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20 January 21
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Ta-Nehisi Coates | Donald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In?
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
Coates writes: "It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true - his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power."
“The First White President,” revisited
’ve been thinking about Barbara Tuchman’s medieval history, A Distant Mirror, over the past couple of weeks. The book is a masterful work of anti-romance, a cold-eyed look at how generations of aristocrats and royalty waged one of the longest wars in recorded history, all while claiming the mantle of a benevolent God. The disabusing begins early. In the introduction, Tuchman examines the ideal of chivalry and finds, beneath the poetry and codes of honor, little more than myth and delusion.
Knights “were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed,” Tuchman writes. “In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century, the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.”
The chasm between professed ideal and actual practice is not surprising. No one wants to believe themselves to be the villain of history, and when you have enough power, you can hold reality at bay. Raw power transfigured an age of serfdom and warmongering into one of piety and courtly love.
This is not merely a problem of history. Twice now, Rudy Giuliani has incited a mob of authoritarians. In the interim, “America’s Mayor” was lauded locally for crime drops that manifested nationally. No matter. The image of Giuliani as a pioneering crime fighter gave cover to his more lamentable habits—arresting whistleblowers, defaming dead altar boys, and raiding homeless shelters in the dead of night. Giuliani was, by Jimmy Breslin’s lights, “blind, mean, and duplicitous,” a man prone to displays “of great nervousness if more than one black at a time entered City Hall.” And yet much chin-stroking has been dedicated to understanding how Giuliani, once the standard-bearer for moderate Republicanism, a man who was literally knighted, was reduced to inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol. The answer is that Giuliani wasn’t reduced at all. The inability to see what was right before us—that Giuliani was always, in Breslin’s words, “a small man in search of a balcony”—is less about Giuliani and more about what people would rather not see.
And what is true of Giuliani is particularly true of his master. It was popular, at the time of Donald Trump’s ascension, to stand on the thinnest of reeds in order to avoid stating the obvious. It was said that the Trump presidency was the fruit of “economic anxiety,” of trigger warnings and the push for trans rights. We were told that it was wrong to call Trump a white supremacist, because he had merely “drawn upon their themes.”
One hopes that after four years of brown children in cages; of attempts to invalidate the will of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit; of hearing Trump tell congresswomen of color to go back where they came from; of claims that Joe Biden would turn Minnesota into “a refugee camp”; of his constant invocations of “the Chinese virus,” we can now safely conclude that Trump believes in a world where white people are—or should be—on top. It is still deeply challenging for so many people to accept the reality of what has happened—that a country has been captured by the worst of its history, while millions of Americans cheered this on.
The temptation to look away is strong. This summer I watched as whole barrels of ink were emptied to champion free speech and denounce “cancel culture.” Meanwhile, from the most powerful office in the world, Trump issued executive orders targeting a journalistic institution and promoted “patriotic education.” The indifference to his incredible acts was telling. So much for chivalry.
The mix of blindness and pedantry did not plague merely writers, but also policy makers and executives. “The FBI does not talk in terms of terrorism committed by white people,” the journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote in the days after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. “Attempting to appear politically ecumenical, a recent bureaucratic overhaul during an accelerated period of domestic terrorism created the category of ‘racially motivated violent extremism.’” But only so ecumenical. “For all its hesitation over white terror,” Ackerman continued, “the FBI until at least 2018 maintained an investigative category about a nebulous and exponentially less deadly thing it called ‘Black Identity Extremism.’”
“When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide,” Tuchman writes, “the system breaks down.” One hopes that this moment for America has arrived, that it can at last see that the sight of cops and a Confederate flag among the mob on January 6, the mockery of George Floyd and the politesse on display among some of the Capitol Police, are not a matter of chance.
More, that Trumpism did not begin with Trump; that the same Republican Party some now recall in wistful and nostalgic tones planted seeds of insurrection with specious claims of voter fraud; that the decision to storm the Capitol follows directly, and logically, from respectable Republicans who claim that Democrats steal elections and defraud this country’s citizens out of their right to self-government.
