11 September 21
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11 September 21
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Twenty years ago, Rep. Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against war in the immediate aftermath of the devastating 9/11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people. “Let us not become the evil that we deplore,” she urged her colleagues in a dramatic address on the House floor. The final vote in the House was 420-1. This week, as the U.S. marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Rep. Lee spoke with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman about her fateful vote in 2001 and how her worst fears about “forever wars” came true. “All it said was the president can use force forever, as long as that nation, individual or organization was connected to 9/11. I mean, it was just a total abdication of our responsibilities as members of Congress,” Rep. Lee says.
California Democratic Congressmember Barbara Lee, her voice trembling with emotion as she spoke from the House floor, would be the sole member of Congress to vote against the war in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The final vote was 420 to 1.
REP. BARBARA LEE: Mr. Speaker, members, I rise today really with a very heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and the loved ones who were killed and injured this week. Only the most foolish and the most callous would not understand the grief that has really gripped our people and millions across the world.
This unspeakable act on the United States has really forced me, however, to rely on my moral compass, my conscience and my god for direction. September 11th changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. This is a very complex and complicated matter.
Now, this resolution will pass, although we all know that the president can wage a war even without it. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, “Let’s step back for a moment. Let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.”
Now, I have agonized over this vote, but I came to grips with it today, and I came to grips with opposing this resolution during the very painful yet very beautiful memorial service. As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” Thank you, and I yield the balance of my time.
AMY GOODMAN: “Let us not become the evil we deplore.” And with those words, Oakland Congressmember Barbara Lee rocked the House, the Capitol, this country, the world, the lone voice of more than 400 congressmembers.
At the time, Barbara Lee was one of the newest members of Congress and one of the few African American women to hold office in either the House or the Senate. Now in her 12th term, she is the highest-ranking African American woman in Congress.
Yes, it’s 20 years later. And on Wednesday this week, I interviewed Congressmember Lee during a virtual event hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, which was founded by Marcus Raskin, a former aide in the Kennedy administration who became a progressive activist and author. I asked Congressmember Lee how she decided to stand alone, what went into that decision, where she was when she decided she was going to give her speech, and then how people responded to it.
REP. BARBARA LEE: Thanks so much, Amy. And really, thanks to everyone, especially IPS for hosting this very important forum today. And let me just say to those from IPS, for historical context and also just in honor of Marcus Raskin, Marcus was the last person I talked to before I gave that speech — the very last person.
I had gone to the memorial and had come back. And I was on the committee of jurisdiction, which was the Foreign Affairs Committee with this, where the authorization was coming from. And, of course, it didn’t go through the committee. It was supposed to come up on Saturday. I got back to the office, and my staff said, “You’ve got to get to the floor. The authorization is coming up. The vote is coming up within another hour or two.”
So I had to race down to the floor. And I was trying to get my thoughts together. As you can see, I was kind of not — I won’t say “not prepared,” but I didn’t have what I wanted in terms of my sort of framework and talking points. I had to just scribble something on a piece of paper. And I called Marcus. And I said, “OK.” I said — and I had talked to him for the last three days. And I talked to my former boss, Ron Dellums, who was, for those of you who don’t know, a great warrior for peace and justice from my district. I worked for him 11 years, my predecessor. So I talked with Ron, and he’s a psychiatric social worker by profession. And I talked to several constitutional lawyers. I’ve talked to my pastor, of course, my mother and family.
And it was a very difficult time, but no one that I talked to, Amy, suggested how I should vote. And it was very interesting. Even Marcus didn’t. We talked about the pros and cons, what the Constitution required, what this was about, all the considerations. And it was very helpful for me to be able to talk to these individuals, because it seems like they didn’t want to tell me to vote no, because they knew all hell was going to break loose. But they really gave me kind of, you know, the pros and cons.
Ron, for example, we kind of walked through our background in psychology and psychiatric social work. And we said, you know, the first thing you learn in Psychology 101 is that you don’t make critical, serious decisions when you’re grieving and when you’re mourning and when you’re anxious and when you’re angry. Those are moments where you have to live — you know, you have to get through that. You have to push through that. Then maybe you can begin to engage in a process that’s thoughtful. And so, Ron and I talked a lot about that.
I talked with other members of the clergy. And I don’t think I talked to him, but I mentioned him at that — because I was following a lot of his work and sermons, and he’s a friend of mine, Reverend James Forbes, who is the pastor of Riverside Church, Reverend William Sloane Coffin. And they in the past had talked about just wars, what just wars were about, what are the criteria for just wars. And so, you know, my faith was weighing in, but it was basically the constitutional requirement that members of Congress can’t give away our responsibility to any executive branch, to the president, whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican president.
And so I came to the decision that — once I read the resolution, because we had one before, kicked it back, no one could support that. And when they brought back the second one, it was still too overly broad, 60 words, and all it said was the president can use force forever, as long as that nation, individual or organization was connected to 9/11. I mean, it was just a total abdication of our responsibilities as members of Congress. And I knew then that it was setting the stage for — and I’ve always called it — forever wars, in perpetuity.
And so, when I was at the cathedral, I heard Reverend Nathan Baxter when he said, “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” I wrote that on the program, and I was pretty settled then that I — going into the memorial service, I knew that I was 95% voting no. But when I heard him, that was 100%. I knew that I had to vote no.
And actually, prior to going to the memorial service, I was not going to go. I talked to Elijah Cummings. We were talking in the back of the chambers. And something just motivated me and moved me to say, “No, Elijah, I’m going,” and I ran down the steps. I think I was the last person on the bus. It was a gloomy, rainy day, and I had a can of ginger ale in my hand. I’ll never forget that. And so, that’s kind of, you know, what led up to this. But it was a very grave moment for the country.
And, of course, I was sitting in the Capitol and had to evacuate that morning with a few members of the Black Caucus and the administrator of the Small Business Administration. And we had to evacuate at 8:15, 8:30. Little did I know why, except “Get out of here.” Looked back, saw the smoke, and that was the Pentagon that had been hit. But also on that plane, on Flight 93, which was coming into the Capitol, my chief of staff, Sandré Swanson, his cousin was Wanda Green, one of the flight attendants on Flight 93. And so, during this week, of course, I’ve been thinking about everyone who lost their lives, the communities that still haven’t recovered. And those heroes and sheroes on Flight 93, who took that plane down, could have saved my life and saved the lives of those in the Capitol.
So, it was, you know, a very sad moment. We were all grieving. We were angry. We were anxious. And everyone, of course, wanted to bring terrorists to justice, including myself. I’m not a pacifist. So, no, I’m the daughter of a military officer. But I do know — my dad was in World War II and Korea, and I know what getting on a war footing means. And so, I am not one to say let’s use the military option as the first option, because I know we can deal with issues around war and peace and terrorism in alternative ways.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what happened after you came off the floor of the House, giving that momentous two-minute speech and going back to your office? What was the reaction?
REP. BARBARA LEE: Well, I went back into the cloakroom, and everyone ran back to get me. And I remember. Most members — only 25% of members in 2001 are currently serving now, mind you, but there’s still many serving. And they came back to me and, out of friendship, said, “You have got to change your vote.” It wasn’t anything like, “What’s wrong with you?” or “Don’t you know you have to be united?” because this was the pitch: “You have to be united with the president. We can’t politicize this. It’s got to be Republicans and Democrats.” But they didn’t come at me like that. They said, “Barbara” — one member said, “You know, you’re doing such great work on HIV and AIDS.” This was when I was in the middle of working with Bush on the global PEPFAR and the Global Fund. “You’re not going to win your reelection. We need you here.” Another member said, “Don’t you know harm is going to come your way, Barbara? We don’t want you hurt. You know, you need to go back and change that vote.”
Several members came back to say, “Are you sure? You know, you voted no. Are you sure?” And then one of my good friends — and she said this publicly — Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, she and I talked, and she said, “You’ve got to change your vote, Barbara.” She says, “Even my son” — she told me her family said, “This is a hard time for the country. And even myself, you know, we’ve got to be unified, and we’re going to vote. You need to change your vote.” And it was only out of concern for me that members came to ask me to change my vote.
Now later, my mother said — my late mother said, “They should have called me,” she said, “because I would have told them that after you deliberated in your head and talked to people, if you’ve come to a decision, that you’re pretty bullheaded and pretty stubborn. It’s going to take a lot to get you to change your mind. But you don’t make these decisions easily.” She said, “You’re always open.” My mother told me that. She said, “They should have called me. I would have told them.”
