Tomgram: Nick Turse, One Hundred Seconds Till the Apocalypse

 

TomDispatch

 

TomDispatch Managing Editor Nick Turse begins his latest post this way: “Whether you’re reading this with your morning coffee, just after lunch, or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s 100 seconds to midnight. That’s just over a minute and a half. And that should be completely unnerving. It’s the closest to that witching hour we’ve ever been.

“Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has adjusted its Doomsday Clock to provide humanity with an expert estimate of just how close all of us are to an apocalyptic ‘midnight’ -- that is, nuclear annihilation. A century ago, there was, of course, no need for such a measure. Back then, the largest explosion ever caused by humans had likely occurred in Halifax, Canada, in 1917, when a munitions ship collided with another vessel, in that city’s harbor. That tragic blast killed nearly 2,000, wounded another 9,000, and left 6,000 homeless, but it didn’t imperil the planet. The largest explosions after that occurred on July 16, 1945, in a test of a new type of weapon, an atomic bomb, in New Mexico and then on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed such a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Since then, our species has been precariously perched at the edge of auto-extermination.

“No one knows precisely how many people were killed by the world’s first nuclear attack. Around 70,000, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many of radiation sickness, by the end of the year. (An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.) In the wake of the first nuclear attack, little was clear. ‘What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known,’ the New York Times reported that August 7th and the U.S. government sought to keep it that way, portraying nuclear weapons as nothing more than super-charged conventional munitions, while downplaying the horrifying effects of radiation. Despite the heroic efforts of several reporters just after the blast, it wasn’t until a year later that Americans -- and then the rest of the world -- began to truly grasp the effects of such new weaponry and what it would mean for humanity from that moment onward.

“We know about what happened at Hiroshima largely thanks to one man, John Hersey….”

This Vanishing Moment and Our Vanishing Future
John Hersey, Hiroshima, and the End of World
By Nick Turse

Whether you’re reading this with your morning coffee, just after lunch, or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s 100 seconds to midnight. That’s just over a minute and a half. And that should be completely unnerving. It’s the closest to that witching hour we’ve ever been.

Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has adjusted its Doomsday Clock to provide humanity with an expert estimate of just how close all of us are to an apocalyptic “midnight” -- that is, nuclear annihilation. A century ago, there was, of course, no need for such a measure. Back then, the largest explosion ever caused by humans had likely occurred in Halifax, Canada, in 1917, when a munitions ship collided with another vessel, in that city’s harbor. That tragic blast killed nearly 2,000, wounded another 9,000, and left 6,000 homeless, but it didn’t imperil the planet. The largest explosions after that occurred on July 16, 1945, in a test of a new type of weapon, an atomic bomb, in New Mexico and then on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed such a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Since then, our species has been precariously perched at the edge of auto-extermination.

No one knows precisely how many people were killed by the world’s first nuclear attack. Around 70,000, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many of radiation sickness, by the end of the year. (An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.) In the wake of the first nuclear attack, little was clear. “What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known,” the New York Times reported that August 7th and the U.S. government sought to keep it that way, portraying nuclear weapons as nothing more than super-charged conventional munitions, while downplaying the horrifying effects of radiation. Despite the heroic efforts of several reporters just after the blast, it wasn’t until a year later that Americans -- and then the rest of the world -- began to truly grasp the effects of such new weaponry and what it would mean for humanity from that moment onward.

We know about what happened at Hiroshima largely thanks to one man, John Hersey. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and former correspondent for TIME and LIFE magazines. He had covered World War II in Europe and the Pacific, where he was commended by the secretary of the Navy for helping evacuate wounded American troops on the Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal. And we now know just how Hersey got the story of Hiroshima -- a 30,000-word reportorial masterpiece that appeared in the August 1946 issue of the New Yorker magazine, describing the experiences of six survivors of that atomic blast -- thanks to a meticulously researched and elegantly written new book by Lesley Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.

Only the Essentials

When I pack up my bags for a war zone, I carry what I consider to be the essentials for someone reporting on an armed conflict. A water bottle with a built-in filter. Trauma packs with a blood-clotting agent. A first-aid kit. A multitool. A satellite phone. Sometimes I forgo one or more of these items, but there’s always been a single, solitary staple, a necessity whose appearance has changed over the years, but whose presence in my rucksack has not.

Once, this item was intact, almost pristine. But after the better part of a decade covering conflicts in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, and Burkina Faso, it’s a complete wreck. Still, I carry it. In part, it’s become (and I’m only slightly embarrassed to say it) something of a talisman for me. But mostly, it’s because what’s between the figurative covers of that now-coverless, thoroughly mutilated copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima -- the New Yorker article in paperback form -- is as terrifyingly brilliant as the day I bought it at the Strand bookstore in New York City for 48 cents.

