09 July 20
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08 July 20
Barbara McQuade, The Daily Beast
McQuade writes: "Normally, a case like this goes to the sex crimes unit. But Ghislaine Maxwell's case has been assigned to public corruption. Here's the likely, and fascinating, reason."
curious detail appears in the press release announcing the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell on charges of conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors.
On Thursday, Audrey Strauss, the newly appointed acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that Maxwell had been charged in a six-count indictment accusing her of enticing and transporting a minor to travel to engage in criminal sexual activity, conspiracy to commit those offenses and perjury in connection with a sworn deposition.
The charges were not a surprise in light of comments by Strauss’s predecessor, Geoffrey S. Berman, last year after Epstein died of an apparent suicide in jail. Berman pledged to the victims of Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking crimes that “our investigation of the conduct charged in the Indictment—which included a conspiracy count—remains ongoing.”
The unusual part of Strauss’s announcement is that the case is assigned to the office’s Public Corruption Unit. The case against Epstein had also been assigned to this unit, which typically focuses on crimes committed by government officials, employees and contractors. Elie Honig, a former prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, told Law and Crime that sex trafficking cases are typically handled out of the office’s Violent and Organized Crime unit.
So why would this case be assigned to the Public Corruption Unit? Prosecutors assigned to such a unit are trained and experienced in handling some of the nuanced issues that arise when government officials are targets of investigations. Charges often involve sophisticated bribery, extortion or fraud schemes in which the parties deliberately speak in coded language to maintain plausible deniability.
The case law is replete with gray areas in which quid pro quo arrangements breaching public trust are spun as mere horse-trading politics. Public officials hire top lawyers, and, as natural risk-takers with much to lose, are less inclined to plead guilty than other defendants. As a result, public corruption prosecutors must have the skill set to not only investigate a complex case but also to take it to trial.
Maxwell is not herself a public official, but maybe she is not the last to be indicted in this case. The assignment of her case to the Public Corruption Unit suggests that the investigation may touch on subjects who are current or former government officials. Facing a potentially lengthy prison sentence if she is convicted, Maxwell has a strong incentive to cooperate with prosecutors by providing substantial assistance in the investigation and prosecution of others in exchange for a recommendation of leniency. Against whom might she be able to testify?
Let’s start with the origins of the case in the Southern District of Florida. Last year Alex Acosta resigned as U.S. Labor Secretary over his involvement in the case when he served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in 2008. He negotiated a deal with Epstein that allowed him to plead guilty to a single count of soliciting prostitution and serve a 13-month state prison, most of it at his own office on work release.
The agreement also included provisions not to charge some of Epstein’s employees or “any potential co-conspirators,” highly unusual language that releases from criminal exposure even defendants whose identities and conduct are unknown. When he negotiated the deal, Acosta ignored the normal practice of notifying the victims. Although no criminal allegations have been filed against Acosta, if the investigation were to include examination of his conduct, that could explain the involvement of the Public Corruption Unit.
In addition, the reference to “potential co-conspirators” suggests that there may have been other people who assisted Epstein in recruiting, grooming or transporting underage girls to engage in criminal sexual activity. This description could also include anyone who engaged in sexual conduct with the underage girls. It is a crime to knowingly patronize a person under the age of 18 to engage in a commercial sex act.
Because Acosta’s non-prosecution deal bound only the Southern District of Florida, the Southern District of New York is free to charge any of Epstein’s co-conspirators. Again, the assignment of the case to the Public Corruption Unit raises a fair inference that these subjects could be current or former government officials. The charges against Maxwell allege that her crimes occurred in New York, Florida and London. Anyone who traveled with Epstein to these locations or who visited him there and engaged in commercial sex acts with girls they knew to be under 18 could be charged with a federal offense.
Epstein was friends with many prominent people, including former President Bill Clinton and President Donald Trump, who once said of Epstein, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” While Clinton and Trump would both qualify as public officials, their friendships with Epstein alone are insufficient to merit investigation without articulable factual allegations of criminal conduct.
