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Showing posts with label OKINAWA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OKINAWA. Show all posts
Sunday, January 2, 2022
Top News: Yes, There Were 10 Good Things About 2021
Friday, October 8, 2021
RSN: How AT&T Helped Build Far-Right One America News
08 October 21
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
As it lauded former President Donald Trump and spread his unfounded claims of election fraud, One America News Network saw its viewership jump. Reuters has uncovered how America’s telecom giant nurtured the news channel now at the center of a bitter national divide over politics and truth.
A Reuters review of court records shows the role AT&T played in creating and funding OAN, a network that continues to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.
OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr has testified that the inspiration to launch OAN in 2013 came from AT&T executives.
“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”
Since then, AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show. Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant.
Herring has testified he was offered $250 million for OAN in 2019. Without the DirecTV deal, the accountant said under oath, the network’s value “would be zero.”
Dallas-based AT&T, a mobile-phone and Internet provider, also owns entertainment giant Warner Media, which includes CNN and HBO. AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015 and in August spun off the satellite service, retaining a 70% share in the new, independently managed company. AT&T’s total U.S. television subscriber base, including satellite and streaming services, fell from 26 million in 2015 to 15.4 million as of August.
AT&T spokesman Jim Greer declined to comment on the testimony about OAN’s revenue streams, citing confidentiality agreements. He said that DirecTV broadcasts “many news channels that offer viewpoints across the political spectrum.”
“We have always sought to provide a wide variety of content and programming that would be of interest to customers, and do not dictate or control programming on channels we carry,” Greer said. “Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.”
After this story was published, AT&T issued a statement saying it has “never had a financial interest in OAN's success and does not 'fund' OAN.”
Although the contracts are confidential, in court filings Herring cited monthly fees included in one five-year deal with AT&T. According to an AT&T filing citing Herring’s numbers, those fees would total about $57 million. Greer said that figure is inaccurate, but declined to say how much AT&T has paid to air OAN, citing a non-disclosure agreement.
Herring and his adult sons own and operate OAN, a subsidiary of their closely held San Diego-based Herring Networks. Their AT&T deal includes Herring’s other network, a little-watched lifestyle channel, AWE. The Herrings declined interview requests.
Herring, who just turned 80, is a self-made businessman who amassed a fortune in the circuit board industry, then turned to television and boxing promotion. OAN’s influence rose in late 2015, when it began covering Trump rallies live, at a time when some of the media still saw the New York celebrity businessman as a longshot presidential contender. The network continues to shower Trump with attention and often provides a friendly platform for his Republican allies.
As president, Trump frequently urged supporters to watch OAN. In his final two years in office, Trump touted the network, known as @OANN online, to his 88 million Twitter followers at least 120 times.
“Hope everybody is watching @OANN right now,” Trump tweeted on December 1, citing a dubious report about a truck carrying more than 100,000 fake ballots. “Other media afraid to show.”
The state and federal court documents reviewed by Reuters detail a lucrative relationship for OAN with AT&T, even as the two occasionally tangled in court.
The records include a reported offer by AT&T to acquire a 5% equity stake in OAN and AWE, though the two sides ultimately signed a different deal. The court filings also cite a promise by OAN to “cast a positive light” on AT&T during newscasts.
The confidential OAN financial records are drawn in part from testimony, including by Herring and the accountant, generated during a labor lawsuit brought against OAN by a former employee and unrelated to AT&T. When that case went to trial last year, the network’s lawyer told the jury that AT&T was keeping OAN afloat.
“If Herring Networks, for instance, was to lose or not be renewed on DirecTV, the company would go out of business tomorrow,” OAN lawyer Patrick Nellies told the court, a transcript shows.
Researchers who tracked the rise of conservative media pillars Rush Limbaugh and Fox News see similarities between those pioneers to One America News and other new rightwing networks, particularly during their formative years.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said the births of Fox News and OAN share common threads: money and opportunity. She noted that the late Republican operative Roger Ailes had the foresight in the 1990s to recommend that Fox create a conservative news network.
“If somebody recognizes there’s a market for something and there’s a lot of money attached to that market, you get a news outlet,” Jamieson said. “So this is AT&T playing the Roger Ailes role.”
Greer, the AT&T spokesman, called that comparison “a ridiculous claim,” noting that other distributors also carry OAN.
A boost from the insurrection
America’s post-election turmoil, punctuated by the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, continues to roil the country. Dozens of election administrators in battleground states Trump lost have received a barrage of death threats, Reuters has reported. A Reuters poll in May showed that a quarter of Americans – and 53% of Republicans – wrongly believe Trump won the 2020 election.
OAN caters to this audience. Trump’s loss was OAN’s gain, social media data show.
The network’s online audience soared in November, after conservative mainstay and OAN competitor Fox News affirmed Joe Biden’s victory. Trump and his camp blasted Fox. A record 767,000 people installed the OAN app that month, nine times as many as in October, according to data firm Sensor Tower. In January, Trump supporters, including at least one carrying an OAN flag, stormed the U.S. Capitol. That month, app installs spiked again to 517,000.
The OAN website averages 8 million visits a month from desktop and mobile users, having peaked at 15 million from November through January, data firm Similarweb found in an analysis for Reuters. Two in three people on desktop computers return to the website after an initial visit, about the same loyalty rate as Fox News and Newsmax, another rival conservative news channel.
One America’s television ratings are harder to measure, partly because it is available in only about a quarter of the estimated 121 million TV households in the United States. Ratings services Nielsen and Comscore, which both show that Fox News continues to be the leading cable network, do not release OAN figures. In an internal email, an OAN news director told staff that the week of the Capitol assault produced the network’s “best ever” ratings, but gave no statistics.
OAN says it is the fourth-rated news network, behind Fox, CNN and MSNBC, and ahead of CNBC, the BBC and Newsmax, but has not provided figures to back this up. (Each of these networks, including One America News, pays Reuters fees to publish the news service’s stories, videos and/or pictures.)
Even so, the number of viewers OAN reaches may be less important than the kind of observers it attracts and galvanizes, said John Watson, an American University journalism professor specializing in ethics and media law.
“If you have 12 Americans being fed a diet of untruth, that’s 12 too many – and here, it’s literally millions,” Watson said of the OAN audience. “When you have that sort of poisonous influence on mass media, it’s a problem; because elections in the United States tend to be so close, a few percentage points here or there can really make a difference.”