I know Hiroshima well. I’ve read it cover-to-cover dozens of times. Or sometimes on a plane or a helicopter or a river barge, in a hotel room or sitting by the side of a road, I’ll flip it open and take in a random 10 or 20 pages. I always marveled at how skillfully Hersey constructed the narrative with overlapping personal accounts that make the horrific handiwork of that weapon with the power of the gods accessible on a human level; how he explained something new to this world, atomic terror, in terms that readers could immediately grasp; how he translated destruction on a previously unimaginable scale into a cautionary tale as old as the genre itself, but with an urgency that hasn’t faded or been matched. I simply never knew how he did it until Lesley Blume pulled back the curtain.

Fallout, which was published last month -- the 75th anniversary of America’s attack on Hiroshima -- offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just how Hersey and William Shawn, then the managing editor of the New Yorker, were able to truly break the story of an attack that had been covered on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers a year earlier and, in the process, produced one of the all-time great pieces of journalism. It’s an important reminder that the biggest stories may be hiding in plain sight; that breaking news coverage is essential but may not convey the full magnitude of an event; and that a writer may be far better served by laying out a detailed, chronological account in spartan prose, even when the story is so horrific it seems to demand a polemic.

Hersey begins Hiroshima in an understated fashion, noting exactly what each of the six survivors he chronicles was doing at the moment their lives changed forever. “Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out, end-of-days nuclear world war,” Blume observes. “But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people -- mothers, fathers, grade school children, doctors, clerks -- going about their daily routines when catastrophe struck.”

As she points out, Hersey’s authorial voice is never raised and so the atomic horrors -- victims whose eyeballs had melted and run down their cheeks, others whose skin hung from their bodies or slipped off their hands like gloves -- speak for themselves. It’s a feat made all the more astonishing when one considers, as Blume reveals, that its author, who had witnessed combat and widespread devastation from conventional bombing during World War II, was so terrified and tormented by what he saw in Hiroshima months after the attack that he feared he would be unable to complete his assignment.

Incredibly, Hersey got the story of Hiroshima with official sanction, reporting under the scrutiny of the office of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, the head of the American occupation of defeated Japan. His prior reportage on the U.S. military, including a book focused on MacArthur that he later called “too adulatory,” helped secure his access. More amazing still, the New Yorker -- fearing possible repercussions under the recently passed Atomic Energy Act -- submitted a final draft of the article for review to Lieutenant General Lesley Groves, who had overseen the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, served as its chief booster, and went so far as to claim that radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.”

Whatever concessions the New Yorker may have made to him have been lost in the sands of time, but Groves did sign off on the article, overlooking, as Blume notes, “Hersey’s most unsettling revelations: the fact that the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”

The impact on the U.S. government would be swift. The article was a sensation and immediately lauded as the best reporting to come out of World War II. It quickly became one of the most reprinted news pieces of all time and led to widespread reappraisals by newspapers and readers alike of just what America had done to Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also managed to shine a remarkably bright light on the perils of nuclear weapons, writ large. “Hersey’s story,” as Blume astutely notes, “was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilization.”

Wanted: A Hersey for Our Time

It’s been 74 years since Hiroshima hit the newsstands. A Cold War and nuclear arms race followed as those weapons spread across the planet. And this January, as a devastating pandemic was beginning to follow suit, all of us found ourselves just 100 seconds away from total annihilation due to the plethora of nuclear weapons on this earth, failures of U.S.-Russian cooperation on arms control and disarmament, the Trump administration’s trashing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and America’s efforts to develop and deploy yet more advanced nukes, as well as two other factors that have sped up that apocalyptic Doomsday Clock: climate change and cyber-based disinformation.

The latter, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is corrupting our “information ecosphere,” undermining democracy as well as trust among nations, and so creating hair-trigger conditions in international relations. The former is transforming the planet’s actual ecosystem and placing humanity in another kind of ultimate peril. “Dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder,” former California Governor Jerry Brown, the executive chair of the Bulletin, said earlier this year. “Climate change just compounds the crisis. If there’s ever a time to wake up, it’s now.”

Over the last three-plus years, however, President Donald Trump has seemingly threatened at least three nations with nuclear annihilation, including a U.S. ally. In addition to menacing North Korea with the possibility of unleashing “fire and fury” and his talk of ushering in “the end” of Iran, he even claimed to have “plans” to exterminate most of the population of Afghanistan. The “method of war” he suggested employing could kill an estimated 20 million or more Afghans, almost all of them civilians. John Hersey, who died in 1993 at the age of 78, wouldn’t have had a moment’s doubt about what he meant.

Trump’s nuclear threats may never come to fruition, but his administration, while putting significant effort into deep-sixing nuclear pacts, has also more than done its part to accelerate climate change, thinning rules designed to keep the planet as habitable as possible for humans. A recent New York Times analysis, for example, tallied almost 70 environmental rules and regulations -- governing planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane emissions, clean air, water, and toxic chemicals -- that have been rescinded, reversed, or revoked, with more than 30 additional rollbacks still in progress.

