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12 December 21
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But Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who spent almost 14 years at Guantánamo and says he was brutally beaten and threatened with execution without ever being charged with a crime, has some advice for his onetime captors: Come clean about what was done to the detainees there, and transfer those accused of committing the Sept. 11 attacks to the United States so they can be openly tried in a court of law.
“They should take anyone who is alleged of those heinous crimes to court in America and let them face the music,” Slahi, 50, now a free man, said during an interview for the Yahoo News “Skullduggery” podcast. “How can you be the leader of the free world if you don’t respect the rule of law?”
Slahi’s story serves as a reminder that when Martin Luther King Jr. said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” the bending can take an excruciatingly long time. It is a story that is powerfully told in “The Mauritanian,” a movie released earlier this year starring Jodie Foster as Slahi’s defense lawyer who helped secure his release after years of legal battles.
An engineering student from Mauritania who had gotten a scholarship to study in Germany, Slahi was swept up in an unrelenting international dragnet in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. At the request of U.S officials, he was detained by Mauritanian police, flown to Jordan in a secretive procedure known as rendition, and then transferred to Guantánamo in early 2002, where he was accused — falsely, as it turned out — of recruiting the hijackers who flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
When Slahi denied the allegations, his interrogators didn’t believe him. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered that he be subjected to harsh interrogations that went far beyond what was in the Army field manual.
That’s “when they start the torture,” said Slahi, recounting his experience via Zoom from Dakar, Senegal. “I remember one day I almost died because they put me in this fridge. And I’m telling you, like, when I say ‘the fridge,’ people don’t understand this because [another detainee] did not survive the fridge. He died in the fridge. It was too cold.
“And I remember this Marine guy, he was like, I was in the fridge and he was pouring water over me and I wore only a thin uniform and I was so cold. But I really wanted him to stop, I wanted to talk. But I couldn’t talk because my lips couldn’t move and my tongue, it was like a stone.”
To be sure, U.S. intelligence officials had reason to be suspicious of Slahi. He seemed, at first blush, the Forrest Gump of Islamic terrorism. A devout Muslim, he had gone to Afghanistan in 1990 to fight with the mujahedeen against the Soviet occupation and joined al-Qaida. (This was during a period in which the CIA was arming the mujahedeen and years before al-Qaida was linked to acts of terrorism.)
When Slahi was studying in Germany, he had received a call from his cousin, a member of al-Qaida’s Shura Council, that was placed from Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone. (According to Slahi, his cousin wanted him to transfer funds for the medical expenses of his father.)
And when he returned to Germany, in 1999, a friend asked him to pick up and bring back to his apartment three visitors from the Middle East, one of whom was Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the organizers of the 9/11 attacks. (Slahi says he had no idea who Binalshibh was and the subject of terror attacks never came up.)
With so many suspicious links, Pentagon interrogators were determined to break him. He was, he says, beaten mercilessly and deprived of sleep for days at a time. Female interrogators — at times wearing masks — disrobed him. They taunted, humiliated, and, he said, sexually assaulted him.
“Still to this day, I have a lot of issues and problems when people touch me, you know, when people close to me touch me, I don’t want them to get close to me,” he said.
There was yet more: He was deprived of sleep for days at a time, bombarded with loud rock music, and, at one point, taken on a boat ride, force-fed seawater and threatened with execution. But what finally broke him was another ploy: His chief interrogator, an ex-Chicago cop with a checkered record of abusing prisoners, told him they were going to arrest his mother and bring her to Guantánamo.
The interrogator “came to me and he handed me a letter. He said this is a letter stating that my mother would be kidnapped, and he insinuated that she would be raped.” It was, he said, “like a stab through my heart.”
“And the only way to stop that from happening was for me to confess to my, quote, unquote, ‘crimes.’ So I wanted to say anything, everything, whatever he wants.”
And so Slahi cracked, signing a lengthy detailed confession to being every bit the al-Qaida operative U.S. officials had accused him of being. In doing so, he was echoing a prewritten script based on what Binalshibh himself had confessed to — Slahi had recruited him for the 9/11 plot. As with Slahi’s confession, it was made only after similar torture.
“When I was tortured, I wanted only to please my interrogator,” said Slahi. “If they told me I was on Mars, I will tell them I was on Mars. If they told me, ‘You were the hijackers and you died on one of the planes,’ I would tell them I died on the plane.”
As ghastly as Slahi’s account sounds, much of it was documented in a searing 2009 report by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The report details how Guantánamo commanders, frustrated at Slahi’s lack of cooperation, proposed special interrogation methods to “shock” the prisoner into submission. He was to be hooded, shaved and doused in freezing cold water and subjected to sensory deprivation and “sleep adjustment,” the report states. Female interrogators were to “make close physical contact” in order to “increase his stress level.” Even before Rumsfeld signed off, some of those methods had begun, the report states. One of the interrogators told Slahi he would “very soon disappear down a very dark hole” and his “very existence will become erased.” He was “shown a fictitious letter” stating that his mother had been detained and might be “transferred to GTMO.”
Slahi’s confession never held up — and he ultimately renounced every word of it. (After reaffirming his denials, he was given two lie detector tests and passed both.) When a Marine officer, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, was assigned to prosecute Slahi before a military commission, he secured access to the classified records of what was done to him and was appalled. “It became clear that what had been done to Slahi amounted to torture,” he said. Couch quit the case in protest. In 2010, Slahi’s lawyer, Nancy Hollander, persuaded a federal judge to order him freed in a habeas corpus hearing.
But even that didn’t lead to Slahi’s release from Guantánamo. The Obama administration appealed the judge’s order, and his case dragged on for another six years. Finally, the government gave up and let Slahi return to his native Mauritania in October 2016.
By then, Slahi had written a book about his experiences, “Guantánamo Diary,” that became an international bestseller and turned him into a symbol of the U.S. government’s excesses in the war on terror. But still, Slahi says, he holds no personal animus against his interrogators. As documented in “In Search of Monsters,” a new documentary film by journalist John Goetz that was recently featured on the National Public Radio program “This American Life," he has even met and bonded with some of those interrogators.
“I tell you a secret, a lot of people really don’t believe that I don’t hold any grudge, and they’re wrong,” he said. Throughout his ordeal, “I took it upon myself to be a nice person and took a vow of kindness no matter what. And you cannot have a vow of kindness without forgiving people. This is what matters to me. I’m so selfish. I want to feel good, you know? And that’s my way to feel good.”
Peter Navarro. (photo: Chris Kleponis/Polaris/Bloomberg)
The direct order cited by Navarro in his letter to Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), the committee chairman, is a public statement Trump issued last month urging “Peter Navarro to protect executive privilege and not let these unhinged Democrats discredit our great accomplishments.” House Democrats released Navarro’s response to the November subpoena on Sunday, along with Clyburn’s reply, which included him scorning the ex-adviser. “Your blanket refusal to comply with the subpoena in its entirety is improper,” Clyburn wrote. “It is abundantly clear that you possess information responsive to the subpoena that is not covered by any colorable claims of executive privilege.”
Navarro fought with government scientists over the federal response to the pandemic and was accused of prioritizing Trump’s election-fraud lies. The former trade adviser risking being held in contempt of Congress follows former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon being indicted on two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to share information to a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
CBP. (photo: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)
The Sheppard, an upscale speakeasy, was so dimly lit it was sometimes hard to see the menu, let alone a stranger at the bar. But amid the red velvet upholstery, Watkins, then a reporter at Politico, almost immediately spotted the man she was supposed to meet: He was wearing a corduroy blazer and jeans and had a distinctive gap between his teeth.
“I won’t tell you my name, but I work for the U.S. government,” he said, according to her account later provided to government investigators.
