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The senator’s blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty makes some question “who matters to Joe."
But Manchin’s definition of Americans’ “needs” was always the problem. Even after his party split the bills, and after it spent many torturous months wheedling and flattering and acceding to his cuts, Manchin never budged from an unreconstructed conservative talking point: give Americans too much help, such as extended unemployment insurance, and they will be indolent and dependent. All over West Virginia, he told me, businesses “can’t find workers. They won’t come back to work.” Dispensing with the euphemisms a few months later, he told reporters, “I cannot accept our economy, or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.”
The active ingredients in Manchin’s political calculus have never been a great mystery: he is a Democrat aiming to get reëlected in an increasingly Republican state, and he is among the Senate’s largest recipients of campaign cash from the coal, oil, and gas industries, which have lobbied against the climate-change provisions in the bill he scuttled. But, to the West Virginians who begged him to support the anti-poverty programs in the Build Back Better bill, his rejection reflects a fundamental seclusion from the needs of people which he is no longer willing or able to perceive. To such critics in the state, Manchin has become an icon of Washington oligarchy and estrangement, a politician with a personal fortune, whose blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty represents a sneering disregard for the gap between their actual struggles and his televised bromides.
If Manchin’s opposition holds, his vote will be decisive in ending the expanded Child Tax Credit program, which, according to the Treasury Department, last week delivered payments benefitting three hundred and five thousand children in West Virginia. Statewide, ninety-three per cent of children are eligible for the credit, tied for the highest rate in the country. Analysts estimate that, if the program is allowed to expire, at the end of the month, fifty thousand children there will be in danger of falling into poverty. The average payment per family: four hundred and forty-six dollars a month.
Manchin is especially vulnerable to accusations of imperial remove. Photos that circulated online show him chatting over the rail of his houseboat in Washington with angry constituents, who had arrived by kayak. After he persuaded the Biden Administration to drop from the bill the Clean Electricity Performance Program, the centerpiece of efforts to slash greenhouse-gas emissions, climate protesters surrounded Manchin’s silver Maserati.
Jim McKay, the director of Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia, a nonprofit organization that lobbied Manchin to support the bill, told me that the senator was “conspicuously absent” from “personal meetings with West Virginia families.” McKay said, “Unfortunately, while his staff did have some meetings—which we are thankful to have had—personal contacts with Senator Manchin were extremely limited.” Dodging uncomfortable meetings is not unique in politics, but the accusation carries a special sting for Manchin, whose status as a Democrat in a red state makes him especially keen to project an image of a man who refuses to “go Washington.” McKay said, “I look forward to when Senator Manchin reconnects with average people.”
To anyone who knows the details, Manchin’s self-narrative—of a coal-country football star from the tiny town of Farmington—has always passed over his wealth and status. The Manchins are machers; Joe’s grandfather ran Farmington’s grocery store and served, over the years, as its fire chief, constable, justice of the peace, and mayor. His father had a similar stature in local politics, while also expanding the family business from groceries into furniture and carpets. Joe’s uncle, A. James Manchin, ascended to the positions of West Virginia’s secretary of state and treasurer. Joe’s daughter, Heather Bresch, went to work at a pharmaceutical plant in the state run by Mylan, eventually becoming its C.E.O. and collecting an estimated $37.6-million exit package when she retired, in 2020. Joe, for his part, has prospered as a coal broker, building a net worth of between four and thirteen million dollars, according to his Senate disclosures. In West Virginia terms, Manchin has been a member of the gentry—corporate, political, and personal—for decades.
Walt Auvil, a member of the West Virginia Democrats’ executive committee who has criticized Manchin for years, told me this week that “no one who matters to Joe has been rescued from poverty by the childhood-tax credits that his stance will end. But it has cut child poverty here by about a third.” Auvil added, “If it does not personally benefit Joe, his major contributors, and/or his family, he is unmoved.” Manchin has always been a brake on the progressive capacity of his party, but the stakes of his opposition matter today more than they ever have. His invocation of an “entitlement mentality,” as an argument for opposing reform and for instituting means testing and work requirements, stands in contrast to what his constituents say they need.
The growing criticisms of Manchin call to mind the reaction that some in Appalachia had to the image promoted by the author turned politician J. D. Vance when he published, in 2016, “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir of his rise from a harrowing childhood in Ohio to the Marines, Yale Law School, and a career in venture capital. Vance urged his fellow-Appalachians to “wake the hell up” and adopt his belief that their woes “were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.”
Although the book became a best-seller during America’s struggle to understand Trump’s rise, it also generated resentment from some in the “culture” that it depicts. Dwight B. Billings, an emeritus professor of sociology and Appalachian studies at the University of Kentucky, called it “an advertisement for corporate capitalism and personal choice.” In a 2019 essay in the Lexington Herald-Leader, Billings wrote that, in Vance’s telling, “the problem boils down simply to the bad personal choices individuals make in the face of economic decline—not to the corporate capitalist economy that creates immense profits by casting off much of its workforce or the failure of governments to respond to this ongoing crisis.”
Bit by bit, Manchin, like Vance, is losing the credibility of his connection to the very place at the heart of his identity. In 2018, Vance, who is now running for the Senate, in Ohio, as a Republican, having renounced his earlier opposition to Trump, spoke at the Appalachian Studies Association Conference. He was booed by a group calling itself the Young Appalachian Leaders and Learners (Y’ALL); the members turned their chairs around and sang the coal-miner anthem “Which Side Are You On?”