President Trump has not, however, been a total outlier when it comes to promoting environmental degradation. American presidents have been presiding over the destruction of the natural environment since the founding of the republic. Signed into law in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act, for instance, transformed countless American lives, providing free land for the masses. But it also transferred 270 million acres of wilderness, or 10% of the United States, into private hands for “improvements.”

More recently, Ronald Reagan launched attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency through deregulation and budget cuts, while George W. Bush’s administration worked to undermine science-based policies, specifically through the denial of anthropogenic climate change. The difference, of course, was that Lincoln couldn’t have conceptualized the effects of global warming (even if the first study of the “greenhouse effect” was published during his lifetime), whereas the science was already clear enough in the Reagan and Bush years, and brutally self-apparent in the age of Trump, as each of them pursued policies that would push us precious seconds closer to Armageddon.

The tale of how John Hersey got his story is a great triumph of Lesley Blume’s Fallout, but what came after may be an even more compelling facet of the book. Hersey gave the United States an image problem -- and far worse. “The transition from global savior to genocidal superpower was an unwelcome reversal,” she observes. Worse yet for the U.S. government, the article left many Americans reevaluating their country and themselves. It’s beyond rare for a journalist to prompt true soul-searching or provide a moral mirror for a nation. In an interview in his later years, Hersey, who generally avoided publicity, suggested that the testimony of survivors of the atomic blasts -- like those he spotlighted -- had helped to prevent nuclear war.

“We know what an atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us,” writes Blume. Unfortunately, while there have been many noteworthy, powerful works on climate change, we’re still waiting for the one that packs the punch of “Hiroshima.” And so, humanity awaits that once-in-a-century article, as nuclear weapons, climate change, and cyber-based disinformation keep us just 100 clicks short of doomsday.

Hersey provided a template. Blume has lifted the veil on how he did it. Now someone needs to step up and write the world-changing piece of reportage that will shock our consciences and provide a little more breathing room between this vanishing moment and our ever-looming midnight.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

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RSN: William Barr's Department of Justice Is a Rogue Agency

 

 