This, of course, is not my first time contemplating the import of such things. “The First White President” was the culmination of the years I’d spent watching the pieces fall into place. Pieces that, once assembled, finally gave us Trump. I’m sorry to report that I think the article holds up well. This would be a much better world if it didn’t. But in this world, an army has been marshaled and barbed wire installed, and the FBI is on guard against an inside job. Whatever this is—whatever we decide to call this—it is not peaceful, and it is not, in many ways, a transition. It is something darker. Are we now, at last, prepared to ask why?
The following is an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s October 2017 cover story, “The First White President.” You can find the full essay here.
IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards—and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.
For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough—Trump has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own. And this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not being a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted for destruction or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white. Trump truly is something new—the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his rightful honorific—America’s first white president.
Steve Bannon. (photo: NBC News)
Trump Issues 73 Pardons and 70 Commutations in a Final Wave of Executive Clemency Grants
Sonam Sheth and Lauren Frias, Business Insider
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump issued more than 140 pardons and commutations late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning as one of his final acts in office."
resident Donald Trump issued more than 140 pardons and commutations late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning as one of his final acts in office.The Washington Post reported that Trump and close aides, including his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, drew up the list during a Sunday meeting in the Oval Office. The New York Times reported that Ivanka Trump sent the final list to the White House counsel's office for approval and that the Justice Department's pardon office, which typically reviews who is granted executive clemency, was not included in the process.
People on the list included:
- Former chief strategist Steve Bannon will be pardoned
- Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit will be granted a commutation
- Rapper Lil Wayne will be pardoned
- Rapper Kodak Black will be granted a commutation
- Former RNC finance chair Elliott Broidy will be pardoned
In total, the White House announced 73 pardons and 70 commutations in the latest round.
Numerous people at the center of speculation about pardons and commutations did not appear on the president's final list, including Rudy Giuliani, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Joe Exotic.
According to The Times, Trump came to his decision after consulting with the criminal-justice advocacy group Cut50, the former Koch Industries executive Mark Holden, and Alice Johnson, a criminal-justice-reform advocate who was convicted on drug-trafficking charges and sentenced to life in prison before Trump commuted her sentence and later granted her a full pardon.
Before the White House announced the latest pardons and commutations, a source told CNN that some Trump allies believed many of the recipients were people the president expected to enjoy beneficial relationships with after leaving office.
"Everything is a transaction," the source told CNN. "He likes pardons because it is unilateral. And he likes doing favors for people he thinks will owe him."
Last month, Trump pardoned 46 people and commuted the sentences of eight others. The list featured several people who had personal connections to the president. Others were not directly tied to Trump, but right-wing media figures had aggressively lobbied for their pardons.
Names on the list included:
- George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign foreign-policy aide who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in the Russia investigation.
- Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in the Russia investigation.
- Roger Stone, a Republican strategist who was convicted in the Russia investigation of multiple felony counts of making false statements, obstruction, and witness tampering.
- Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was convicted of eight counts of tax fraud, bank fraud, and failure to report foreign bank accounts, and who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction.
- Charles Kushner, Jared's father, a former real-estate businessman who pleaded guilty in 2005 to 16 counts of tax evasion, one count of retaliating against a federal witness, and one count of lying to the Federal Election Commission.
- Former Republican Rep. Steve Stockman, who was convicted of 23 counts of fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, and false statements.
- Former Republican Rep. Chris Collins, who pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI and conspiring to commit securities fraud.
- Former Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter and his wife, Margaret, who pleaded guilty to misusing campaign funds.
- Four former Blackwater guards convicted in connection to the massacre of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007.
- Two former Border Patrol agents convicted of shooting and injuring an unarmed immigrant in 2006.
In November, the president also pardoned his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI as part of the Russia investigation.
The president is granted extraordinarily broad pardon powers under the Constitution. But Trump has drawn significant scrutiny for circumventing the lengthy legal and ethical review process at the Justice Department that determines who gets executive clemency.
Instead, the vast majority of the president's highest-profile pardons and commutations have gone to his friends and loyalists or to others whose names were suggested by conservative media powerhouses, such as Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News.
