daniel broke that law because of his conscience. The government’s contention that he wanted to ingratiate himself with journalists was absurd. Consequently, he decided to sentence Daniel to 45 months in prison. The courtroom remained silent, as most attendees didn’t fully understand the implications of the judge’s decision. But I was sitting next to NSA whistleblower Tom Drake. We understood and we smiled at each other.
Forty-five months is not actually 45 months. First, with good behavior time off, that cuts the sentence to 39 months. With three months already served, that cuts it to 36 months. The judge ordered that Daniel be placed in the Bureau of Prisons’ Residential Drug and Alcohol Program, which takes another 12 months off the sentence, bringing it to 24 months. And finally, Daniel is eligible for six months of halfway house time or home confinement, putting the actual sentence at 18 months.
There was one final blow against the government. After passing sentence, Judge O’Grady asked if there was any other business. Daniel’s attorneys said that there was – the issue of four more espionage charges. They said the fact that the government had not yet moved forward on the other charges was a violation of Daniel’s constitutional right to a speedy trial. Why waste any more of the court’s time and the taxpayers’ money, they asked. The judge agreed. He dismissed all of the remaining charges with prejudice. Daniel Hale’s nightmare is finally coming to an end.
Through all of this drama, there was one thing that the prosecutor said that has stuck in my mind. It probably sounded profound to some, but to me it sounded as though the Justice Department still has no idea how to deal with national security whistleblowers. The prosecutor told the judge repeatedly that Daniel’s sentence had to be sufficiently severe that it serves as a deterrent to other people in the intelligence community who may be considering speaking with the press. Whistleblowers must be stopped before they become whistleblowers.
What he didn’t and doesn’t understand is that no sentence will serve as a deterrent. An Israeli researcher found that whistleblowers have an unusually well-defined sense of right and wrong – far more highly developed than the population at large. Where there is injustice, they will speak out. Where there is waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality, they will speak out. They’re not afraid of the Justice Department. They’re not afraid of espionage charges. They’re willing to risk long sentences. Right is right. That’s Daniel Hale.
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.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Reps. Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal listen as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks during a press conference. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Progressives Fire Warning Shot on Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal
Jordain Carney, The Hill
Carney writes: "Senate progressives are signaling they aren't ready to bless a bipartisan infrastructure deal unless they can secure firm commitments on a separate Democratic-only bill." VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
enate progressives are signaling they aren't ready to bless a bipartisan infrastructure deal unless they can secure firm commitments on a separate Democratic-only bill.
The early pushback comes as President Biden and a bipartisan group of senators reached an agreement on infrastructure spending, underscoring that any bipartisan legislation will have a ways to go before winning broad support on Capitol Hill.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) vowed that there would not be movement on a bipartisan deal unless there is a "firm, absolute agreement" on a sweeping reconciliation bill.
"There is not going to be a bipartisan agreement without a major reconciliation package," he said before Biden announced the deal Thursday afternoon.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said he is "not voting for a bipartisan package unless I know what is in reconciliation.
"I think there is, like I said, 20 votes for this," he added. "I can find you a lot of other things that there are 20 votes for."
Murphy said Democrats "need to have some understanding" that includes a "pathway to pass" a larger Democratic-only bill through the budget reconciliation process. He sidestepped a question about procedure and timing, saying those issues are still being discussed.
A bipartisan group of 10 senators — five Democrats, five Republicans — announced on Wednesday night that they had reached an agreement on a scaled-down infrastructure package and that White House negotiators had agreed to the details. Biden met with the group on Thursday and formally endorsed the deal, which includes $559 billion in new spending for a total of $1.2 trillion over eight years.
The deal includes $559 billion in new spending for a total of $1.2 trillion over eight years.
But that amount is still substantially smaller than what many Democrats want. Biden has outlined a $2.3 trillion jobs plan and a $1.8 trillion families plan, while the bipartisan group plan is more tightly focused on more traditional infrastructure like roads, bridges and broadband.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) panned the bipartisan framework from Wednesday night as "paltry." And Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) argued that the "confusion" over what is in the bipartisan plan underscores that the smaller plan and the Democratic-only bill have to be linked.