In West Virginia today, Manchin is facing his own chorus of skepticism. For all of the senator’s warnings against entitlement, McKay, the child-welfare advocate, notes that Manchin’s opposition to the Build Back Better bill “means more parents will have to leave a job they love because they can’t afford the cost of child care for their children.” McKay added, “West Virginia has several counties without a single licensed child-care center. That problem will now persist indefinitely.”
Milton Marin Caceres-Molina was arrested and deported with use of
President Donald Trump went after undocumented immigrants by using “stingray” cellphone tower technologies. Now Joe Biden’s administration is continuing with the practice.
But by the time authorities figured out who Caceres-Molina was, he was already gone.
Federal law enforcement officials tried to locate Caceres-Molina based on selfies he posted to Facebook. But when that effort failed, a U.S. Marshal applied for a warrant to authorize the use of a controversial technology to track down Caceres-Molina. Authorities wanted to use a cellphone tower simulator to locate the mobile phone associated with his Facebook account.
They easily tracked Caceres-Molina down, and he was arrested shortly after.
Donald Trump’s Administration pioneered the use of these cellphone tower simulators—a spy tool colloquially known as a “Stingray” that tricks mobile phones into connecting with a fake cell tower to identify the phone’s physical location—to hunt down people accused of low-level immigration offenses. But, according to new court documents obtained by The Daily Beast, Joe Biden’s administration is pressing on with the controversial tool.
The cell tower simulators have already raised privacy concerns among civil liberties advocates. Stingrays are, after all, powerful tools in the federal government’s hands, and there are a host of problematic uses, critics contend, particularly in the absence of a warrant or in the investigation of low-level offenses.
“Cell site simulators are tremendously powerful and invasive surveillance technology,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech, privacy, and technology project told The Daily Beast. “It’s a positive development that DHS is telling judges what they’re doing and getting search warrants—they did not used to do this.”
“But,” Freed Wessler continued, “if these devices are ever to be used under the system of the constitution, they need to be reserved for the most serious investigations with strict oversight and limitations.”
The Detroit News reported the first known use of a cell site simulator, used to locate and deport Rudy Carcamo-Carranza, a 23-year-old restaurant worker wanted on illegal reentry charges after he was allegedly involved in a car accident and fled the scene.
In 2019, according to reporting from Univision, immigration officials again used a cell site simulator to locate and deport Valente Palacios Tellez, a Mexican immigrant charged with illegal reentry after he returned to the U.S. following deportation and was arrested following a fight outside a restaurant in New York City.
But little is known about other cases in which immigration officials have used the devices.
In documents obtained by the ACLU through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policy asserted that immigration officials could use cell site simulators only in the context of a criminal case.
But whether a given immigration violation is treated as a criminal or civil offense has grown increasingly arbitrary, according to Freed Wessler.
“They have said that they do not use these for civil immigration enforcement. The problem is that we’ve had over the past couple decades an incredible criminalization of immigration law,” Freed Wessler said.
While illegal reentry is a crime, federal authorities used to manage the violations through civil immigration enforcement measures. But as immigration has become a more contentious political issue over the past few decades, prosecutors have increasingly opted to charge immigrants with criminal offenses.
During the Obama administration, criminal prosecutions of illegal entry and reentry spiked, rising again under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.
In two of the previously known cases involving cell simulators used for immigration enforcement, the suspects attracted attention from federal law enforcement following relatively low-level state level charges.
In the warrant application for Caceres-Molina’s phone location, federal law enforcement note that he’s wanted in his home country of El Salvador on aggravated homicide charges, although the affidavit in support of a criminal complaint against him makes no mention of the charges.
ICE policy for obtaining cell site simulator warrants, as spelled out in the documents obtained by the ACLU, does not restrict the use of cell site simulators to undocumented immigrants charged with additional, non-immigration related offenses.
“If they can go after this guy just based on an arrest warrant for an illegal reentry charge, then there’s nothing binding them from doing the same thing against anybody who could be charged with illegal entry or reentry,” Freed Wessler said.
Voters cast ballots in Houston, Texas, in October 2020. (photo: Elizabeth Conley/AP)
Program asks people on voter rolls to prove citizenship, sparking concern that eligible voters could be wrongfully targeted
The Texas secretary of state’s office has identified just under 12,000 people it suspects of being non-citizens since September, when the program restarted (there are more than 17 million registered voters in Texas). About 2,327 voter registrations have been cancelled so far. The vast majority of cancellations were because voters failed to respond to a notice giving them 30 days to prove their citizenship.
The secretary of state flags anyone as a suspected non-citizen if they register to vote and then subsequently visit the Texas department of public safety (DPS), the state’s driver’s license agency, and indicate they are not a citizen.
Local election officials in Texas’ 254 counties are then asked to review the names. If those officials cannot verify citizenship, they are required to send them a letter asking them to prove their citizenship within 30 days or else their voter registration gets cancelled.
But election officials in Harris county, the most populous in the state, are concerned about the accuracy of the data being used to challenge voters.
After the county mailed proof of citizenship requests to 2,796 people, 167 voters - nearly 6% of those contacted – responded with proof of citizenship. The state removed an additional 161 people from the list of people whose citizenship needed to be verified, according to a county official.
“We are not confident in the quality of the information we are being mandated to act upon,” Isabel Longoria, the county’s election administrator, said in an email.
In Fort Bend county, just outside of Houston, officials mailed notices to 515 people in October. About 20% responded with proof of citizenship and the rest were removed from the rolls, according to John Oldham, the county’s election administrator. Many of the people who responded said they had accidentally checked a box during their DPS transaction indicating they were not citizens, Oldham said.