Pro-Trump rioters tear down a barricade as they clash with Capitol police on Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
Georgia Lawyer Said He Kicked in Pelosi's Door, She Could've Been 'Torn Into Little Pieces'
David K. Li and Ali Gostanian, NBC News
Excerpt: "A Georgia lawyer boasted that he and fellow rioters 'kicked in Nancy Pelosi's office door' and the House speaker dodged being 'torn into little pieces,' according to a criminal complaint."
Suspect William McCall Calhoun Jr. faces a host of charges stemming from the Jan. 6 pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol Building.
Georgia lawyer boasted that he and fellow rioters "kicked in Nancy Pelosi's office door" and the House speaker dodged being "torn into little pieces," according to a criminal complaint.
William McCall Calhoun Jr., an attorney from Americus, Georgia, has been charged with entering a restricted building, violent or disorderly conduct and obstructing official proceedings of government, according to an FBI affidavit seeking his arrest.
The FBI's National Threat operation Center received a tip that Calhoun documented — in words and video on social media — his role in the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol Building, according to the affidavit.
Thousands of supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in hopes of stopping Congress from formalizing President-elect Joe Biden's victory. At least five people died as a result of the violence.
Calhoun said the "mob" searched through Pelosi's "inner sanctum," according to his Facebook post cited in the affidavit.
"And get this - the first of us who got upstairs kicked in Nancy Pelosi's office door and pushed down the hall towards her inner sanctum, the mob howling with rage," Calhoun wrote, according to the FBI.
"Crazy Nancy probably would have been torn into little pieces but she was nowhere to be seen."
Calhoun's Facebook and Parler accounts, cited in the affidavit, appeared to be deleted by Tuesday afternoon.
The suspected rioter was taken into custody on Friday and will remain in jail until his bail hearing on Thursday, according to a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Georgia.
An attorney for Calhoun did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
Calhoun, who practices criminal and insurance law, was in good standing and has not been targeted for any discipline, according to Georgia Bar Association records.
A spokesman for the association declined to discuss Calhoun on Tuesday afternoon but said in a statement: "The Bar only has jurisdiction over lawyers in their professional lives, so the rules do not cover personal conduct unless a member is convicted of a crime."
He's been licensed to practice law in Georgia since 1990.
Reality Winner leaves the federal courthouse where she was sentenced on Aug. 23, 2018, in Augusta, Georgia. (photo: Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/TNS/Alamy Live News/Alamy(
Federal Prison Took Nine Months to Investigate Reality Winner's Abuse Claim
Taylor Barnes, The Intercept
Barnes writes: "The NSA whistleblower says she was threatened by a guard after making a report of abuse."
n New Year’s Eve, Billie Winner-Davis, the mother of National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner, received a panicked call from the Fort Worth, Texas, prison where her daughter is serving a more than five-year sentence. Winner revealed to her mother that she had filed a sexual assault complaint in March under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA. The months-old claim, though, had become newly urgent. In December, Winner told her mother, through tears, that the guard she accused of wrongdoing announced to her unit that Winner had filed a report and warned: “If you lie on me, I go for blood.”
Other incarcerated women gathered around Winner and told her that they would keep her safe, her mother said, relating Winner’s account. The young Air Force veteran, Winner-Davis said, felt “perfectly safe” around the other detainees and feared that the prison would put her in solitary confinement as a would-be protective measure.
Winner-Davis pulled every lever she could to sound the alarm. She wrote to the prison’s administration, to Texas’s two senators, to her congressional representative, and to the White House. She shared details of the incident with her tens of thousands of social media followers.
Then, in early January, the prison did something it had not done in the more than nine months since Winner filed her PREA complaint: send an investigator to interview her about the incident and, remarkably, a physician to examine her for signs of sexual assault.
When a baffled Winner explained to the doctor that her complaint had been filed nearly a year before, he took her vitals and wrote down an account of what had happened, according to Alison Grinter, the Dallas-based attorney running Winner’s clemency bid.
“As soon as their attention was brought around to this, they went through the protocol,” Grinter said. “But of course, the protocol is designed and is almost entirely always done within 24, 48 hours of the report. This is just totally outrageous.”