At least one self-described regular OAN viewer recently sent a threatening note to an election official. In August, Sheila Garcia of Riverside County, California, sent Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold a scathing message. Biden beat Trump in Colorado, and Garcia accused Griswold, the state’s top election official, of treason – warning her that punishments for that crime are hanging and legal injection. “Within several months you will have to decide between the two,” Garcia wrote.
In an interview, Griswold said she considered threats like Garcia's message a credible threat on her life. That threat and dozens of others caused her to seek extra security measures, she said.
Garcia, 55, told Reuters she’s convinced Biden stole the election and said she gets most of her news from OAN. She compared U.S. mainstream media to state propaganda outlets in China and Cuba. Her message to Griswold, she said, was legal. “If you're afraid of a little old lady in a trailer park in California, I feel sorry for you,” she said in an interview.
Neil W. McCabe, OAN’s former Washington bureau chief and now national political correspondent for The Tennessee Star, rejects the idea that the network is a toxic influence. He said OAN serves an important public role and has earned loyalty from viewers who share a similar world view.
“When you give a voice to the voiceless, you’re going to bond with them,” McCabe told Reuters. “Who else is doing these stories?”
In several instances, records show, the network broadcast statements and theories that were proven false.
YouTube suspended OAN from making money off its YouTube channel last year for, among other things, repeatedly violating its COVID-19 policy, which prohibits content claiming there’s a guaranteed cure. OAN touts hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug promoted by Trump, without scientific evidence, as a cure for COVID.
During last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, OAN aired an unconfirmed report that an elderly demonstrator in Buffalo, New York, who was knocked down and seriously injured by police was trying to jam the cops’ radios. Trump, citing the OAN story, tweeted that the man “could be an ANTIFA provocateur.”
The false accusation went viral. In the two days after the OAN broadcast, one-third of all online references cited the network, an analysis compiled by Zignal Labs for Reuters found.
On January 6, after Trump supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol, an OAN news director cautioned staff via email, “Please DO NOT say ‘Trump Supporters Storm Capitol …’ Simply call them demonstrators or protestors … DO NOT CALL IT A RIOT!!!”
A day later, Herring suggested the riot might be a false-flag operation by the leftwing Antifa movement. “We want to report all the things Antifa did yesterday. I don’t think it was Trump people but lets investigate,” he emailed OAN producers. The Federal Bureau of Investigation says there is no evidence of Antifa involvement in the riot. All but a handful of the some 600 suspects charged so far have been rightwing Trump backers.
The next day, Herring tweeted: “If anyone thinks we will throw the best President America has had, in my 79 years, under the bus, you are wrong. We will continue to give him honest coverage.”
His network went on to support Trump in an unusual way: OAN allowed two reporters to raise $605,000 to help fund a “private” audit of the presidential vote in Arizona, despite Republican officials’ assurances that Biden won the state. According to an OAN executive, they did so with the network’s blessing but in a private capacity.
One of the OAN reporters, Christina Bobb, also worked part-time for the Trump recount legal team, according to a recent deposition by Trump’s then-lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani. An OAN executive confirmed the arrangement. Bobb, a lawyer and former Trump administration official, did not reply to a request for comment.
Five former OAN producers said in interviews that they found the practice of reporters raising funds for events they cover unethical, but said OAN’s move did not surprise them.
“If there was any story involving Trump, we had to only focus on either the positive information or basically create positive information,” said Marissa Gonzales, an OAN producer from 2019 until she resigned in 2020. “It was never, never the full truth.”
Since March, OAN has sold hours of infomercial time to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a leading purveyor of false claims the election was stolen. Lindell has used that time on OAN to repeatedly broadcast his election conspiracy “docu-movies.” A primary Lindell target is Dominion Voting Systems Inc, whose machines count votes in 28 states and use paper ballots and records for auditing.
In August, Dominion sued OAN for defamation. “OAN saw a business opportunity” and fueled bogus conspiracies about alleged vote tampering, Dominion contended. “OAN helped create and cultivate an alternate reality where up is down, pigs have wings,” the lawsuit said.
The network’s lawyers have said in letters to Dominion that the election coverage is protected free speech and that the Lindell programs include a disclaimer that they are “opinions only and are not intended to be taken or interpreted by the viewer as established facts.”
Other Trump supporters, including Lindell and lawyers Giuliani and Sidney Powell, offered a similar free speech defense in related lawsuits brought by Dominion. In August, a federal judge said the Lindell, Giuliani and Powell cases should proceed toward trial, noting that the Constitution does not necessarily offer “blanket immunity for statements that are political in nature.”
Generally, the network runs few commercials compared to its competitors, and former bureau chief McCabe said the paucity of advertising is a kind of superpower. The network’s reliance on fees from cable, satellite and streaming providers, instead of commercials, inoculates it from advertiser boycotts faced by counterparts such as Fox News and rightwing online news site Breitbart, in McCabe’s view.
“Because they basically live off the cable and satellite fees, nobody can organize a protest against One America News,” McCabe said.
AT&T & OAN: Origin story
From the early 1970s to the late 1990s, Robert Herring Sr, with sons Charles and Robert Jr, created highly successful and profitable circuit board companies. They sold one such business in 1988 for about $52 million and another two in 2000 for $122 million.
In 2004, they created a television network called WealthTV, a channel dedicated to affluent lifestyles – yachts, mega-mansions and private jets.
It proved to be a tough sell. Most cable and satellite providers declined to carry it, even when the Herrings offered WealthTV at a discount, or even for free, just to get it on air. “We went to every place you could think of, begging to get on,” Herring said last year on his network.
In 2007 and 2008, Herring petitioned the Federal Communications Commission and courts for help, alleging that the large cable providers favored networks they owned or co-owned, discriminating against independent broadcasters like him. The providers countered that they had the right to broadcast channels they believed provided the best content.
The FCC concluded that the providers had exercised appropriate business discretion and a federal court affirmed that decision. The Herring litigation irritated some providers, lawyers for two carriers told Reuters, making it even harder to get WealthTV on cable or satellite.
Still, the Herrings say they developed a good relationship with AT&T, which began carrying WealthTV in 2006 through U-verse, an Internet set-top box service that can access live TV and video on demand. By 2012, WealthTV had evolved, carrying news updates and live boxing. The Herrings were keen to leverage their existing production facilities in San Diego to launch a second network, either a boxing channel or news outlet.
In a pivotal moment for the company, the Herrings say in court filings, depositions and sworn statements, unidentified AT&T executives told them there was an audience for another conservative news network. Herring seized the opportunity.