"The confusion over the last few days makes it even more important in my mind that the two efforts ... be directly connected. And I want it understood that as chairman of the Finance Committee ... I will not support anything that throws those other matters overboard," Wyden said, referring to priorities like climate change, health care and changes to the tax code.
Wyden declined to say how that would work procedurally on the Senate floor, saying it was still under discussion, but reiterated that the two plans have to be "directly connected."
Democrats are pursuing a two-track path as they try to get infrastructure passed through Congress this year. On one path is the bipartisan group's proposal, on the second is a Democratic-only bill that would be used to pass the reconciliation process that allows Democrats to avoid a 60-vote legislative filibuster.
Part of the scheduling headache for Democratic leaders is that reconciliation is a two-step process: First lawmakers need to pass a budget resolution that greenlights and includes instructions for a subsequent Democratic-only bill. Then they have to write and pass the sweeping multitrillion-dollar infrastructure bill itself.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), amid progressive pressure, said on Thursday before the deal was announced that the House will not pass the bipartisan bill until they are also ready to pass the larger Democratic-only package.
But progressives don't have that guarantee in the Senate, where they appear likely to move separately.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters on Wednesday night that he would take up both the potential bipartisan deal and the "first act" of the Democratic-only bill — passing the budget resolution that tees it up — in July.
Schumer has not given a hard timeline for when the Senate will take up the subsequent Democratic-only infrastructure package. But the Senate is poised to leave town in early August until mid-September, and Democrats believe its increasingly likely it will wait until the fall.
To even pass the budget resolution, Democrats need total unity from all 50 of their members, something they don't yet have. And progressives are warning that they won't let the bipartisan bill move forward without a broader deal on how the bigger package gets passed.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) warned that progressives are "not going to be left holding the bag."
"There is no half a deal or 10 percent of a deal that covers roads and bridges and leaves everything else behind," Warren said.
"We'll work out the details on how the votes go, that's part of what we're talking about right now," she added. "But make no mistake there's commitment in our caucus that one piece is not going to go forward and leave the rest of it in the train station."
Deputy Service Bailiff Michael Taylor signs a writ of eviction in the unincorporated community of Galloway, west of Columbus, Ohio, March 3, 2021. (photo: Stephen Zenner/Getty)
Rep. Mo Brooks, pictured in 2017 on Capitol Hill, and others were sued by another lawmaker earlier this year. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
After Susan LaPierre killed an elephant in Botswana, video shows, she touched the creature's feet and said, 'A podiatrist would love working on him.' (photo: The New Yorker)
How the Head of the NRA and His Wife Secretly Shipped Their Elephant Trophies Home
Mike Spies, The New Yorker
Spies writes: "The couple had their names removed from the shipment, and placed an order for the animals' feet to be turned into 'stools,' an 'umbrella stand,' and a 'trash can.'" VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
The couple had their names removed from the shipment, and placed an order for the animals’ feet to be turned into “stools,” an “umbrella stand,” and a “trash can.”
n the early fall of 2013, an export company in Botswana prepared a shipment of animal parts for Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, and his wife, Susan. One of the business’s managers e-mailed the couple a list of trophies from their recent hunt and asked them to confirm its accuracy: one cape-buffalo skull, two sheets of elephant skin, two elephant ears, four elephant tusks, and four front elephant feet. Once the inventory was confirmed, the e-mail stated, “we will be able to start the dipping and packing process.” Ten days later, Susan wrote back with a request: the shipment should have no clear links to the LaPierres. She told the shipping company to use the name of an American taxidermist as “the consignee” for the items, and further requested that the company “not use our names anywhere if at all possible.” Susan noted that the couple also expected to receive, along with the elephant trophies, an assortment of skulls and skins from warthogs, impalas, a zebra, and a hyena. Once the animal parts arrived in the States, the taxidermist would turn them into decorations for the couple’s home in Virginia, and prepare the elephant skins so they could be used to make personal accessories, such as handbags.