It was June 1, 2017, and Watkins was a rising star in the world of national security journalism, breaking big stories about the investigation into President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. She had hopped from the Huffington Post to BuzzFeed and then Politico, when a man writing under the pseudonym Jack Bentley had reached out, wanting to meet with her. She agreed, as journalists often do, thinking he might be a potential source.
Once at the bar, however, she found that the man seemed more interested in gathering information about her than in providing her with information. And he appeared to know a lot about her, including details of her travels and her relationship with James Wolfe, an older man who worked on Capitol Hill.
The meeting, which lasted almost four hours, would change both of their lives. Late the following year, Wolfe, the onetime boyfriend of Watkins, was sentenced to two months in prison for lying to the FBI about his relationship with reporters. And Watkins, by then at the New York Times, faced ethical questions about her relationship with Wolfe, even though she denied he had been a source for her stories while they were involved.
The true mystery of the saga was the role of the man at the bar. He was portrayed in subsequent articles as something of a rogue actor who had taken it upon himself to conduct a Trump-era leak investigation, and he subsequently faced an internal investigation at the Department of Homeland Security, where he worked.
Yet documents obtained by Yahoo News, including an inspector general report that spans more than 500 pages — and includes transcripts of interviews that investigators conducted with those involved, emails and other records — reveal a far more disturbing story than the targeting of a single journalist. The man, whose real name is Jeffrey Rambo, worked at a secretive Customs and Border Protection division. The division, which still operates today, had few rules and routinely used the country’s most sensitive databases to obtain the travel records and financial and personal information of journalists, government officials, congressional members and their staff, NGO workers and others.
As many as 20 journalists were investigated as part of the division’s work, which eventually led to referrals for criminal prosecution against Rambo, his boss and a co-worker. None were charged, however.
Rambo, who believes he was unfairly vilified for seeking out Watkins, said in a wide-ranging exclusive interview with Yahoo News that he acted legally and appropriately. He agreed to speak amid what he describes as escalating threats against him in San Diego, where he now lives, and after Yahoo News obtained a copy of the inspector general investigation into Rambo and his colleagues.
“ I’m being accused of blackmailing a journalist and trying to sign her up as an FBI informant, which is what’s being plastered all around San Diego at the moment because of misinformation reported by the news media,” he said in the interview.
The story Rambo tells is even stranger than the one already in the public view, which is strange enough. His meeting with Watkins, he says, was the result of a Trump-era White House assignment to Customs and Border Protection to combat forced labor. Rambo, the lead on the project, was authorized to reach out to anyone who he thought might be useful, including journalists and other people inside and outside the government.
As part of that process, he and others he worked with vetted those potential contacts, pulling email addresses, phone numbers and photos from passport applications and checking that information through numerous sensitive government databases, including the terrorism watchlist.
“There is no specific guidance on how to vet someone,” Rambo later told investigators. “In terms of policy and procedure, to be 100 percent frank there, there's no policy and procedure on vetting.”
Those swept up in the division’s vetting included journalists from national news organizations, ranging from the Associated Press to the New York Times. Even Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post, was flagged in those searches.
“When a name comes across your desk you run it through every system you have access to, that's just status quo, that's what everyone does,” Rambo told investigators.
But the idea of government officials trawling through government databases, looking at the private lives — and even romantic relationships — of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime, is precisely what civil liberties experts have warned about for years.
“For two decades, we’ve seen how the collect-it-all, share-it-all philosophy underlying post-9/11 law enforcement floods agencies with sensitive personal information on millions of Americans,” Hugh Handeyside, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties National Security Project, told Yahoo News. “When agencies give their employees access to this ocean of information, especially without training or rigorous oversight, the potential for abuse goes through the roof.”
Rambo, however, doesn’t see his story as one of abuse. He was doing precisely what his higher-ups authorized him to do.
“I’m called a rogue Border Patrol agent, I’m called a right-hand man of the Trump administration, I accessed data improperly, I violated her constitutional rights — all of these things are untrue,” Rambo told Yahoo News. “All these things are standard practices that — let me rephrase that. All of the things that led up to my interest in Ali Watkins were standard practice of what we do and what we did and probably what’s still done to this day.”
CBP’s National Targeting Center was created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to help identify potential threats crossing the borders of the United States, whether people, drugs or weapons. When Rambo was detailed to the center in 2017, he was assigned to the newly launched Counter Network Division, a unit designed as a bridge between law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community that prided itself on taking “out of the box” approaches.
Freed from the constraints of bureaucracy, those inside were supposed to think creatively about how to solve problems. According to testimony in the inspector general report, Rambo’s supervisor, Dan White, fostered a freewheeling atmosphere at the division, calling his team “WOLF,” short for “way out in left field.” White even had a water bottle with a WOLF sticker. He himself would later tell investigators: “We are pushing the limits and so there is no norm, there is no guidelines, we are the ones making the guidelines.”
The division’s assignments were high-level and came directly from the CBP commissioner, the secretary of Homeland Security or the White House, which in May 2017 asked the division to look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the U.S. believed companies were using cobalt mined by forced labor to produce consumer goods in China. Rambo, one of few Border Patrol agents assigned to the division, where he worked alongside representatives from across law enforcement and intelligence agencies, was asked to lead the project. “My orders were to tackle a problem set that we were given from the White House,” he told Yahoo News.
Rambo, according to documents included in the inspector general report, was told to gather the evidence needed to hit companies with sanctions under the rarely used Tariff Act of 1930. He proposed using information from experts in academia, NGOs, humanitarian groups, officials at other government agencies and journalists specializing in forced labor reporting. The plan was greenlighted by his boss, he later told investigators, with one caveat. "Make sure you vet whoever you contact,” Rambo said White told him.
In late May 2017, Rambo and one of his co-workers began reaching out to people, including Martha Mendoza, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter who covered forced labor. On May 31, Rambo, using his government email, wrote to Mendoza explaining that CBP was trying to identify companies that were importing goods possibly linked to forced labor. “We are hoping to connect with subject matter experts outside of the traditional government circles as your ‘rules of engagement’ are a bit different than ours,” he wrote Mendoza, “and can perhaps help in pointing us in the right direction to U.S. companies that meet such criteria or are suspected of such.”
Another reporter who caught his eye was Ali Watkins. On June 1, he spotted a Politico story by Watkins on how Russia’s spy games were heating up inside the United States. Her story, which came at the height of Trump administration concerns over leaks relating to the FBI’s Russia investigation, cited a half-dozen anonymous current and former intelligence officials. “Ali Watkins was, for lack of a better word, the hot-topic reporter at the time,” Rambo told Yahoo News.
Rambo, who was later pressed repeatedly about why he chose to reach out to Watkins, a reporter who had never written about forced labor, said he was looking for prominent journalists with access and buzz. He told investigators he wanted to identify national security journalists who could not just tell CBP about forced labor but also publish stories that would allow him to “overstate” U.S. enforcement capabilities. Rambo believed these stories inflating U.S. capabilities would prompt shippers to alter their routes, proving they were involved in illegal activities.
“I thought, ‘OK, I’ll use Ali Watkins,’” he said.
A former senior DHS official told Yahoo News that forced labor was indeed a concern of CBP.
“Forced labor was a priority of the administration. It’s a priority of the Senate Finance Committee that oversees U.S. Customs and Border Protection," the former official added. "It remains a bipartisan priority both for the anticompetitive aspects and trade perspective, but more importantly for the humanitarian aspects."
(“Committee staff are not aware of the Counter Network Division working on forced labor,” Keith Chu, a spokesman for Sen. Ron Wyden, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told Yahoo News. The staff were also not aware that Rambo’s leak investigation was done under the auspices of working on the forced labor issue, he added.)
Asked about Rambo’s plan, however, the official expressed surprise that such a thing would be pursued at CBP.