24 September 20

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24 September 20 It's Live on the HomePage Now: Reader Supported News CAN SOMEONE, ANYONE DONATE $100? - We have one week to go for September and way below where we were last month and where we need to be. This is a serious problem that threatens RSN — for real. Who out there can spare a hundred? With urgency and respect. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation! Charles Pierce | William Barr's Department of Justice Is a Rogue Agency Charles Pierce, Esquire Pierce writes: "The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives would like to speak to an assistant attorney general named Eric Driesband, as well as one Michael Carvajal, the director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, and one Donald Washington, the director of the U.S. Marshals Service." This is completely, howl-at-the-moon, barking nuts. he Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives would like to speak to an assistant attorney general named Eric Driesband, as well as one Michael Carvajal, the director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, and one Donald Washington, the director of the U.S. Marshals Service. The committee has some questions covering a broad range of topics related to the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. The DOJ responded with a letter from Stephen F. Boyd, yet another assistant attorney general, in which it was explained that the three administration* officials would not be coming before the committee. It is an altogether remarkable letter and yet completely typical of this administration. Unfortunately, when given the opportunity to obtain information from the head of the Department of Justice about precisely these matters, many Committee Members chose instead to use their allotted time to air grievances. Rather than attempt to obtain information from the Department that would assist the Committee in recommending legislation to the House, many Members of the majority devoted their time entirely towards scolding and insulting the Attorney General. These Members refused to allow the Attorney General to respond to their accusations or to answer questions asked for rhetorical effect. As the New York Times reported, “Democrat after Democrat posed questions to Mr. Barr only to cut him off when he tried to reply, substituting their own replies for his.” See Barr Testimony: Highlights of Combative Hearings on Protests, Stone Case and More, N.Y. Times (July 28, 2020). In what can only be viewed as a coordinated effort to muzzle the Attorney General, the Members repeatedly invoked the phrase, “reclaiming my time,” which they employed more than 30 times when the Attorney General tried to respond. All told, when the Attorney General tried to address the Committee’s questions, he was interrupted and silenced in excess of 70 times. Some Members were quite candid that they had no interest in actually hearing from the Attorney General. One Member interrupted him and admitted, “Well I don’t want you to tell your story.” Oversight of the Department of Justice, Hearing Before the H. Comm. on the Judiciary, 116th Cong. (July 28, 2020). Another advised, “You will have a chance to comment after your testimony is done here today.” Despite the Attorney General appearing in person and taking questions from all Members who were present, he was denied the most basic opportunities to respond. In short, the reply from the Executive to a perfectly legitimate request from the Legislature, a co-equal branch of government, can be summed up as: a) Pound sand, and b) It should pound sand because it had the audacity to pay insufficient respect to William Barr, the White House manure spreader. This is pure, raw balls. Barr tried to filibuster his way through every answer and the Democrats on the committee refused to let him do that, and now the DOJ claims the right to deny Congress its legitimate oversight power because members of Congress tried to do what they're supposed to do. Worse, through a tortured misreading of a Supreme Court decision, the administration* is claiming the de facto right to determine what is or is not a "legitimate legislative purpose." Yet the House’s so-called oversight “hearing” of the Attorney General did preciously little to advance any legitimate interest since the Attorney General was repeatedly denied the opportunity to provide information to the Committee. We very much regret that the Committee did not elect to engage in a meaningful, good-faith effort to obtain information and views from the Attorney General while he was present and prepared to testify. Having squandered its opportunity to conduct a meaningful oversight hearing with the Attorney General, it remains unclear how further public spectacles with other Department officials would now—a mere 14 legislative days since the Attorney General’s hearing—advance the Committee’s legitimate oversight efforts. That's not your decision to make, Bunky. I don't care if the committee members squirted Barr with seltzer bottles the last time he appeared, you don't get to tell a congressional committee what it can and cannot question a government official about, and you don't get to blow off the committee's request for testimony from witnesses because you didn't like the decorum that prevailed when somebody else was testifying earlier. (Here, for example, is Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia being so dreadfully rude to poor Bill Barr, who was just trying to duck the questions like any veteran government white dude would.) Under Barr, the Department of Justice has become a rogue agency at the beck and call of the White House. This is further illustrated by the weird-but-nonetheless-scary declaration that New York City, Portland, and Seattle should be recognized as "anarchist jurisdictions" and, as such, denied aid from the federal government. From CNN: "When state and local leaders impede their own law enforcement officers and agencies from doing their jobs, it endangers innocent citizens who deserve to be protected, including those who are trying to peacefully assemble and protest," Attorney General William Barr said in a statement on Monday. "We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted when the safety of the citizenry hangs in the balance. It is my hope that the cities identified by the Department of Justice today will reverse course and become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting their own citizens." This is, not to put a finer point on it, completely, howl-at-the-moon, barking nuts—far more literally anarchic than anything done by a kid in the streets of Seattle. The Executive cannot unilaterally repurpose money already appropriated, no matter what magic incantation Barr comes up with out of his Conservative Book of Spells. Moreover, there's more than a little evidence that these three cities were chosen because a) the president* has no chance of winning the states in which they're located, and b) because the local officials spurned the president's offer of shock troops. You will note that neither Kenosha nor Minneapolis are on the list, probably because the president*'s campaign thinks Wisconsin and Minnesota are still up for grabs. And, as for the second reason, it is becoming plain that the worst thing you can do to Bill Barr is laugh at his mighty sword. Why do they laugh at his mighty sword? READ MORE Demonstrators march along Constitution Avenue in protest following a Kentucky grand jury decision in the Breonna Taylor case on Sept. 23, 2020 in Washington, DC. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty) ALSO SEE: Democrats Decry Kentucky Attorney General's Decision as an Example of Systemic Injustice 'Absolutely Heartbreaking' Ruling in Breonna Taylor Shooting Sparks New Wave of National Protests for Justice, Racial Equality Jordan Culver and Grace Hauck, USA Today Excerpt: "The announcement of a grand jury's decision to indict one of the three police officers involved in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor - and that the indictment wasn't related to her death - sparked another wave of protests for justice and racial equality around the nation." READ MORE Former Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. (photo: Getty) Andrew Weissmann's Inside Story of the Mueller Probe's Mistakes George Packer, The Atlantic Packer writes: "'There's no question I was frustrated at the time,' Weissmann told me in a recent interview. 'There was more that could be done that we didn't do.'" In a new book, Andrew Weissmann, one of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s top deputies, lays out the limits and letdowns of the years-long Russia investigation.

ndrew Weissmann was one of Robert Mueller’s top deputies in the special counsel’s investigation of the 2016 election, and he’s about to publish the first insider account, called Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation. The title comes from an adapted quote by the philosopher John Locke that’s inscribed on the façade of the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C.: “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”

Weissmann offers a damning indictment of a “lawless” president and his knowing accomplices—Attorney General William Barr (portrayed as a cynical liar), congressional Republicans, criminal flunkies, Fox News. Donald Trump, he writes, is “like an animal, clawing at the world with no concept of right and wrong.” But in telling the story of the investigation and its fallout, Weissmann reserves his most painful words for the Special Counsel’s Office itself. Where Law Ends portrays a group of talented, dedicated professionals beset with internal divisions and led by a man whose code of integrity allowed their target to defy them and escape accountability.