The LaPierres felt secrecy was needed, the e-mails show, because of a public uproar over an episode of the hunting show “Under Wild Skies,” in which the host, Tony Makris, had fatally shot an elephant. The N.R.A. sponsored the program, and the couple feared potential blowback if the details of their Botswana hunt became public. Footage of their safari, which was filmed for “Under Wild Skies” and recently published by The Trace and The New Yorker, shows that Wayne had struggled to kill an elephant at close range, while Susan felled hers with a single shot and cut off its tail in jubilation. Plans to air an episode featuring the LaPierres’ hunt were cancelled.
Records obtained by The Trace and The New Yorker show that Susan leveraged the LaPierres’ status to secretly ship animal trophies from their safari to the U.S., where the couple received free taxidermy work. New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has regulatory authority over the N.R.A., is currently seeking to dissolve the nonprofit for a range of alleged abuses, including a disregard for internal controls designed to prevent self-dealing and corruption by its executives. In a complaint filed last August, James’s office asserted that trophy fees and taxidermy work “constituted private benefits and gifts in excess of authorized amounts pursuant to NRA policy to LaPierre and his wife.” The new records appear to confirm those allegations. The N.R.A.’s rules explicitly state that gifts from contractors cannot exceed two hundred and fifty dollars. The shipping and taxidermy of the Botswana trophies cost thousands, and provided no benefit to the N.R.A.—only to the LaPierres. In the complaint, James’s office alleged that the LaPierres also received improper benefits related to big-game hunting trips in countries including Tanzania, South Africa, and Argentina. The attorney general declined to comment further on the details of the case.
Taxidermy work orders containing the LaPierres’ names called for the elephants’ four front feet to be turned into “stools,” an “umbrella stand,” and a “trash can.” At their request, tusks were mounted, skulls were preserved, and the hyena became a rug. The episode represents a rare instance in which the gun group’s embattled chief executive is captured, on paper, unambiguously violating N.R.A. rules; the e-mails show that Susan directed the process while Makris’s company, Under Wild Skies Inc., which received millions of dollars from the N.R.A., picked up the tab.
Andrew Arulanandam, the N.R.A.’s managing director of public affairs, said, over e-mail, that the LaPierres’ “activity in Botswana—from more than seven years ago—was legal and fully permitted.” The couple’s safari trips, he added, were meant to “extol the benefits of hunting and promote the brand of the N.R.A. with one of its core audiences.” Moreover, he claimed, “Many of the most notable hunting trophies in question are at the N.R.A. museum or have been donated by the N.R.A. to other public attractions.”
The LaPierres’ effort to keep their taxidermy work secret spanned four months and involved multiple individuals, companies, and countries. On September 27, 2013, the shipping company in Botswana sent its first e-mail to the LaPierres and informed them that the animal parts would be sent to a different company, in Johannesburg, South Africa, before making their way to the United States. “We will be keeping you advised on the progress of this shipment as it moves along these processes,” the message said. In early October, after multiple phone calls with Susan, the American taxidermist wrote to one of the shipping agents involved in the exportation process. He explained that there had been a recent controversy involving Makris, and that the LaPierres “can not afford bad publicity and a out cry.” The taxidermist added, “That is why they are trying not to have there names show up on these shipments so the information does not fall into the wrong hands.” Two months later, the taxidermist checked in with Makris, and asked what he should do with the items once he received them. “W and Susan will tell you how they want theirs mounted,” Makris replied, before reminding the taxidermist that “they said you could handle the import discreetly.” Makris then informed the taxidermist that he would pick up the couple’s tab.
Throughout December, 2013, e-mails show that the taxidermist negotiated with both export companies on the couple’s behalf, with Susan, and also others, copied. “AS requested by the LaPierre’s in a earlier email there name and contact information is to be replaced with my name and contact information,” one note to the Botswana company read. The organization replied that trophies “can only be exported from Botswana in the name of the licensee,” and that “it’s been that way for years, and the export regulations stipulate this.” The taxidermist replied, “This request was only made by Susan and Wayne LaPierre and understand you need to follow the law were applicable.”
The taxidermist then turned his attention to the company in South Africa. On December 10th, the taxidermist told Susan that, once the hunting trophies arrived in Johannesburg, an agent would generate a new air waybill to attach to the shipment and enter the taxidermist’s name on it as the consignee, instead of the LaPierres’. When the trophies arrived in the United States and were cleared through government agencies, it would look as though they belonged to the taxidermist. “Awesome,” Susan replied.
