28 February 21
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27 February 21
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Charles Pierce | Joe Biden Completes the Rite of Passage for Any American President: Bombing the Middle East
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes:
The logic of our policy in that part of the world remains frustratingly circular as well as frustratingly extra-constitutional.
he new administration made its first boom-boom in Syria on Thursday, sent its first explod-a-gram message, which is now a rite of passage for presidents of both parties. I know that the effort to delegitimize the election was unprecedented and violent, and that it continues to this day, but you’re not really a president of the United States until you’ve blown something up in the Middle East. From the Washington Post:
The attack on a border-crossing station in eastern Syria, the first lethal operation ordered by the Biden administration against Iran’s network of armed proxies, was “authorized in response to recent attacks against American and coalition personnel in Iraq, and to ongoing threats,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
It was, apparently, as limited strike as it could be, and at least this administration isn’t going to be pounding its chest for the next three years about it, but the logic of our policy in that part of the world remains frustratingly circular as well as frustratingly extra-constitutional. As Daniel Larison pointed out on the electric Twitter machine:
To sum up, we have to bomb targets in Syria without authorization to protect the troops that are in Iraq without authorization in order to pursue an unauthorized anti-ISIS mission that is really just an excuse to keep troops in the country for anti-Iranian reasons…"We have to defend our wanted troop presence in one country by attacking targets in yet another country" sounds unrelated to self-defense of the United States, but who can say?
And the bipartisan semi-consensus on the value of explod-a-grams remains baffling, especially to those of us who remember that it is the same logic by which Richard Nixon carpet-bombed North Vietnam so he’d have a ceasefire to run on in 1972.
The airstrike appears to be part of a U.S. message to Iran that it cannot improve its leverage in talks by attacking U.S. interests. But Biden’s decision to use force may also set back his plan to shift the focus of U.S. national security away from the Middle East in a long-planned pivot to Asia.
“The strike, the way I see it, was meant to set the tone with Tehran and dent its inflated confidence ahead of negotiations,” said Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official who is currently a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute. “You don’t want to enter into potential talks with Iran on any issue with a bruise to your face from the Irbil attacks.”
“Sending messages.”
“Saving face.”
As far as casus belli go, these are pretty damn lame. And, not for nothing, but we just blew up a piece of Syria because an American contractor got killed. We know that the de facto leader of the Saudi government may have ordered the murder and butchery of a U.S.-resident journalist. Send a message on that.
Proud Boys and other protesters in Washington, D.C. (photo: Getty Images)
Capitol Police Chief Warns of Armed Plot During Biden's First Speech to Congress
Chris Sommerfeldt, New York Daily News
Sommerfeldt writes:
ar-right extremists are threatening to “blow up” the U.S. Capitol during President Biden’s State of the Union address in hopes of killing dozens of members of Congress, a top security official told lawmakers on Thursday.
Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman made the disturbing revelation in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee while justifying the need for keeping strict security measures in place at the Capitol in the wake of last month’s deadly pro-Trump attack.
“We know members of the militia groups that were present on Jan. 6 have stated their desires that they want to blow up the Capitol and kill as many members as possible with a direct nexus to the State of the Union,” said Pittman, who took over as chief after her predecessor, Steven Sund, resigned in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol assault.
Pittman said intelligence agents, likely from the FBI, have come across the threats of mass violence in chatter on encrypted internet forums, underscoring that the prospect of more far-right attacks is of key concern to U.S. law enforcement agencies.
Biden was initially expected to deliver his first State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress this month. However, that timeline now appears unlikely, and the White House has not yet set a date for the annual speech.
As part of her testimony, Pittman also shed new light on the communication breakdown between congressional security officials on Jan. 6.
Sund testified earlier this week that he asked the since-resigned House and Senate sergeants-at-arms to call in National Guard assistance around 1 p.m. on Jan. 6, as a mob of Trump supporters began attacking the Capitol.
Pittman said she had pulled Sund’s phone records and that they confirmed he spoke with former House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving at 12:58 p.m. and former Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger at 1:05 p.m. on Jan. 6.
But Irving claimed in testimony this week that he didn’t speak to Sund until after 2 p.m., at which point the rioters had already breached the building.
The discrepancies have gained much attention from lawmakers, who are trying to find out why it took hours before National Guard troops responded to the Capitol riot, which left a police officer and four others dead after then-President Trump told the attackers at a rally to “fight like hell” to stop Congress from certifying his election defeat.