“I can tell you at minimum that is an overexuberant interpretation. CBP does not conduct psychological ops or misinformation campaigns. CBP is not a member of the intelligence community. CBP does not have the authorities to do those kinds of things,” the former senior official said.
Rambo believed he did have the authority, and he had certainly had his boss’s approval to contact Watkins. After reading her story, he did something that most journalists probably don’t expect government officials to do: He ran Watkins through an assortment of databases. Those included, among others, CBP’s Automated Targeting System, a tool that compares travelers against law enforcement and intelligence data; TECS, which tracks people entering and exiting the country; the Treasury Department’s FinCEN, used for identifying financial crimes; and the State Department consular database, which included details of her passport application.
“When you say vet someone, you vet them. There’s no parameters on what that means,” Rambo said.
“Vet the reporters you use,” Rambo said his boss told him, “‘vet them through our systems.’ I vet them no different than I vet a terrorist.”
On his screen was Watkins’s international travel, color-coded blue in a format similar to an Excel spreadsheet. He saw a flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sandwiched between two trips with the same person, a man more than 30 years her senior named James Wolfe. Together they traveled to Cancún, London and Spain, according to the inspector general report.
Recounting his search of Watkins’s travel, Rambo began to reenact what he saw as his “aha moment.”
“I know what suspicious travel looks like,” he said, recalling the moment he thought he had stumbled on something big: the mystery male companion.
“Who is James Wolfe?” he recalled asking himself, mimicking typing when describing his efforts to identify Watkins’s traveling companion.
Then he queried Watkins’s family members, thinking he might be related to her. Wolfe, he found, was not a family member but a senior staff member on Capitol Hill.
“Why is Ali Watkins flying with the head of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee?” Rambo recalled wondering, excited by his find.
But he already had a theory, one that would later be denied by Watkins. Wolfe, he surmised, was giving her information and access in exchange for a personal relationship with her.
“It’s reasonable for me to believe in exchange for personal trips she was given access to Guantánamo,” he recounted, unaware that the Pentagon regularly offers journalists the opportunity to travel to the U.S. naval base there to report on legal proceedings related to 9/11 detainees.
Rambo then went to his boss. “I say, ‘This person is great in terms of access, but based on my vetting she may be receiving classified info,'” he recalled to Yahoo News.
White later told investigators that the division would regularly conduct checks on journalists to determine their personal connections, to establish if they were someone CBP could trust.
“Figure it out,” White told Rambo. “If you can use her, use her. If not, don’t.”
That afternoon, Rambo reached out to Watkins using the address jackbentleyesq@gmail.com, which he later described as an “off network” account sanctioned by the Counter Network Division. “It wasn’t just some random alias I created just then to meet her,” he said during an interview in San Diego, where lives with his two dogs, father-and-son beagles named Jack and Bentley.
He would later defend using the Gmail account and a fake name, he said, because he didn't want to provide information on where he worked unless he deemed her trustworthy. He and his boss even discussed signing her up as a confidential human source — a highly unusual proposal for a journalist — so she would be locked into a confidentiality agreement, though the idea was never pursued.
Rambo and Watkins agreed to meet in Dupont Circle that evening.
As Rambo prepped for his meeting, he reached out to an old FBI counterterrorism contact, now at the bureau’s headquarters. “Can you give me a call,” Rambo wrote in an email. “If possible ASAP. I need to run something by you that I *believe* might be in your swim lane.”
At the bar, Rambo sipped WhistlePig old fashioneds and fired off questions to Watkins. Could he trust her? Had she ever burned a source? The questions began to unnerve Watkins, particularly when they revealed that Rambo appeared to know private details about her life, like where she had lived in New Jersey for a short period, and where she traveled. And yet they stayed in the bar for nearly two hours talking.
Around midnight, as the bar was closing, Rambo paid with a credit card, and they began walking together up the street toward Kramerbooks & Afterwords, a popular bookstore and café near Dupont Circle. Inside, Watkins said, Rambo was holding up books and magazines while talking, as if to conceal his identity.
At around 1 a.m. the two left Kramerbooks together and walked down the street.
Standing in front of a closed Starbucks, Rambo continued to press Watkins about her sources. Had she ever had an inappropriate relationship with a source? Had she ever done anything to compromise her journalistic integrity?
Watkins said no, but eventually told Rambo what he already suspected: She was involved with Wolfe, but she denied he was leaking to her. “I’ve never received information from that person,” she said, according to her account later.
“Do you know he is married?” Rambo asked, turning the cellphone in his hand around so Watkins could see.
“This is his wife,” Rambo said, apparently not realizing he was showing her a photo of Wolfe’s first wife (the two had divorced and Wolfe had remarried).
Rambo continued to ask about her relationship, and what would happen to her career if it was made public.
“Are you trying to blackmail me?” Watkins asked him. Rambo denied he was.
The two continued talking outside the Starbucks, with Rambo pressing her on Wolfe and her confidential sources. Watkins by then felt “spooked,” she later told investigators.
Rambo never revealed to Watkins where he was employed or his real name, but she later told investigators he insinuated he was working in the Washington metro area with the FBI.
“Here’s a tip,” he told her not long before they parted ways around 2 a.m. “Don’t travel together.”
The morning after the meeting, both Watkins and Rambo each set out to investigate the other.
Rambo emailed his FBI contact again. “Confirmed improper relationship between a member of the SSCI and the press,” he wrote, using an abbreviation for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “Additional details in person if possible.”
“[Subject of investigation] is the SSCI Director of Security,” he added in another email an hour later.
That same day, Watkins returned to the Sheppard to get Rambo’s credit card slip, which had his real name. A quick Google search led to a story about a Border Patrol agent starting a brewery. She called CBP, gave his name and asked to be connected. After a brief silence, then a click, a phone rang. No one picked up. Still, she later told investigators, she took this as “quasi-confirmation” that Jack Bentley was Jeffrey Rambo. (Even several years later, Rambo is still furious at the bar for giving Watkins his credit card receipt. “Who owns that place? They gave her my personal information,” he fumed.)
Rambo didn’t know that she had identified his real name when, a few days after their meeting, he discussed with his boss, White, how to proceed. According to emails included in the inspector general report, Rambo was ready to hand everything over to the FBI, but his boss stopped him. White wanted to run Watkins through more DHS databases to find out if she had any sources inside the department, expanding the investigation. Rambo’s probe into Watkins and Wolfe also now had a name, taken from the whiskey he drank at the bar where he met Watkins: Operation Whistle Pig.
Rambo said Operation Whistle Pig was focused only on whether Wolfe was providing classified information to Watkins, or anyone else, but it appeared that a large number of journalists were caught up in the probe. “After ‘Operation Whistle Pig’ was approved, Rambo identified 15 to 20 national security reporters and conducted CBP records checks of those reporters,” according to a FBI counterintelligence memo included in the inspector general report.
While the Justice Department has policies on seeking information from journalists or news organizations, the rules apply to records that require a subpoena or warrant, such as phone records, not information that the government already possesses. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department responded to questions about this.
White then introduced Rambo and another member of the team to Charlie Ratliff, a program analyst in the Counter Network Division. Ratliff worked on DOMEX, a program that collects information from the contents of a person’s electronic device when they cross a U.S. border. The controversial program sweeps up everything from phone contacts and emails to the contents from encrypted messaging apps and social media.
“We know you do high profile,” White told Ratliff, introducing him to Rambo.
Rambo explained to Ratliff that Watkins and Wolfe were having an “affair” and that Wolfe may have been leaking classified information to Watkins. Rambo gave Ratliff what are known as “selectors,” such as telephone numbers, email addresses and Social Security numbers. Ratliff, in turn, ran those selectors through a number of databases, including the Terrorist Screening Database, a watchlist that has more than 1 million names and has been widely criticized for errors and lack of review.