In his 2019 deposition in the labor suit unrelated to AT&T, the elder Herring said he created OAN for two reasons.
“To make money, number one,” Robert Herring said. “But number two, is that AT&T told us … they wanted a conservative network.”
The lawyer questioning Herring, Rodney Diggs, followed up.
“So,” the lawyer said, “AT&T kind of dictated the kind of network that they wanted. Because there was an opportunity, you jumped at it?”
“Yes, sir,” Herring replied.
Equity, celebration, surprise
A few months after launching OAN in July 2013, AT&T proposed acquiring a 5% stake in Herring Networks.
In a sworn statement, OAN president Charles Herring said he accepted the oral offer in October 2013. Emails show that the two sides executed a non-disclosure agreement that December and that AT&T due-diligence executives visited the Herrings in San Diego in January 2014.
But the equity proposal did not materialize into a signed contract. Instead, in April 2014 the two sides signed a more conventional deal: AT&T agreed to pay the Herrings 18 cents per subscriber on U-verse each month for five years. AT&T had 5.7 million U-verse subscribers.
Suddenly, after years of rejection, the Herrings were players.
The joy lasted less than a month. In May 2014, AT&T announced that it planned to acquire the satellite service DirecTV, which had 20 million TV subscribers at the time.
This alarmed the Herrings because their deal with AT&T was limited to U-verse. If AT&T moved all its U-verse customers to DirecTV, the Herrings feared they might receive nothing, court filings show. OAN would lose millions of potential viewers.
To prevent that, Charles Herring hustled to Los Angeles to see a key AT&T executive.
Lobbying for AT&T
That executive, according to Charles Herring’s sworn account in a lawsuit the Herrings would later file against AT&T, was Aaron Slator, then AT&T’s president of content and advertising.
Slator told him AT&T needed help to allay FCC and other officials’ concern that the DirecTV deal – a consolidation of providers – might make it harder for independent networks to get on the air, Charles Herring said.
So, he said in the affidavit, Slator proposed a new deal: If the Herrings lobbied on AT&T’s behalf, AT&T would air OAN and WealthTV on both U-verse and DirecTV. The Herrings would be paid one-third less per subscriber, but because DirecTV had so many more subscribers, the deal could be worth $100 million over five years.
The Herrings got to work.
Charles Herring hired a Washington lobbyist and met with FCC officials, FCC records show. He says he signed a filing of support “ghostwritten by AT&T” and sent it to the FCC. He says he attended a $50,000-per-person Republican fundraiser as part of the campaign.
The Herrings even offered to air positive news about AT&T on OAN, the network said in its lawsuit against AT&T, which said it could not comment on the litigation.
“Herring’s support of AT&T ran deep,” the Herrings’ lawyers wrote. “Herring invited AT&T to utilize OAN’s news programs to cast a positive light on the acquisition and advocated for other issues affecting AT&T’s business.”
In court records, AT&T denied it made such a deal to carry OAN on DirecTV if the Herrings lobbied for the merger. “Support for the merger was never a condition of or part of any content agreement,” an AT&T spokesperson recently told Reuters. Slator, no longer with AT&T, could not be reached for comment.
Another former senior AT&T executive told Reuters the company never made quid-pro-quo offers linking network deals to political support. “You just don’t mix the two,” he said.
In any event, the former executive said, such lobbying by a conservative news channel would be implausible or ineffective because it would have come during the presidency of Barack Obama, a Democrat. “The Herrings were not going to have influence with Obama’s people,” said the former AT&T official.
The FCC approved the AT&T-DirecTV deal in July 2015.
The Herrings say AT&T still refused to put OAN and WealthTV on DirecTV, leaving them only on the shrinking U-verse platform. In March 2016, the Herrings sued AT&T, alleging it had broken an oral promise.
AT&T denied any wrongdoing, issuing a statement at the time that said, “This lawsuit is simply a ploy by Herring to negotiate a slanted deal.”
The Herrings won a key pretrial ruling from a federal judge, however, and in March 2017, the case was settled on undisclosed terms. A month later, OAN and WealthTV (since renamed AWE) began appearing on DirecTV.
Keeping his network
On February 5, 2020, the U.S. Senate, sitting as a jury during Trump’s first impeachment trial in Washington, acquitted him of abusing his power for asking Ukraine’s president to launch an investigation into then-candidate Biden.
On the same afternoon, in a San Diego courtroom, Robert Herring sat before a different jury, the one that heard evidence from the OAN accountant in the employment case.
The jury had already found that OAN had wrongly fired the former producer for filing a racial complaint. Now, the jury was considering punitive damages. To help determine an appropriate penalty, the law allowed the jury to hear testimony about OAN's financial condition.
In addition to testifying that AT&T provided 90% of Herring Networks’ income, the accountant said the company’s book value – the net value of its assets – was a modest $16.6 million.
When Herring took the witness stand, he said OAN’s market value was far higher. He confirmed a 2020 Wall Street Journal report that pro-Trump private equity investors sought to buy OAN for $250 million. Herring told the court he had given the group a few exclusive months to come up with the money but that it had only raised $35 million.
“No way I would sell for $35 million,” Herring testified.
For nearly four decades, Herring had worked closely with his sons to build several successful businesses, including OAN. The network, he said, carried sentimental value.
“I am not sure I want to sell for anything,” he said.
Video footage catches Minneapolis Police discussing 'hunting people' during George Floyd protests. (photo: Getty Images)
The officer said it was “nice to hear” that police had shifted course and planned to "go find some more people, instead of chasing people around.” He called it a “nice change of tempo,” and added, in a comment recorded by a body camera and made public this week: “F--- these people.”
Another video captured an officer saying that a group of demonstrators “probably is predominantly White, because there’s not looting and fires.” In a different recording, an officer was filmed firing what appear to be rubber bullets toward peaceful demonstrators — many of whom had taken to the streets to protest not only Floyd’s death but the aggressive tactics of a department long accused of racism and brutality.
"Gotcha," he shouts amid laughter, before fist-bumping another officer.
The videos, captured by police body cameras, documented officers speaking derisively about the demonstrators, the news media and Mayor Jacob Frey (D). They were filmed on May 30, 2020, five days after Floyd was killed gasping for air under police officer Derek Chauvin’s knee.
The recordings — which range from brief snippets to extended clips — provide fresh insight into the way officers engaged with protesters in the wake of Floyd’s death, as the city reeled from the ongoing demonstrations, looting and fires. They also emerged at a pivotal moment, as voters in Minneapolis consider a ballot measure that could dramatically reshape law enforcement in the city and reverberate nationwide.