Despite the security failures, Pittman said law enforcement agencies did not receive an early heads up about the scope of the Jan. 6 riot.
“Although we knew the likelihood for violence by extremists, no credible threat indicated that tens of thousands would attack the U.S. Capitol, nor did the intelligence received from the FBI or any other law enforcement partner indicate such a threat,” Pittman said.
Members of the appropriations committee were not convinced.
“Top officials either failed to take seriously the intelligence received, or the intelligence failed to reach the right people,” said Washington Rep. Jaime Herrera-Beutler, the committee’s top Republican.
It was revealed earlier this week that the FBI sent a “critical threat” alert to Capitol Police on Jan. 5 warning that far-right extremists were preparing to unleash “war” the next day if Congress certified President Biden’s election. It has also been revealed that Capitol Police officials distributed a separate internal document warning that armed extremists were poised for violence and could attack Congress because they saw it as the last chance to try to overturn the election.
Congress is likely to continue investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection for months, if not years.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said Congress will establish an independent 9/11-style commission to investigate the attack, and members on both sides of the aisle support the idea.
Family members of Ronald Greene listen to speakers as demonstrators gather for the March on Washington, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Michael M. Santiago/AP)
Louisiana Police Trooper Kicked and Dragged Black Man Who Died in Custody, Records Show
Associated Press
Documents obtained by AP reveal bodycam footage shows Kory York dragging Ronald Greene ‘on his stomach by the leg shackles’
Louisiana state police trooper has been suspended without pay for kicking and dragging a handcuffed Black man whose in-custody death remains unexplained and the subject of a federal civil rights investigation.
Body camera footage shows Kory York dragging Ronald Greene “on his stomach by the leg shackles” following a violent arrest and high-speed pursuit, according to internal state police records obtained by the Associated Press.
The records are the first public acknowledgement by state police that Greene was mistreated. They confirm details provided last year by an attorney for Greene’s family who viewed graphic body camera footage of the May 2019 arrest and likened it to the police killing of George Floyd, whose death last year triggered widespread protests and a national reckoning with police brutality and systemic racism.
The video shows troopers choking and beating the man, repeatedly jolting him with stun guns and dragging him face-down across the pavement, the attorney told AP.
State police have repeatedly refused to publicly release the body camera footage. The agency has been tight-lipped about Greene’s death and initially blamed the man’s fatal injuries on a car crash outside Monroe, Louisiana.
York, who turned his own body camera off on his way to the scene, is seen on other body-cam footage yanking Greene’s shackles and repeatedly using profanity toward Greene before he died in custody.
York was suspended without pay for 50 hours following an internal investigation that also led to the termination of another trooper, Chris Hollingsworth, who died in a single-car crash after learning he had been fired over his role in the incident.
The AP last year published a 27-second audio clip from Hollingsworth’s body camera in which he can be heard telling a colleague: “I beat the ever-living fuck out of” Greene before he “all of a sudden he just went limp”.
“It is now undisputed that Trooper York participated in the brutal assault that took Ronald Greene’s life,” said Mark Maguire, a Philadelphia civil rights attorney who represents Greene’s family. “This suspension is a start but it does not come close to the full transparency and accountability the family continues to seek.”
Lamar Davis, who took over as state police superintendent last year, wrote York that his suspension had been decided by his predecessor, Kevin Reeves, adding he “would have imposed more severe discipline” had it been up to him.
York told investigators he turned his own body-worn camera off because it was beeping loudly and that his “mind was on other things” after arriving at the scene.
Erik Prince. (image: Soohee Cho/The Intercept)
Erik Prince and the Failed Plot to Arm a Warlord in Libya
Matthew Cole, The Intercept
Cole writes:
n 2019, Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater and a prominent Donald Trump supporter, aided a plot to move U.S.-made attack helicopters, weapons, and other military equipment from Jordan to a renegade commander fighting for control of war-torn Libya. A team of mercenaries planned to use the aircraft to help the commander, Khalifa Hifter, a U.S. citizen and former CIA asset, defeat Libya’s U.N.-recognized and U.S.-backed government. While the U.N. has alleged that Prince helped facilitate the mercenary effort, sources with knowledge of the chain of events, as well as documents obtained by The Intercept, reveal new details about the scheme as well as Prince’s yearslong campaign to support Hifter in his bid to take power in Libya.