In Cameron county, along the US-Mexico border, election officials have sent out 246 letter since September, almost all to people with Hispanic surnames, according to the Texas Monthly, which first reported the program restarted. About 60 people have been cancelled so far.
After the notices went out, a married couple who had heard about the notices came into the elections office to provide their naturalization papers, even though the couple’s citizenship wasn’t challenged, said Remi Garza, the county elections administrator.
“It saddened me too,” Garza said. “People who shouldn’t have to be concerned about this type of proving citizenship felt that they had to do that.”
Voting rights groups say they are trying to better understand the process the state is using, but are concerned eligible voters are getting targeted.
“ A US citizen voter who gets a challenge letter is understandably intimidated. And especially for naturalized US citizens, who went through an entire bureaucratic process to be able to vote, getting a letter that accuses them of being an ineligible voter is particularly intimidating,” said Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “People will naturally assume, based on this official correspondence, that they might have made some kind of mistake, or that they are not proper voters.”
The program had been on hold since 2019, when a federal judge ordered Texas to stop a similar, error-filled, effort that he described as “ham-handed”. As part of a settlement in that case, Texas agreed to only flag people if they registered to vote prior to the DPS visit in which they indicated they weren’t a citizen. It also agreed to reinstate and challenge voters who provided proof of citizenship, even if it was outside the 30-day window.
The citizenship check comes as Republicans have moved to blunt the rapidly growing political power of Texas’ non-white population. Texas prosecutors have sought criminal punishments for people, including non-citizens, who make voting mistakes and the attorney general, Ken Paxton, has zealously pursued claims of voter fraud, which is exceedingly rare in Texas and elsewhere.
Bruce Elfant, whose office oversees voter registration in Travis county, said his office so far has internally been able to confirm that less than 100 of the 300 to 400 people flagged by the secretary of state’s office were citizens. Most in the group had been flagged because of clerical errors, he said. His office has not yet sent out any challenge notices and is waiting for more information before it does so.
In El Paso county, state officials referred 4,000 suspected non-citizens for review, and around 300 had already offered proof of citizenship, said Lisa Wise, the county’s election administrator. The county isn’t currently cancelling the registration of any voter who doesn’t respond, she said.
Federal law prohibits officials from conducting mass voter cancellations within 90 days of a primary election. Texas’ primary is on 1 March, so the state can’t remove anyone who doesn’t respond to a proof of citizenship letter until later this spring.
Thomas Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization was trying to understand why eligible voters were being flagged, but it was clear “something is not going right”.
“Even if your system flags one eligible voter and threatens to remove them, that’s a problem,” he said. “If you have hundreds, and if you add it up across counties, you’re probably getting to thousands of eligible voters, being threatened with removal.”
Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state’s office said he was confident in the data.
“We’re following the settlement agreement exactly as we’re supposed to. If the counties have additional information where they’re able to cross people off the list who have in fact become citizens and they’re lawfully registered to vote, that’s great. That’s how the process is supposed to work.”
But Buser-Clancy noted that those who were able to affirm their citizenship likely only represented a fraction of the eligible voters who were probably affected.
“Those people are the lucky ones that both received the notice, like actually went through their mail, looked it up, and had the documentation on hand to send in,” he added. “What that tells you is that there’s some other percentage of people who are going to be removed from the rolls even though they’re eligible voters.”
Hassan Aleiwi Muhammad Sultan, now 16 and in a wheelchair, was hit by an April 29, 2016, strike in East Mosul, Iraq, aimed at an ISIS recruiter. (photo: Ivor Prickett/The New York Times)
U.S. air power has been central in the country’s wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, with officials promising that drones and other sophisticated weapons allow the U.S. military to carry out precision airstrikes that spare civilians caught in war zones. But a groundbreaking investigation by The New York Times reveals the U.S. military’s air wars have been plagued by bad intelligence, imprecise targeting and a lack of accountability for thousands of civilian deaths, many of them children. The two-part series by reporter Azmat Khan is based on a trove of internal Pentagon documents, as well as on-the-ground reporting from dozens of airstrike sites and interviews with scores of survivors. “What you have is a scale of civilian death and injury that is vastly different than what they claim,” says Khan, who spent five years on the investigation.
New York Times reporter Azmat Khan writes, quote, “The documents lay bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, many of them children.”
The reports directly contradict public claims made by successive U.S. presidents and military leaders. In 2016, then-President Obama claimed the U.S. was waging the most precise air campaign in history.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: In stark contrast to ISIL, which uses civilians as human shields, America’s armed forces will continue to do everything in our power to avoid civilian casualties. With our extraordinary technology, we’re conducting the most precise air campaign in history. After all, it is the innocent civilians of Syria and Iraq who are suffering the most and who need to be saved from ISIL’s terror.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Azmat Khan, an award-winning investigative journalist, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. She spent over five years researching the U.S. air wars. As part of her reporting, she visited dozens of different bomb sites in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Part one of her investigation is headlined “Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes.” And part two is “The Human Toll of America’s Air Wars.”
Azmat Khan, welcome back to Democracy Now! Thank you so much for this comprehensive report. I’m wondering if you can start off by telling us the story of Ali Fathi Zeidan and his family.
AZMAT KHAN: Sure. So, Ali Fathi Zeidan and his family had moved from a town, a village called Wana, which was just south of the Mosul Dam. They left it because there was fighting between ISIS and Peshmerga forces, and they were really looking for anywhere where they could be safe. And that often meant, for many families who were fleeing displacement in 2015, in 2016 — it often meant moving to places where you already had family. And Ali Fathi Zeidan’s daughter was married to a young man whose brother lived in West Mosul, and that’s where they wound up living.