Watkins didn’t have any direct connections in that database, also known as TSDB, but one of her contacts did: Arianna Huffington, the founder of the Huffington Post. “Oh….and the Huffington Post owner was/is a direct contact to a TSDB on 3 phones and 1 email. LoL,” Ratliff wrote in one email to White.
“It’s impossible for Arianna to comment, as she is completely unclear what her connection to the watchlist is,” a spokesperson for Huffington told Yahoo News.
Handeyside, the ACLU attorney, called the database “a due process disaster.”
“The standard for placement on the watchlist is so low, and the safeguards against errors and misplaced suspicion are so deficient, that it’s no wonder the watchlist has ballooned to well over a million people,” he said. “Having a connection to someone on the watchlist is not remotely suspicious of itself.”
But it wasn’t just journalists being investigated, or “vetted,” in the parlance of the Counter Network Division. Ratliff, whose email signature was “In God We Trust. For Everyone Else We Vet,” created a PDF file later that month that included “several Congressional referrals,” according to the inspector general report. That PDF was then sent to CBP’s Analytical Management Systems Control Office, which is described in congressional testimony as dedicated to finding anomalies among the agency’s employees “to mitigate any potential threat to the CBP mission.”
According to White’s later testimony, Ratliff regularly investigated congressional staffers’ travel captured by CBP to run against the Terrorist Screening Database. “White stated that when Congressional ‘Staffers’ schedule flights, the numbers they use get captured and analyzed by CBP,” the inspector general report says. White told the investigators that Ratliff “does this all the time,” looking at “inappropriate contacts between people.” At one point in an email, Ratliff also references sending a PDF package listing several congressional members linked to people on the Terrorism Screening Database. It is unclear, based on the inspector general report, which members were identified.
Rambo then contacted analysts with Deloitte, a government contractor that had employees working directly for CBP’s Counter Network Division, who specialized in investigating people using social media and other open sources of information. “I sent them the link to that [Russia] article as context as to who Ali Watkins was and basically told them to move on with that to uncover what they could,” Rambo told investigators. He identified Watkins as a “primary target” of Operation Whistle Pig and Wolfe as an “associated target.”
Deloitte did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
The Deloitte team soon sent back a bulletin pinpointing Watkins’s exact location on dates when they knew she was with Wolfe, like their trip to Spain. They also noted other geotagged Facebook check-ins during the time under scrutiny, including domestic travel to three states. The bulletin included information on her mother and brother and links to their profiles. Attached to the email were photos taken from Watkins’s Facebook profile showing her in Spain.
“Gracias,” Rambo replied.
There were conflicting accounts about how many other journalists, beyond Watkins, who were scrutinized by the Counter Network Division. White told investigators that in preparation for speaking with the Associated Press’s Mendoza, she was run through multiple databases, and “CBP discovered that one of the phone numbers on Mendoza’s phone was connected with a terrorist.”
In a statement to Yahoo, after being told of the investigation into one of its reporters, an AP spokesperson, Lauren Easton, blasted CBP.
“The Associated Press demands an immediate explanation from U.S. Customs and Border Protection as to why journalists including AP investigative reporter Martha Mendoza were run through databases used to track terrorists and identified as potential confidential informant recruits,” Easton told Yahoo News in a statement. “We are deeply concerned about this apparent abuse of power. This appears to be an example of journalists being targeted for simply doing their jobs, which is a violation of the First Amendment.”
According to a memo that Troy Miller, then the head of the National Targeting Center, provided to investigators, the division reached out to reporters at the Huffington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Associated Press. “These entities were analyzed further to determine nexus to the information being provided to CBP in order to validate any future information that would be provided on alleged forced labor practices,” wrote Miller, who went on to become the acting CBP commissioner.
According to records included in the inspector general report, such vetting was standard practice at the division.
“I would just remove journalists from that question, to begin with,” Rambo later said when asked about the vetting process for journalists. “Just through day-to-day practice of how we operate, when you're told to vet somebody, that you vet them through all of those systems.”
A former New York Times reporter confirmed to Yahoo News that they met with Dan White and others at CBP to discuss trade-based money laundering, among other issues. “They also pitched me on the labor abuse work that CBP was doing,” the former Times reporter said.
"We are deeply troubled to learn how U.S. Customs and Border Protection ran this investigation into a journalist's sources,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a New York Times spokesperson, wrote to Yahoo News. “As the Attorney General has said clearly, the government needs to stop using leak investigations as an excuse to interfere with journalism. It is time for Customs and Border Protection to make public a full record of what happened in this investigation so this sort of improper conduct is not repeated."
The Justice Department and the White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including about the appropriateness of investigating journalists. A spokesperson for DHS referred requests for comment to CBP.
“CBP vetting and investigatory operations, including those conducted by the Counter Network Division, are strictly governed by well-established protocols and best practices,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a written statement to Yahoo News. “The Counter Network Division within U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) National Targeting Center (NTC) shares information with key partners, analyze threats, and enhances the U.S. government’s operational ability to combat illicit networks, including those associated with terrorists and transnational criminal organizations.”
“CBP does not investigate individuals without a legitimate and legal basis to do so,” the spokesperson added. “These investigations support CBP’s mission to protect our communities.”
Whatever Rambo’s original purpose for vetting Watkins, his focus in the days after meeting her was on furthering a leak investigation, and he appeared to view himself as a central player. “[M]y main concern is that encounters such as these are a large part of the leaks occurring and building it out could paint a better picture with regards to that if the dots can all be connected,” he wrote to the FBI on June 5.
And it was jusn’t just Watkins who interested him. When Reality Winner was arrested for leaking classified information about Russia to the Intercept that month, Rambo emailed the Deloitte contractors working with him a link to a news story about her arrest. “First of many,” one of the Deloitte contractors replied.
Rambo responded with just a photo of Omar Little, an iconic character from the long-running television series “The Wire” (Little is a criminal who operates according to a strict moral code). Underneath the image were the words “Omar Comin Yo,” a reference to his catchphrase meant to evoke fear and impending death. “As in Ali Watkins or James Wolfe is next in terms of being arrested for leaking information,” Wolfe told investigators when asked what he meant with the reply.
Over the summer, Rambo stayed on the leak investigation, even requesting another cellphone for his work with the FBI. In mid-July, he met with two FBI agents at an Au Bon Pain next to the Hoover building in downtown Washington, D.C., to relay what he knew about Watkins and Wolfe. He also sent them copies of their travel records plucked from CBP’s system. “Let me know if you need anything else specifically and I’ll get it to you ASAP,” Rambo told the FBI agents, according to an email he sent following the meeting.
“This is all great info. Thanks so much for your help,” one of the agents replied. “I’ll look over all of this and get a plan moving forward.”
On July 13, Rambo wrote the Deloitte team with good news. “Just as a heads up, ‘Whistle Pig’ was accepted as a full-blown case,” he wrote. “Just got confirmation yesterday so wanted to update you guys so you knew what became of it.”
While Rambo thought the case was moving forward, one of agents told him a month later they weren’t pursuing the investigation. In October, however, Rambo, who was now working for CBP in California, got a call. “The FBI just launched a media leak investigation unit, and suddenly they had all the interest in the world,” he recalled to Yahoo News.
He was also asked to sign a Classified National Security Disclosure Agreement preventing him from discussing his conversation with the FBI about Watkins and Wolfe, according to the inspector general report.
Finally, nearly a year later after his last conversation with FBI agents, Rambo’s work seemed to pay off: James Wolfe was indicted, not for leaking classified information but for lying to FBI agents about his relationship with reporters, including his travel with Watkins. (Wolfe did not respond to a request for comment.)