Some of the footage was first published by the Minnesota Reformer, a nonprofit news organization. More footage was made public this week by an attorney for Jaleel Stallings, a 29-year-old Black man who was charged with shooting at police amid the unrest after Floyd’s death.
Facing charges of attempted murder and assault, Stallings stood trial in July and was acquitted on all counts that month after he argued that he fired in self-defense, believing he was being attacked by civilians, not police.
The recordings capturing Minneapolis officers are among evidence considered in Stallings’s case. Stallings’s attorney, Eric Rice, has released other evidence in the case as well, including police reports and transcripts.
Stallings was accused in a June 2020 criminal complaint of firing three or four shots at approaching police officers. According to the complaint, Minneapolis police officers approached him and other men on May 30, 2020. Officers had already been targeted by gunfire, rocks and debris by that point in Minneapolis, the complaint said.
After an officer fired a “marking round” — or rubber bullet — at him, the complaint said, Stallings fired at the officers. No police reported being struck, though two officers said they believed at the time that other officers were shot, the complaint said.
Rice, Stallings’s attorney, wrote in a letter about the case that Stallings saw what appeared to be a civilian van, heard what sounded like a gunshot and felt pain in his chest. Stallings, a military veteran, believed he was shot, Rice wrote, and had no reason to think police were in the van.
The criminal complaint alleged that after firing at the officers, Stallings fled and ignored police commands to stay down, leading an officer “to use physical force” as he resisted them. Surveillance footage made public in the case last week appears to show Stallings firing his weapon and lying down behind his truck, rather than trying to flee, before officers are seen running up and repeatedly kicking and hitting him.
Rice wrote in his letter that after firing three shots, Stallings heard people shouting “shots fired” and realized police were in the van, so he laid down with his hands visible to avoid being seen as threatening.
According to Rice, prosecutors offered Stallings a plea deal, under which he would plead guilty to the two attempted murder counts and be sentenced to more than 12 years in prison. Stallings instead chose to go to trial, where he faced at least a decade behind bars if convicted, his attorney said.
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Wednesday about the matter.
Critics have questioned not only how the police treated Stallings but also how the case made it to trial. “Prosecutors saw this video before deciding to charge Mr. Stallings,” said Mary Moriarty, the former chief public defender in Hennepin County who is now running for county attorney.
Rice said Stallings felt it was important to have the materials made public, both to “rebut false allegations” against him and to let people see the evidence for themselves.
"When officers say Mr. Stallings was resisting, it's important to be able to see the source evidence and examine, was Mr. Stallings resisting?" Rice said in an interview Wednesday. "And if he wasn't, why did officers make that representation? And if it was false, was it investigated?"
"I hope the attention given to this case can help improve our law enforcement and criminal justice system," Rice said.
A police spokesman declined to address several questions about the video footage made public in the case, including when the department became aware of what was in the recordings and the status of the officers involved, saying only that a probe was underway.
“Due to an ongoing, internal investigation, The Minneapolis Police Department is not able to comment on these issues,” the spokesman, Officer Garrett Parten, wrote in an email.
Floyd’s death triggered a wave of demonstrations that spread from coast to coast. The Major Cities Chiefs Association, a group of police leaders representing the country’s largest local law enforcement agencies, said in a report last fall that there were more than 8,000 protests between May 25, 2020, and July 31, 2020.
The “vast majority” of these were peaceful, the group said, but a fraction were marked by looting, vandalism and some violence against police. More than 2,000 officers were injured, the report said.
During the protests, police were recorded using force on demonstrators, including on unarmed protesters, footage that also spread widely online. In one of the most high-profile examples, Buffalo police officers shoved an elderly man and knocked him to the ground, and other officers walked by as he lay unmoving and bleeding.
Months after the largest demonstrations concluded, watchdogs and outside analysts released reports examining how police responded to the unrest. While noting that law enforcement officers were facing difficult, prolonged situations, these reports faulted police for actions such as their uses of force, treatment of demonstrators and poor planning.
The Denver police, a review found, were “caught by surprise by the size and scale of the protests,” and people in the community believed officers used equipment and tactics “that exacerbated conflicts and led to more uses of force.” In Philadelphia, a review said, police did not properly deploy officers in the early days and then resorted to “at times excessive use of force against protesters.”
A review in New York City found that police used force and tactics that “often failed to discriminate between lawful, peaceful protesters and unlawful actors.”
Chicago police officers failed to turn on body cameras when required, while officers "underreported uses of baton strikes and manual strikes," leading to an incomplete tally "of severe and potentially out-of-policy uses of force," a review concluded.
The city of Minneapolis is conducting an after-action review of the department’s response to the protests, including the use of less-lethal weaponry. Several city council members have been openly critical of the department, suggesting their aggressive response to demonstrators in the early days after Floyd’s death escalated the chaos and burning of parts of the city.
The Minneapolis police and other local law enforcement agencies are also facing several lawsuits related to their response to the aftermath of Floyd’s death, including suits filed by residents and journalists who say they were injured by rubber bullets fired by police.
According to discipline records made public by MPD, just one officer has been reprimanded for actions taken in the days after Floyd’s death — an officer who anonymously spoke to GQ magazine about the “us versus them” culture inside the department without first getting permission.
This new video footage has also emerged publicly weeks before a vote that could significantly impact policing in the city.
Voters on Nov. 2 will consider a ballot question that would remove the city charter’s requirement that Minneapolis have a minimum number of police officers based on population. The question calls for replacing the Minneapolis police force with a Department of Public Safety that could include police officers “if necessary.”
This proposed amendment has sparked intense emotions in a city still reeling from the trauma of Floyd’s death and the fiery protests that erupted in the aftermath.
Residents are also dealing with a dramatic uptick in violent crime, including record numbers of shootings and homicides, that occurred while scores of Minneapolis police officers left the department. As of last week, more than 200 officers had left the department or were on leave seeking to leave their jobs, more than a third of the force.
Supporters of the ballot measure argue that past efforts to reform the Minneapolis Police Department have failed and that a new department would allow the city to “reimagine” public safety. But opponents, including Frey, have called the ballot initiative an untested “experiment” that could make the city less safe and send it into further chaos.
A spokeswoman for Frey called the footage in the Stallings case “galling” but declined to address it further on Wednesday.