So, then I walked back to the office. And my phone started ringing. Of course, I looked up at the television, and there was the, you know, little ticker saying, “One no vote.” And I think one reporter was saying, “I wonder who that was.” And then my name showed up.
And so, well, so I started walking back to my office. Phone started blowing up. The first call was from my dad, Lieutenant — in fact, in his latter years, he wanted me to call him Colonel Tutt. He was so proud of being in the military. Again, World War II, he was in the 92nd Battalion, which was the only African American battalion in Italy, supporting the Normandy invasion, OK? And then he later went to Korea. And he was the first person who called me. And he said, “Do not change your vote. That was the right vote” — because I had not talked to him beforehand. I wasn’t sure. I said, “Nah, I ain’t gonna call dad yet. I’m going to talk to my mother.” He says, “You do not send our troops in harm’s way.” He said, “I know what wars are like. I know what it does to families.” He said, “You don’t have — you don’t know where they’re going. What are you doing? How’s the Congress going to just put them out there without any strategy, without a plan, without Congress knowing at least what the heck is going on?” So, he said, “That’s the right vote. You stick with it.” And he was really — and so I felt really happy about that. I felt really proud.
But the death threats came. You know, I can’t even tell you the details of how horrible it is. People did some awful things during that time to me. But, as Maya Angelou said, “And still I rise,” and we just keep going. And the letters and the emails and the phone calls that were very hostile and hateful and calling me a traitor and said I committed an act of treason, they’re all at Mills College, my alma mater.
But also, there were — actually, 40% of those communications — there’s 60,000 — 40% are very positive. Bishop Tutu, Coretta Scott King, I mean, people from all around the world sent some very positive messages to me.
And since then — and I’ll close by just sharing this one story, because this is after the fact, just a couple years ago. As many of you know, I supported Kamala Harris for president, so I was in South Carolina, as a surrogate, at a big rally, security everywhere. And this tall, big white guy with a little kid comes through the crowd — right? — with tears in his eyes. What in the world is this? He came up to me, and he said to me — he said, “I was one of those who sent you a threatening letter. I was one of those.” And he went down all what he said to me. I said, “I hope the cops don’t hear you saying that.” But he was one who threatened me. He said, “And I came here to apologize. And I brought my son here, because I wanted him to see me tell you how sorry I am and how right you were, and just know that this is a day for me that I’ve been waiting for.”
And so, I’ve had — over the years, many, many people have come, in different ways, to say that. And so, that’s what kept me going, in a lot of ways, knowing that — you know, because of Win Without War, because of the Friends Committee, because of IPS, because of our Veterans for Peace and all the groups that have been working around the country, organizing, mobilizing, educating the public, people really have begun to understand what this was about and what it means. And so, I just have to thank everybody for circling the wagons, because it was not easy, but because all of you were out there, people come up to me now and say nice things and support me with a lot of — really, a lot of love.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Congressmember Lee, now it is 20 years later, and President Biden has pulled the U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. He’s being fiercely attacked by both Democrats and Republicans for the chaos of the last few weeks. And there’s been — Congress is calling an inquiry into what happened. But do you think that inquiry should extend to the whole 20 years of the longest war in U.S. history?
REP. BARBARA LEE: I think we need an inquiry. I don’t know if it’s the same one. But, first of all, let me say I was one of the few members who got out there early, supporting the president: “You’ve made the absolute correct decision.” And, in fact, I know that if we stayed there militarily for another five, 10, 15, 20 years, we’d be probably in a worse place, because there’s no military solution in Afghanistan, and we can’t nation build. That’s a given.
And so, while it was difficult for him, we talked a lot about this during the campaign. And I was on the drafting committee of the platform, and you can go back and kind of look at what both Bernie and the Biden advisers on the platform came up with. So, it was promises made, promises kept. And he knew that this was a hard decision. He did the right thing.
But having said that, yes, the evacuation was really rocky in the beginning, and there was no plan. I mean, I don’t guess; it didn’t appear to me to be a plan. We did not know — even, I don’t think, the Intelligence Committee. At least, it was faulty or not — or inconclusive intelligence, I assume, about the Taliban. And so, there were a lot of holes and gaps that we’re going to have to learn about.
We have an oversight responsibility to find out, first of all, what happened as it relates to the evacuation, even though it was remarkable that so many — what? — over 120,000 people were evacuated. I mean, come on, in a few weeks? I think that that is an unbelievable evacuation that took place. Still people are left there, women and girls. We’ve got to secure, make sure they’re secure, and make sure there’s a way to help with their education and get every American out, every Afghan ally out. So there’s still more work to do, which is going to require a lot of diplomatic — many diplomatic initiatives to really accomplish that.
But finally, let me just say, you know, the special inspector for Afghanistan reconstruction, he’s come out with reports over and over and over again. And the last one, I just want to read a little bit about what the last one — just came out a couple weeks ago. He said, “We were not equipped to be in Afghanistan.” He said, “This was a report that will outline the lessons learned and aim to pose questions to policymakers rather than making new recommendations.” The report also found that the United States government — and this is in the report — “did not understand the Afghan context, including socially, culturally and politically.” Additionally — and this is the SIGAR, the special inspector general — he said that the “U.S. officials rarely even had a mediocre understanding of the Afghan environment,” — I’m reading this from the report — and “much less how it was responding to U.S. interventions,” and that this ignorance often came from a “willful disregard for information that may have been available.”
And he’s been — these reports have been coming out for the last 20 years. And we’ve been having hearings and forums and trying to make them public, because they are public. And so, yes, we need to go back and do a deep dive and a drill-down. But we also need to do our oversight responsibilities in terms of what just recently happened, so that it’ll never happen again, but also so that the last 20 years, when we conduct our oversight of what happened, will never happen again, either.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, in this part of the evening, especially for young people, what gave you the courage to stand alone against war?
REP. BARBARA LEE: Oh gosh. Well, I’m a person of faith. First of all, I prayed. Secondly, I’m a Black woman in America. And I’ve been through a heck of a lot in this country, like all Black women.
My mother — and I have to share this story, because it started at birth. I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. And my mother went to — she needed a C-section and went to the hospital. They wouldn’t admit her because she was Black. And it took a heck of a lot for her finally to be admitted into the hospital. A lot. And by the time she got in, it was too late for a C-section. And they just left her there. And someone saw her. She was unconscious. And then they, you know, just saw her laying on the hall. They just put her on, she said, a gurney and left her there. And so, finally, they didn’t know what to do. And so they took her into — and she told me it was an emergency room, wasn’t even the delivery room. And they ended up trying to figure out how in the world they were going to save her life, because by then she was unconscious. And so they had to pull me out of my mother’s womb using forceps, you hear me? Using forceps. So I almost didn’t get here. I almost couldn’t breathe. I almost died in childbirth. My mother almost died having me. So, you know, as a child, I mean, what can I say? If I had the courage to get here, and my mother had the courage to birth me, I guess everything else is like no problem.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Congressmember Lee, it’s been a pleasure talking to you, a member of the House Democratic leadership, the highest-ranking —
AMY GOODMAN: California Congressmember Barbara Lee, yes, now in her 12th term. She is the highest-ranking African American woman in Congress. In 2001, September 14th, just three days after the 9/11 attacks, she was the sole member of Congress to vote against military authorization — the final vote, 420 to 1.
When I interviewed her Wednesday evening, she was in California campaigning in support of Governor Gavin Newsom ahead of this Tuesday’s recall election, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland. Barbara Lee represents Oakland. On Monday, Newsom will campaign with President Joe Biden. This is Democracy Now! Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Remember Rockefeller at Attica” by Charles Mingus. The Attica prison uprising began 50 years ago. Then, on September 13th, 1971, then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered armed state troopers to raid the prison. They killed 39 people, including prisoners and guards. On Monday, we’ll look at the Attica uprising on the 50th anniversary.
A patient hospitalized with COVID-19. (photo: BioSpace)
Moderna vaccine is most effective, says another study, the largest to date in U.S. to assess real-world effectiveness
A second study showed that the Moderna coronavirus vaccine was more effective in preventing hospitalizations than its counterparts from Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson. That assessment was based on the largest U.S. study to date of the real-world effectiveness of all three vaccines, involving about 32,000 patients seen in hospitals, emergency departments and urgent-care clinics across nine states from June through early August.