What should have seemed like good news for Rambo suddenly made him a lightning rod. On June 12, 2018, just a week after Wolfe was indicted, the Washington Post published an article about Rambo’s meeting with Watkins, identifying him by his real name. Rambo, who never realized she had learned his name, was blindsided.
Rambo, the article reported, had told Watkins that “the administration was eager to investigate journalists and learn the identity of their confidential sources to stanch leaks of classified information.”
Rather than a law enforcement officer working hand-in-hand with the FBI on an investigation, Rambo suddenly found himself painted as a rogue agent conducting his own leak investigation. “Rambo’s search of travel records could be a crime if he didn’t have a legitimate reason to examine that information,” the Post said it had been told by unnamed officials.
“Rambo was not part of the FBI’s investigation of Wolfe,” the Post reported, citing an anonymous law enforcement official.
The FBI nondisclosure agreement left Rambo hamstrung: He couldn’t correct the record or break his silence. “Knowing what I know now, I never would have signed it,” he said, adding that his lawyer has since told him it probably isn’t binding.
The FBI declined to comment on any aspect of this story.
White would initially claim to investigators that he wasn’t aware of Rambo’s meeting with Watkins. But he wrote an email to Ratliff the day after the article was published saying, “Thanks, now I just have to go back and recreate Rambo’s date night,” an apparent reference to the meeting at the Sheppard.
That same day, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General launched an investigation into Rambo, who was put on administrative leave. The probe, conducted jointly with CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility, focused on whether Rambo improperly accessed government databases to get information on Watkins and Wolfe without a need to know, and if he’d used that information to question Watkins about possible leaks of classified information outside the scope of his official duties.
Over the next two years, investigators interviewed Rambo, his supervisors, his co-workers and even Watkins. They also reviewed thousands of emails and records related to Rambo’s investigation into Watkins and Wolfe and his interactions with the FBI.
The inspector general’s report found grounds for potential criminal charges against Rambo, including improperly accessing records, making false statements and conspiracy. White, who appeared to have lied about several aspects of his role in the Watkins probe, was referred to prosecutors for possible charges of conspiracy and making false statements, the latter being the same charge that sent Wolfe to prison. Ratliff, who helped Rambo with the searches, also faced potential charges.
White did not respond to a detailed request for comment. Yahoo News made multiple attempts to reach Ratliff, who it appears no longer works at CBP.
On Oct. 22, 2020, the Office of Inspector General presented the criminal referrals to Mark Lytle, the head of financial crimes at United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. In January, Lytle replied that it was declining to prosecute, based on several factors, including legal precedent on law enforcement use of databases and “the lack of CBP policies and procedures concerning Rambo’s duties.”
A spokesperson for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to comment. Lytle, who has since left the office, did not respond to requests for comment.
That doesn’t surprise Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and constitutional law expert who has reviewed surveillance programs. When the government wants to investigate someone for doing something illegal or inappropriate, it has free rein so long as it doesn’t violate any specific law. “If there is no law or policy that specifically regulates it, then there’s nothing that prohibits it,” he said.
But Handeyside, the ACLU attorney, says these very lack of procedures are the heart of the problem: “We’re in a very dangerous place if having no rules means officers can’t break any rules.”
Beyond the legal precedent, there was another reason prosecutors didn’t want to charge Rambo. “Chief Lytle also stated that it would not be very good jury appeal as Rambo’s actions revealed potential criminal violations by Wolfe, Rambo reported the information to the FBI, and Wolfe was later indicted,” the inspector general report states.
In response to questions about the results of its investigation, a spokesperson for the Office of Inspector General replied: “To maintain independence in appearance and fact, DHS OIG does not participate in DHS operational or programmatic decisions.”
Chu, the Wyden spokesperson, said the senator was only aware of the inspector general’s investigation from news reports. “The [Department of Homeland Security inspector general] was asked repeatedly for the results of its investigation, but never provided it,” he said.
Watkins, who still works as a reporter at the New York Times, expressed outrage over the new revelations about the investigation into her and Wolfe’s relationship. “I’m deeply troubled at the lengths CBP and DHS personnel apparently went to try and identify journalistic sources and dig into my personal life,” she told Yahoo News. “It was chilling then, and it remains chilling now.”
While acknowledging that her prior relationship with Wolfe was problematic for her reporting, she said that was no excuse for the government’s conduct. “My mistakes — none of which should have concerned Jeffrey Rambo or the CBP — have been more than clearly established in various records, including my employer’s,” she added. “Those mistakes were mine, not my family’s, and that their privacy was violated in this process is egregious.”
The same month that prosecutors told the inspector general they would not be pursuing charges, Rambo was taken off administrative leave and cleared to return to work as a Border Patrol agent. It wasn’t public vindication, but at least he had his job back.
Earlier this year, Jeffrey Rambo opened a small coffee shop in the Barrio Logan section of San Diego, home to a tight-knit Latino community. He says its name, Storymakers Coffee Roasters, is a tribute to the coffee producers the shop features. He’s also back in the field working as a Border Patrol agent, but he runs the coffee shop in his free time. He describes coffee roasting as his passion.
One of the keepsakes he has from his time in the Washington area is a large glass globe with cobalt blue oceans and clear land, an award from CBP for his work that came with a cash bonus. The globe is a reminder that, before the press coverage, he was lauded for his work at the National Targeting Center, including on the Watkins/Wolfe case. The plaque on the globe reads: “Jeffrey Rambo — In Honor and Recognition of Your Dedication to the National Targeting Center Counter Network Division in 2017.” At his going-away party, his boss even cited his work on the leak investigation, Rambo told investigators.
He still has his job at CBP, but not the accolades. And it hasn’t been easy going at his coffee shop either. In late September, he arrived one morning and found a photo of himself plastered to a telephone pole outside, identifying him as a Border Patrol agent. It called him a racist who tried to blackmail a journalist. Some posters had a QR code that linked to a list of articles about Rambo. The posters were also plastered around the neighborhood, which he blames on the press coverage of his role in the Wolfe investigation.
More than four years after he met with Watkins, Rambo agreed to sit down with a Yahoo News journalist at a cocktail bar in San Diego to tell his story. He agreed to speak, he said, because of the threats to him and his shop. He also wants people to know he’s been cleared by CBP — something the agency has authorized him to disclose — and is hoping to offset the bad news stories.
He’s angry at lots of people. At the press for vilifying him, and CBP for not publicly defending him, and the FBI for its “poor handling” of the case. “They never would have had a case pertaining to Ali Watkins or James Wolfe or any other people that may or may not be involved in this matter if that information wasn’t provided to them by me,” he says.
The news stories follow him everywhere. Recently, he had a date planned with a woman, but she canceled after reading articles about him. In the meantime, Dan White, Rambo’s onetime boss, is back at the Counter Network Division, supervising the same team as before. When the inspector general requested any new policies or procedures the division had for contacts with journalists and people outside government, it received no reply.
Rambo is convinced the whole story will clear him.
Sitting with a Yahoo News reporter at the bar, not far from his coffee shop, Rambo was sipping his WhistlePig old fashioned, talking about the most recent threats, when two women sitting across the bar recognized him from the fliers around Barrio Logan, the ones that called him a “fed” and “a rat,” and said he tried to blackmail a journalist and make her an FBI informant.
"How did you not see this would be a problem?" said one of the women, referring to his opening a coffee shop in Barrio Logan.
As with everyone else, Rambo was convinced that if he told them his side of the story, he could win them over.
“Ask me anything,” he said, buying their next round of drinks.
For two hours, until the bar closed, Rambo spoke to the women about his job and his presence in Barrio Logan.
“Jeffrey Rambo the coffee shop owner is different than Jeffrey Rambo, Border Patrol agent,” he told them. “That’s just my day job.”