Once the shipping crates landed in Johannesburg, another contact of the taxidermist’s drove two hours to check if the LaPierres’ names were written on the containers. When the friend discovered that they were, he scrubbed them off. In late January, 2014, the taxidermist told Susan that the shipment had arrived. “Looks like everything is here and no protestors,” he wrote.
After Susan killed the elephant in Botswana, video shows, she was fixated on the creature’s feet. As she touched them, she said, “He’s so wrinkly. . . . Wow. A podiatrist would love working on him.” Photographs of the taxidermied appendages show that the animal’s wrinkled gray skin, the light coating of hair, and the massive, cracked toenails are all preserved, and, in the case of the stools, topped with wooden rings and black leather seating pads.
The taxidermist had successfully completed a highly sensitive, laborious project. Two years later, in 2016, he reached out to Susan because he was trying to buy a boat from someone she and Wayne knew, and he hoped that Wayne could connect them. In an e-mail, the taxidermist said it was fine if she could not help, noting that “life will go on.” Still, he asked for the courtesy of a reply, one way or the other. He did not receive one.
Arulanandam, the N.R.A spokesman, alleged that “communications” with the taxidermist stopped after he “appeared to make threats against members of an N.R.A. delegation that participated in the Botswana excursion. He also sought benefits and payments to which he was not entitled.”
The taxidermist wrote a parting e-mail three months later, expressing his frustration at the lack of response. It wasn’t so long ago, he said, that Susan had “begged” him over the phone to remove the LaPierres’ names from their “harvested Elephants” and promised him “ ‘A BIG FAVOR’ ” in return. In case she had forgotten, he reminded her, “you could not afford protesters” and a “media shit storm.”
A protest against the Saudi regime for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (photo: AP)
A Saudi Official's Harrowing Account of Torture Reveals the Regime's Brutality
David Ignatius, The Washington Post
Ignatius writes: "Held captive by Saudi agents, Salem Almuzaini, once an official of the regime, was beaten repeatedly on the soles of his feet, his back and his genitals, according to a harrowing account of his torture and captivity filed in a Canadian court." VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
eld captive by Saudi agents, Salem Almuzaini, once an official of the regime, was beaten repeatedly on the soles of his feet, his back and his genitals, according to a harrowing account of his torture and captivity filed in a Canadian court. He says he was whipped, starved, battered with iron bars and electrocuted; he also describes being ordered to crawl on all fours and bark like a dog. Accompanying his report are graphic photos of Almuzaini’s extensive scars from injuries he said were inflicted by operatives of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
As set out in the court papers, Almuzaini was first seized in Dubai on Sept. 26, 2017, by United Arab Emirates security officials and sent to the kingdom; he vanished on Aug. 24, 2020, after visiting a senior Saudi state security official, and has not been seen since. His description of his treatment in the intervening years — at two Saudi prisons, and at Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, where suspected opponents of the regime were detained in 2017 — offers a horrifying view of the lengths to which the regime under the crown prince, known as MBS, has gone to punish its perceived enemies.
His narrative, translated from Arabic and filed in June in an Ontario court, was sent via text message to the cellphone of his wife, Hissah, in September 2019, according to her family, with instructions that she release it if he were to disappear again. The chilling description, reminiscent of memoirs of suffering by political prisoners in Iran, Chile, South Africa and the Soviet Union, offers the most extensive personal account to date of the alleged brutal conduct of the Saudi regime.
“The days passed, and I continued to fear hearing the keys and the door opening,” Almuzaini writes at one point. “I didn’t know what was in store for me, whether torture or elimination.” He describes how one interrogator ordered him to kiss his shoe, then struck his head. “The sad irony is that there was no other agency I had helped more than the Mabahith and Special Affairs, and now I was under their arrest and subject to their torture,” Almuzaini writes of the Saudi secret police.
The degree of psychological torture and attempted dehumanization that Almuzaini describes is as horrifying as the physical abuse. At one point, his interrogator told him to reach into a box and choose a whip for his next beating; when he hesitated, the interrogator chose one and used it to lash Almuzaini while urinating. Almuzaini was instructed not to say his name, and instead refer to himself as “9,” At another point, he was ordered to eat his dinner off the floor, like a dog.