The mission to back Hifter ultimately failed, but a confidential U.N. report issued last week and first reported by the New York Times concluded that Prince, a former Navy SEAL, and his associates violated the U.N. arms embargo for Libya. For more than a year, The Intercept has been investigating the failed mercenary effort, dubbed Project Opus. This account is based on dozens of interviews, including with people involved in the ill-fated mission, as well as the U.N. report and other documents obtained exclusively by The Intercept. It includes a blow-by-blow account of how Prince and an associate sought to pressure the Jordanian government to aid the illicit mission, as well as previously unreported details about how the architects of Project Opus used Prince’s connections to the Trump administration to try to win support for their efforts in Libya.
The Intercept’s reporting shows that the push to aid Hifter continued even after Project Opus fell apart. In the summer of 2019, after their backdoor efforts failed to convince Jordan to approve the arms transfer, Prince called a member of Trump’s National Security Council to request a meeting; Prince asked the official to meet with Christiaan Durrant, Prince’s business associate and former employee. At the Army and Navy Club near the White House, with Prince sitting silently at his side, Durrant described the campaign to back Hifter and asked for U.S. support for their mercenary effort, the former NSC official told The Intercept. The upside, Durrant told the official, was that the U.S. help would limit Hifter’s reliance on the Russians, who were also supporting him in the war. The official, who asked not to be named because he feared professional reprisals for being publicly associated with Prince, balked. “It wasn’t something I wanted to be involved in,” he said.
In a statement, Prince’s lawyer, Matthew Schwartz, categorically denied the findings of the U.N. report and said he had asked the body to retract it. “Mr. Prince had no involvement in any alleged military operation in Libya in 2019, or at any other time,” the statement said. “He did not provide weapons, personnel, or military equipment to anyone in Libya.” Schwartz declined to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept, including about whether Prince lobbied Trump administration officials to support Hifter.
An attorney for Durrant, Vince Gordon, declined to answer detailed questions from The Intercept, instead providing a link to a statement in which Durrant acknowledged having set up a company called Opus, but said his work has never “involved any military operations or armed conflict. … We don’t breach sanctions; we don’t deliver military services, we don’t carry guns, and we are not mercenaries.” Durrant added: “I remain friends with Erik Prince and have no business or financial relationship with him.”
Many questions about Project Opus remain unanswered, including who paid for the operation, which allegedly cost $80 million, according to the U.N. report. It is also unclear what happened to that money after the mission failed, and whether its architects had help from other governments such as the United Arab Emirates, which has long supported Hifter.
The U.N. is continuing its investigation, and the FBI has been asking questions about Prince’s involvement in the Jordanian deal and his connections to the Libyan conflict. (“The FBI cannot confirm the existence of an investigation into Mr. Prince,” a spokesperson told The Intercept.) If the U.N. Sanctions Committee approves the report’s findings, Prince would face a travel ban and have his bank accounts frozen. At least four countries have opened criminal probes into the alleged Libya plot as a result of the U.N. investigation, according to a Western official.
The purpose of the mercenary mission was to provide Hifter with a “maritime interdiction capability … but also the capability to identify and strike land targets, and terminate and/or kidnap high-value targets,” the U.N. report concluded. The report, authored by an independent group of investigators who monitor sanction violations, known as the Panel of Experts, includes a PowerPoint presentation that outlines detailed plans for the mission.
The PowerPoint describes a so-called termination team, a hit squad composed of foreign mercenaries who would jump out of the helicopters to chase and kill their targets; it appears to be modeled on the secretive, elite U.S. Joint Special Operations Command. The PowerPoint lists 10 individuals as assassination targets, including commanders aligned with the U.N.-backed Tripoli government as well as two EU citizens.
A right-wing political donor whose sister, Betsy DeVos, served as Trump’s education secretary, Prince founded the private security company Blackwater. After the company’s contractors killed 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, Prince changed its name and ultimately sold it in 2010. He later moved to the UAE and helped build a presidential guard for the royal family before being pushed out amid negative media exposure and questions about missing money. He established a small investment fund called Frontier Resource Group that was financed by his personal wealth and focused on natural resources in Africa. Simultaneously, he set up a Hong Kong-based logistics and security company, Frontier Services Group, whose largest investor is a powerful Chinese government-owned investment bank.
During the Obama administration, Prince tried and failed many times to intervene in Libya’s devastating civil war. “Erik Prince has been attempting to deploy a small-scale aviation and maritime private military capability into Libya since 2013,” the U.N. report states. “The scale, organization and systems proposed were all similar to those deployed on the private military operation Opus in eastern Libya.”