While the three vaccines were collectively 86 percent effective in preventing hospitalization, protection was significantly higher among Moderna vaccine recipients (95 percent) than among those who got Pfizer-BioNTech (80 percent) or Johnson & Johnson (60 percent). That finding echoes a smaller study by the Mayo Clinic Health System in August, not yet peer-reviewed, which showed the Moderna vaccine to be more effective than Pfizer-BioNTech at preventing infections during the delta wave.
Noting the effectiveness of all vaccines against severe illness and death, public health officials have continued to urge people to get whatever vaccine is available, rather than to shop around and delay inoculation.
“The bottom line is this: We have the scientific tools we need to turn the corner on this pandemic,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at a White House coronavirus briefing Friday. “Vaccination works and will protect us from the severe complications of covid-19.”
The trio of reports comes just after President Biden announced sweeping coronavirus vaccine mandates Thursday to curb the surging delta variant, a move expected to increase the pressure on the tens of millions of Americans who have resisted vaccinations. The virus has killed more than 650,000 people in the United States, with about 1,500 average daily deaths for the past eight days — a toll not seen since early March, according to data analyzed by The Washington Post.
The CDC studies offer some clarity at a confusing moment in the pandemic amid concerns about waning immunity and the vaccines’ protection against a more contagious variant. The data is broadly consistent with findings from other studies: The vaccines continue to provide strong protection for most people against hospitalization and death, even during the delta surge, but are less effective in protecting the oldest adults, especially those with underlying medical conditions.
The highly transmissible delta variant now accounts for more than 99 percent of new coronavirus infections, the CDC estimates. Fear of fading protection against severe disease is why the administration hopes to roll out boosters as soon as health authorities give the green light. Pfizer is in line to be the first brand approved as a booster by the Food and Drug Administration, since the company has submitted data on the safety and effectiveness of boosting its own two-shot regimen with a third shot of the same vaccine. Approval of the other vaccines is expected to follow in coming months.
In the CDC report that analyzed vaccine effectiveness by brand, researchers looked at how well the shots protected against severe disease. They measured effectiveness against hospitalization and, separately, against trips to the emergency department or urgent care. Overall effectiveness in preventing emergency department or urgent-care trips was 82 percent. Effectiveness was highest among Moderna recipients (92 percent), followed by Pfizer (77 percent) and Johnson & Johnson (65 percent).
The CDC report doesn’t explain why Moderna might offer a greater benefit. One possibility is that Moderna’s dose of mRNA is three times that of Pfizer-BioNTech’s. The interval between shots is also longer: four weeks for Moderna instead of three weeks for Pfizer-BioNTech. Some research has shown that longer intervals between shots — including much longer periods, beyond four weeks — could be advantageous to building immunity.
But researchers found diminishing effectiveness against hospitalizations among adults 75 and older, and suggested that the decline could be from waning immunity and the impact of a more contagious variant. The report noted, however, that “this moderate decline should be interpreted with caution” and might be related to changes in the coronavirus, weakening vaccine-induced immunity as time passes or “a combination of factors.”
Nevertheless, the three vaccines showed continued robust protection for all adults — greater than 82 percent — against hospitalization, emergency room and urgent-care trips.
“It is really, really great to have 82 percent effectiveness in the time of delta,” four to six months after many people have gotten vaccinated, said Eddie Stenehjem, one of the authors and an infectious-disease physician at Intermountain Healthcare, a health system based in Salt Lake City that participated in the study. “We hope this is reassurance to the general public.”
Another CDC study shows that the vaccines endured some erosion as the delta variant became dominant, especially among adults 65 and older, but protection against severe disease and death remained strong, albeit less so in that older group. The CDC analyzed data on more than 600,000 covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths among people 18 and older by vaccination status, reported from April 4 to July 17 in 13 states and cities.
The report estimated that vaccine effectiveness against infection dropped from 90 percent in the first part of that period, when delta had not yet gained significant traction, to less than 80 percent from mid-June to mid-July, when delta began out-competing all other variants of the virus. Effectiveness against hospitalization and death showed barely any decline during the entire period.
“Still achieving 80 percent is a very good number,” said Mehul Suthar, a virologist at Emory University who studies the coronavirus. “These vaccines still hold up against a highly transmissible variant.”
There were more breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths than during the spring, but not to a dramatic extent given the broadening of vaccination. Between June 20 and July 17, vaccinated people accounted for 14 percent of hospitalizations for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, and 16 percent of deaths, roughly double the percentage seen in the spring, the CDC reported.
But that is not surprising, given that vaccinations increased dramatically across the country. An increased percentage of vaccinated people among those who are hospitalized or die would be expected when they account for a greater proportion of the population. The CDC said its data showed only a very small decline in protection against severe disease and death when the higher vaccination rates were taken into account.
“The vaccines remain very protective against severe disease,” said William Moss, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I think we set our expectations too high for vaccines, thinking they were going to prevent people from getting infected and transmitting the virus.”
The third study looked at the effectiveness of the two mRNA vaccines — Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna — among patients at five Veterans Affairs hospitals in Atlanta, New York, Houston, Los Angeles and Palo Alto, Calif., from Feb. 1 to Aug. 6. The report found that the mRNA vaccines were 87 percent effective in preventing hospitalizations and remained highly effective even during delta’s predominance.
Effectiveness in preventing hospitalizations dropped to 80 percent among those 65 and older, compared with 95 percent among those 18 to 64 years old.
The numbers reported Friday were a reminder of how top government health officials, as well as Biden, have repeatedly used outdated CDC information, saying breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths are extremely rare. Their message — that vaccinations are hugely beneficial — is largely supported by the new studies, but they were relying on data that did not capture the effects of delta, relaxed public behavior and naturally declining immunity.
U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. (photo: WSJ)
Two decades ago, the mainstream media responded to the September 11 attacks by stacking their news coverage and pundit commentary with the country’s most belligerently pro-war voices. We are still paying for their appalling misjudgment.
How, having just witnessed the Washington foreign policy establishment’s monumental failure in the country, and having covered firsthand the war’s aimless carnage for years, could the press be eager for more of it?
The answer lies twenty years ago in the weeks after the attack that started it all, where this same media — the same institutions, nationalist worldview, and even the same high-profile figures — were instrumental in sending the US military into Afghanistan to begin with.
September 12–14, 2001
Just as Tony Blair privately plotted out the entire “war on terror” the day after the attacks, the press immediately set the course of the next two decades of foreign policy, mainly by handing the mic to a variety of neoconservative voices.
A bevy of war hawks appeared in the September 12 New York Times to solidify in public minds the strategy that would soon lead to foreign policy disaster. “We have to stop thinking about this as cops and robbers and start thinking about it as a war,” Eliot Cohen told the paper (months later, Cohen would dub it “World War IV,” a massive, perpetual struggle of ideologies to defeat “militant Islam,” of which Afghanistan was just one front).
Calling it a war, he explained, “means you have fewer compunctions about killing them” and that “you may well do things that may well involve collateral damage and hurting civilians.” Henry Kissinger, one of history’s worst warmongers, made much the same point, declaring the attacks “comparable to Pearl Harbor” and urging “the same response.”
The attacks, former state department and CIA official Larry Johnson said, “awakened people to the need to use weapons not used before — including nuclear weapons — on Afghanistan” (lest the United States only make a few “craters” and “be seen as unable to fight,” he explained), while former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger told the paper: “There’s only one way to deal with people like this — that’s to kill some of them.”
“The only way to prevent this in the future is to do what the terrorists did to demonstrate the consequences,” the Los Angeles Times quoted one analyst as advising. “We need a huge show of force that involves huge loss of material assets and lots of casualties.” A day later, former CIA officer and neoconservative analyst Reuel Gerecht appeared in the New York Times, stressing the need for “cluster bombs, even napalm” to fight the war, “not cruise missiles” designed to limit collateral damage.
This was the country’s premier liberal paper, publishing barely coded calls for indiscriminate slaughter of civilians — a war crime.
The Times was far from alone. “That we have promised retaliation for decades and then always drawn back, hoping that we could get through if we simply did not provoke the enemy, is appeasement, and it must be quite clear by now even to those who perpetually appease that appeasement simply does not work,” Mark Halperin wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (headline: “We Beat Hitler. We Can Vanquish This Foe, Too”). Jumping on then-president George W. Bush and other neocons’ framing of events as a “war,” the paper elsewhere urged “rethinking some of the softer political pieties about our modern, violent world,” and “fight[ing] by wartime rules”: namely, “killing your enemy without the demands of due process or a permission slip from the World Court.”