They moved into an industrial area in this wheat storage district called Yabisat. And, you know, this was a very large extended family. Ali Fathi Zeidan had many children and grandchildren. And they essentially were unable to afford a nice apartment, but they moved into this kind of storage space, you know, made it home, brought in things to sleep on, brought in a water tank — essentially, you know, tried to get by as best they could during this war.
And one night in March of 2016, they were sitting down to dinner, and there was an airstrike. What they didn’t know at the time was that the United States had been surveilling this house and that particular compound or area that the house was located on, believing it to be the site — or that area to be the site of a chemical weapons production facility and other kinds of structures associated with chemical weapons making and dissemination.
And so, what wound up happening is that the intelligence review before the strike was carried essentially had different people weighing in on this target. You know, the actual intelligence for this site may have come from this human source. And as different people sort of evaluated what they saw, there was one person who was looking at this and saw the intelligence and said, “Listen, I have a bit of a different assessment.” And she was a USAID official who, when she spotted the 10 children that everyone who was reviewing this footage saw, said, “Listen, I don’t think those children are transients,” meaning they’re merely passing through. “I think they may live in or near this target compound.” And the military disagreed. They continued to classify the children as transients, meaning that they believed they could mitigate the potential for the harm to those kids by carrying out the strike at night, when they wouldn’t be outside playing or wherever it was that they had seen them playing, by a stream near the structure, in the target video, in the pre-surveillance video.
And so, you know, shortly after this airstrike, video surfaced online of family members, whom I met many years later — four years later, I believe — who were picking up the bodies of their loved ones and trying to salvage everyone they could. At least 21 people died from that single family alone in this airstrike, and they were civilians. And when that video surfaced online — ISIS often made propaganda videos — it triggered a credibility assessment, in which the U.S.-led coalition took a look at the evidence, reinterviewed this USAID official to try to determine what went wrong. And what they concluded was that there was — you know, that the process and procedures, you know, they did not find any wrongdoing or disciplinary action. In fact, they said they had even taken more measures than necessary to protect against civilian harm. And there really wasn’t the kind of deep unearthing of what happened here.
When I first got this document about this incident, I showed it to somebody, a source in the military. And, you know, he said, “You know what this is, right? This is confirmation bias.” He explained it this way. He said that military officials, they see something that’s called a target or called a chemical weapons production facility, and as it’s being vetted through these chains, they place very high value on that kind of vetting. And at that point, it’s very hard for them to unsee it as anything else other than that particular target. And so, you know, he said that probably this USAID official, who had not been through so many instances of that kind of military analysis that would lead you to believe that these people were targets or that these children were not transients, or whatever it might be, she had the kind of eyes that were clear and an understanding of ground realities to understand what was happening here.
And so, that issue of confirmation bias came up again and again in the more than 1,300 records that I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act of the military’s own assessments Misidentification, conflating somebody who was a civilian for a combatant was common. And the number one reason why that often happened was that there was confirmation bias at play.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Azmat, I wanted to ask you to put these records and this many deaths in the context of past U.S. wars. It seems to me that the mass killings of civilians have marked all modern U.S. wars. In Vietnam, it was the use of napalm and white phosphorus bombs against what became the civilian — largely civilian population; during the Panama invasion, the first use of what the Pentagon called bunker buster bombs. But it wasn’t until the Gulf War of 1991 that the Pentagon began to trumpet the use of so-called smart, remote precision-guided bombs, that were going to eliminate civilian casualties. And our government seems to increasingly rely on this false claim that better technology can somehow eliminate mistakes and save both U.S. soldiers and civilians. What do you see from these documents once again demonstrates the basic or fundamental fallacy of this approach to war?
AZMAT KHAN: So, it’s true that, you know, a lot of these different innovations in warfare, in weaponry, have been implemented in earlier wars. And at the time, the United States would make grand claims about it. You mentioned the Gulf War. It’s true. During the Gulf War, U.S. officials were very apt to talk about the use of precision-guided weapons, laser-guided weapons, their effectiveness in hamstringing one of the largest militaries in the world with what was categorized at the time as “surprisingly few” civilian casualties.
There’s Congressional Research Service report that came out many years later, or was made public many years later, that said that a lot of those claims being made about the effectiveness of that precision weaponry’s use in the Gulf War were vastly overstated. We’ve seen that again and again. In fact, there are claims about the use of precision-guided weapons that just don’t stack up with the reality of what they can actually offer.
Certainly there are advancements in the ability to follow a moving target, but here’s the thing. You can precisely hit a target exactly the way you want to with many of this new weaponry, but that is meaningless, that precision is meaningless, if you have the wrong target in the first place, if your intelligence is wrong. And so, what I found in many of these documents were overwhelming patterns of failures in intelligence, over and over, whether that was conflating a civilian with a combatant. Probably the biggest was just failing to detect the presence of civilians in the first place before carrying out a strike. There were so many instances in which they had determined or concluded that there were no civilians in that area, or they did not detect the presence of them.
And the military is really only held to a standard of, you know, “With reasonable certainty, we concluded this particular thing,” and their chain of command and their process. So, you know, another major finding in the examination of these documents was that there were no findings — or at least not in the records I have — any findings of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. And that surprises a lot of people, but it probably shouldn’t, when you know what results in findings of wrongdoing or disciplinary action in the kind of apparatus or the way that these investigations or assessments work, which is that it’s based on mainly chain of command, reasonable certainty.