Such an allegation has been made about Britain’s Prince Andrew, whom the Southern District of New York has sought to interview. One of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, has accused Prince Andrew of having sex with her when she was 17. In June, Berman issued a statement that the British royal had not been cooperative with his prosecutors.
Berman stated that Prince Andrew was seeking to “falsely portray himself to the public as eager and willing to cooperate with the investigation into Epstein, even though the Prince has not given an interview to federal authorities, has repeatedly declined our request to schedule such an interview. . . If Prince Andrew is, in fact, serious about cooperating with the ongoing federal investigation, our doors remain open, and we await word of when we should expect him.” Prince Andrew, whether as witness, subject or target, would certainly qualify as a public official such that assignment of the case to the Public Corruption Unit would make sense.
In the coming months, we will see movement on the Maxwell case, as she either goes to trial, pleads guilty or otherwise resolves her case. We may also see additional charges against others who assisted Epstein or who patronized the girls he abused. The prosecutors seem to be preparing for the possibility of defendants whose names are known to the public.
Supreme Court. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/Getty)
Supreme Court Upholds Trump's Rollback of Birth Control Coverage Mandate
Susannah Luthi, Politico
Excerpt: "The Supreme Court, in its 7-2 ruling, sought to resolve a long-running legal battle that previously vexed the justices."
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Susannah Luthi, Politico
Excerpt: "The Supreme Court, in its 7-2 ruling, sought to resolve a long-running legal battle that previously vexed the justices."
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Pedestrians walk through the gates of Harvard Yard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass, in 2019. (photo: Charles Krupa/AP)
Harvard, MIT Sue to Block ICE Rule That Would Force Many International Students to Leave US if They Take Classes Entirely Online
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Trump administration's decision to bar international students from staying in the U.S. if they take classes entirely online this fall."
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Associated Press
Excerpt: "Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Trump administration's decision to bar international students from staying in the U.S. if they take classes entirely online this fall."
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Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Alexander Vindman Retires, Citing Campaign of 'Bullying' and 'Retaliation' by Trump After Impeachment Testimony
Missy Ryan and Shane Harris, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "An Army officer who played a high-profile role in President Trump's impeachment proceedings is retiring from the military over alleged 'bullying' and 'retaliation' by the president, his lawyer said Wednesday."
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Missy Ryan and Shane Harris, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "An Army officer who played a high-profile role in President Trump's impeachment proceedings is retiring from the military over alleged 'bullying' and 'retaliation' by the president, his lawyer said Wednesday."
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The Israeli Defence Forces in the Gaza Strip. (photo: Getty)
How Counterinsurgency Tactics in the Middle East Found Their Way to American Cities
Elyse Semerdjian, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Many of the repressive police tactics and technologies used in the US have been developed in the Middle East to suppress dissent. Ending police violence at home must involve ending America's wars abroad."
Elyse Semerdjian, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Many of the repressive police tactics and technologies used in the US have been developed in the Middle East to suppress dissent. Ending police violence at home must involve ending America's wars abroad."
knee to the neck. A rubber bullet to the eye. A tear gas canister to the head. America spends $100 billion annually on policing, much of it supported by the exchange of material and counterinsurgency tactics used in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the “war on terror.” Raining down on American protesters in the current wave of protests, rubber bullets have a history stretching back to the British policing of Republican protesters in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and the Israeli containment of Palestinians during the First Intifada in 1987. How have the military tactics and technologies used to suppress dissent in the Middle East found their way to America’s cities in the latest round of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests?
A Very Special Friendship
In May, protests erupted after the asphyxiation of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer — an extrajudicial execution for the alleged use of a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill at a convenience store. Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, the store owner who contacted the police about Floyd, is himself a Palestinian-American, but may not see the connection between his being Palestinian and the choke hold that took Floyd’s life.
In 2012, a hundred Minneapolis police officers received training from Israeli consultants in Chicago, while another counter-terrorism training session, cosponsored by the FBI, took place in Minneapolis. Israeli deputy consul Shahar Arieli commented on the training at the time, “Every year we are bringing top-notch professionals from the Israeli police to share some knowledge and know-how about how to deal with terrorism with our American friends.”