“There’s no question I was frustrated at the time,” Weissmann told me in a recent interview. “There was more that could be done that we didn’t do.” He pointed out that the special counsel’s report never arrived at the clear legal conclusions expected from an internal Justice Department document. At the same time, it lacked the explanatory power of last month’s bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on the 2016 election. “Even with 1,000 pages, it was better,” Weissmann said of the Senate report. “It made judgments and calls, instead of saying, ‘You could say this and you could say that.’”

The Mueller inquiry was the greatest potential check on Trump’s abuse of power. The press gives the president fits, but almost half the country chooses not to believe the news. Congress will protect Trump as long as his party controls at least one chamber. Local prosecutors and civil plaintiffs are severely limited in pursuing justice against a sitting president. Public opinion is immovably split and powerless until the next election. Only the Special Counsel’s Office—burrowing into the criminal matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election, a possible conspiracy with the Trump campaign, and the president’s subsequent attempts to block an investigation—offered the prospect of accountability for Trump. Mueller couldn’t try the president in court, let alone send him to prison, but he could fully expose Trump’s wrongdoing for a future prosecutor, using the enforceable power of a grand jury subpoena. The whole constitutional superstructure of checks and balances rested on Mueller and his team. As their work dragged on through 2017 and 2018, with flurries of indictments and plea deals but otherwise in utter silence, many Americans invested the inquiry with the outsized expectation that it would somehow bring Trump down.

Suddenly, in March 2019, the Special Counsel’s Office completed its work. A report, hundreds of pages long, with many lines blacked out, was delivered to the attorney general. Before releasing it to the public, Barr pronounced the president innocent, in a brazen mix of elisions, distortions, and outright lies—for the report presented extensive evidence of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russian assets, and of the president’s efforts to obstruct justice. The lesson Trump took from the Mueller investigation was that he could do anything he wanted. He declared himself vindicated, vowed to pursue the pursuers, and immediately turned to extorting favors for another election from another foreign country. Uproar over “Russiagate” gave way to uproar over “Ukrainegate.” The Mueller report faded away, as if it had all been for nothing.

“Had we given it our all—had we used all available tools to uncover the truth, undeterred by the onslaught of the president’s unique powers to undermine our efforts?” Weissmann writes in the introduction. “I know the hard answer to that simple question: We could have done more.” Elsewhere, he admits that, “like Congress, we were guilty of not pressing as hard as we could” for evidence. He calls a crucial passage of the Mueller report “mealymouthed”—an easy mark for Barr’s treachery. “Part of the reason the president and his enablers were able to spin the report was that we had left the playing field open for them to do so.”

Weissmann, who now teaches at NYU, is a former federal prosecutor from New York, with an aggressive reputation and a precise manner. He won cases against Mafia bosses and Enron executives, served as Mueller’s general counsel at the FBI, and became the head of the Justice Department’s criminal-fraud section under President Obama. When Mueller was appointed special counsel in May 2017, he chose Weissmann to lead “Team M”—the group responsible for the case against Paul Manafort, Trump’s corrupt former campaign chairman. Theirs was the most straightforward part of the investigation; they produced an early indictment and, ultimately, a conviction of Manafort on tax fraud and other charges.

Team M also came close to establishing a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. On August 2, 2016, Manafort dined in New York City with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian-born business associate with ties to Russian intelligence and oligarchs. Manafort, a lavishly compensated hired gun for some of the oligarchs, had been sharing campaign strategy with Kilimnik, including sensitive polling data. Over dinner, Manafort described Trump’s strategy in four battleground states; Kilimnik in turn presented for Trump’s approval a Russian “peace plan” that would amount to the annexation of eastern Ukraine. Last month’s Senate report, going further than Team M, named Kilimnik as an actual Russian intelligence officer and revealed his likely connection to the 2016 election-interference operations. “This is what collusion looks like,” the committee’s Democratic members wrote in an appendix.

In the absence of a discoverable deal between the Trump campaign and Russian assets, the number and flagrancy of contacts and the readiness of Trump and his advisers to lie about them have been too easily minimized. As Weissmann observes in Where Law Ends: “The hope of uncovering something even greater distorted the perception of what was actually brought to light.” Weissmann and his colleagues were thwarted by chance—Manafort’s No. 2, Rick Gates, arrived late for the dinner with Kilimnik and was subsequently unable to tell investigators all that was discussed. They were hamstrung by Mueller’s decision not to look into Trump’s financial dealings with Russia, which might have established a source of Russian leverage over Trump, but which the president had declared a red line not to be crossed. And they were frustrated by perjury—for Manafort never stopped lying to Team M. His lies were encouraged by the president, who made sympathetic noises about Manafort with the suggestion that stonewalling might earn him a pardon. Trump’s pardon power was an obstacle that the prosecutors didn’t anticipate and could never overcome. It kept them from being able to push uncooperative targets as hard as in an ordinary criminal case.