And despite this often being framed — you know, when there’s a major failure that becomes very public, like the Kabul strike or the MSF bombing in Kunduz in — you know, the bombing of the Doctors Without Borders clinic in 2015 in Kunduz, Afghanistan, American officials will come out and say this is an anomaly, this is unique, this is an extremely tragic error. But what I found through the examination of the documents and ground visits to, yes, 60 sites that were deemed credible, meaning they had accepted those — they had accepted that casualties occurred, and more than 40 others that were either deemed noncredible or not yet assessed, so more than a hundred in total — what I often found in examining the records, looking at these strikes on the ground, interviewing people, and really going in-depth, was that there were patterns of failure that they really couldn’t investigate or understand without being on the ground, that they had limited view from where they were looking and the kinds of things that they were using.
And after a while, once you see that over and over and over, you do have to ask whether this is really a system of accountability or whether it is designed to function as a system of impunity, actually to provide, for example, as some sources have told me, to provide legal cover in instances in which there will be allegations against U.S. soldiers, or even to provide the military, as one analyst, Larry Lewis, who has studied a lot of these kinds of documents in the past, put it, to basically provide them expanded authority on the battlefield and use to justify taking greater freedom of action in war.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And speaking of accountability, your reports of the — and these were actually the military’s own investigations. About how many of them did the Pentagon officially acknowledge as civilian casualties? And how many were basically kept in-house, until you were able to uncover these records?
AZMAT KHAN: Oh, OK. So, the number of records that had previously been made public before I obtained them, of the vast trove, they’ve conducted, at least in the air war against Iraq and Syria, I think, around 2,800 assessments that they’ve done, either determining them to be credible or not. Of those 2,800, 340 have been deemed credible. Before I had started requesting them, or, actually, before — just putting aside the number I got, the number that had been made public among those was less than 20. So, less than 20 of these records had ever been made public. I obtained, I think, 216 credible assessments and around 1,100 or so noncredible ones, where they concluded that it was not likely that they had killed or injured civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you give us the example, Azmat Khan, of what happened in Syria? You have Special Operations forces reporting they killed 85 ISIS fighters in a July 2016 air raid in northern Syria. In fact, the raid hit houses far from the frontline, killing 120 villagers. And use that as an example of what gets covered up.
AZMAT KHAN: Yeah. So, I mean, in this case, what you have is a scale of civilian death that is vastly different — of civilian death and injury that’s vastly different than what they claim. This is an area of Syria called Al Tokhar. And it was widely known, among local journalists, online materials, open-source materials, that as many as — some people claimed as many as 200 people had died. And in this reporting, essentially, what I got was a single — was a document that said that they had concluded that 85 ISIS fighters had been killed at three staging areas, at these different vehicles they had attacked.
And I went to the site of it in Syria, in Al Tokhar, and, you know, over months, I verified these numbers but came to the conclusion that at least 120 civilians had been killed. And in the Pentagon’s own assessment, they acknowledged that between seven and 24 civilians had been killed. So, you’re looking at, in this case, like a fourfold increase, at least, of the actual rate of civilian death or injury.
So, you know, the strength or the kind of — I learned a lot from doing this reporting, right? And the ability to compare the documents that are made, with respect to assessing these records, to the reality on the ground, even in cases where they have accepted an incident as credible and acknowledged that maybe casualties took place, to find those distinctions, I think, was really arresting and concerning.
AMY GOODMAN: And I know you have to go. I want to get to this issue of what is happening today. You talk about the U.S. new way of war taking shape after the 2009 surge in U.S. forces in Afghanistan. By the end of 2014, Obama declared America’s ground war essentially done, shifting the military’s mission to mostly air support and advice for Afghan forces battling the Taliban, at roughly the same time authorizing a campaign of airstrikes against ISIS targets and in support of allied forces in Iraq and Syria. Can you talk about how the Obama administration paved the ground for former President Trump to launch tens of thousands of airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and then what Biden is doing today?
AZMAT KHAN: Well, it’s 8:30, and I said that I would leave at 8:30, but I — and it’s a very complicated question that deserves like a longer answer. But, certainly, you can say that we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the use of airstrikes as American soldiers were withdrawn from different war zones under the Obama administration. And as a result of that, there was a choice to ramp up the number of airstrikes. So, certainly, that’s the case. And if you like to learn more about that, read it as it’s written in this story. And, yes, certainly, under the Trump administration, you saw the expanded use of who could call in airstrikes, as in that chain of command, about who could authorize some of these strikes changed, as well. But, you know, I really don’t want to get in —
AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Yes, OK. We will link to both parts of this astounding report, that took you years to do. Azmat Khan, we want to thank you so much for being with us, award-winning investigative journalist with The New York Times Magazine. We’ll link to the new two-part investigation, part one headlined “Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes,” and part two, “The Human Toll of America’s Air Wars.”
Visitors in masks on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on December 18. (photo: Samuel Corum/Getty)
Preventing pandemics is much cheaper than fighting them once they happen.
On Sunday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced on Fox News that he was done with Build Back Better, President Biden’s signature domestic policy bill, seemingly dooming the roughly $1.8 trillion package covering subsidies for everything from clean energy to child care.
But as my colleague Andrew Prokop noted, there is another way to read this moment: not as a burial for Biden’s legislative hopes, but an opportunity to reset them. Manchin has been very clear for months that he opposed the current structure of the Build Back Better Act, in which — in an attempt to keep costs down — many programs have scheduled expiration dates after a few years. He preferred a bill that fully paid for a handful of permanent programs. After Manchin’s Fox News appearance, the Washington Post reported that the senator had presented Biden with a $1.8 trillion spending proposal that included huge clean energy subsidies, a permanent pre-K program, and a permanent boost to Obamacare subsidies for health insurance.