He conceded concerns that “law enforcement operations could violate civil rights,” speaking about a productive collaboration developing “terrorism prevention techniques.” That same year, the Minneapolis Police Department adopted those techniques — frequently used against Palestinians and protesters in the West Bank — and entered them into their use-of-force guidelines. In the last five years, Minneapolis officers have rendered forty-five people unconscious, including George Floyd.
The United States has long been Israel’s primary supplier of military weapons — a “special relationship” forged when the United States transported 2.2 million dollars of military assistance during the 1973 War. Over the decades, a complicated web of aid, military contracts, subsidies, and cash funds have been given to Israel.
More recently, the United States has promised 38 billion dollars over the next decade in military aid to Israel, with President Trump openly acknowledging that arms deals create jobs in the United States. Though it is not called economic stimulus, 100 percent of US aid is flushed back into Israel’s economy, and Israeli arms, in turn, are coveted in the global market because they have been field tested within the laboratory of human suffering called the West Bank and Gaza.
As Jeff Halper argues after September 11, the United States adopted Israel’s “security state” model where constitutional, civil, and human rights are subordinated to security imperatives. With security as the nation’s highest value, Israeli knowledge in policing terrorism, surveillance, behavioral science, profiling, torture, and maiming was transferred to various offices in the United States, among them the Department of Homeland Security, US marshals, police chiefs, Customs and Border Protection agents, the FBI, and the CIA.
At the time of this exchange, Israel was fighting a second Palestinian uprising, the Al-Aqsa Intifada. With the prevalence of civilian suicide bombers, Israel’s counterinsurgency focused on unarmed Palestinian and foreign protesters, as well as journalists resisting the army’s occupation tactics.
During this Second Intifada, a new practice known as “human shields” became military policy, whereby soldiers held the bodies of Palestinians as human armor in an act that left no doubt whose life was disposable in the logic of the occupation. Although Israeli courts made the practice illegal in 2005, it continues to be used in the Occupied Territories.
Because of the live rounds fired during the Second Intifada, Israel offered safety to “embedded journalists,” who would become mouthpieces for the Israeli military. The United States would borrow this policy for journalists a few years later in Iraq, using military law and disorder to undermine the democratic pillar of the free press.
As foreign peace activists and Palestinian protesters were shot with live sniper rounds during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Israel developed a sophisticated public-relations campaign to counter its global image, part of which included partnerships with US law enforcement.
An extensive 2018 report titled “Deadly Exchange: The Dangerous Consequences of American Law Enforcement Trainings in Israel,” compiled by Researching the American-Israeli Alliance, documents how Israel’s policing tactics were transferred to US personnel. Over 250 police departments have received training inside Israel.
Moreover, Israeli Weapons Industries established two police training centers inside the United States: a police academy in Paulden, Arizona, and the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) Center, in partnership with Georgia State University in Atlanta. The same university offers degrees to Israeli personnel as a part of these exchanges grounded in the integrated knowledge of counterinsurgency.
Atlanta, one of the great black American cities, created a video integration center modeled after one frequently showcased during a training session in the Old City of Jerusalem. Near Atlanta is GILEE’s predecessor, the School of the Americas, where ten former heads of state in Latin America honed their skills in torture and repression.
That Rayshard Brooks and George Floyd could be killed by police in the street means the rules of the occupation are at play on US soil. Procedurally, the knee to the neck and other choking restraints should only be used when an officer believes their life is in imminent danger.
A week ago, an officer in Bellevue, Washington, restrained an unidentified black woman who asked to speak with the sheriff. As he pushed her to the ground he said, “On the ground or I’ll put you out,” a threat to render her unconscious or possibly dead with his choke hold. What does it say when black people appealing for their legal and human rights are interpreted by the police as life threatening?
The “no knock” warrant that broke down Breonna Taylor’s door and enabled police to shoot her eight times is not only the police equivalent of a drive by shooting, it’s a paramilitary tactic. In 2016, when the Houston shooter was “neutralized” using a robot field-tested in Afghanistan, it marked the first “targeted assassination” of an American citizen. The United States condemned extrajudicial killings in the Occupied Territories before adopting it for use on suspected terrorists.