The United States “must have the aim of decisive victory over an aggressor that has attacked the country, not one-time retaliation or criminal prosecution for an act of terrorism,” affirmed the Washington Post. Calling for “a major realignment of priorities and resources,” it urged “serious political, economic or military consequences” for any country that so much as declined to cooperate in this “war effort.” While “holding governments accountable” for their support for terrorism “doesn’t necessarily mean military ground wars,” it went on, “neither can the United States shrink from action because it costs too much or might cause casualties.”
The LA Times likewise demanded the United States respond “not with one-time retaliatory actions but with a sustained, long-term crusade against terrorism,” using the same charged, genocidally tinged language Bush would soon be rightly criticized for. Rather than law enforcement, extradition, and trial, this crusade called for “additional methods, some of them more harsh.”
“The necessary long battle against elusive foes without fixed battle lines can hardly avoid ‘collateral damage’: the deaths of innocents,” the paper concluded. “And the deaths of Americans.”
Right-wing commentators often led the charge. Kissinger was given space in the LA Times to assure readers the terrorists were “motivated by a hatred of Western values” in what they saw as “a clash of civilizations.” Quoting heavily from once and future far-right Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, George Will wrote in the Post of “a war to reverse the triumph of the West,” likened “Islamic radicalism” to the Nazis’ goal to expand across Europe, and suggested “not going after needles in haystacks but against the haystacks — the states that sustain terrorists.”
“This is not crime,” Will’s fellow Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote. “This is war.” Charging that the country had been attacked because it had responded to a declaration of war “by issuing subpoenas” and launching “a few useless cruise missile attacks on empty tents in the desert,” he demanded the US military instead “rain destruction on combatants” in the war against “radical Islam.” Rather than bringing individual terrorists to justice, Krauthammer said, the United States “must carry their war” to “any country that harbors and protects” bin Laden and others, in this case Afghanistan.
Likewise, the Times’ Tom Friedman mocked the announcement that there would be no more curbside check-ins at airports. “Does my country really understand that this is World War III?” he asked. “And if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means there is a long, long war ahead.” America had to prove “that we understand that many of these terrorists hate our existence,” he said, and called for a “World War III Manhattan project” to take on terrorists. “While this may have been the first major battle of World War III, it may be the last one that involves only conventional, non-nuclear weapons,” he wrote.
Just five years later, the Financial Times deemed Friedman the second-most influential commentator for the US elite. Number one? Krauthammer.
Just as it was this past month, stacking column inches almost exclusively with pro-war “experts” was a choice. There were plenty of prescient voices who called the disaster that was to come: Phyllis Benes, cautioning this was “not a ‘war’ that can be won by military means”; Lloyd Dumas, pointing out that “the money we’ve poured into missile defense, B-2 bombers and F-22s is of no use in preventing or defending against this kind of horrendous attack”; or Stephen Zunes, warning that a military response would create “a spiral of violent retaliation,” killing “civilians just as innocent as those killed in New York City,” and leaving “survivors bent on revenge.” Unless they read independent media or leafed through obscure sections of the occasional daily national paper, Americans didn’t hear their perspectives.
All Roads Lead to War
This early period set the template for the rest of the coverage heading into the Afghanistan war. The long-term war on terror framework envisioned by the Bush administration and war-hawk media figures became the consensus vision for the way forward; whatever deviated from it was buried or treated as unserious.
This White House messaging became the unofficial editorial line. Outlets underlined the brutality of the Taliban government while focusing constant attention on the subordinate status of women under their rule (“Life under the Taliban is so repressive for Afghan women that many of them now see US military action against the regime as their best hope for a freer life,” went one front-page piece). And having drilled into Americans’ brains that this was a war, headlines soon reflected the widespread understanding that the Taliban needed to be toppled from power: “Our first move: Take out the Taliban”; “Help Afghanistan to Acquire a Government of National Unity”; “Go After the Taliban and Rebuild Afghanistan.”
The anti-Taliban Northern Alliance got the opposite treatment. Viewed as a viable avenue for getting rid of the Taliban, and a handy way to put a homegrown gloss on a foreign invasion, news outlets covered the coalition of warlords sympathetically. “Besieged commander says US could turn tide,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune, with its portrait of an Alliance general, “his voice filled with yearning,” pointing to targets he fantasized US forces bombing. Peter Baker, then at the Post, gave voice to refugees in Alliance territory, who said things like, “If the Americans attack the bases of Osama bin Laden and we were free from them, we would go back home right now”; or, “the United States should bring peace and freedom. How can the destruction of our country continue?”
Readers weren’t told that the warlords behind this Alliance had records full of just as much brutality and misogyny as the Taliban, as well as corruption, all factors that had fed into the Taliban’s rise in the country to start with. As anyone who did know might have predicted, once the Taliban were out, they quickly put in place their own repressive regimes, some of them as ultraconservative and oppressive for women as anything the Taliban put in place. But that didn’t matter there and then. “Perhaps the most important step we could take would be to furnish large-scale arms, training and other support to the Northern Alliance,” wrote CIA analyst and former Clinton advisor Kenneth Pollack in the Wall Street Journal. Other important steps? Taking “direct military action,” and “looking to kill [Bin Laden’s] people.”
“In the past, we have demonstrated an unwillingness to inflict casualties — even military casualties,” wrote Pollack. “This time, we should be looking to maximize casualties.”
Headlines frequently blared that the Taliban were refusing to hand over Bin Laden, without putting it in proper context: that they wanted to see proof of his guilt first, which US officials refused to hand over; that those officials moved the goalposts, declaring that even if the Taliban facilitated his arrest, they would have to give up every other terrorist inside the country to “drain the swamp” and avoid being invaded; the concessions the Taliban repeatedly made in the face of a US attack; or the fact that the Arab and Muslim worlds and their leadership opposed an invasion. (Once bombing started, the administration would reject a new Taliban offer to hand him over to a third country). Some commentators even justified the Bush administration’s behavior.
“So what?” said right-wing commentator Bruce Herschensohn, reacting to a hypothetical where bin Laden and Al Qaeda turn out to have been uninvolved in the attacks after all. “If we are at war against terrorism, all terrorists should be on notice that they are the enemies of the United States and of all civilized societies.” The country wasn’t at war with individual terrorists, but with terrorism as a whole, he explained, making the entire notion of coughing up proof of bin Laden’s guilt irrelevant anyway.
The few exceptions to this coverage — highlighting the civilian casualties that would come out of this war, underlining the role of US foreign policy in stoking terrorism and the futility of military solutions to the problem, or otherwise pushing back on the pro-war narrative — tended to be hidden to all but the most avid news consumer. M1, M2, C1, B4, B7, A21: these were the back pages Americans had to scour to find the few stones clinking against the mammoth wall of pro-war messaging built by the White House and media.
Meanwhile, the Right delighted in the marginalization of left-wing and antiwar opinion, scoffing triumphantly that “politically correct” pieties about human equality, tolerance, and solidarity had gone out the window.
“The nice kids have been taught that all differences are to be celebrated,” sneered David Rieff in the Chicago Tribune. “It just doesn’t make emotional sense [to them] that cultural differences could lead to war and not greater understanding.” Pointing to big majorities in support of military action, the paper quoted Rich Lowry’s prediction that “the portions of the left that oppose it will go the way of the America Firsters during the last war.”
“In one atrocity, Osama bin Laden may have accomplished what a generation of conservative writers have failed to do: convince mainstream liberals of the illogic and nihilism of the powerful postmodern left,” cheered Andrew Sullivan in one particularly nauseating Wall Street Journal column.
There is literally nothing that the Left can credibly cling to in rationalizing support for these hate-filled fanatics. This is therefore an excruciating moment for the postmodern, postcolonial left. They may actually have come across an enemy that even they cannot argue is morally superior to the West. . . . The emergence of the Taliban is a body blow. If dark-skinned peoples are inherently better than light-skinned peoples, then how does a dark-skinned culture come up with an ideology that is clearly a function of bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia?
By the time this column was printed on October 4, there were already copious reports of racist attacks on Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs. This was the ugly backdrop to Sullivan’s cartwheels now that, in his mind, the West had been proven superior to a “dark-skinned culture.”
A War on the World — With Exceptions
Drunk on the revenge fantasies and grandiose visions of American power that percolated down from the top in those days, the press gave voice to the warped thinking that would soon take the United States from Afghanistan into the Iraq disaster. Just like the Bush administration had already loosely plotted out a timetable of military attacks across the Middle East and North Africa while the towers were practically still smoldering, right-wing hawks looking to make the case for forever war got a warm welcome in mainstream news outlets.