That raises the possibility of Biden and Manchin ripping up the bill and starting anew, with a goal of selecting a handful programs to implement permanently. Manchin has been clear that pre-K, clean energy, and expanded Obamacare can be on that list. He and Biden are likely to wrangle intensely over how much of this year’s bigger child tax credit can be made permanent in the deal; Manchin is a well-known skeptic of the program.
But one kind of investment that hasn’t received much attention (with some exceptions, like from my colleague Dylan Scott) deserves a place of permanence in a Biden-Manchin grand bargain: pandemic preparedness. A relatively modest long-term investment in getting better at deterring, detecting, and responding to future biological threats would prevent truly catastrophic damage akin to what we’ve experienced since March 2020. It could save millions of lives and trillions of dollars, if the cost of the current pandemic is any indication — and far more if the next one is even worse.
Pandemic preparedness has gotten short shrift in Build Back Better negotiations, but it deserves a place at the center of Congress’s agenda. This pandemic won’t be the last, and Americans cannot afford to be caught as unprepared as we were this time.
The incredible shrinking pandemic preparedness plan
The White House, to its credit, understands that preventing the next pandemic requires a large-scale investment. That’s why in September, White House science adviser Eric Lander and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan put out a report calling for $65.3 billion in spending on pandemic preparedness, spread over 10 years.
The proposal included, among other things, $24.2 billion in spending on vaccine preparedness (for instance, improving manufacturing capacity and developing candidate vaccines for common types of viruses), $11.8 billion to prepare antiviral and other therapies against likely pandemic pathogens, and $5 billion on research and manufacturing for testing, as well as funding for personal protective equipment (PPE) and improving building design (for instance through better ventilation). It’s worth reviewing the spending plan in full just to get a sense of how sprawling and comprehensive it is.
But the administration did not put forward the full $65.3 billion in the reconciliation spending package. Initially, it proposed $30 billion in spending in its “American Jobs Plan,” unveiled in late March, which provided the basis for spending negotiations with Congress after the passage of emergency economic stimulus.
Then, upon the announcement of the $65.3 billion pandemic prevention plan, Lander told reporters that the administration wanted at least $15 billion of it funded through reconciliation, much less than either $65.3 billion or $30 billion.
The version passed by the House included even less: $3 billion for pandemic preparedness, split between $1.4 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to do everything from improving testing to laboratory upgrades to genomic sequencing of new pathogens; $1.3 billion for the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Activities (ASPR) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to be spent on both manufacturing and research of countermeasures; and $300 million for the Food and Drug Administration to improve its technology and lab infrastructure.
This is nowhere near enough. $3 billion is an insufficient investment in preventing future pandemics, especially in the midst of the current pandemic that, per research by Harvard economists David Cutler and Larry Sanders, has already cost the US some $16 trillion.
After analyzing data on some 2,600 past disease outbreaks, the research company Metabiota estimated that there’s a roughly 25 percent chance of another pandemic on the scale of Covid-19, or greater, occurring in the next 10 years. If such a pandemic costs us $16 trillion, reducing the odds of it happening by just one percentage point has a value of $160 billion. While precise estimates are impossible, a sensible pandemic prevention policy that includes extensive manufacturing capacity for treatments and vaccines and tests and PPE that can be deployed rapidly should reduce the odds of such a pandemic, or reduce such a pandemic’s severity, by much more than one percentage point.
Simply deploying genomic sequencing technology and data systems that would enable real-time monitoring of new diseases to major hospitals and wastewater processors should substantially reduce pandemic risk.
“The cost to set up and run a surveillance architecture in 200 urban hospitals in the US would be well under $1 billion, and it could be done within a year,” scientist David Ecker wrote in Scientific American last year.
Such a system would be able to detect a novel virus like SARS-CoV-2 if only seven symptomatic people went into emergency rooms and underwent routine testing that didn’t detect an already-known pathogen. This process would then enable the virus to be rapidly sequenced and for diagnostics, vaccines, and therapies to be rapidly developed to target it. Such a world seems possible, for an incredibly modest cost.
The best case I can see against including the full $65.3 billion in preparedness funding in the reconciliation bill is that there may be other avenues to pursue it. Republicans in Congress have been surprisingly willing to back investments in science in certain cases. The US Innovation and Competition Act, a $250 billion investment in improving manufacturing and boosting scientific research and development in a bid to “beat China,” got a whopping 19 Republican senators to vote for it in June. While it’s worse than the initially proposed version, even critics praised the final passed bill as representing a major investment in research.
If such a coalition can be put together for pandemic preparedness funding as well, it may represent a way to make this investment without taking scarce space in the Build Back Better bill.
Some progressive activists have offered this as a reason to avoid prioritizing pandemic preparedness; Democratic Socialists of America activist Emma Claire Foley told the American Prospect this fall that pandemic preparedness was a “fundamentally limited approach that fits very well in a moderate agenda,” preferring to focus on expanding access to health insurance.
Pandemic preparedness doesn’t have a natural constituency the way that, say, expanding Medicare. There isn’t the same activist ferment around it that there is around climate change, another ongoing catastrophic risk to humanity. And the political upside for elected officials is hard to see. No one ever gets credit for the pandemic that didn’t happen, which is one reason why it’s so hard to get politicians to prepare for rare but potentially catastrophic threats.
But ultimately, we need to be prioritizing pandemic preparedness funding whenever the opportunity arises. The possibility of increased pandemic preparedness investment in non-Build Back Better bills should not prevent any investment from occurring in Build Back Better. Even a full $65 billion program over 10 years would pale in comparison to the $500-$600 billion that Manchin supports to tackle climate change, for instance, or the $200 billion the Biden administration estimates that universal pre-K (another Manchin-supported policy) will cost over 10 years.