Prince’s relationship to Hifter dates back to at least 2015, according to the U.N. report. That year, the report notes, Prince supplied Hifter with a private jet. Over a three-week period in February 2015, Hifter flew the Frontier Services plane to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — the Sunni Arab coalition that supported his effort to take control of Libya. On the day Hifter returned from his tour, the eastern Libyan government nominated him as the leader of its military. Shortly afterward, Prince began offering plans to use a mercenary force in eastern Libya under the guise of stopping the flow of migrants to Europe. The plans went nowhere.
When Trump won the White House, Prince wasted no time in inserting himself into what would emerge as a new Middle Eastern coalition under a new president. In January 2017, he flew to the Seychelles to meet with Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, known widely as MBZ. The crown prince would become a key player in the Trump administration’s evolving plans for the region. While Prince’s Seychelles trip has been probed for possible connections to the Trump-Russia scandal, there were other motives at play.
On the trip, Prince pitched MBZ on his private military ideas to support the UAE’s wars in Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. “Prince was like a kid at Christmas about his meeting with MBZ,” according to notes from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, who interviewed Prince during the Trump-Russia investigation. “He could only focus on the presents under the tree.” After his appearance at MBZ’s private summit, Prince had what was then a secret meeting with Kirill Dmitriev, the powerful head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund. The meeting with Dmitriev was initially suspected to be a backchannel effort by Putin and Trump to lift U.S. sanctions on Russia. The investigators’ notes revealed that the subject was Prince’s mercenary ambitions in the Libyan conflict. When the secret summit was over, Prince tagged along with MBZ on his private jet back to the UAE. During the flight, Prince later told special counsel investigators, Prince discussed his “idea for using a modified crop duster as a counterinsurgency plane.”
Prince had made his way into the Trump White House’s inner circle, forging ties to the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as Kushner sought to reshape U.S. policy in the Middle East, according to three people with knowledge of their relationship. Prince acted as a “shadow adviser” to Kushner, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with their relationship. “This is completely false,” wrote Jason Miller, a spokesperson for Kushner. “Mr. Prince in no way served as an advisor to Mr. Kushner in any capacity.”
At the same time, Prince was acting as an unofficial adviser to MBZ. A leading buyer of U.S. arms, the UAE regained its position as one of America’s closest allies during the Trump years, following a chill in relations under President Barack Obama, and expanded its influence and military involvement in the Gulf and Africa. Within a year of Trump taking office, the Gulf nation had taken the lead in supporting Hifter as the figure most likely to defeat the U.N.-recognized government in Libya and perhaps unify the fractured country. The UAE ramped up its support for Hifter and his forces, providing air defenses, drones, and jets, as well as paying for foreign mercenaries to fight alongside Hifter’s troops.
Prince benefited from the warm relationship between Kushner and the UAE, a former senior U.S. intelligence officer who consults with Middle Eastern governments told The Intercept. The UAE, the former official said, wanted the Trump administration to let it help Hifter win control of Libya, while the UAE worked to realize Trump and Kushner’s vision of a realigned Middle East. The Abraham Accords, which the Trump administration touted as its signature foreign policy achievement, involved normalizing relations between Israel and a handful of Arab nations, including the UAE. “Kushner and MBZ decided to let Erik have some contracts while they reordered the Gulf,” the former intelligence officer told The Intercept.
“Mr. Kushner has no knowledge of Mr. Prince’s contracts,” Kushner’s spokesperson told The Intercept. “Mr. Kushner has not even spoken or communicated with Mr. Prince since 2017, and any assertion otherwise is complete nonsense.”
After Libya’s Arab Spring uprising shook the government of Col. Muammar Gaddafi, the U.S. and NATO allies helped overthrow him in 2011. The following three years, the country was largely stable, though political and geographic fissures and rivalries percolated. But when violent conflict between the U.N.-recognized Government of National Accord based in Tripoli and Hifter’s Libyan National Army in the country’s east broke out in 2014, thousands of civilians were killed and many more displaced. At least five countries began to provide military support to the warring parties, in violation of the U.N. arms embargo. Turkey has supported the GNA, while the UAE, Egypt, Russia, and Jordan have supported Hifter and the LNA. Thousands of foreign mercenaries flooded the country, and the war became one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.