"Under State law, the mayor is limited on what he can say without exposing the City to legal liability or undermining the disciplinary process," the spokeswoman said. "He won’t trade accountability of involved officers for political expediency.”
Stephanie Grisham listens during a meeting with then-President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House. Grisham spoke admitted recently that she "probably" was not truthful when she went on Fox News to represent the administration. (photo: Al Drago/Getty Images)
Former Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham and former presidential surrogate Rudy Giuliani admitted that some of the biggest hitters in right-wing TV were essentially state-run media
The first bit of insight comes from Stephanie Grisham, the former White House press secretary currently trying to cleanse herself of her sins by dishing on her former boss — including that he likes to de-stress with show tunes from Cats — in a new tell-all book and requisite media tour. On Tuesday morning, Grisham explained to CNN that Fox News essentially worked in tandem with the Trump administration.
“That’s just where we went to get what we wanted out,” Grisham said. “I looked forward to going and doing Lou Dobbs because Lou Dobbs would do all the talking about how great everything was and I would just nod and say yes. By and large they didn’t get tough with us. They just took what we were saying and disseminated it.”
Grisham also admitted that she “probably wasn’t” truthful when she appeared on the network as press secretary. Very brave of you to admit this, Stephanie.
When asked if Fox News was state-run media for Trump, Grisham hesitated, noting that the network does employe some legitimate journalists — emphasis on some. “I think certainly in the evening, yes, it was,” she acknowledged. “I think more importantly with OAN coming out … I think that is like state-run media.”
Speaking of OAN, former Trump lawyer and current 77-year-old man who’s being sued into oblivion Rudy Giuliani said in a recent deposition that while OAN reporter Christina Bobb was volunteering for Trump’s legal team following the 2020 election (which in itself is … very strange), she had to run her stories by the Trump campaign for approval. “If she did develop a discrete, good story, she would have to run it past us so it didn’t violate any of our rules or whatever,” Giuliani explained in the deposition, which was conducted in August as part of a defamation suit filed by a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems, which Giuliani and others baselessly alleged may have had a role in rigging the 2020 election. Giuliani’s comments in the deposition were initially reported by The Daily Beast.
“I was pretty comfortable they would live by it because they had before,” Giuliani added of the agreement the legal team reached with OAN President Charles Herring, regarding Bobb. “I knew she had tremendous enthusiasm for doing this and I always like to hire people with enthusiasm because they work harder.”
As is the case with many, many things regarding Trump and his administration, all of this is deeply ironic considering how relentlessly the former president accused the media of working in tandem with the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine these revelations stopping Fox News, OAN, and any other network that wants in on the action from coordinating with Trump once again should he decide to run for the White House in 2024, a prospect that seems to be growing more and more likely by the day.
It's time for us to end our blind faith in drones, according to Emran Feroz. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
The very first drone attack missed its target, and two decades on civilians are still being killed. Why can't we accept that the technology doesn't work?
Ten years ago, the US placed a $5 million bounty on his head, so his appearance generated plenty of commentary about how he was openly traveling around Kabul—indeed, in September the Taliban even made him Afghanistan’s minister of refugees.
But what the gossip and the op-eds didn’t mention was that the real surprise wasn’t Haqqani’s public appearances—it was that he was appearing at all: Multiple times over the last two decades, the US military thought they’d killed him in drone strikes.
Clearly Haqqani is alive and well. But that raises a glaring question: if Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani wasn’t killed in those US drone strikes, who was?
The usual bland response is “terrorists,” an answer now institutionalized by the highest levels of the US security state. But the final days of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan showed that is not necessarily true. A day after an attack on troops at Kabul’s teeming airport, for example, the US responded with a “targeted” drone strike in the capital. Afterward it emerged that the attack had killed 10 members of one family, all of whom were civilians. One of the victims had served as an interpreter for the US in Afghanistan and had a Special Immigrant Visa ready. Seven victims were children. This did not match the generic success story the Biden administration initially told.
Something different happened with this strike, however. For years, most of the aerial operations the US has conducted took place in remote, rural locations where few facts could be verified and not many people could go to the scene.
But this strike took place in the middle of the country’s capital.
Journalists and investigators could visit the site, which meant they could easily fact-check everything the United States was claiming—and what had actually happened soon became clear. First, local Afghan television channels, like Tolo News, showed the family members of the victims. With so much attention being paid to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, international media outlets started to arrive, too. A detailed report by the New York Times forced Washington to retract its earlier claims. “It was a tragic mistake,” the Pentagon said during a press conference, as it was forced to admit that the strike had killed innocent civilians with no links to ISIS.
In fact, America’s last drone strike in Afghanistan—its last high-profile act of violence—was eerily similar to its very first one.
On October 7, 2001, the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in order to topple the Taliban regime. That day the first drone operation in history took place. An armed Predator drone flew over the southern province of Kandahar, known as the Taliban’s capital, which was the home of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the group’s supreme leader. Operators pushed the button to kill Omar, firing two Hellfire missiles at a group of bearded Afghans in loose robes and turbans. But afterward, he was not found among them. In fact, he evaded the allegedly precise drones for more than a decade, eventually dying of natural causes in a hideout mere miles from a sprawling US base. Instead, America left a long trail of Afghan blood in its attempts to kill him and his associates.
“The truth is that we could not differentiate between armed fighters and farmers, women, or children, ” Lisa Ling, a former drone technician with the US military who has become a whistleblower, told me. “This kind of warfare is wrong on so many levels.”
More than 1,100 people in Pakistan and Yemen were killed between 2004 and 2014 during the hunt for 41 targets, according to the British human rights organization Reprieve. Most of those targets are men who are still alive, like the Haqqanis, or Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who just published another book while thousands of people have been murdered by drones instead of him. As far back as 2014, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that only 4% of drone victims in Pakistan were identified as militants linked to Al-Qaeda. It also underlined that the CIA itself, which was responsible for the strikes in the country, did not know the affiliation of everyone they killed. “They identified hundreds of those killed as simply Afghan or Pakistani fighters,” or as “unknown,” the report stated.
And yet many US military officials and politicians continue to spin the drone narrative. Even the targeted militant groups have joined in: for a couple of years, the Taliban have been using armed commercial drones to attack their enemies, portraying drones as technologically superior—just as American officials had done before them. “The drone’s targeting system is very exact,” one member of the Taliban’s drone unit recently told Afghan journalist Fazelminallah Qazizai.
The Taliban don’t have the same drone resources as the US. They aren’t backed by a global assassination network of operators and weather experts. Nor do they have a satellite relay station like the one at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, which was described as the heart of the US drone war in documents supplied by Daniel Hale, a former intelligence analyst who became a whistleblower.