Yet a few hours later, after the bar closed, Jeffrey Rambo, whether a border agent or coffee shop owner, was tearing down posters of himself around his neighborhood in San Diego. He wanted CBP and the police to come take fingerprints, to identify who put up the posters (they declined). “CBP said this is a private matter, but that’s bullshit,” he said. “In this neighborhood, being identified as law enforcement is dangerous.”
The man who investigated a journalist and her sources now feels wronged by the media, which investigated him, and frustrated that he can’t marshal the resources of the government to investigate his critics.
Rambo knows that speaking to a journalist about his case will likely get him fired from his government job, but CBP’s refusal to defend him has led him, as he put it, “to take matters into my own hands.”
“What none of these articles identify me as, is a law enforcement officer who was cleared of wrongdoing, who actually had a true purpose to be doing what I was doing,” he said, “and CBP refuses to acknowledge that, refuses to admit that, refuses to make that wrong right.”
Insurrections loyal to President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
For many rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, self-incriminating messages, photos and videos that they broadcast on social media before, during and after the riot are influencing even the sentences in their criminal cases.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson read aloud some of Russell Peterson’s posts about the riot before she sentenced the Pennsylvania man to 30 days imprisonment. “Overall I had fun lol,” Peterson posted on Facebook.
The judge told Peterson that his posts made it “extraordinarily difficult” for her to show him leniency.
“The ’lol’ particularly stuck in my craw because, as I hope you’ve come to understand, nothing about January 6th was funny,” Jackson added. “No one locked in a room, cowering under a table for hours, was laughing.”
Among the biggest takeaways so far from the Justice Department's prosecution of the insurrection is how large a role social media has played, with much of the most damning evidence coming from rioters' own words and videos.
FBI agents have identified scores of rioters from public posts and records subpoenaed from social media platforms. Prosecutors use the posts to build cases. Judge now are citing defendants' words and images as factors weighing in favor of tougher sentences.
As of Friday, more than 50 people have been sentenced for federal crimes related to the insurrection. In at least 28 of those cases, prosecutors factored a defendant’s social media posts into their requests for stricter sentences, according to an Associated Press review of court records.
Many rioters used social media to celebrate the violence or spew hateful rhetoric. Others used it to spread misinformation, promote baseless conspiracy theories or play down their actions. Prosecutors also have accused a few defendants of trying to destroy evidence by deleting posts.
Approximately 700 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the riot. About 150 of them have pleaded guilty. More than 20 defendants have been sentenced to jail or prison terms or to time already served behind bars. Over a dozen others received home confinement sentences.
Rioters’ statements, in person or on social media, aren’t the only consideration for prosecutors or judges. Justice Department sentencing memos say defendants also should be judged by whether they engaged in any violence or damaged property, whether they destroyed evidence, how long they spent inside the Capitol, where they went inside the building and whether they have shown sincere remorse.
Prosecutors recommended probation for Indiana hair salon owner Dona Sue Bissey, but Judge Tanya Chutkan sentenced her to two weeks in jail for her participation in the riot. The judge noted that Bisssey posted a screenshot of a Twitter post that read, “This is the First time the U.S. Capitol had been breached since it was attacked by the British in 1814.”
“When Ms. Bissey got home, she was not struck with remorse or regret for what she had done,” Chutkan said. “She is celebrating and bragging about her participation in what amounted to an attempted overthrow of the government.”
FBI agents obtained a search warrant for Andrew Ryan Bennett's Facebook account after getting a tip that the Maryland man live-streamed video from inside the Capitol. Two days before the riot, Bennett posted a Facebook message that said, “You better be ready chaos is coming and I will be in DC on 1/6/2021 fighting for my freedom!.”
Judge James Boasberg singled out that post as an “aggravating” factor weighing in favor of house arrest instead of a fully probationary sentence.
“The cornerstone of our democratic republic is the peaceful transfer of power after elections,” the judge told Bennett. “What you and others did on January 6th was nothing less than an attempt to undermine that system of government.”
Senior Judge Reggie Walton noted that Lori Ann Vinson publicly expressed pride in her actions at the Capitol during television news interviews and on Facebook.
“I understand that sometimes emotions get in the way and people do and say stupid things, because it was ridiculous what was said. But does that justify me giving a prison sentence or a jail sentence? That’s a hard question for me to ask,” Walton said.
Prosecutors asked for a one-month jail sentence for Vinson, but the judge sentenced the Kentucky nurse to five years of probation and ordered her to pay a $5,000 fine and perform 120 hours of community service.
In the case of Felipe Marquez, the judge found social media posts belied serious mental health issues that needed treatment rather than incarceration. Marquez recorded cellphone videos of himself with other rioters inside the office of Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. Back at home in Florida, Marquez posted a YouTube video in which he rapped about his riot experience to the tune of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me.” with lyrics that included, “We even fist-bumped police,” and “We were taking selfies.”
In the video, Marquez wore a T-shirt that said, “Property of FBI.”
Prosecutors had recommended a four-month jail sentence, but U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras sentenced him instead to three months of home confinement with mental-health treatment, followed by probation. “I do think you have some serious issues you need to address. That played a large role in my sentencing decision," he said.
Judge Jackson gave Andrew Wrigley a history lesson before she sentenced the Pennsylvania man to 18 months of probation. Wrigley posted a photo on social media of him holding a 1776 flag during the riot. The judge said the gesture didn’t honor the nation’s founders.
“The point of 1776 was to let the people decide who would rule them. But the point of the attack on the Capitol was to stop that from happening," Jackson said. "The point of the attack on the Capitol was to subvert democracy, to substitute the will of the people with the will of the mob.”
Videos captured New Jersey gym owner Scott Fairlamb punching a police officer outside the Capitol. His Facebook and Instagram posts showed he was prepared to commit violence in Washington, D.C., and had no remorse for his actions, prosecutors said.
Senior Judge Royce Lamberth said other rioters in Fairlamb's position would be “well advised” to join him in pleading guilty.
“You couldn’t have beat this if you went to trial on the evidence that I saw,” Lamberth said before sentencing Fairlamb to 41 months in prison.
But it worked to the advantage of one. Virginia charter boat captain Jacob Hiles likely avoided a stricter sentence by posting videos and photos of him and his cousin at the Capitol. A day after the riot, Hiles received a private Facebook message from a Capitol police officer who said he agreed with Hiles’ “political stance” and encouraged him to delete his incriminating posts, according to prosecutors.
The officer, Michael Angelo Riley, deleted his communications with Hiles, but investigators recovered the messages from Hiles’ Facebook account, prosecutors said. Riley was indicted in October on obstruction charges.
On Monday, Jackson sentenced Hiles to two years of probation. Prosecutors said the case against Riley may have been impossible without Hiles' cooperation.
Kevin Strickland says he's not angry – but he's 'disgusted and disappointed about what has happened to me.' (photo: Kansas City Star/TNS)
A new Missouri bill could make Kevin Strickland and other exonerees eligible for restitution payments
For 43 years of a sentence under a former Missouri law known as the “Hard 50” – which required Strickland to serve at least 50 years before he would be eligible for parole – that was an impossibility.
But on 23 November, Strickland, 62, was discharged from the state’s custody, ending his incarceration for a 1978 triple murder he always maintained – and local prosecutors and Kansas City officials now agree – he did not commit. Now he’s waking at his brother’s place.
“I’m waking up anxious to get outside,” Strickland told the Guardian at his lawyer’s 38th floor office in Kansas City, the Great Plains out spread out across the arc of the windows. “I want to know and feel light. Three o’clock in the morning, I’m ready. Time to go. I don’t know where I’m going but I know it’s time to go.”