“I was beset with worry on all sides,” Almuzaini recounts. “I worried for my mother, wife, children, sisters, uncle, companies, employees, my future, the pain in my body, the humiliation, and the fear. In reality, feelings cannot describe it. All I’ll say is that the injustice and repression of mankind were intense. I felt weak and powerless.”
The Saudi Embassy in Washington, informed about the allegations of torture by Almuzaini and his wife, declined to comment, as did the embassy of the UAE.
Almuzaini, a graduate of the Saudi police academy, joined the Interior Ministry and supervised airline projects for Mohammed bin Nayef, who was then in charge of the ministry’s counterterrorism projects and later interior minister and crown prince. According to Almuzaini’s account, when MBN decided to create a private airline company called Alpha Star Aviation Services, he asked Almuzaini to run it. Later, when MBN formed his own commercial private airline company, Sky Prime Aviation, he asked Almuzaini to oversee it in Dubai.
Lawyers for Saad Aljabri, a former Saudi intelligence official, have argued in legal documents that these air operations were initially created to shield Saudi and U.S. covert intelligence operations against terrorist groups.
Almuzaini’s alleged crime, judging from the questions he says he was asked by his torturers, was that he aided in a plot to skim money from the two airlines — something he says he denied throughout the torture sessions. Aljabri has similarly denied any involvement in misusing funds. Companies controlled by the Saudi government have sued Aljabri in Canada, where he now lives, to recover money they claim he stole.
But Almuzaini’s real offense, as outlined in the court documents, may have been that he married Hissah, the daughter of Aljabri. MBS, a rival of MBN, has been pursuing Aljabri since 2017, when he deposed MBN as crown prince and Aljabri fled the kingdom. MBS has been trying to force him to return to the kingdom since then.
Almuzaini’s wife described one gruesome moment that her husband had confided. “He said that once, before he was struck a hundred times without pause, he was told ‘this is on behalf of Saad Aljabri,’ and ‘this is what you get for marrying his daughter,’” she wrote. “Sometimes, the interrogators told Salem while beating him that ‘we are adding extra lashes and beatings because your father-in-law is not here, so you can take his portion.’”
The Almuzaini affidavit was filed to support Aljabri’s claim that, as his lawyers argue in a recent court filing, MBS has “sought to consolidate his power by persecuting his perceived rivals under the guise of an ‘anti-corruption’ campaign” and that payments to Aljabri “were fully authorized and approved” by MBN and other Saudi authorities.
The alleged treatment of Almuzaini is just one example of MBS’s seeming obsession with Aljabri’s family. The crown prince blocked two of Aljabri’s then-teenage children, Omar and Sarah, from leaving the country in 2017, when he began his internal putsch to consolidate power and has used them as seeming hostages to try to force their father to return to the kingdom. Omar and Sarah are now imprisoned. I described their plight in The Post in June 2020, and it was featured in a recent report by Human Rights Watch. Aljabri’s friends, relatives and business associates have also been detained.
After Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in Istanbul in October 2018 on what the CIA says were the orders of MBS, Almuzaini had a flash of recognition. He told his wife that the people who were interrogating him included Maher Mutreb, publicly identified as the leader of the Istanbul hit team, and seven of its other members, according to his wife’s affidavit. Among those present during his torture was MBS’s close assistant, Saud al-Qahtani, the affidavit alleges.
In a bizarre irony, two planes owned by Sky Prime, the airline Almuzaini helped run for MBN, were used to transport to Istanbul the hit team that killed Khashoggi, after MBS had appropriated the company, according to court documents filed by Aljabri’s lawyers.
When Almuzaini was held at the Ritz-Carlton for about six weeks starting in late 2017, the torture stopped, according to his wife’s affidavit. The shakedown was now about getting money — as was the case with about 400 other prominent Saudis, including princes and global financiers, who were rounded up at the Ritz-Carlton in November 2017 and forced by MBS’s operatives to hand over assets.
“We’re going to take all of your money,” Almuzaini writes that he was told at the Ritz-Carlton. “We don’t recognize the contracts or any of your nonsense. We’re going to return the money to the state.” He eventually agreed to sign over 400 million Saudi riyals, about $106 million at current exchange rates.