“Afghanistan is just stage one. A logical stage two is Syria,” wrote Krauthammer. “Stage three is Iraq and Iran, obviously the most difficult and dangerous.” “At the battle of Midway, the US didn’t just go after individual kamikazes. They went after the carriers,” went Netanyahu’s advice, quoted in a column by Bret Stephens, who listed these “carriers”: Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, the Palestinian Authority. “Mr. Netanyahu’s counsel is that they be crushed straightaway.” If they weren’t, warned one Journal op-ed titled “Oust the Taliban,” then “there isn’t much hope of removing other, more study terrorist states,” adding Algeria to the list.
“May the coalition roll from strength to strength,” prayed Halperin, who urged Bush to make ousting the Taliban “the chief aim” of an invasion. A successful war, he wrote, would set up a “historical precedent” and give Washington a “credential” that would “convince regimes that harbor or would harbor terrorists that the United States will carry through with its demands until they are met” — first in Syria, then maybe Libya, “and so on.”
Conspicuously missing from every one of these lists was Saudi Arabia, which over decades had used its oil money to ingratiate itself with the US elite, the Bush family first among them, and its media. Even before journalists and other investigators turned up evidence of Saudi government complicity in the attacks, the list of red flags was long: fifteen of the nineteen attackers had been Saudi; the government was directly responsible for the spread of the ultraconservative version of Islam the terrorists adhered to; and Saudi rulers had earlier rejected Sudan’s offer to take in an arrested and deported bin Laden, despite US pressure — the same standard that was enough to doom the Taliban.
Over the years, the public would learn there really had been a fundamentalist, repressive, and anti-woman government involved in the September 11 attacks. But in the all-out rush to war, this information was publicized too late to stop a pointless war on Afghanistan.
Where Are They Now?
It should go without saying that no one who urged this foolish and destructive course suffered any professional consequences. The opposite happened, actually.
Once the Taliban were taken out, Eliot Cohen quickly turned to beating the drums for “the big prize,” Iraq, urging officials to transform the entire Middle East by force, and play “by ‘9/11’ rules,” meaning: “we help our friends, punish those who impede us, and annihilate those who attack us.” More than a decade later, he continues to be feted by liberal news outlets to make the case for more military aggression — the latest enemy is China — and is a contributing writer at one of the country’s most influential liberal magazines.
Henry Kissinger, the grand old man of war crimes himself, is still a sought-after voice on foreign policy, as was the case this past August, when the Economist asked him to explain the US failure in Afghanistan. Bret Stephens became one of the Times’ token right-wingers, using his platform to push for war with Iran and, of course, China. Halperin became a ubiquitous political pundit, his career wounded only by a sexual harassment scandal. Friedman continued to cheerlead for war from his perch at the Times, though the Afghanistan withdrawal seems at least to have brought him to his senses on China. Peter Baker, the reporter who wrote glowingly of the Northern Alliance as they begged for US backing, has used his position as that paper’s chief White House correspondent to inveigh persistently against withdrawing from the country, even quoting (and not disclosing) a Raytheon board member to do so.
Charles Krauthammer, who died in 2018, didn’t live long enough to see the end of the war he worked so hard to send others to fight, but he used his remaining years to push for another war with Iran and praise Trump for abandoning his initially tough posture toward the country that actually facilitated the September 11 attacks; he was eulogized by the Times as “one of the nation’s most cogent conservative voices.”
His fellow right-wing Post columnist George Will is still there, attacking the withdrawal under both Trump and Biden (despite having seemed to come to Jesus more than a decade ago), and itching for conflict with China. Netanyahu, whose deranged calls for the United States to wage war on the entire Middle East were repeatedly cited in those days, became the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history and a respected statesman among the Washington establishment.
Nearly every one of these figures later built off their success on Afghanistan to do the same for Iraq. Both the neoconservatives and the centrist Washington foreign policy establishment — in both cases made up almost entirely of figures pining for a war they’d been too young to fight in, but old enough to grow up worshipping — had spent the postwar decades desperately searching for another World War II, a morally righteous war to re-energize the country’s martial reflexes.
The first Gulf War had, in their minds, been such a thing, curing the country of its dreaded Vietnam syndrome. Here was an even better chance to exorcize the ghosts of failure and return to the golden age of American power that existed only in their minds. The yearning was obvious: September 11 was Pearl Harbor; Al Qaeda were the Nazis; the war on terror was World War III — or was it number IV?
The psycho-political complexes of a handful of men unable to measure national greatness in anything other than the capacity to kill and destroy ended up costing the country trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, and destabilizing one of the world’s already volatile regions. All have remained respectable voices, having climbed only further up the media ladder after leading the United States and world into what still feels like never-ending turmoil.
No Hugging, No Learning
The post-9/11 days were a vicious time, and chances were that, between public rage and the war-hungry extremists in power under Bush, something rash and pitiless would have come out of the aftermath of the attack. But that something didn’t need to be the longest war in US history, nor the perpetual murder machine we call the war on terror.
Pretty much every convention that would come to characterize that “war” was established in those early weeks: that the United States had to treat the struggle as a war; that there was no number of years or lives too big to spend on winning it; that “radical Islam” was the opponent; and that the adversary was driven by a mindless hatred of Americans and their values, and nothing else.
Washington conceivably could have taken a law enforcement approach to stopping terrorism, capitalizing on the global outpouring of sympathy and good will toward the United States in the wake of the attacks to ensure that the terrorists were brought justice, and could have rethought the destructive foreign policy that terrorists themselves have cited over and over as driving their determination to attack and harm the United States. But that was the lily-livered babble of idiot peaceniks, the public was told; much more sensible to topple a few unrelated governments, in advance of waging war on the entire planet.
When we think of those years, we imagine bloodthirsty rags like the Weekly Standard or the National Review making these arguments. But these delusional neocon fantasies reached their widest audience through mainstream and liberal news outlets, which saw their mission in the wake of the attack not as holding the powerful to account or scrutinizing government policies, but in the nationalistic terms summed up by ex-CBS anchor Dan Rather six days after the towers were hit: “George Bush is the President. He makes the decisions, and, you know, it’s just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.”
This history has taken second billing in our collective memory to the media’s failure on Iraq, largely owing to Afghanistan’s status in the United States as the “good war.” But two decades of that war has, hopefully, buried that misconception: the war wasn’t good for the US soldiers killed and maimed while fighting it; for the vast majority of Afghanistan’s women, terrorized and mistreated by coalition forces; or for their sons, husbands, and other relatives, who were killed and tortured in any number of inhuman ways.
The question is, have the media outlets that helped lead the country into disaster learned from this dreadful saga? Or is it just a matter of time before history is repeated?
Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay prison. (photo: Getty Images)
The 20-year conflict will not be fully resolved until the issue of prisoners of war has been justly settled.
During the final week of November 2001, a total of around 5,000 unarmed Taliban prisoners of war were massacred in two closely related incidents near Mazar-e-Sharif. Several dozen survivors were among the earliest detainees sent to Guantánamo Bay. These massacres received widespread media coverage at the time but elicited minimal sympathy from an American public still deeply shaken by September 11. Reporter Robert Young Pelton spoke for many Americans when he said, “We could have wiped out every Talib on earth and no one would have cared.”
Now that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan has finally ended, the time has come for these events to be reevaluated dispassionately and for the issue of prisoners of war to be resolved once and for all.
During the summer and fall of 2001, I served as a Taliban infantryman in northern Afghanistan. In mid-November of that year, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was on the verge of collapse. Kabul and several other major cities had been overrun by the Northern Alliance, a warlord cartel described by journalist Robert Fisk as “a symbol of massacre, systematic rape, and pillage” that would form the nucleus of America’s collaborationist regime for the next two decades. Our commanders told us that the Taliban had begun to evacuate their forces from urban centers to protect civilians from dangers posed by 15,000-pound Daisy Cutters, Tomahawk cruise missiles, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium munitions. I saw the toll that some of these weapons took on Afghan civilians with my own eyes.
By mid-November, our division of about 8,000 mujahideen had been surrounded by the Northern Alliance in Kunduz. An agreement was made between our commanders and Northern Alliance warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who had recently subordinated his militia to the CIA. The agreement guaranteed us safe passage through Mazar-e-Sharif to Herat, near the Afghan border with Iran. From there, my understanding was that the Afghan mujahideen would return home, while foreign volunteers would evacuate to neighboring countries. In return, Dostum would be left to take control of the northeastern city of Kunduz without a fight.