In the moment that Strickland walked free, he was Missouri’s longest serving inmate. His conviction for the murders of Sherrie Black, 22, Larry Ingram, 21, and John Walker, 20, during a home invasion largely rested on the eyewitness testimony of the sole survivor of the crime, Cynthia Douglas.
Douglas recanted her testimony in 2009, saying she had been pressured by prosecutors to identify Strickland, a Black man who was then 18 years old. But until his case was taken up by the Midwest Innocence Project, which was joined in an effort to overturn his conviction by Jackson county prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, there was little Strickland could do.
“You can’t even imagine – and you don’t want to,” Strickland says of his incarceration. “It’s tough to be told when to do things every day. When to lay down. Eat. Sleep. Play. And to know those things are going to repeat day after day after day so long as you keep living – and that it’s not going to change.”
“You’ve just got to go through it. It’s dark. I didn’t check out. You have to face it. Deal with it. I’ve seen several suicides, so that would be an indication their will and strength had been compromised.”
Strickland, who is confined to a wheelchair until his spinal stenosis is treated, has become in many ways an example of criminal justice inequities, and not just in the circumstances of his conviction – no physical evidence tied him to the crime scene; an all-white jury came back after two hours, though he recalls 15 or 30 minutes. “They sure didn’t waste any time,” he says.
His case has also drawn attention to a Missouri law that denies restitution unless an exoneration results solely from DNA profiling analysis. Last week, state representative Mark Sharp filed a bill to change the state’s restitution law to include people found innocent as the result of an evidentiary method. The proposal would allow eligible people to receive as much as $100 aday for every day they spent incarcerated after conviction, or $36,500 a year.
In Strickland’s case that would be about $1,569,500 – just short of the $1,734,370 raised by the Innocence Project’s GoFundMe page. In Kansas City last week, many said they had repeatedly donated small amounts to the fund, a gesture that could be interpreted as a show of sympathy and popular resistance to injustice.
But not all are on board with Strickland’s release, which followed a law passed in April that gave Baker, the county prosecutor, the right to ask the court to vacate Strickland’s guilty verdict.
Missouri’s fiercely conservative attorney general, Eric Schmitt, battled to uphold Strickland’s conviction, delayed his hearing and attempted to block his release with a series of motions, each rejected by retired Missouri appeals court judge James Walsh.
“I’d always felt the attorney general’s office was going to oppose everything,” Strickland says. “They’d oppose the change of the day from Monday to Tuesday. It’s what they do.”
Missouri governor Mike Parson also rebuffed appeals to pardon him, arguing that it was not a “priority”, even as he pardoned Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the Missouri couple who confronted racial justice protesters with guns last year.
But Strickland is now a hero to many. Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas invited him to switch on the Christmas lights on a 100-foot-tall fir tree; Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes said he hoped Strickland’s release “can be a thing that doesn’t let people get in that same situation that he was in and lose a big part of their life”.
Strickland says he’s not angered by four decades of incarceration. Anger is a luxury for others, he says, but one that he does not have an inclination to indulge. “I can’t waste energy in anger, so I don’t get angry, because anger sometimes make you get physical. Anger is a strong word and it brings on negativity. I’m just disgusted and disappointed about what has happened to me.”
As in other recent wrongful conviction releases, including Anthony Broadwater, who served 16 years after being misidentified by author Alice Sebold as the perpetrator of her rape, the question of restitution is a question that keeps surfacing. Having been imprisoned for his entire adult life, Strickland has no savings or ability to show work history for social security entitlements. He plans to use the funds that have been raised “wisely, not wastefully. No partying. There won’t be none of that.”
“I’m truly grateful, and I’m not just saying that because it’s the politically correct thing to say. I need it, and I didn’t know there was so many caring people out there.” But the attention he’s getting is unfamiliar. “I can’t say I enjoy it. Big groups are too much, and I don’t like people constantly rolling up me. But you got to take the bitter with the sweet.”
His plan is to find a quiet, safe place to live, away from most people, and to try to appreciate the days he has “moving forward”.
“I’m going to eat what I want to eat, do a little swimming, and just try to enjoy the remainder of my life.” He might like to live in the country. “I’m a country boy at heart,” he says. “Some people have a problem with squirrel and rabbit. But I’m good with them. I’ll eat some raccoon, deer, wild turkey, snake. And I want to try ‘gator.”
But his real ambition is to go fishing. “I’d fish anywhere you told me I could fish. When I fish, I’m not fishing for sport, I fish to eat. That guy Jeremy [Wade, host of TV show River Monsters] – I’d like to go out fishing with him. He knows what he’s doing.”
During his incarceration, Strickland was once in contact with Cynthia Douglas, the woman who identified him as being one of the murderers, when he heard that she was trying to clear up her mistake.
“I called her to thank her for what she was trying to do. It was just one time. But I knew what had happened – that she had been pressured into saying it was me. I felt pity for her that she’d had to accuse me. But she was trying to do the right thing, so those feelings went out the window.”
Strickland is heartened by the increasing number of exonerees from the criminal justice system. What would make a difference to preventing future wrongful convictions, he believes, is to have a public defender in every precinct before suspects are pulled into a lineup.
“The justice system doesn’t have to change,” Strickland says. “It has to be re-booted from the ground up. The police are relying on civilians to call in tips. They need to find detectives who want to do their jobs, and not rely on civilians to tell them which way to go.”
Being released from long-term incarceration is not simple – mastering a cellphone, for instance, or getting ID can be tricky. The sight of a clock reminds him of head-count time – 5.30am, 7.30, 11, 4, and 10pm. When he was released, he was met by his friend Ricky Kidd, who was exonerated after 23 years and released from Western Missouri correctional.
Kidd’s counsel was to take it slow, take time to acclimate, don’t do anything on anybody’s time but your own. “You can’t catch those 43 years,” Strickland says. “Can’t get them back. They’re gone. Never can. So I need to fix that in my mind and slow down.”
Xiomara Castro celebrates during general elections on November 28, 2021, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (photo: Inti Ocon/Getty Images)
Since a US-backed coup toppled leftist president Manuel Zelaya in 2009, Honduras has been in crisis. The election of socialist Xiomara Castro is a chance to break the cycle and take on neoliberalism.
By means of sheer resistance, resilience, mobilization, and organization, they have managed to defeat Juan Orlando Hernández’s narco-dictatorship at the ballot box. As presidential candidate of the left-wing Libre Party (the Freedom and Refoundation Party, in its Spanish acronym), Xiomara Castro obtained a splendid 50-plus percent of the vote — between 15 to 20 points more than her closest rival, National Party candidate Nasry Asfura — in an election with historic high levels of participation (68 percent).
The extraordinary feat performed by the people of Honduras takes place under the dictatorial regime of Hernández (aka JOH) in an election marred by what appears to be targeted assassinations of candidates and activists. Leading up to October 2021, sixty-four acts of electoral violence, including eleven attacks and twenty-seven assassinations, had been perpetrated. And in the period preceding the election (November 11–23), another string of assassinations, mainly of candidates, took place.
None of the fatal victims were members of Hernández’s National Party. The aim seems to have been to terrorize the opposition, and particularly their electorate, into believing that it was unsafe to turn out to vote — and that even if they did, they would again steal the election through fraud and violence, as they had done twice already, in 2013 and 2017.
Commentators correctly characterize this as the “Colombianization” of Honduran politics — that is, a ruling gang in power deploys security forces and paramilitary groups to assassinate opposition activists. In Honduras, the most despicable act was the murder of environmental activist, feminist, and indigenous leader Berta Cáceres by armed intruders in her own house after years of death threats.
Cáceres had been a leading figure in the grassroots struggle against electoral fraud and dictatorship and had been calling for the urgent refounding of the nation, a proposal incorporated into the programs of mass social movements such as the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. Since 2009, hundreds of activists have been assassinated at the hands of the police, the army, and paramilitaries.