(Hale, too, has revealed evidence showing that most drone victims in Afghanistan were civilians. His reward was 45 months in prison.)
But even though they don’t have the same means as the US, the Taliban too have been convinced that drones are the perfect weapons. “We work for our ideology,” a Taliban drone operator told Qazizai.
Even though they know strikes regularly miss their targets, it seems that they—just like the US—have a blind faith in technology.
Japanese school girls and their teacher look at a U.S. air base in Kadena, Okinawa, Japan, on June 22, 2005. (photo: Toru Yamanaka/AFP)
The naval agency investigated at least eight sexual offenses between 2017 and 2019. None of them were reported to Congress or the public.
Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault.
One witness reported what was happening to the mall’s security office. Using closed-circuit TV cameras, the guards located the suspect — still masturbating — and contacted the local police department. But before the officers arrived, the man got into his car and left the scene.
It was easy for police to confirm that the suspect was a U.S. service member — his car’s license plate was stamped with the letter “Y,” a registration assigned to military members, their dependents, and contractors in Japan, more than 55,000 of whom live in Okinawa. The police determined that the suspect was a petty officer second class sailor stationed on a Navy installation within the U.S. Air Force’s Kadena Air Base, the largest U.S. facility in the Asia-Pacific region. Under questioning by police and Naval Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, agents, the sailor confessed to the offense. He also admitted to masturbating inside his car at the same mall and elsewhere on four previous occasions.
Witnesses told police that the incident had left them disturbed. One woman explained how the sailor had followed her while he was masturbating; she had felt “extremely sickened” and feared that he would assault someone. Describing the American’s actions as “hideous,” one of the security guards said he would not be able to forget what had happened. Both witnesses told police the sailor ought to be severely punished.
That didn’t happen.
Japanese prosecutors, who can request jurisdiction when U.S. service members commit offenses while off-duty, ceded control of the case to the military; by the time the Navy convened a court-martial, nine months had passed since the incident. The sailor pleaded guilty to indecent exposure and was sentenced to 90 days confinement and a bad conduct discharge. But due to a pretrial agreement, he received only 30 days and was permitted to leave the military under an administrative separation. He was not recorded on a sexual offender registry.
Despite the severity of the offense, and the lax punishment, the sailor’s crime was not made public. It required a series of Freedom of Information Act requests, which I filed with the NCIS in 2018 and 2019 and wrote about for the Okinawa Times in August. (This is the first publication of the FOIA results in English.) According to the NCIS case files, between 2017 and 2019 there were at least seven other investigations into U.S. military personnel for sexual offenses against Japanese women in Okinawa — and none were made public. Perpetrators had not been punished under Japanese law nor had their cases appeared in the annual reports produced by the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office for the U.S. Congress. (The Intercept has revealed similar gaps in reporting sexual assaults committed by U.S. troops in Africa.)
At the time of publication, United States Forces Japan had not provided comment on the apparent omission of these cases from the SAPRO reports.
It is a pattern familiar to Suzuyo Takazato, co-chair of the feminist group Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence and chair of the Rape Emergency Intervention Counseling Center Okinawa.
“Both the U.S. and Japanese governments want to minimize people’s awareness of the number of crimes committed by U.S. service members on Okinawa. They think if this information becomes public, it will harm U.S.-Japan relations. They believe the U.S.-Japan relationship should take priority over the rights of Okinawans,” she said.
Today, Okinawa prefecture is the reluctant host to 31 U.S. military bases, which occupy approximately 15 percent of the main island. Although the prefecture consists of less than 1 percent of Japan’s total land mass, it has 70 percent of the country’s U.S. facilities; 11 of the bases in Okinawa belong to the U.S. Marine Corps. Washington and Tokyo insist that these troops are needed to maintain stability in the region, but a majority of Okinawans have repeatedly expressed resentment toward the disproportionate burden placed on their prefecture. In a 2017 survey of residents conducted by Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, 26 percent of respondents called for all U.S. bases to be removed from their island, and another 51 percent wanted them to be reduced to a level equivalent to mainland Japan. Packing so many military facilities onto Okinawa concentrates many of the problems there: aircraft accidents, environmental contamination, and crime, particularly against women.
For more than 25 years, Takazato and the members of Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence have compiled an ongoing chronology of U.S. military rapes of Okinawan women. Combing through municipal records and interviewing victims, they have uncovered how the earliest attacks started soon after the U.S. invasion of Okinawa in 1945 and have continued unabated to the present day. The total number of victims runs into the hundreds, but Takazato says many cases remain hidden.
In mainland Japan and overseas, people are aware of only a few of these crimes, notably the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three U.S. service members in 1995 and the rape and murder of a 20-year-old woman by a former Marine in 2016. Both events triggered mass protests on the island, attended by tens of thousands of Okinawans demanding the revision of the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement, or SOFA.
Established in 1960, SOFA outlines the rights and responsibilities of U.S. troops and military-related civilians living in Japan, including how they ought to be tried when they break local laws. SOFA gives the military jurisdiction over service members who commit offenses while in the performance of official duty, and it only requires suspects to be handed over to Japanese authorities after charges have been filed. Such loopholes have allowed the military to unilaterally determine what constitutes “on duty,” and they have impeded Japanese police’s ability to interview suspects.
Hiroshi Fukurai, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explains that the roots of SOFA lie in the wave of U.S. colonization of islands such as Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines in the late 19th century: “The U.S. wanted to protect its citizens from what it saw as ‘odd’ local laws, so it created extraterritorial jurisdiction whereby military members and other Americans were exempt from punishment. Today’s Japan-U.S. SOFA is based on the same principle of immunity — in effect, SOFA protects U.S. troops and military-related personnel from being prosecuted under Japanese law.”
In response to public fury following the crimes in 1995 and 2016, the U.S. and Japan promised to make improvements to SOFA, but these changes turned out to be merely cosmetic. The U.S. said it would give “sympathetic consideration” when Japan requested the pre-indictment handover of service members suspected of heinous crimes (interpreted as rape or murder) and reduced the categories of contractors protected by SOFA.
Although SOFA applies throughout Japan, Okinawa, which hosts the bulk of the U.S. presence, suffers the most, explains Takazato, and it is women who repeatedly become the victims of these failures in military and Japanese justice.