The agreement stipulated that we would travel to Herat in a convoy of trucks with only our light weapons, and it was decided that the foreign volunteer brigade would go first. We were about one-third Arab, one-third Uzbek, and one-third Pakistani, with smaller numbers of other nationalities totaling a few hundred. The remaining mujahideen were primarily Afghans and were to follow the same route from Kunduz through Mazar-e-Sharif to Herat.
A few days earlier, thousands of miles away and unbeknownst to us, the following exchange had taken place at a Pentagon press briefing:
REPORTER: Mr. Secretary, you had mentioned earlier that the U.S. is not inclined to negotiate nor to accept prisoners. Could you just elaborate what you meant by “nor to accept prisoners”?
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD: We have only handfuls of people there. We don’t have jails, we don’t have guards, we don’t have people who — we’re not in the position to have people surrender to us. If people try to, we are declining. That is not what we’re there to do, is to begin accepting prisoners and impounding them in some way or making judgments. That’s for the Northern Alliance, and that’s for the tribes in the south to make their own judgments on that.
REPORTER: So they would be taken — you’re not suggesting they would be shot, in other words?
RUMSFELD: Oh, my goodness, no. You sound like Charlie. (laughter)
Once we were on the road, instead of permitting our convoy to pass as had been agreed, the CIA-led force insisted that we lay down our weapons before proceeding through Mazar-e-Sharif. After tense negotiations and a great deal of hesitation on our part, we complied. But instead of fulfilling their side of the agreement and letting us proceed, Dostum’s militiamen diverted our trucks to the Qala-e-Jangi fortress on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif and began to bind us with our own turbans. The CIA interrogators made it clear that if we did not talk to them, we would be killed:
CIA OFFICER MIKE SPANN: You believe in what you’re doing here that much, you’re willing to be killed here? How were you recruited to come here? Who brought you here? Hey! What’s your name? Hey! Who brought you here? Wake up! Who brought you here to Afghanistan? How did you get here? What? Are you Muslim? Put your head up. Don’t make me have to get them to hold your head up. …
CIA OFFICER DAVID TYSON: Mike!
SPANN: Yeah, he won’t talk to me.
TYSON: OK, all right. We explained what the deal is to him.
SPANN: I was explaining to the guy we just want to talk to him, find out what his story is.
TYSON: Well, he’s a Muslim. You know, the problem is he needs to decide if he wants to live or die, and die here. If he don’t want to die here, he’s gonna die here. … It’s his decision, man. We can only help the guys who want to talk to us. …
SPANN: Do you know the people here you’re working with are terrorists and killed other Muslims? There were several hundred Muslims killed in the bombing in New York City. Is that what the Quran teaches? I don’t think so. Are you going to talk to us?
TYSON: That’s all right, man. Gotta give him a chance. He got his chance.
Our Uzbek brothers were acutely aware of the likelihood they would be sent back to a country that Secretary of State Colin Powell described as “an important member of this coalition.” Political prisoners in Uzbekistan faced torture with cattle prods, asphyxiation with gas masks and plastic bags, dousing with freezing cold water, beatings with steel pipes and nail-studded wooden clubs, involuntary psychiatric treatment, electric shocks applied to the genitals, the removal of fingernails and toenails with pliers, the burning of body parts, rape, repeated kicks to the head, flogging the soles of the feet, forced labor in subzero temperatures, and being boiled alive.
When it became clear that we had been betrayed, some of the Uzbek mujahideen detained in the fortress spontaneously launched a desperate revolt that could have only resulted in a massacre, but as the poet al-Mutanabbi said: “I am drowning, so what do I have to fear from getting wet?”
As this began to unfold, the remainder of the convoy proceeded along the same route. They were stopped in the desert about five miles west of Kunduz and surrounded by U.S. Special Forces, along with their proxy militia. The convoy was then commandeered to a different fortress, known as Qala-e-Zeini, on the road between Mazar-e-Sharif and Sheberghan. Detainees were taken down from the trucks and tied up with their turbans. Survivor Abdul Rahman recalled seeing about 50 people buried alive; survivor Mohammad Yousuf Afghan recalled seeing more prisoners beaten to death and others drowned in pools of standing water. However, the vast majority were locked in metal shipping containers and left to die.
Each of the containers held 200 to 300 detainees. By the time they arrived at Sheberghan and the containers were opened, most of the detainees had suffocated. In some containers there were no survivors. One of the truck drivers recalled: “They opened the doors and the dead bodies spilled out like fish. All their clothes were ripped and wet.” The thousands of bodies were then buried in mass graves in the Dasht-e-Leili desert outside the city. Another witness said that some survivors were summarily executed at the burial site under the supervision of U.S. Special Forces.
A confidential U.N. memorandum shared with Newsweek concluded that evidence gathered at the site was “sufficient to justify a fully-fledged criminal investigation,” as the mass graves contained “bodies of Taliban POWs who died of suffocation during transfer from Kunduz to Sheberghan.” However, due to “the political sensitivity of this case and related protection concerns, it is strongly recommended that all activities relevant to this case be brought to a halt until a decision is made concerning the final goal of the exercise: criminal trial, truth commission, other, etc.”
As Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, said in a 2009 report: “Gravesites have been tampered with, evidence has been destroyed, and witnesses have been tortured and killed.” PHR researcher Nathaniel Raymond added, “Our repeated efforts to protect witnesses, secure evidence and get a full investigation have been met by the U.S. and its allies with buck-passing, delays and obstruction.”
Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban government’s ambassador to Pakistan, who was detained for three and a half years in Guantánamo Bay, later wrote that of some 8,000 Taliban fighters who surrendered, “only 3,000 were to survive captivity. I had been in Islamabad trying to secure their release, and talked to Dostum several times, and he had assured me that the prisoners would be well treated. I even went to the United Nations to inform them about the prisoners, as well as the Human Rights Commission and the Red Cross.”
Survivors of the twin massacres at Qala-e-Jangi and Dasht-e-Leili were initially detained together in a massively overcrowded prison in Sheberghan. Some would be killed by guards or die of medical neglect, starvation, or disease, but most would later be released. Several dozen others would be among the first planeloads of prisoners transported to Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Bay.
In June 2006, Qala-e-Jangi survivor Yasser al-Zahrani, along with Ali al-Salami and Mani al-Utaybi, would be found hanging in their cells at Camp Delta, according to their autopsies. It later emerged that rags had been shoved down their throats. Their battered bodies were subsequently mutilated and returned to their families with their throats removed. In early 2009, Guantánamo detainees selected Qala-e-Jangi survivor Mohammad al-Hanashi as their representative and negotiator. Shortly thereafter, he was involuntarily committed to the Behavioral Health Unit, the camp mental hospital, and subsequently died on June 1, 2009, under dubious circumstances. Internal documents from the BHU dated June 1 and 2 were later described in a memo as “missing and unrecoverable for inclusion in the case file.” According to former detainee Mansoor Adayfi, what these four had in common was that they all played prominent roles in various forms of protest at Guantánamo, including mass hunger strikes. The same was true of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, who was sent to the BHU shortly before being transferred to Camp V, where he died in solitary confinement under similarly questionable circumstances in 2012, two years after he had been cleared for release.
The history of the Guantánamo Bay internment camp did not begin in January 2002 with the opening of Camp X-Ray. It began in November 2001 with the mass slaughter of Taliban detainees on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif. The CIA has yet to release its video footage of the massacre at Qala-e-Jangi and what led up to it, some of which I watched them film, nor has an exhaustive inquiry ever been conducted into the suspicious deaths at Guantánamo of Yasser al-Zahrani, Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi, Mohammad al-Hanashi, or Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif. There has also never been any satisfactory explanation for the death in custody of Guantánamo detainee Abdul Rahman al-Umari in 2007, nor of Awal Gul and Haji Naseem in 2011.
The conflict in Afghanistan will not be fully resolved until the issue of prisoners of war has been justly settled. All remaining detainees must be set free, and comprehensive independent investigations must be conducted into these massacres and suspicious deaths. As the 20-year American occupation of Afghanistan comes to an end, so too must the obscene mockery of justice at Guantánamo Bay.
Students wear masks to protect against Covid-19 in a classroom. (photo: JHU)
The 1st District Court of Appeal ruled Friday that a Tallahassee judge should not have lifted an automatic stay two days ago that halted enforcement of the mask mandate ban.
The upshot is that the state could resume its efforts to impose financial penalties on the 13 school boards currently defying the mask mandate ban. Those have included docking salaries of local school board members who voted to impose student mask mandates.