Since civil war broke out in Libya, the U.S. has largely remained on the sidelines. Official U.S. policy has been to support the U.N.-led peace process, although Trump called Hifter in April 2019, after Hifter’s attack on Tripoli, to thank him for his counterterrorism efforts, according to news accounts at the time. The UAE has backed Hifter because it wants to quash any remnants of popular uprising and return the country to military dictatorship.
The political landscape created by Trump’s victory presented new opportunities for Prince to resume his push to support Hifter. The U.N. report, citing a confidential source, described an April 2019 meeting between Prince and Hifter in Cairo to discuss a planned mercenary intervention in Libya. In a statement, Prince’s lawyer said his client “has never met or spoken to Mr. Hiftar. This alleged meeting is fiction and never took place.” But two people with knowledge of Prince’s relationship with the Libyan commander confirmed to The Intercept that Prince does indeed know Hifter, and asserted that he has met with the Libyan strongman, along with one of Hifter’s sons. (In April 2019, the same month as the alleged meeting in Cairo with Hifter, the House Intelligence Committee formally sent the Justice Department a criminal referral on Prince, accusing him of making “materially false statements” to Congress in the Trump-Russia probe. Among the allegations made by the Intelligence Committee was that Prince tried to conceal from Congress the second meeting he had with Dmitriev in Seychelles about Libya.)
Project Opus was designed to leverage Prince’s connections to help Hifter gain the upper hand in Libya. The elaborate plan involved buying at least nine disused, U.S.-made military aircraft from the government of Jordan and airlifting them to the Libyan battlefield in June 2019. But there was an urgent problem: Jordanian officials were holding up the $80 million arms deal, which would have violated U.N. sanctions and possibly U.S. law.
On paper, the plan provided Hifter with a special operations force that could fly and kill at night in a bid to help the Libyan commander topple the GNA in Tripoli. Failing that, the paramilitary force could help Hifter resuscitate his military operation, which had stalled on the outskirts of the capital.
But Jordan’s leader, King Abdullah II, has ultimate authority to approve any deal for weapons from his small Middle Eastern nation. Prince knew the king well from the “war on terror” years, when Blackwater, Prince’s private security company, worked closely with the Jordanian government. Prince knew how Jordan’s levers of power worked and who could move them, so he contacted one of Abdullah’s personal advisers.
Prince asked the adviser to help an associate of Prince’s with what he described as a shipment of humanitarian aid. Abdullah knew about the shipment, Prince told the adviser, and it had been “cleared in Washington.” The adviser was troubled by Prince’s vagueness. “I didn’t know Prince as a humanitarian,” he later told The Intercept. Nonetheless, Prince told the king’s adviser that the associate would contact him.
Moments later, the adviser received a message on Signal from Durrant, a former Australian military pilot who had a long association with Prince. Durrant was using the screen name Gene Rynack, an alias that the U.N. report noted may have been a reference to Mel Gibson’s character in the film “Air America.”
Durrant, in the statement his lawyer provided, does not deny that he contacted Jordanian officials. But he portrayed Opus as a project aimed at supporting private companies and NGOs in war-torn Libya. “Through OPUS we provided engineering inspections and recommendations on the viability and value of several different aircraft. We were not involved in the sale of these aircraft beyond the inspection and viability recommendations,” Durrant asserted. “I was in Jordan as part of this project and held meetings with numerous Government officials.” But the texts Durrant sent the king’s adviser contradict those claims.
Those texts made it clear to the adviser that this was no humanitarian aid mission. Durrant asked Abdullah’s adviser to arrange for the Jordanian government to allow a scheduled first shipment of equipment and mercenaries to depart for Libya. Durrant briefly explained the situation: Nine U.S.-manufactured military helicopters, weapons, ammunition, and other equipment were headed to Libya, according to Durrant’s text messages, which were obtained by The Intercept. Durrant estimated that it would require 10 round-trip flights using a Jordanian military C-130 cargo plane to deliver everything, including the helicopters.
“We are paying J[ordan] for everything,” Durrant texted the adviser, including for the rental of the transport plane. Durrant then tried to coax the adviser to help by describing how beneficial the arms shipment would be for the kingdom. The Jordanians would “make money,” Durrant promised, “we are employing a lot of locals and #1” — a reference to the king, according to the adviser — “can take all the glory of [the] mission.”
Durrant then tried to reassure the king’s adviser, writing that “[r]eputation risk” had been assessed and promising, “we will hide/destroy any footprints.”