The Special Counsel’s Office also worked under the constant threat that Trump would fire Mueller, as Richard Nixon had fired Archibald Cox, the first Watergate special prosecutor, in the Saturday Night Massacre. Trump tried several times to get rid of Mueller, but he was stopped by his underlings, who knew that it would lead to legal and political disaster. Still, the threat never went away, and in the end, it served the president’s interests well: “The specter of our being shut down exerted a kind of destabilizing pull on our decision-making process.” Where Law Ends describes numerous instances, large and small, when Mueller declined to pursue an aggressive course for fear of the reaction at the White House. For example, the special counsel shied away from subpoenaing Don Trump Jr. to testify about his notorious June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Ivanka Trump, who didn’t attend the meeting but talked with participants afterward in the lobby, and later discussed with her father how to conceal details from the press, was never even asked to speak with Mueller’s investigators: They “feared that hauling her in for an interview would play badly to the already antagonistic right-wing press—Look how they’re roughing up the president’s daughter—and risk enraging Trump, provoking him to shut down the Special Counsel’s Office once and for all.”

Weissmann blames this persistent timidity on one of Mueller’s other top deputies, a lawyer named Aaron Zebley, comparing Zebley to George B. McClellan (and more zealous team members, including himself, to Ulysses S. Grant). “Repeatedly during our twenty-two months in operation,” Weissmann writes, “we would reach some critical juncture in our investigation only to have Aaron say that we could not take a particular action because it risked aggravating the president beyond some undefined breaking point.”

Weissmann described to me this failure of nerve on Zebley’s part, an aversion to confronting the ugliness coming from Trump. I pointed out that all of these were ultimately Mueller’s decisions. Weissmann agreed.

His portrait of Mueller is admiring and affectionate. The former FBI director is laconic, loyal, demanding, and, very occasionally, drily charming. Weissmann goes to great lengths to understand Mueller’s thinking on two of his central decisions: not to subpoena Trump, and not to state plainly in the report what the evidence of volume two makes clear—that Trump obstructed justice. Neither decision holds up to Weissmann’s scrutiny.

On the subpoena, Weissmann told me that the reason given in the report—that the legal battle would have unduly delayed the inquiry—was less than candid, since a subpoena issued at the start of the investigation could have been resolved by the Supreme Court months before the date of the report’s completion. In Where Law Ends, Weissmann reveals that the real reason for not compelling the president to be interviewed was Mueller’s aversion to having an explosive confrontation with the White House. On the obstruction of justice, Mueller declined to make a determination because of a long-standing Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Mueller, judging that Trump wouldn’t have his day in court until he became a private citizen again, refrained from stating that Trump had broken the law (even though volume one of the report explicitly cleared the president of the conspiracy charge).

Weissmann politely demolishes this effort at extreme fairness. “I was flummoxed by Mueller’s thinking,” he admits. The special counsel was required to make a legal recommendation on the facts and present it in an internal department document to the attorney general. Barr could decide to keep the report private. Or, if it became public, Trump could use his unparalleled platform to defend himself to the country. Or he could choose to be charged and tried in order to clear his name. Mueller, completely out of character, was “making his own, freelance judgments about what was appropriate and not delivering on what he was tasked with doing.”

Weissmann made these arguments to the lawyer whom Mueller had assigned to draft this tricky passage of the report. “I also think it seems like a transparent shell game,” Weissmann told his colleague. “When there is insufficient proof of a crime, in volume one, we say it. But when there is sufficient proof, with obstruction, we don’t say it. Who is going to be fooled by that? It’s so obvious.”

By abdicating the role of prosecutor, Mueller cleared the way for Barr to take it on himself. Mueller and Barr were old friends. Several weeks before submitting the report, Weissmann writes, Mueller informed Barr of his intent to omit any legal recommendation. Barr didn’t object. Without telling Mueller, he saw a chance to disfigure the report into an exoneration of the president and thereby make its damning truths disappear. “Barr,” Weissmann writes, “had betrayed both friend and country.”

And Mueller? He was incapable of navigating the world remade by Trump. He conducted himself with scrupulous integrity and allowed his team to be intimidated by people who had no scruples at all. His deep aversion to publicity silenced him when the public badly needed clarity about the special counsel’s dense, ambiguous, at times unreadable report. His sense of fairness surrendered the facts of presidential criminality to an administration that was at war with facts. He trusted his friend Barr to play it straight, not realizing that Barr had gone crooked. He left the job of holding the president accountable to a Congress that had shown itself to be Trump’s willing accomplice. He wanted, above all, to warn the American people about foreign subversion of our democracy, while the greater subversion gathered force here at home.