The Colombianization analogy does not stop at the assassination of opponents. Last June, the Washington Post explained the extent of infiltration by organized crime: “Military and police chiefs, politicians, businessmen, mayors and even three presidents have been linked to cocaine trafficking or accused of receiving funds from trafficking.”
US judge Kevin Castel, who sentenced Tony Hernández, JOH’s brother, to life in prison after he was found guilty of smuggling 185 tons of cocaine into the United States, said, “Here, the [drug] trafficking was indeed state-sponsored.” In March 2021, at the trial against Geovanny Fuentes, a Honduran accused of drug trafficking, the prosecutor, Jacob Gutwillig, said that JOH helped Fuentes with the trafficking of tons of cocaine.
Corruption permeates the whole Honduran establishment. National Party candidate Nasry Asfura has faced a pretrial “for abuse of authority, use of false documents, embezzlement of public funds, fraud and money laundering,” and Yani Rosenthal, a congressman and banker who was the candidate of the once ruling Liberal Party, was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison in the United States for “participating in financial transactions using illicit proceeds (drug money laundering).”
The parallels continue. Like Colombia, Honduras is a narco-state in which the United States has a host of military bases. It was from Honduran territory that the Contra mercenaries waged a proxy war against Sandinista Nicaragua in the 1980s, and it was also from Honduras that the US-led military invasion of Guatemala was launched in 1954, bringing about the violent ousting of democratically elected left-wing nationalist president Jacobo Árbenz. Specialists aptly refer to the country as USS Honduras.
Cocaine trafficking and state terrorism, which operates as part of the drug business, are tolerated and probably supported by various US agencies in exchange for a large US military presence — the United States has Soto Cano and twelve other military bases in Honduras — due to geopolitical calculations like regional combat against left-wing governments. This criminal system’s stability requires the elimination of political and social activists.
Thus, many US institutions, from the White House down the food chain, turn a blind eye to the colossal levels of corruption. In fact, Southern Command has been actively building Honduras’s repressive military capabilities by funding and training special units like Battalion 316, which reportedly acts as a death squad “guilty of kidnap, torture, and murder.”
“Between 2010 and 2016, as US ‘aid’ and training continued to flow, over 120 environmental activists were murdered by hitmen, gangs, police, and the military for opposing illegal logging and mining,” one report explains.
The legacy of right-wing governments since the violent ousting of Manuel Zelaya in 2009 is abysmal. Honduras is one the most violent countries in the world (37 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, with 60 percent attributable to organized crime), with staggering levels of poverty (73.6 percent of households live below the poverty line, out of which 53.7 percent live in extreme poverty), high levels of unemployment (well over 12 percent), and even higher levels of underemployment (the informal sector of the economy, due to the effects of COVID-19, grew from 60 to 70 percent). Its external debt is over $15 billion (57 percent of its GDP), and the nation suffers from a high incidence of embezzlement and illegal appropriation of state resources by criminal administrations.
The rot is so pronounced that back in February this year, a group of Democrats in the US Senate introduced legislation intended to cut off economic aid and sales of ammunition to Honduran security forces. The proposal “lays bare the violence and abuses perpetrated since the 2009 military-backed coup, as a result of widespread collusion between government officials, state and private security forces, organized crime and business leaders.” In Britain, Colin Burgon, the president of Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America, issued scathing criticism of the British government’s complicity for “having sold (when Boris Johnson was Foreign Minister no less) to the Honduran government spyware designed to eavesdrop on its citizens, months before the state rounded up thousands of people in a well-orchestrated surveillance operation.”
To top it all off, through the Zone for Employment and Economic Development initiative, whole chunks of the national territory are being given to private enterprise under a “special regime” that empowers investors to establish their own security bodies — including their own police force and penitentiary system — to investigate criminal offenses and instigate legal prosecutions. This takes neoliberalism and the dream of multinational capital to abhorrent levels: the sell-off of portions of the national territory to private enterprise. To state that the Honduran oligarchy, led by JOH, is “selling the country down the river” is not a figure of speech.
It is this monstrosity, constructed since the overthrow of President Mel Zelaya in 2009 on top of the existing oligarchic state, that the now victorious Libre Party and incoming president Xiomara Castro need to overcome to start improving the lives of the people of Honduras. The array of extremely nasty internal and external forces that her government will be up against is frighteningly powerful, and they have demonstrated in abundance what they are prepared to do to defend their felonious interests.
President-elect Xiomara’s Libre Party is the largest in the 128-seat Congress, and with its coalition partner, Salvador, it will have a very strong parliamentary presence, which will be central to any proposed referendum for a constituent assembly aimed at refounding the nation. Libre has also won in the capital city, Tegucigalpa, and in San Pedro Sula, the country’s second largest city. More importantly, unlike elections elsewhere (in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia), the National Party’s candidate, Asfura, has conceded defeat. Thus, Xiomara has a very strong mandate.
However, in a region subjected to US-led regime-change operations — the coup in Bolivia, the coup attempt in Nicaragua, the mercenary attack against Venezuela, a raft of violent street disorders in Cuba, vigorous destabilization against recently elected president Pedro Castillo in Peru, and so on, ad nauseam — Honduras will need all the international solidarity we can provide, which we must do.
The heroic struggle of the people of Honduras has again demonstrated that it can be done: neoliberalism and its brutal foreign and imperialist instigators can be defeated and a better world can be built. So before Washington, its Honduran cronies, its European accomplices, and the world corporate media unleash any shenanigans, let’s say loud and clear: US hands off Honduras!
Joe Biden. (photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)
But it might keep propping them up at home.
One of Joe Biden’s priorities upon entering the White House was to change that and shift the focus to sustainable development and green recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In November, the U.S. joined nearly 40 countries at the United Nations climate summit that pledged to end financing by the end of 2022 for projects outside their borders that emit greenhouse gases. Now the Biden administration is starting to make good on that promise a year in advance.
According to Bloomberg News, the White House sent a memo to U.S. embassies halting federal spending on new coal plants and other new carbon-intensive projects abroad in early December. The directive was broad, not only prohibiting U.S. financial support for new carbon-intensive projects but also banning diplomatic and technical assistance.
“Our international energy engagement will center on promoting clean energy, advancing innovative technologies, boosting U.S. clean-tech competitiveness and providing financing and technical assistance to support net-zero transitions around the world,” the message said.
The news comes as Congress is poised to offer a lifeline for coal-fired power plants at home by increasing the tax credit that plants can claim for installing carbon capture systems. The increase is part of the Build Back Better Act, a $2 trillion social spending and climate bill that passed in the House in November and includes billions of dollars to cut emissions. As the Senate continues negotiations on the bill, lawmakers are also considering doling out $775 million in subsidies for oil and gas producers to monitor and reduce their methane emissions.
Bloomberg, which obtained a copy of the memo, reports that the new ban does not apply to projects the U.S. is already financing or otherwise providing support for. It also exempts new oil and gas projects if they are expected to advance national security or expand energy access. More than 700 million people still lacked access to electricity in 2019, according to the International Energy Agency.
Kate De Angelis, international finance program manager for the advocacy group Friends of the Earth, told Bloomberg these exemptions “could render these restrictions on fossil fuel financing completely meaningless.” Friends of the Earth found that the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a government agency that finances projects in low- and middle-income countries, spent almost $4 billion on fossil fuel projects over the past five years. The U.S. Export Import Bank, which facilitates the U.S. export of goods and services, has approved over $5 billion for fossil fuel projects abroad in the last two years.
Jake Schmidt, senior strategic director for international climate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, was more optimistic about the policy’s reach. “This sends a very clear signal about getting out of the vast majority of oil and gas projects,” he told E&E News.
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