Takazato’s assertion is supported by the NCIS Okinawa case files released via FOIA. The reports detail at least eight instances in which Japanese women were the victims of military sexual offenses between 2017 and 2019. Six of the suspects were Marines; one was a military contractor affiliated with the Marine Corps; and one, the perpetrator of the shopping mall exposure, was a sailor. Not only do these cases reveal U.S. service members’ continuing sexual violence against women in Okinawa, but they also highlight how the U.S. military and Japanese civilian judicial systems fail to provide justice for women sexually attacked by service members on the island.
In August 2017, just a year after the 2016 rape and murder prompted mass outcry, a Marine seized a woman’s mobile phone to lure her into an alleyway. He raped her, then told her to wash up using water from a puddle; she later explained to police that she thought she was going to be murdered. The victim filed a formal complaint with Okinawa police, and according to the NCIS case file, she was adamant that charges would be pressed. Nevertheless, when the case was referred to the Japanese prosecutor’s office, it declined to proceed.
The NCIS took control of the case and declined to hold the suspect in confinement during its investigation. Seven months after the alleged attack, the victim withdrew from participation.
The suspect, meanwhile, committed another sexual assault — this time against a female Marine in January 2018. He was tried at a general court-martial and found guilty of this offense and others, including attempted drug distribution, and received a three-year prison sentence and a dishonorable discharge. But he was not punished for the rape of the civilian.
In October 2017, a woman contacted the NCIS to file a complaint against a Marine who had choked and raped her. The base commander declined prosecution on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence. The case file does not mention whether Japanese police were informed of the incident.
In the spring of 2018, the NCIS investigated two on-base incidents. In February, a Marine touched a woman’s buttocks at a club on Camp Hansen. The incident was reported to the military police, but the victim told Okinawa police she did not wish to participate in an investigation; the base commander decided not to punish the suspect. The following month, a Marine sexually assaulted a woman during a concert at Camp Schwab. The NCIS identified the suspect, but he denied the accusations. Japanese prosecutors declined to prosecute, and the U.S. military decided not to take action either.
Autumn of 2018 saw two more assaults. In October, at an off-base establishment, a Marine pulled down a woman’s shirt to expose her breasts. The woman declined to participate in the investigation by the NCIS or Japanese police. As a result, the military charged the Marine with disobeying orders as well as drunk and disorderly conduct. Instead of facing a court-martial, he was allowed to leave the military without receiving any punishment. In November, a woman reported that she had been raped by a Marine at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. Japanese prosecutors ceded jurisdiction to the military, and following the NCIS investigation, the Marine received a warning for disorderly conduct, drunkenness, and indecent conduct — but he was permitted to stay in the military.
“When you look at these cases from an outsider’s perspective, it might seem the military justice system is failing — but from a military viewpoint, these cases show SOFA is working just fine,” said Fukurai. “For the military, this is what SOFA and extraterritoriality are designed to do — it is a system designed to protect American service members who break the law in Japan from being punished under Japanese law.”
Takazato said she was angered by the NCIS reports — but not surprised. “Okinawa is a paradise for U.S. service members wanting to sexually assault women. They have the mentality that they won’t be punished here, and they think Okinawan women don’t report sexual assaults,” she said.
Takazato asserts that some of the problem lies with the Japanese judicial system, which frequently blames the victims of sexual assaults. Takazato has accompanied victims of U.S. military violence to Japanese police stations where she saw for herself how officers rebuke women for where they had been or what clothes they had worn.
“When it comes to sexual crimes, this victim-blaming extends throughout the Japanese justice system. But it is even worse for victims of the U.S. military. Because the authorities prioritize Japan-U.S. relations over the rights of Okinawans, prosecutors decline cases where the accused is a U.S. service member,” said Takazato.
According to research by the Okinawan newspaper the Ryukyu Shimpo, Japanese prosecutors were significantly more reluctant to indict U.S. service members, contractors, and their dependents than members of the Japanese general public. Between 2007 and 2016, only 18 percent of military-affiliated suspects were indicted versus 41 percent of the public accused of crimes. The proportion of military suspects prosecuted dropped to 15 percent in 2020, according to the nongovernmental organization Japan Peace Committee.
One of the NCIS reports obtained via FOIA exemplifies how the U.S. military can shut down Japanese police investigations.
In April 2015, witnesses in Kin town reported a man wearing a Marine Corps uniform masturbating in a car near schools on two different days. Japanese police identified the owner of the vehicle as a Marine sergeant. Interviewed by Okinawa police and NCIS agents, he denied any involvement and attempted to provide an alibi — but it did not check out.
When Okinawa police tried to interview the sergeant again, he invoked his right to counsel, and then the Marine Corps Provost Marshal’s Office advised the police that the suspect would not answer any more of their questions. At this point, according to the NCIS report, Okinawa police decided to drop the case, and the suspect’s command also decided not to take any further action.
According to Marine Corps court-martial summaries, sex crimes targeting children are endemic among the Marines in Okinawa. Between January 2015 and December 2020, 69 Marines were convicted in Okinawa for sexual offenses involving minors, including possession and distribution of child sexual abuse images and actual or attempted sexual assault of a child. All of those found guilty received military prison sentences and bad conduct or dishonorable discharges. It is unclear how many of the cases involved Okinawan children or how many were, for example, military dependents.
Neither the U.S. Air Force nor the Army makes their own court-martial summaries readily accessible to the public, so it is difficult to ascertain the prevalence of sexual assault of children by members of the Air Force and soldiers in Okinawa. The Intercept has requested this data from United States Forces Japan — but it has not yet been provided.
Consistently, the U.S. military attempts to play down the levels of offenses committed by its service members in Okinawa. The Okinawa Marines’ homepage states that most of them are “law abiding, honorable and respectful” and claims: “According to the Okinawa Prefectural Police (OPP) the U.S. SOFA per capita crime rate is less than half the crime rate in Okinawa.”
Orientation lectures, given to new Marines arriving on the island, state, “U.S. crime is limited to 1% of all crimes on Okinawa (compared to 4% of the population).” Controversially, the lectures attribute military crimes to “gaijin [foreigner] power.” One lecture from February 2014, which I obtained via FOIA in 2016, states, “We get carried-away with our sudden ‘gaijin power’ (Charisma man effect) and tend to go over-board by doing things that is [sic] not acceptable to the majority in society.”
Okinawa is the poorest prefecture in Japan — it has the country’s highest unemployment rate, and 30 percent of Okinawan children live below the poverty line. Many Okinawan women work in the service industry, often in relatively unstable jobs. Hotel, bar, and restaurant staff frequently bear the brunt of military violence.