The U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday it has begun a new grant program to provide funding for school districts in Florida and elsewhere that lose money for implementing anti-coronavirus practices such as mandatory masks.
DeSantis spokesperson Christina Pushaw said in a tweet that the decision means "the rule requiring ALL Florida school districts to protect parents' rights to make choices about masking kids is BACK in effect!"
DeSantis has argued that the new Parents Bill of Rights law reserves solely for parents the authority to determine whether their children should wear a mask to school. School districts with mandatory mask rules allow an opt-out only for medical reasons, not parental discretion.
Charles Gallagher, attorney for parents challenging the DeSantis ban, said he is "disappointed" by the appeals court decision.
"With a stay in place, students, parents and teachers are back in harm's way," Gallagher said in a tweet.
The back-and-forth legal battles stem from a lawsuit filed by parents represented by Gallagher and other lawyers contending that DeSantis does not have authority to order local school boards to ban mask mandates.
Leon County Circuit Judge John C. Cooper agreed in an Aug. 27 order, then on Wednesday lifted a stay that had blocked his ruling from taking effect. The appeals court now has put that stay back in place as the governor seeks a ruling making his mask mandate ban permanent.
The appeals judges noted that a stay is presumed when a public officer or agency seeks appellate review of a judicial order.
"We have serious doubts about standing, jurisdiction, and other threshold matters," the appeals judges wrote in a one-page decision. "Given the presumption against vacating the automatic stay, the stay should have been left in place pending appellate review."
In his previous order, Cooper said the overwhelming evidence is that wearing masks provides some protection for children in crowded school settings, particularly those under 12 who are not currently eligible for vaccination. The court battle comes as Florida copes with the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus that has overrun hospitals across the state.
On the Parents Bill of Rights, Cooper said his previous order follows the law that reserves health and education decisions regarding children to parents unless a government entity such as a school board can show their broader action is reasonable and narrowly tailored to the issue at hand.
The next stage of the legal fight will test whether Cooper's conclusions are correct.
Central American asylum seekers traveling to the U.S. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
"One day we were waiting on the call to enter the US, and the next we don't know if we will ever be allowed in."
But that call never came. And then a few days later, someone on a WhatsApp group of Cuban asylum-seekers shared an article about how the Supreme Court had refused to block a requirement that the US restart a Trump-era program that forced thousands like Frank and his wife to wait in Mexico until a decision on their case was made.
"My wife fell to the floor in tears," said the 32-year-old, who declined to use his full name out of fear of government scrutiny. "One day we were waiting on the call to enter the US, and the next we don't know if we will ever be allowed in."
More than 70,000 immigrants and asylum-seekers were sent back to Mexico under what’s officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) and unofficially known as the “Remain in Mexico” program, where they have little access to legal aid and live with the constant threat of violence from cartel members. Now, until the Biden White House resolves the recent court action, thousands of immigrants like Frank will be back to square one.
The Biden administration's recent troubles in ending the Remain in Mexico policy stem from a district judge's order that it be reinstated on Aug. 13. The Supreme Court refused to block the order after the administration appealed, forcing the government to restart it. This week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CBS Evening News that while he opposed the Trump-era program, he was "obliged" to revive it due to the federal court order.
This summer, Biden fulfilled a campaign promise and formally ended Remain in Mexico. And, as part of a second phase, the US was allowing in people like Frank, who had been ordered deported in absentia after failing to attend his MPP court hearings.
But Christopher Boian, a spokesperson for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said that the organization was waiting for confirmation from the US on how the court ruling will affect people with in absentia orders.
In a statement to BuzzFeed News, the Department of Homeland Security said that as long as the lower court’s injunction remains in effect, it and its partners will suspend efforts to process immigrants who were previously enrolled in MPP.
DHS added that it was working on a way to accommodate those who were enrolled in MPP under the previous administration, are still outside the US, and have active immigration proceedings.
For immigrants who had been ordered to be deported after not attending their hearings — sometimes because they were a victim of a crime in Mexico — the US went through a labor-intensive process to reopen their cases.
ICE prosecutors were also told in late August in an email that they must suspend “any and all processes” related to winding down the program.
Asylum officers received an email in late August as well, saying the agency was taking steps to reimplement and enforce MPP in good faith. The email also said DHS was working with the State Department and the Mexican government to ensure the “expeditious reimplementation” of the Remain in Mexico program.
But the email from Andrew Davidson, head of asylum at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, also said restarting the program would depend on Mexico and the return of the necessary infrastructure to handle the cases.
Staffers were also told that the agency should “cease all activities” at ports of entry related to processing people who were previously enrolled in MPP.
Some immigrants missed their court hearings because they were kidnapped or targeted by criminals. From February 2019 to February 2021, Human Rights First counted at least 1,544 public reports of murder, rape, and other attacks committed against people in MPP.
Frank and his wife missed their hearing because of a shootout that occurred outside their apartment in Ciudad Juárez. They were already running late because Frank's wife was sick, but the shooting all but ensured they would miss their appointment.
Life in Mexico isn't easy for immigrants. Not only are asylum-seekers under a constant threat of violence, but neither employers nor rental property owners want them.
Two months ago, a group of men assaulted Frank at a stoplight, stealing the bike he used to get to work. He used to have a job at a US-operated factory in Mexico, where he assembled pieces for heaters. Now he’s a repairperson, but jobs are inconsistent and he barely makes enough for rent and food.
Frank also has a fear of being kidnapped and doesn't leave his apartment unless he has to. All immigrants and asylum-seekers run the risk of being kidnapped, but criminals sometimes target Cubans because their families are more likely to be established in the US and have more money.
"Here in Mexico, they call us ATM machines," Frank said. "It hasn't been easy living here, and I'm begging the US to at least let those of us with open cases enter the country. I don't know how much longer we can wait."
'Environmentalists warn the social and environmental impacts could be devastating.' (photo: Mongabay)
The Campos Amazonicôs National Park is officially under strict federal protection, with all exploration and activity barred within its limits. The area was designated as a conservation unit in 2006, with the aim of shielding the savanna – or cerrado – enclave that lies nestled within it, which scientists believe holds crucial clues about how both ecosystems evolved over time.
The park was also intended as a buffer from the deforestation radiating from the Trans-Amazonian Highway, which runs 4,260 kilometers (2,647 miles) from the coastal state of Paraíba to the southern edge of Amazonas. The park’s creation was meant to protect the region’s rich biodiversity and the rivers that snake through it from the destruction next door.
“It’s an area that is really important for conservation,” said Fernanda Meirelles, co ordinator at Idesam, a Manaus-based nonprofit focused on conservation and sustainable development of the Amazon. “The diversity is really rich, there are species that are only found there.”
The park stretches through Amazonas state and crosses into neighboring Rondônia and Mato Grosso, where cattle and soy fields are fast replacing rainforest. Most of it is nestled within the municipalities of Novo Aripuanã, Manicoré and Humaitá in Amazonas, with small sections spilling into Machadinho d’Oeste in Rondônia and Colniza in Mato Grosso.
But this lush corner of the Amazon is under threat at the hands of loggers, cattle ranchers and speculators, environmentalists say. So far this year, 3,542 deforestation alerts have been confirmed in primary forest within Campos Amazônicos, according to satellite data from the University of Maryland visualized on Global Forest Watch. While this is a bit lower than the same period in 2020 when deforestation spiked particularly dramatically in the park, it still represents a 37% jump over the average amount of forest loss for the previous five years.
This is in step with the wider destruction sweeping through the Brazilian Amazon. From January until July, deforestation surged to its highest level since 2012, according to a recent report by Imazon, an NGO monitoring the clearing. For the first time, parts of the rainforest are even contributing to climate change rather than offsetting it: researchers found some areas are now emitting more carbon than they are capturing.
As the devastation advances deeper into Campos Amazônicos, advocates fear the impact on the rare plant and animal species it houses could be devastating. The advancing deforestation also risks opening up the broader area to invasions, threatening a mosaic of pristine protected forests that lie beyond the park.
“It will generate pressure on this conservation corridor,” said Antônio Victor Fonseca, a researcher at Imazon. “The only way to stop this advance is for authorities to act, to send a firm signal that deforestation won’t be tolerated.”
Illegal logging advancing
In the region around the park, invaders have been chipping away at the rainforest for decades. The incursions began in the 1970s with the construction of the BR-230 highway, which sliced through the heart of the Amazon and opened up access to the remote area.