While it would be great if an opportunity presents itself for bipartisan investment in pandemic preparedness, we can’t count on that. The best way for Manchin and Biden to prevent the next pandemic is to invest in prevention right now.
A woman waits for her neighbor while Ukrainian army soldiers patrol the streets in Mayorske, a village near a closed, Ukraine-controlled checkpoint, where tensions are high as Russian military forces gather near the border. (photo: Andriy Andriyenko/AP)
A reporting trip to Donbass reveals the tight hold Russia already has over the lives of Ukrainians accustomed to living with war.
Another challenge, unmentioned, would be the mud.
As I read the assessment, I was halfway to Kostyantynivka, a small city in Donetsk that is the last stop — and the closest to the front line of the war in Donbass — on the seven-hour train from Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
“The greatest danger is while staying on the front line,” the security message said. “So please reduce your time there wherever possible.”
But with Russia massing troops on the border and the U.S. warning that an invasion could be imminent, our reporting trip sought to paint a picture of the war that has been going on for nearly eight years, killing more than 14,000 people and displacing more than 730,000. We also hoped to gauge whether the risk of escalation seemed as dire to Ukrainian soldiers and commanders as Washington claimed. So my colleague, the photographer Brendan Hoffman, and I were angling to spend as much time near the front as possible.
In Brussels, I cover the EU and NATO, where the main conflict zone is the press room at the European Commission and the biggest threat can be bad cafeteria food. So before flying to Kyiv, I drove 90 minutes from my office to West Flanders, close to the battlefields of World War I, to buy body armor. Expecting the mud, I also packed boots.
I’ve followed the Ukraine story closely since before the start of the Maidan Revolution in 2013, when I was a Moscow-based correspondent for The New York Times. I spent months in Kyiv during and after the pro-European protests, and also reported from Crimea where I saw Russian soldiers, in uniforms without insignia, remove the license plates from their military vehicles. And I was at one of the few Ukrainian military bases to put up resistance before it was finally taken by Russian forces that came busting in with armored vehicles and gunfire.
In these situations, the disconnect between political rhetoric and reality on the ground can be big.
As a result of the recent U.S. warnings, the world was suddenly trying to guess whether Russia would or would not invade Ukraine (again) — and, if so, when. But in Ukraine, we found less focus on the question of outright invasion and more concern that Moscow would never release the grip it already has over the occupied swaths of Donetsk and Luhansk. We also heard fears that the West would inadvertently help Russia destabilize the Ukrainian government by pressuring President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to hold local elections in Donbass and grant the region measures of autonomy without first restoring Kyiv’s political authority and its control over Ukraine’s border with Russia.
Invasion is an ever-present risk, but one that doesn’t fit with Putin’s hybrid strategy so far. Rather, conversations with soldiers on the front lines and civilians living nearby highlighted just how deeply Russia has entangled itself in Ukraine — not just in the occupied territories, but in the daily lives of Ukrainians who have grown accustomed to living with war, and whose aspirations to live in a normal, democratic European country hang in the balance.
Donbass is an old coal mining region, but war is now the area’s main occupation. The extent of that transformation was instantly visible at the rail stations in Kramatorsk and Kostyantynivka, where there seemed to be at least as many soldiers in fatigues as there were civilians.
As I arrived in Kostyantynivka on the “fast” train from Kyiv, there were soldiers in and outside the station, on street corners, and crowded into a Georgian café across the street selling coffee and the cheese-stuffed pies called khachapuri. In an old Soviet-style stolovaya, or canteen, where a full meal costs about $5, three soldiers were topping off their lunch with vodka shots.
After so many years of fighting and bloodshed — open warfare in the early years, a grinding battle of attrition more recently — military conflict, its bureaucratic encumbrances and its persistent sense of unease are now built into the landscape and into people’s lives. It is a sad situation similar to other zones that have experienced seemingly never-ending hostilities, such as Israel’s West Bank or Nagorno-Karabakh before last year’s decisive victory of Azerbaijan over Armenia. The abnormal — shelling and shooting, highway checkpoints, abandoned bombed-out buildings — is now normal. And the misery of war blends with the misery of the pandemic — as at military hospital No. 66, where we spoke to doctors who simultaneously treat patients with Covid and those wounded by shelling or sniper fire.
The human tragedy can be staggering to view and to hear about firsthand, all the more because it is unremarkable to the people experiencing it. On top of the lost lives, families have been separated, homes and livelihoods destroyed or abandoned. At a café in Kostyantynivka, Andrei Chornousov explained that he had not been able to attend the funerals of his parents who had remained in Donetsk after the start of the war. At first, he and his wife told their daughters, ages 8 and 6 at the time, that the bombs they were hearing were actually fireworks. Now, they are old enough to understand the truth.
And yet throughout our visit, there was also a sense that ironically, Putin’s tactic of creating a frozen conflict in Donbass was backfiring; the status quo in many ways has been faring better for Kyiv than Moscow. Slowly but surely the Ukrainian military has been growing stronger, acquiring new weapons like armed drones from Turkey, and benefiting from NATO’s support, such as the U.K. helping to build new naval bases. Soldiers are under no illusion that Ukraine could win a war against Russia, but they are certain they will make Russia pay a high price in blood. Meanwhile, democratic reforms are advancing in Kyiv, even as Russia is stuck paying the bills in the occupied territories. It was not hard to see why Putin seems intent on shaking things up.