Durrant followed up with a phone call asking Abdullah’s adviser to keep the weapons deal secret, the adviser told The Intercept. Durrant said that although the Trump White House supported the mission and the CIA was aware of it, only Durrant and Prince knew all the details, according to the adviser.
The next day, Durrant sent a memo to the adviser outlining the status of the arms shipment as well as the planned military operation in Libya. Durrant called his group “Opus,” and the plan was as ambitious as it was unrealistic. Littered with military jargon, the memo, which was obtained by The Intercept and described in the U.N. report, listed the equipment and units headed to Benghazi. The helicopter gunships and weapons had been selected and inspected, the memo stated, and were ready to be packed up and sent across the Mediterranean into eastern Libya. The shipment would include surveillance airplanes that could be used to target people and enemy supply ships, as well as a drone. It also featured a unit to track and seize weapons smuggled via the Mediterranean by allies of the GNA, a cyber unit, and a medical evacuation plane. And it anticipated providing at least a dozen helicopters, including nine that Durrant intended to purchase from the Jordanian government. There would be a “marine strike group” with two armed boats that would be used to create a blockade, Durrant’s memo stated, forcing “enemy supply vessels” to dock in Benghazi, Hifter’s seat of power.
Now, with some of the shipment ready to move, Durrant and his team needed export licenses. “The team can be effective within 7 days if [the Jordanian government] supports with export of controlled items, including helicopters, air ammunition, ground weapons, ground ammunition and night vision,” according to the memo. Despite Durrant’s efforts and Prince’s outreach to the king’s adviser, the Jordanian military refused to sign off on the licenses.
In Jordan, Prince’s intervention in a “humanitarian” shipment was raising more questions for Abdullah’s adviser. If the king knew about the shipment, as Prince had told the adviser, and if the White House and the CIA were on board, as Durrant had claimed, why would Prince ask for help from one of the king’s personal aides?
Prince’s outreach and Durrant’s memo made several people around King Abdullah uneasy, and the Jordanian monarch signed off on a quiet inquiry to get to the bottom of it, according to the royal adviser and a second person familiar with the investigation. One of Abdullah’s military advisers, an active-duty British general named Alex Macintosh, was put in charge. Macintosh had formerly served with the British SAS, an elite commando unit, and the king respected his judgment.
Macintosh’s inquiry was brief, according to two people with knowledge of it. He met with Durrant, who was using a transparently fake alias and staying in an Amman hotel with what Macintosh later described as a motley-looking crew of Western mercenaries. Durrant told him he was buying nine helicopters from the Jordanian government — six MD530 Little Birds and three AH-1 Cobras — plus heavy weapons and ammunition. But Durrant didn’t have so-called end user certificates: internationally recognized paperwork that identifies where, to whom, and for what purpose arms are being transferred. This was the heart of the problem. With a U.N. arms embargo banning weapons shipments to Libya, it could not be listed as the destination for Durrant’s shipment. And because the aircraft were U.S.-made, their purchase would require preauthorization from the U.S. government, which had not been provided. The British general asked Durrant which country the end user certificates would list as the destination for the shipment. Durrant told Macintosh that they could declare the destination was Tunisia, Libya’s neighbor, or “anywhere else you find acceptable,” according to a Western official who discussed it with Macintosh. Macintosh declined to comment.
As Macintosh investigated, he made another discovery: The king’s brother, Prince Feisal Hussein, had been involved in the attempt to sell the Jordanian aircraft and arms, according to the Jordanian royal adviser, who discussed the finding with Macintosh. Feisal’s role was confirmed by two other people with knowledge of the deal.
In a response provided by the Jordanian Embassy, Feisal said he had no involvement in the attempted weapons shipment nor any relationship with Prince. “The government will conduct a full, transparent investigation into all allegations related to this alleged operation,” according to the statement. “In relation to allegations that have recently appeared in press reports, we confirm that Jordan sold no planes to Libya.”
The weapons sale had a certain logic. The Jordanian military had a stockpile of old U.S.-made attack helicopters donated more than a decade earlier by the U.S. and Israel to help bolster Jordan’s counterterrorism forces. But the helicopters were old and expensive to maintain, and Jordan ultimately had little use for them. Blackwater and Prince might have benefited most from the donated helicopters: Jordan’s military had hired the company in 2006 to train Jordanian special operations forces on how to use them. In Feisal’s capacity as a senior air force officer, he had worked with Prince and Blackwater on their training.