The road was part of a broader plan hatched by the military dictatorship that governed Brazil at the time: fearing invasions on its sovereignty, it pushed to populate the vast rainforest, dubbing it “land without men for men without land.”
With the road, came an explosion in deforestation. Migrants flooded into the region from other states, lured by promises of plentiful land that they could clear, plant and call their own. Loggers eager to extract valuable tree varieties carved dirt roads branching off the highway, encroaching deeper into the forest. Timber and cattle became the economic engines of municipalities like Novo Aripuanã, where much of the park lies.
Campos do Amazônicos was at the front lines of the pressure. When it was converted from an undesignated public forest to a protected national park in 2006, it topped the list as the most deforested federal conservation unit in Brazil. Much of the destruction was coming from within, as squatters poured in and laid claim to areas of forest along the Estrada da Estanha, a roughly-carved informal road slicing through the conservation area.
When authorities placed the park under protection, they relocated some of the settlers to an area just outside of its boundaries, according to documents detailing the plans for the park’s creation.
But, even with strict limits on exploration, keeping deforestation in check remained elusive. The owners of at least three rural properties were granted permission to remain, government land registry data shows. And, by 2011, these properties had ballooned into sprawling cattle ranches, said Pablo Pacheco, a researcher at Idesam who has analyzed deforestation in the park.
“When the park was created, there were already some people occupying parts of it,” Pacheco told Mongabay in a phone interview. “And once the land is cleared and these properties are established, it’s harder to expel them.”
Deforestation slowed in the years following the park’s creation, in step with a broader decline across the Amazon. But, now, the destruction has intensified again as new logging settlements emerge just outside the park’s limits. Increasingly, loggers are encroaching deeper into the forest in search of untapped areas to explore, according to an environmental enforcement agent who asked to remain anonymous as he is not allowed to speak to the press.
“The process begins with selective clearing – the logger goes in to extract the trees that have the highest commercial value,” the environmental source said. “And when the area loses its appeal to loggers, that’s when the occupation comes in the form of invasion or land-grabbing. Eventually, cattle ranching follows. It all happens completely illegally.”
Much of the incursion into Campos Amazônicos is now coming from the village of Santo Antônio do Matupi, a timber and cattle hub in Manicoré, the enforcement source said. Pressure is also mounting along the park’s southern boundaries where the village of Guatá, in Mato Grosso’s remote Colniza municipality, is fast turning into an illegal logging hub too, the source added.
“The park is under pressure both from the north and the south,” the source said. “The economy of this region, in these communities, revolves completely around timber and the raising of cattle. It’s a new frontier that’s being explored.”
Renewed plans to pave a stretch of another highway that slices through this part of Amazonas are also fueling a fresh surge in deforestation. Local sources say outsiders are illegally invading forests, in the hopes that they will soon be able to transport timber from the area via the BR-319 highway running from Rondonia’s capital of Porto Velho to Manaus, the Amazon’s largest city.
A speculative land rush
Much of the occupation of the Campos Amazônicos park is happening through illegitimate land claims, fueled by hopes that protections on the park may be loosened in the future, environmentalists say. Even though the park is under federal protection, this hasn’t stopped invaders from falsely registering slices of it as their property.
“This deforestation has much more to do with occupation, than with agricultural use,” said Fonseco. “Here, it’s deforestation that’s speculative. They are occupying the land and speculating that their claim to it will eventually be recognized.”
Some 411,474 hectares of the Campos Amazônicos park have been falsely claimed as private property through the national system of rural land registration, known as Sistema de Cadastro Ambiental Rural (CAR), according to Pacheco’s analysis of Rede Simex data. This represents nearly 43% of the park, with some slices of land even registered more than once by different owners.
“There is intense land speculation in the park,” Pacheco said. “Even though it is a protected area, the person registers this land, clears it and puts some cattle on it. And once the property is consolidated, it becomes harder to expel them from there.”
The surge in land speculation within the Campos Amazônicos park has been driven in large part by a steady stream of friendly signals from authorities over the last two years, environmentalists say – from local politicians all the way up to the president himself.
In neighboring Acre, lawmakers are mulling a bill that would change the designation of the Serra do Divisor National Park, weakening restrictions on its use and paving the way for a road to cut through the pristine area. The move would also permit loggers, ranchers and farmers to move into the park and legally clear swaths of it.
In Rondônia, meanwhile, state representatives passed a law this year slashing the size of two protected areas, the Jaci-Paraná Extractive Reserve and the Guajará-Mirim State Park. This removed protections on some 219,000 hectares, benefitting ranchers illegally claiming the land. It also fueled hopes among land-grabbers that the same could happen in Amazonas.
“Once there is recent precedent of the margins of protected areas being redrawn, inevitably, the invasion ends up advancing,” Fonseca said. “It creates the expectation that it could happen in other regions too… Those illegally occupying the park are trying to put pressure on authorities to reduce the limits.”
On a federal level, President Jair Bolsonaro has also encouraged invaders, railing against environmental protections and vowing to open up protected areas to ranchers, loggers and miners. He has also slashed environmental enforcement budgets, curbing the capacity of federal agents to combat invasions and deforestation within the park, advocates say.
“The narrative of the federal government … ends up giving a license to those who want to deforest in broad daylight,” said Virgílio Viana, superintendent at Fundação Amazonas Sustentável (FAS) and a former environmental secretary for the state. “What we’re seeing within the park speaks to a broader trend across the Amazon – and it’s directly linked to the environmental policies on the federal and state level.
Arc of deforestation nearing
The frenzied destruction seen in Campos Amazônicos is emblematic of a broader explosion of illicit logging in the Amazon. Timber extraction swallowed up 464,000 hectares of forest between August 2019 and July 2020, according to an analysis by Rede Simex, an environmental research network made up of Imazon, Idesam, Imaflora and the ICV, which all monitor deforestation in the Amazon.
“Logging is the first step in the opening of agricultural frontiers,” said Pacheco, who took part in the study. “We are seeing new agricultural frontiers emerging in this area. And the money generated from timber is used to finance this opening.”
Mato Grosso state accounted for the bulk of the destruction, with 236,000 hectares of forest lost to logging – or just over half of the total area logged across the Amazon. But the study shows Amazonas is emerging as an important new frontier, with 71,000 hectares cleared by loggers, most of it in the southern stretch of the state.
Now, the fear is that logging may be laying the groundwork for industrial agriculture, as the “arc of deforestation” – a crescent-shaped strip running along the southern and eastern edges of the Brazilian Amazon where agribusiness is displacing forest – creeps closer.
“We have observed this shift in the arc of deforestation to this area in the state of Amazonas,” Fonseca said. “It’s encroaching on this region and it’s advancing more and more each day.”
Steep price
Environmentalists warn the social and environmental impacts could be devastating. The park holds one of the most striking enclaves of cerrado in the Amazon rainforest, housing stretches of shrubs, grasslands and dry forest typical of the savanna biome. Scientists believe it offers evidence that the two biomes naturally existed side by side some 10,000 years ago.
Campos Amazônicos is also part of the Southern Amazon Conservation Corridor that represents one of the best-preserved stretches of the rainforest. The block includes the Mosaico do Apuí and the Juruena National Park, with the trio of parks together making up a protected zone stretching some 9 million hectares.
In addition, the park wraps around the Tenharim do Igarapé Preto Indigenous Reserve, which was until recently under attack by illegal miners who descended on the territory in search of cassiterite. In 2018, Brazil’s main environmental agency, Ibama, succeeded in expelling the miners – but sources say the fresh incursions into Campos Amazônicos could put the area back at risk.
“There are a lot of conservation units in this region – but the enforcement within them is weak,” Meirelles said. “And there is no buffer zone around them. So these conservation units remain really vulnerable.”
Deforestation could also weaken the banks of several important rivers that also run through the park, including the Rio Jiparaná, Rio Branco and Rio Guaribas. This could lead to sedimentation of the rivers and even reduce the water levels within them, increasing the risk of drought in the future.
Notably, the invasions threaten the exceptional diversity in flora and fauna found within the park. The Campos Amazônicos is home to species like the white-nosed saki (Chiropotes albinasus), as well as a dazzling diversity of bird species. The Manicore marmoset (Callithrix manicorensis) – a type of tamarin endemic to Brazil – was discovered in the park in 2000.
“The destruction of this region puts an end to all this diversity – and it undermines the very role that the park was serving in protecting the area,” Pacheco said. “It’s a very steep price to pay.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay
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