The Bureau of Prisons, in a statement, told The Intercept it has a “zero tolerance” policy for sexual abuse and that all allegations are “thoroughly investigated.” But experts said the protections laid out under PREA may still come up short for the range of ways that incarcerated people experience sexual threats.
People incarcerated in federal prisons file hundreds of PREA reports each year, but administrators frequently decide that the allegations aren’t true or can’t be substantiated. A 2019 PREA audit of Federal Medical Center Carswell, the prison where Winner is being held, said that “retaliation monitoring” at the facility was not always undertaken “in a timely manner,” as noted by journalist Kevin Gosztola at Shadowproof, who first reported Winner’s allegations. The shortcomings in the reporting system can leave vulnerable incarcerated people to doubt what protection, if any, they can count on and, like Winner, cause them to second-guess their own experience.
The alleged retaliatory verbal threat capped off a dark year for Winner, her penultimate one behind bars.
Winner is currently serving the longest prison sentence of its kind under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law used in recent years to send journalists’ sources to prison, even as comparable defendants have simply gotten probation for “mishandling classified information.”
The government itself acknowledges that Winner’s intent was to send the document she leaked to journalists and therefore warn the American public, rather than use it for personal gain. The NSA report detailed phishing attacks by Russian military intelligence on local U.S. election officials and was published in a June 2017 article by The Intercept. (The Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media, contributed to Winner’s legal fund through the Press Freedom Defense Fund.)
In 2020, she suffered a series of legal defeats as she attempted to secure compassionate release during the Covid-19 pandemic — something that would not only have brought peace of mind to her and her family but was also in line with pandemic policy guidance to prisons from then-Attorney General William Barr. In the months while she waited for courts to respond, Winner became infected with Covid-19 during a mass outbreak in her prison, which would eventually see six incarcerated people die with the virus.
Throughout the pandemic, the prison’s lockdown crippled Winner’s ability to manage the eating disorder she was diagnosed with during the time when she spent 12-hour days translating the intercepted communications of terror suspects in the drone program. At her sentencing, Winner told a judge that bulimia is “the most pressing internal challenge in my day-to-day survival.”
The March incident that prompted Winner to file a PREA report occurred around 3 a.m., during an overnight cell check that guards perform to make sure incarcerated people are in their beds, according to Grinter, who got an account directly from Winner. If guards cannot see a person, they may make a vocal command to get their attention; Winner told her attorneys that a guard reached into her bed and rubbed her arm.
It’s unclear what action, if any, prison administrators took after Winner filed her complaint. Federal Medical Center Carswell did not respond to emailed questions or a voicemail from The Intercept, and the Bureau of Prisons’ public affairs office said it cannot comment on individual claims made by an incarcerated person.
Winner told her mother and Grinter that nothing happened after she filed her PREA report. Winner-Davis believes only her public outcry led the prison to send an investigator and doctor to meet Winner in January. Winner-Davis said her daughter said that the investigator, during the interview, led Winner to doubt her own gut feeling that she had been violated.
“This investigator just pretty much minimized everything and, during the interview process, was basically trying to persuade Reality that nothing happened,” Winner-Davis said, recounting her daughter’s observations. “When she walked out, she got really angry because she’s like: ‘No, dang it, this happened. And I’ve been victimized.’”
Julie Abbate, national advocacy director of Just Detention International, a group dedicated to ending sexual abuse in detention, said it is possible that the prison officials decided an incident like the one described by Winner does not fall under PREA. But that doesn’t mean an incarcerated woman didn’t find it sexually threatening, according to Abbate. If a woman is asleep in her bed late at night and then is abruptly awoken by a hand on her skin, she will likely experience that in a way that is overshadowed by her awareness of women’s sexual vulnerability, she said.
In response to a description of the incident that Winner gave her attorneys, Abbate said: “Absolutely, without question, I don’t doubt for a second that if she says she was sexually threatened. If she says she felt sexually threatened, then she felt sexually threatened.”
Prison safety protocols may call for checking up on incarcerated people overnight, both to ensure that there are no escapes and that no one has had a medical emergency, Abbate said, but it should be done in a way that takes women’s real fears over their vulnerability into account.