Almuzaini wrote to his wife: “It wasn’t enough for them to torture and imprison me, but they had to take my money, too. Why was all of this happening? Why all the injustice? I didn’t do anything wrong or commit any sin.… I had offered my services and accomplished many things for the nation. I had helped keep it safe.”
Concluding his searing narrative, Almuzaini says of his captors, “In all honesty, the only words I have to describe them were hypocrites who corrupted the earth.”
The Tesoro oil refinery in Washington state. (photo: Kevin Schafer/Getty)
Washington State County Is First in US to Ban New Fossil Fuel Infrastructure
Oliver Milman, Guardian UK
Milman writes: "A county in Washington state has become the first such jurisdiction in the US to ban new fossil fuel infrastructure, following a lengthy battle over the impact of oil refineries on the local community." VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
Whatcom county’s council passed measure that bans new refineries, coal-fired power plants and other related infrastructure
county in Washington state has become the first such jurisdiction in the US to ban new fossil fuel infrastructure, following a lengthy battle over the impact of oil refineries on the local community.
In a vote on Tuesday night, Whatcom county’s council unanimously passed a measure that bans the construction of new refineries, coal-fired power plants and other fossil fuel-related infrastructure. The ordinance also places new restrictions on existing fossil fuel facilities, such as a requirement that any extra planet-heating gases emitted from any expansion be offset.
Whatcom county is located in the far north-west corner of Washington state, next to the Canadian border and abutting the Salish sea. The county hosts two of the state’s five oil refineries, with BP and Phillips 66 overseeing facilities at the Cherry Point complex that refines much of the oil from Canada and Alaska that is then distributed along the US west coast.
“There will be no new refineries, they won’t be able to get permits to export their product and while we will still have these dinosaur facilities already here it will be more challenging for them to expand,” said Todd Donovan, who is serving his second term on the council and was a major proponent of the new rule. “The future is clearly in renewable energy.”
The ban is the culmination of a years-long fight to curb fossil fuel activity in the county to help address the climate crisis and reduce air pollution. A huge coal export facility, which would have moved 50m tons of coal a year, was proposed for Cherry Point but was eventually blocked in 2016 following fears raised by the local Lummi Nation that it would have destroyed fisheries.
Donovan said that people in the county had become increasingly alarmed about the environmental fallout of fossil fuel activity, including impacts upon fisheries and local orca whales.
“We just had our hottest day on record a few days ago, the salmon are disappearing, the glaciers are melting so much that you look at Mount Baker near here and you see bare rock where there used to be ice,” he said. “With all the fires and the heat, people are connecting the dots that this is climate change caused by fossil fuels. It has galvanized them.”
The fossil fuel industry previously attempted to block any new restriction upon its activity in Whatcom county, pouring money into local elections and claiming that the move would cost several thousand jobs. More recently, however, the industry entered into talks over how the new restrictions would work.
“Washington’s energy industry believes that ongoing capital investment into existing refinery operations is necessary to ensure the safe, state-of-the-art, clean production of transportation fuels,” Holli Johnson, manager of north-west external affairs for the Western States Petroleum Association. Johnson added that the association’s members were a “primary driver of economic growth and prosperity” and help fund local schools and healthcare facilities through tax revenues.
This relatively liberal enclave on Washington coast may be the first to call time on the fossil fuel industry but environmentalists hope it will spur other jurisdictions to do the same, then pushing the federal government to rapidly phase out oil, coal and gas in order to avoid worsening the ravages of the climate crisis, which is fueling huge heatwaves, drought and fire across the US west, along with flooding from Germany to China.
To date, Joe Biden’s administration has paused new oil and gas drilling on public land and attempted to accelerate the growth of renewable energy but has declined to set an end point for fossil fuels. Republicans, meanwhile, remain staunch defenders of the industry.
“This is a huge moment, it challenges the narrative that has been the default of the past century that new fossil fuel infrastructure is inevitable and will always be built,” said Matt Krogh, a campaigner at the environmental group Stand.earth who lives in Whatcom county. “There is a tipping point where if enough communities take action we will see Washington DC take notice.”
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