The hallmark of the “war on terror” was the presumption that any youthful, able-bodied male is a terrorist body. Fighting-age brown male bodies were “neutralized” by the person controlling the drone in Yemen and Afghanistan who, like the police knocking down Taylor’s door, serves as judge, jury, and executioner. In the “war on terror,” all military-aged men were not counted as civilian casualties.
The very presence of the living black body of the African American and the brown body of the Arab are a threat regardless of whether they are carrying a weapon or not, whether they are a criminal or not.
“Humane War” on Home Turf
The killing, maiming, and imprisonment of Palestinian bodies is today considered “worst practice” of the Israeli occupation. When these brutal tactics caused an international backlash during the First Intifada, Israel responded by “softening” its approach with the adoption of rubber bullets — much as the British Army was moved to adopt rubber bullets as an alternative after the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre caused so much bad publicity.
Today, there are more than seventy-five different types of “non-lethal” projectiles labeled rubber bullets. A beanbag round recently entered the skull of a sixteen-year-old protester in Austin causing the kind of injury that has maimed and killed Palestinian protesters for over three decades. While Austin has since banned beanbag rounds, the overall militarization of the American police has effectively Palestinianized dissent in the United States, bringing counterinsurgency tactics that both the United States and Israel have been using against Arabs onto home turf.
In a series of peaceful, unarmed border protests called “The Great March” in Gaza from 2018 to 2019, over 10,000 Palestinians were maimed by Israeli snipers with state-of-the-art scopes on their guns aimed for the knees. Weapons designed to inflict maximum damage without killing by using ammunition that mushrooms and expands within the body.
When we look only at death, we overlook lifelong disability caused by “less-lethal weapons.” This new frontier is called “humane war.” It’s goal is to kill less people while maiming for life. Jasbir Puar has documented how less lethal weapons produce disabled bodies that will be fed back into the capitalist medical industry to be rehabilitated for a profit.
In his prescient work, Rubber Bullets (1998), the late Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi argued that Israel’s choice to use the apparently nonlethal projectiles against Palestinians was a moral turning point that threatened liberal democracy by compromising its principles for the sake of extreme nationalism. Rubber bullets and knees on necks have similarly brought America to the precipice. How do we fight back against the normalization of militarized police violence in our cities and the threat it poses to democracy?
Ending America’s “forever wars” is a start. Activists must demand a ban on surplus materials and tactics training acquired by the police from Israel and US counterinsurgency abroad. The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions national committee issued a powerful statement of solidarity calling for support for BLM.
Such solidarity is built on an understanding that what is happening inside the United States, though not identical, is intimately connected to technologies of colonization and brutal policing overseas, in places like Palestine. Addressing the crisis at home, means looking toward the United States’s influence — and inspiration — abroad.
Havana, Cuba. (photo: iStock)
Cuba Denounces US Blockade Worsening During the Pandemic
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Despite the U.S. blockade's harm to Cuba's social and economic development, the island sent over 30 brigades to 87 African, European, and Latin American nations to serve against the COVID-19 pandemic."
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teleSUR
Excerpt: "Despite the U.S. blockade's harm to Cuba's social and economic development, the island sent over 30 brigades to 87 African, European, and Latin American nations to serve against the COVID-19 pandemic."
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Oil pipeline. (photo: Paul A. Souders/Getty)
This Federal Permit Used to Fast-Track Pipelines. Now It's Threatening Them.
Emily Pontecorvo, Grist
Pontecorvo writes: "While the Atlantic Coast Pipeline's demise was a decision made by its developers, and Keystone's impairment a judicial matter, both outcomes are directly tied to the same ongoing battle over a federal permit that helps developers to fast-track pipeline construction called Nationwide Permit 12. Its fate could have far-reaching consequences for pipeline development all over the country."
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Emily Pontecorvo, Grist
Pontecorvo writes: "While the Atlantic Coast Pipeline's demise was a decision made by its developers, and Keystone's impairment a judicial matter, both outcomes are directly tied to the same ongoing battle over a federal permit that helps developers to fast-track pipeline construction called Nationwide Permit 12. Its fate could have far-reaching consequences for pipeline development all over the country."
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