In our interview, I asked Weissmann if Mueller had let the American people down. “Absolutely, yep,” Weissmann said, before quickly adding: “I wouldn’t phrase it as just Mueller. I would say ‘the office.’ There are a lot of things we did well, and a lot of things we could have done better, to be diplomatic about it.”

And the investigation—was it a historic missed opportunity?

Weissmann’s reply was terse. “That’s fair.”

With the end of the Special Counsel’s Office, the one real check on Trump’s unfettered power was gone, until the next election. Now it’s upon us, and the president remains free to repeat what worked for him in the last one.

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death Friday helped prompt a surge in voter interest. (photo: Getty)

Voter Registration Surges After Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Death, Voting Groups Say
Brian Schwartz, CNBC
Schwartz writes: "Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death Friday helped prompt a surge in voter registration, according to voting groups."
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Rightwing and leftwing protesters battle with mace, paint balls and rocks near Justice Center in downtown Portland Saturday, 22 August 2020. (photo: Brooke Herbert/AP)

Revealed: Pro-Trump Militias Plotted Violence Ahead of Portland Rallies
Jason Wilson and Robert Evans, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Leaked chat logs show Portland-area pro-Trump activists planning and training for violence, sourcing arms and ammunition and even suggesting political assassinations ahead of a series of contentious rallies in the Oregon city, including one scheduled for this weekend." 

Patriots Coalition members suggested political assassinations and said ‘laws will be broken, people will get hurt’, leaked chats show

eaked chat logs show Portland-area pro-Trump activists planning and training for violence, sourcing arms and ammunition and even suggesting political assassinations ahead of a series of contentious rallies in the Oregon city, including one scheduled for this weekend.

The chats on the GroupMe app, shared with the Guardian by the antifascist group Eugene Antifa, show conversations between Oregon members of the Patriots Coalition growing more extreme as they discuss armed confrontations with leftwing Portland activists, and consume a steady diet of online disinformation about protests and wildfires.

At times, rightwing activists discuss acts of violence at recent, contentious protests, which in some cases they were recorded carrying out. At one point, David Willis, a felon currently being sued for his alleged role in an earlier episode of political violence, joins a discussion about the use of paintballs.

Where other members had previously suggested freezing the paintballs for maximum damage, Willis wrote: “They make glass breaker balls that are rubber coated metal. They also have pepper balls but they are about 3 dollars a ball. Don’t freeze paintballs it makes them wildly inaccurate” [sic.]

Willis did not immediately respond to voice and text messages sent to his listed cellphone number.

Another prolific poster is Mark Melchi, a 41-year-old Dallas, Oregon-based car restorer who claims to have served as a captain in the US army.

Melchi has been recorded leading an armed pro-Trump militia, “1776 2.0” into downtown confrontations in Portland, including on 22 August. At several points in the chat he proposes violence in advance of those confrontations, and appears to confess to prior acts committed in the company of his paramilitary group.

In advance of the 22 August protest, Melchi wrote: “It’s going to be bloody and most likely shooting, they’re definitely armed… so let’s make sure we have an organized direction of movement and direction of clearing or other Patriots will be caught in the possible cross fire. When shit hits the fan.”

He advised other members to ignore weapons statutes, writing, “I saw someone say bats, mace, and stun guns are illegal downtown. If you’re going to play by the books tomorrow night, we already lost. We are here to make a change, laws will be broken, people will get hurt… It’s lawlessness downtown, and people need to be prepared for bad things.”

Following these comments, several rightwing demonstrators were recorded using gas and bats on 22 August, where Melchi and his militia were also present.

In other remarks ahead of the day, Melchi draws on what he claims is his group’s history of traveling to multiple states to engage in violence at protests.

“My Group 1776 2.0. Has been fighting Antifa in Seattle, Portland, for months”, Melchi writes, adding “this won’t be a simple fist fight. People will get shot, stabbed and beat.”

He also claims police cooperation in interstate violence, writing “Yes, going after them at night is the solution… Like we do in other states, tactical ambushes at night while backing up the police are key. You get the leaders and the violent ones and the police are happy to shut their mouths and cameras.”

Melchi nevertheless recommends that members disguise themselves to avoid the consequences of homicide.

“We must be ready to defend with lethal response… Suggest wearing mask and nothing to identify you on Camera…to prevent any future prosecution.”

In response to detailed questions about these contributions, Melchi responded with an email that falsely suggested his comments might have been photoshopped, and concluded with direct threats.

Melchi wrote: “I suggest you don’t threaten combat veterans sweetheart, might get a little uncomfortable for ya big guy!”

Melchi’s sentiments in the chat logs were in keeping with fantasies of, and plans for, violence, which are constantly discussed by group members.

Although some members are connected with extremist groups or militias, on the whole they describe themselves as “patriots”, and they express no clear ideology beyond a hatred of the left, and a preparedness to use violence. The shared allegiances expressed in the group are mostly to the police, the United States and Donald Trump, a person whom some say they are prepared to kill for.