Early on the morning of our first full day of reporting, our gear was in the back of a military truck. After an hour’s drive and a brief stop at a checkpoint, we were in Avdiivka, on the outskirts of Donetsk. We were headed to an industrial zone close to the front line, where the soldiers dig into surrounding trenches, peer out at the enemy through periscopes, and sleep in a basement for protection against shelling.
On the way, we stopped in a residential neighborhood to see what was left of a nine-story apartment building that was hit repeatedly by shelling, and sits mostly vacant. Sitting on a bench outside in the building’s rear yard was Danil Derbrovsky, who used to live with his family on the seventh floor. They now live with his parents in a different part of town. Derbrovsky said the building was shelled more than 50 times in the early years of the war, yet somehow his apartment remained mostly intact. “Even the windows were not broken,” he said. “But we’re afraid to live here.” His daughter, Diana, was just 7 years old when the fighting started. She is now 15.
In Avdiivka, soldiers said that nothing had changed at the front for months, if not years. It’s a standoff, with fighting that ebbs and flows but never stops.
Leading us through ankle-deep mud to see his soldiers in their trenches, Senior Lieutenant Mykhaylo Novitskyi, who has a 1-year-old son, Timur, said he was not worried about a Russian invasion, and that the West also should not be intimidated by Putin.
On the wall in one trench, the soldiers had tacked up photographs of injuries from sniper fire, as a reminder to stay vigilant.
“If we are not afraid, why should the West be afraid?” Novitskyi asked. “We are thinking about it all the time. There are three scenarios. The first is that Russia attacks, the second is that they give us the territories back, and third is they continue to provoke.” The most likely scenario, Novitskyi and other soldiers agreed, was the third.
In July 2020, a cease-fire between Ukraine and Russia provided some respite. But things began to worsen again this past spring when Russia massed troops on the border. Monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe say that by September, the numbers of cease-fire violations were back to pre-July 2020 levels. Now, with political tensions high, the violence has spiked even further.
The soldiers we met expressed little interest in politics. Most said they saw the war and their role in the conflict in the simplest terms: Russia and Russian-backed fighters had seized territory in Donetsk and Luhansk. Their job was to protect their land and to reclaim the occupied territories. If Russia invaded, they said, they would fight.
But there are reasons to believe that even if Putin decides not to push his troops beyond Donbass in pursuit of a land bridge to Crimea, as some in the West fear, Russia will not back away.
One soldier we met in the frontline village of Pisky had attended a military high school in Donetsk before the start of the war. The school’s website notes that it is now following Russian educational regulations “on the official instructions of the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.”
The Kremlin for years has pursued a policy of soft annexation in the occupied territories, issuing Russian passports to residents, imposing Russian education regulations, and generally controlling regional governance. The territories are increasingly isolated. The checkpoint that we visited near the occupied city of Horlivka used to handle 12,000 crossings per day, but has been closed by the separatist side, ostensibly because of Covid, since March 2020.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin last week reiterated a list of demands, including a hard guarantee that NATO would not expand eastward, but that made no mention of the situation in Donbass — a sign to some that the military incursion into Ukraine is meant to create leverage, a means to grander geopolitical ends.
Essentially, Russia appears to be using Ukraine as a pawn — precisely what Putin accuses the West of doing, as he did in a long treatise last summer proclaiming Russians and Ukrainians to be “one people” who share a “historical motherland” but accusing Kyiv of serving “external patrons and masters.”
Back in Avdiivka, Novitskyi urged the West not to buy Russian propaganda. He reiterated that there was no reason for Ukrainians to fear. “We’re at home,” he said. “And at home, you relax.”
A koala is taken into rehabilitation from a timber plantation in Victoria, Australia after cases of alleged animal cruelty were discovered on the site. (photo: AP)
According to a statement from Victoria state's Conservation Regulator, 21 koalas were found dead and dozens more injured at a timber plantation in Cape Bridgewater, about 377 kilometers (234 miles) southwest of the state capital, Melbourne, in February 2020.
Authorities euthanized 49 of the wounded koalas, with many suffering from starvation, dehydration and fractures, the statement said.
A man and an earthmoving company are accused of causing "unreasonable pain or suffering to dozens of koalas," the statement said. "They are also charged with destroying koalas which are a protected species."
They face a total of 126 charges each, including 18 aggravated cruelty charges for allegedly causing fatal injuries. One cruelty charge was laid against a separate contracting business for allegedly disturbing the koala population. The statement did not name those accused.
The maximum penalty for one charge of animal cruelty is nearly $78,000 for a business and more than $32,000 or 12 months' jail for an individual.
In a statement at the time, Conservation group Friends of the Earth Australia called the incident a "koala massacre," adding it was "alarmed that such wanton destruction and widespread death and injuries continue to plague the south west Victorian plantation industry."
Threats to koalas
Koalas are a protected species in Australia and face a number of threats to their survival.
The country's koala population suffered severe losses during the catastrophic bushfires of 2019, which destroyed more than 12 million acres (48,000 square kilometers) of land across the state of New South Wales alone.
More than 60,000 koalas either died, lost their habitat or suffered injury from the flames, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
Experts say the species is also facing localized extinctions because of the threat of chlamydia, which causes blindness and painful cysts in a koala's reproductive tract that may lead to infertility or death.
The climate crisis has made koalas more susceptible to the disease. Chlamydia spreads more quickly through their population under stressful environmental conditions, including hot weather, drought and habitat loss, according to the Australian government.
In mid-2021, an Australian government report on the conservation status of koalas recommended the animal's status be changed to "endangered" in Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, as a result of the rapid population decline in those areas.
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