In January 2019, for example, a maid at a hotel within Kadena Air Base reported that an American civilian employee of Marine Corps Community Services had been masturbating while she cleaned his room. He had stood up, exposed his penis, and then, with what appeared to be semen on his fingers, asked her for a tissue. The NCIS tried to locate the suspect in Okinawa, but they could not find him because he had quit his on-base job and checked out of the hotel earlier than scheduled. The report makes no mention that Okinawa police were notified of the American employee’s harassment of the maid, and the NCIS closed the case without finding the suspect.
Takazato says the NCIS reports help fill in the picture of military sexual violence on her island, and she plans to add them to her ongoing chronology of crimes against women dating back to April 1945. The sexual offenses against women in Okinawa detailed in the reports are, of course, only a fraction of the actual tally of military crime on the island. The reports do not include investigations into offenses committed by soldiers and members of the U.S. Air Force nor do they take into account the number of victims who do not report their attacks.
But in the Marines’ perspective, as detailed in the orientation talks, Okinawans have “double standards,” and their dissatisfaction toward the U.S. military presence is “more emotional than logical.” After I reported on the lectures in 2016, there was widespread anger in the prefecture; the Marine Corps said it would review its contents.
A similar uproar occurred in 1995 when, commenting on the rape of the 12-year-old girl by three service members, Adm. Richard C. Macke, commander of the United States Pacific Command, said it would have cost less to visit a prostitute than hire the vehicle the rapists had used to abduct the child. He was forced to resign.
The U.S. military’s claims that offenses committed by service members are lower than the local population are flawed. They fail to note Japanese prosecutors’ low indictment rate of military personnel, and they are silent on offenses committed within the military, including rape and sexual assault.
United States Forces Japan has not yet explained whether it stands by such claims about its purported low crime rate nor has it provided more recent data.
“It pays to complain,” state the Marine orientation lectures. “Anywhere offense can be taken it will be used.”
Ndakasi died on Sept. 26 after battling a prolonged illness and in the arms of her caretaker. (photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images)
Ndakasi died on Sept. 26 after battling a prolonged illness and in the arms of her caretaker, according to a statement from the Virunga National Park.
She was found in 2007 by Virunga rangers at 2 months old clinging to the lifeless body of her mother, who was killed by armed militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The rangers decided to rescue the gorilla after determining that none of her family members were in the area. That evening she met Andre Bauma, who would become her caretaker and lifelong friend, according to the statement.
"It was a privilege to support and care for such a loving creature, especially knowing the trauma Ndakasi suffered at a very young age," Bauma said in the statement.
After the death of her mother, it was determined she was too vulnerable in the wild and was transferred to the Senkwekwe Center, an orphanage for mountain gorillas in the park, where she lived for 11 years until her death.
According to the statement, Ndakasi was featured in films and documentaries before going viral on Earth Day in 2019 when she and another gorilla photobombed a photo of Bauma that garnered almost 100,000 likes on Instagram.
Ndaksai and another orphaned gorilla, Ndeze, were standing on their feet behind Bauma looking straight into the camera lens "with cheeky grins."
The Virunga National Park said her life was a symbol of survival for the once endangered species. In the year she was born, mountain gorillas had a population of 720, according to the park.
That number is estimated to have grown to more than 1,000 in 2021.
"It was Ndakasi’s sweet nature and intelligence that helped me to understand the connection between humans and Great Apes and why we should do everything in our power to protect them," Bauma said in a statement.
"I loved her like a child and her cheerful personality brought a smile to my face every time I interacted with her."
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. (photo: The Wild Is Waiting)
Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, released a statement expressing disappointment in a decision by the administration to expand Bears Ears National Monuments and Grand Staircase-Escalante, which were downsized significantly under President Donald Trump.
They cover vast expanses of southern Utah where red rocks reveal petroglyphs and cliff dwellings and distinctive twin buttes bulge from a grassy valley. The Trump administration cut Bears Ears, on lands considered sacred to Native American tribes, by 85 percent and slashed Grand Staircase-Escalante by nearly half.
Cox’s statement did not include specifics how much of the monuments Biden plans to restore, and the White House and the U.S. Interior Department declined immediate comment.
Cox noted he had offered to work with the administration on a legislative solution.
“The president’s decision to enlarge the monuments again is a tragic missed opportunity — it fails to provide certainty as well as the funding for law enforcement, research, and other protections which the monuments need and which only Congressional action can offer,” he said in the statement released with other state leaders.
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney also criticized Biden by saying in a tweet Thursday that he “squandered the opportunity to build consensus” and find a permanent solution for the monuments.
“Yet again, Utah’s national monuments are being used as a political football between administrations,” Romney said. “The decision to re-expand the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante is a devastating blow to our state, local and tribal leaders and our delegation … today’s “winner take all” mentality moved us further away from that goal.”
Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, applauded Biden’s decision and said she hopes it marks an initial step toward his goal of conserving at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and ocean by 2030.
“Thank you, President Biden,” Rokala said in a statement. “You have listened to Indigenous tribes and the American people and ensured these landscapes will be protected for generations to come.”
Trump’s cuts ironically increased the national attention to Bears Ears, Rokala said. She called on the federal government to increase funding to manage the landscape and handle growing crowds.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous Cabinet secretary, traveled to Utah in April to visit the monuments, becoming the latest federal official to step into what has been a yearslong public lands battle.
Former President Barack Obama proclaimed Bears Ears a national monument in 2016. The site was the first to receive the designation at the specific request of tribes.
The Bears Ears buttes, which overlook a grassy valley, are considered a place of worship for many tribes, according to Pat Gonzales-Rogers, executive director of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. The group includes the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni and Ute Indian Tribe.
The Trump administration’s reductions to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante paved the way for potential coal mining and oil and gas drilling on lands that were previously off-limits. However, activity was limited because of market forces.
Conservative state leaders considered the size of both monuments U.S. government overreach and applauded the reductions.
Environmental, tribal, paleontological and outdoor recreation organizations sued to restore the monuments’ original boundaries, arguing presidents lack legal authority to change monuments their predecessors created. Meanwhile, Republicans argued Democratic presidents have misused the Antiquities Act signed by President Theodore Roosevelt to designate monuments beyond what’s necessary to protect archaeological and cultural resources.
The administration has said the decision to review the monuments was part of an expansive plan to tackle climate change and reverse the Trump administration’s “harmful” policies.
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