Ahead of 22 August, a user “Paige” says “I’m waiting for the presidential go to start open firing”.

Melchi, the militia leader, responds, “Well Saturday may be that go lol”.

Alex Newhouse, the digital research lead at the Center for Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute, said of the group that “the main mechanism that makes these communities so dangerous is the incessant desensitization to the idea of political violence”.

Newhouse said that the ideas expressed in the group were entrenched in “extreme nationalism – that a few strong men with guns can together take out an evil that is at once imagined as an existential threat, and pathetically weak”. Newhouse added that the group’s discussions “fit within a broader trend of rightwing extremists becoming more accelerationist over time”.

The chatlogs became fractious at the peak of Oregon’s recent wildfire emergency. While some members said they had gone to rural areas to “hunt” imagined antifa arsonists, others became concerned about the dangers.

As early as 9 September, the baseless idea that the fires were a coordinated arson attack was treated as settled fact, with Melchi writing: “People have officially died from these Antifa Fires. I’d shoot them on site” [sic], and another user, Dub, responding: “Yes sir if I see them they are getting dropped where they stand.”

When adverse consequences of vigilantism became evident, leadership attempted to bring the group back under control. After a member of the group reported that an associate had been arrested in Lane county for “holding [someone] at gunpoint”, the group’s administrator, who used the user name Patriot Coalition, wrote “STOP HOLDING PEOPLE AT GUN POINT- STOP PULLING YOUR WEAPONS… VIDEO- TAKE PICTURES AND CALL 911.”

Mary McCord is the legal director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law School, which on Wednesday released a series of fact sheets on anti-paramilitary laws in all 50 states.

Given details of the content of the chats, McCord said that “this is the kind of thing that might allow authorities to take action”, and that members of the group may “already be in violation of Oregon’s anti-paramilitary laws”.

The group also talked about coordinating at the rally with the Proud Boys, an extreme rightwing group. One user, identified as Bravo91 and a part of the group’s leadership, spoke of phone calls with the Proud Boys.

Along with antifascist demonstrators, Democratic politicians are also the target of violent fantasies in the chats. In particular, Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, is demonized and nominated as a possible target for assassination by the group.

On 24 August, a user identified as “Trent-Medford” writes, “Fuck wheeler… guess what soon as we are done with these punks. He’s next freakin coward !!!!!!”

User T Durden went further. In response to news that an alleged arsonist had been released on bail, and without encountering disagreement, they wrote: “Maybe we need to start taking care of the justice ourselves!”, adding, “Start with justice on our DA and then move on to the governor. Maybe by the time we get to the first judge, they will have changed their tunes.”

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A new massacre in Algeciras, Colombia occurred less than 24 hours after the massacre in the department of Córdoba. (photo: Twitter)

Colombia: Two New Massacres Not Even 24 Hours Apart
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The municipal authorities of Algeciras, in the department of Huila in southern Colombia, confirmed Wednesday that a massacre occurred on a farm in the region on Tuesday night when unknown shooters killed three men." 

The new massacre in Algeciras occurred less than 24 hours after the massacre in the department of Córdoba.

The information indicates that at least three armed men came to a house in the village of Quebradón Sur and murdered both Jimmy Betancourt Ortiz, 43, and Alejandro Betancourt, 25, father and son. The third person killed was an employee of a property belonging to an ex-combatant of the FARC-EP, who has not yet been identified.

Police authorities and the Attorney General's Office are in the area to collect the bodies and carry out the respective investigations that could shed more light on this new massacre—which is not the first in this territory—some 200 km southwest of Bogotá.

This massacre took place less than 24 hours after another one recorded in the department of Córdoba in northern Colombia when a group of men killed four people in the rural area known as Versalles, in the jurisdiction of the village of Batatal.

These two massacres occurred in the context of a recent complaint by the FARC party, which reported that ex-combatant Nelson David Sánchez Segura died Tuesday after being a victim of an attack in the municipality of Tumaco, in Nariño department, in the southwest of the country.

A recent massacre on July 16, also in the municipality of Algeciras, Huila, saw six heavily armed individuals kill four other people and wound two more, which generated a series of forced displacements of hundreds of residents.

According to figures from the Institute for Peace and Development Studies, Indepaz, some 246 people have died in the 61 massacres recorded in Colombia this year, in a trend that has not stopped and only increased since the signing of the 2016 peace accords.

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An aerial view of the Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., in May. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on Wednesday that bans the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles in the state by 2035. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty)

Governor Gavin Newsom Signs Order Banning Sales of New Gasoline Cars by 2035
Lauren Sommer and Scott Neuman, NPR
Excerpt: "California will phase out the sale of all gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035 in a bid to lead the U.S. in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging the state's drivers to switch to electric cars."
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