“What this means is that the BOP” — Bureau of Prisons — “is failing its women prisoners if they’re not dealing with them in a gender-responsive manner,” she said.
Since Winner relayed the alleged verbal threat to her mother and attorneys, a staffing change at the prison has allayed her immediate concerns, according to Winner-Davis, though her daughter remains worried that a reversal would put her back in danger.
Her supporters are drumming up attention and advocacy with an eye on the incoming Biden administration, with a military families advocacy group launching a letter-writing campaign to seek clemency or a pardon for the young veteran as a growing and diverse array of political actors back her cause.
But while she continues to be incarcerated, the verbal threat looms large for Winner.
Grinter said, “She’s still very concerned about facing retaliation.”
Bobi Wine was the main challenger to longtime leader Yoweri Museveni, who won with 58 percent of the votes. (photo: Baz Ratner/Reuters)
Uganda Accuses US of 'Subverting' Presidential Election
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Uganda's government accused the United States of trying to 'subvert' last week's presidential elections after the US ambassador attempted to visit opposition leader Bobi Wine, who has been under house arrest."
US Ambassador Natalie E Brown was stopped from visiting Bobi Wine who is effectively under house arrest.
US Ambassador Natalie E Brown was stopped from visiting Wine at his residence in a suburb in the northern outskirts of the capital, the embassy said in a statement late on Monday.
The mission said Brown wanted to check on the “health and safety” of Wine, who became famous after years of singing about government corruption and nepotism, charges the government denies.
The former pop star-turned-legislator, who came second with almost 35 percent votes, rejected the results and accused his rival, President Yoweri Museveni, of winning by fraud. Wine has so far provided no evidence to support his allegations.
The electoral commission, however, on Saturday declared Museveni the winner with 58.6 percent of the vote. Museveni, 76, has been in power since 1986.
On Tuesday, Wine’s lawyers filed a petition in the high court challenging the legality of detaining Wine and his wife without charge. The court has not yet said when the petition will be heard, lawyer Benjamin Katana told Reuters news agency.
‘Meddle in Uganda’s internal politics’
Government spokesman Ofwono Opondo said Brown had no business visiting Wine.
“What she has been trying to do blatantly is to meddle in Uganda’s internal politics, particularly elections, to subvert our elections and the will of the people,” he said. “She shouldn’t do anything outside the diplomatic norms.”
The sharp, public rebuke to the US from the Ugandan government is relatively unusual as the two nations are allies.
Kristof Tetica, a professor of international development at the University of Antwerp, noted Museveni’s relations with the international community took a turn for the worse since November, when the president blamed anti-government demonstrations on “foreign groups and homosexuals”.
He added donor support from the international community has been crucial to Museveni’s government since the mid-1980s.
“Particularly, the US has been a key ally of Uganda. On average they support Uganda with $970m a year, they’ve given military support. The country is seen as a key source of stability in the region, and that has given Uganda leeway for transgressions like corruption,” Tetica told Al Jazeera.
“So that’s why it’s so surprising relations have become so hostile.”
There was no immediate comment from Brown or the US embassy.
Opondo said, without providing any evidence, that Brown had a track record of causing trouble in countries where she has worked in the past. The government was watching her, he added.
The US embassy has said last week’s vote was tainted by harassment of opposition candidates, suppression of media and rights advocates, and a nationwide internet shutdown.
“These unlawful actions and the effective house arrest of a presidential candidate continue a worrying trend on the course of Uganda’s democracy,” it said in the statement on Monday.
‘Unlawful actions’
Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi, on Monday appealed to “fellow citizens of the world” to help him as he remained effectively under house arrest since Thursday.
The US supports Ugandan soldiers serving in an African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia and has donated about $1.5bn to Uganda’s health sector in the past three years.
The US and the European Union did not deploy observer missions for the polls because Ugandan authorities denied accreditation and failed to implement recommendations by past missions.
During the campaigning, security forces routinely broke up Wine’s rallies with tear gas, bullets, beatings and detentions.
They cited violations of laws meant to curb the spread of the coronavirus for those actions.
In November, 54 people were killed as security forces tried to quell riots that erupted in several cities after Wine was detained for alleged violation of the anti-coronavirus measures. He was arrested multiple times during the campaigning.
Bobi Wine and his National Unity Platform (NUP) have rejected the results and said they were planning to challenge it legally.
On Monday, security forces cordoned off the party’s offices in the capital.
Liberation Day Song: Leonard Cohen | Hallelujah
Leonard Cohen, YouTube
Excerpt: "Now I've heard there was a secret chord, that David played, and it pleased the Lord."
Lyrics Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah
From the 1984 album, Various Positions
Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you dont really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor falls, the major lifts
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew her
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Well, maybe there's a God above
As for me all I've ever learned from love
Is how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
But it's not a crime that you're hear tonight
It's not some pilgrim who claims to have seen the Light
No, it's a cold and it's a very broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Well people I've been here before
I know this room and I've walked this floor
You see I used to live alone before I knew ya
And I've seen your flag on the marble arch
But listen love, love is not some kind of victory march, no
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
There was a time you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And I remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove she was moving too
And every single breath we drew was Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Now I've done my best, I know it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didnt come here to London just to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand right here before the Lord of song
With nothing, nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Western monarch. (photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
Monarch Butterfly Population Moves Closer to Extinction
Olga R. Rodriguez, Associated Press
Rodriguez writes: "The number of western monarch butterflies wintering along the California coast has plummeted precipitously to a record low, putting the orange-and-black insects closer to extinction, researchers announced Tuesday."
An annual winter count by the Xerces Society recorded fewer than 2,000 butterflies, a massive decline from the tens of thousands tallied in recent years and the millions that clustered in trees from Northern California’s Marin County to San Diego County in the south in the 1980s.
Western monarch butterflies head south from the Pacific Northwest to California each winter, returning to the same places and even the same trees, where they cluster to keep warm. The monarchs generally arrive in California at the beginning of November and spread across the country once warmer weather arrives in March.
On the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, another monarch population travels from southern Canada and the northeastern United States across thousands of miles to spend the winter in central Mexico. Scientists estimate the monarch population in the eastern U.S. has fallen about 80% since the mid-1990s, but the drop-off in the western U.S. has been even steeper.
The Xerces Society, a nonprofit environmental organization that focuses on the conservation of invertebrates, recorded about 29,000 butterflies in its annual survey last winter. That was not much different than the tally the winter before, when an all-time low of 27,000 monarchs were counted.
But the count this year is dismal. At iconic monarch wintering sites in the city of Pacific Grove, volunteers didn’t see a single butterfly this winter. Other well-known locations, such as Pismo State Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove and Natural Bridges State Park, only hosted a few hundred butterflies, researchers said.
“These sites normally host thousands of butterflies, and their absence this year was heartbreaking for volunteers and visitors flocking to these locales hoping to catch a glimpse of the awe-inspiring clusters of monarch butterflies,” said Sarina Jepsen, director of endangered species at the Xerces Society.
Scientists say the butterflies are at critically low levels in western states because of destruction to their milkweed habitat along their migratory route as housing expands into their territory and use of pesticides and herbicides increases.
Researchers also have noted the effect of climate change. Along with farming, climate change is one of the main drivers of the monarch’s threatened extinction, disrupting an annual 3,000-mile (4,828-kilometer) migration synched to springtime and the blossoming of wildflowers. Massive wildfires throughout the U.S. West last year may have influenced their breeding and migration, researchers said.
A 2017 study by Washington State University researchers predicted that if the monarch population dropped below 30,000, the species would likely go extinct in the next few decades if nothing is done to save them.
Monarch butterflies lack state and federal legal protection to keep their habitat from being destroyed or degraded. In December, federal officials declared the monarch butterfly “a candidate” for threatened or endangered status but said no action would be taken for several years because of the many other species awaiting that designation.
The Xerces Society said it will keep pursuing protection for the monarch and work with a wide variety of partners “to implement science-based conservation actions urgently needed to help the iconic and beloved western monarch butterfly migration.”
People can help the colorful insects by planting early-blooming flowers and milkweed to fuel migrating monarchs on their paths to other states, the Xerces Society said.
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