The king was told that Prince and Feisal were involved in the proposed weapons shipment, according to his adviser. By then, the CIA had learned that Prince and Durrant were claiming that the U.S. government had signed off on the deal. The CIA sent a message to Abdullah making clear the agency wanted him to stop the transfer, according to two people familiar with the CIA’s outreach, including a person with direct knowledge. The king agreed to shut it down. “You had Erik involved in a deal where [the Jordanian military] would have to issue fraudulent end-user certificates in an obvious violation of the U.N. arms embargo,” the adviser told The Intercept. “The king was advised that this could hurt future [legitimate] military sales.”
Despite Project Opus’s failure to get the helicopters and arms from Jordan to Libya, the mission to deliver a mercenary force to Hifter went forward. The mercenaries, led by a South African helicopter pilot, flew to Benghazi on June 25 or 26, according to the U.N. report and a person familiar with the operation. Durrant quickly purchased six replacement helicopters from South Africa for roughly $18 million and shipped them to Libya, according to the U.N. report. But the helicopters were old and unarmed, unlike the ones the contract had promised.
When Hifter learned that the Jordanian deal had failed and Durrant and his team had instead shipped six substandard helicopters, he flew into a rage and threatened the mercenaries, according to the U.N. report. Hifter sent the pilots back to their safe house under guard, according to a person with knowledge of the operation.
The mercenaries, concerned for their own safety given Hifter’s anger, decided to flee the country, according to the person with knowledge of the operation. On June 29, 2019, the team abandoned the six South African helicopters and escaped from a Benghazi harbor. They left for Malta on the same two rigid hull boats that Durrant had outlined in his memo, according to the U.N. report. The boats were supplied by another Prince business partner, a Maltese arms dealer. The trip took 36 hours after one of the two boats malfunctioned and had to be left behind. When they reached Malta, the mercenaries paid a fine for arriving without an entry visa and were released. Local media reported that they claimed to be civilian contractors who had fled Libya because the security situation on the ground was untenable.
Durrant claimed that the men were not mercenaries, instead portraying them as unarmed logistical personnel being sent in to support oil and gas companies. In the statement provided by his lawyer, Durrant claimed the men had entered the country “to setup a logistics centre in Libya. Within 48 hours they left due to security concerns. … Nothing happened and in no way were any sanctions breached.” Durrant denounced what he called the “politicization of the UN” through its investigation, claiming the investigators chose to use their “limited resources to pursue 20 unarmed personnel entering Libya for a 48 hour period yet thousands of armed mercenaries and seemingly limitless weapons are continually flowing into the country,” according to his statement.
Even after the Jordanian shipment failed to materialize and the mercenaries fled Libya, Prince and Durrant didn’t give up. Instead, they shifted their efforts to Washington. It was no secret that Prince advocated using mercenaries to support Hifter. From the early days of the Trump administration, he had pushed for a U.S.-backed, Gulf-funded private military force to enter Libya, according to Trump administration officials and documents. Before Hifter’s April 2019 offensive, Prince argued that his plan would end the ground war in Libya, stop terrorism, and make it easier to stabilize the country, according to a former Trump administration NSC official. “That’s just not something the U.S. government can do,” the former official said. “It sounds attractive and sexy because it sounds clean and easy, but it’s actually not, and [it’s] not legal.”
After the operation fell apart in June, Durrant continued to lobby members of the administration to revive the mission. One of those officials was Victoria Coates, then-NSC senior director for the Middle East and North Africa and one of the few Trump administration officials who had met Hifter. Coates knew that Durrant was a business associate of Prince’s; Durrant called Coates and told her he was supporting Hifter and wanted Washington’s backing. “I never met with Christiaan Durrant,” Coates told The Intercept. “After one or two phone calls, he made me feel uncomfortable.” Coates said she asked the White House switchboard to block future calls from Durrant.
When Durrant’s direct outreach failed, Prince contacted his friend on the NSC, one of Coates’s colleagues, for the meeting at the Army and Navy Club, which also led nowhere. Prince then reached out to yet another Trump administration official. This time, Prince asked the official to help connect Durrant with the CIA. The official spoke to The Intercept on the condition that they not be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the press. Durrant told the official that he was part of a military group working in Libya that included Americans and wanted CIA support. “He said ‘We’re with Hifter, we might be getting pushed out, and the Russians are coming in to support him,’” the official recalled Durrant telling him. “He kept it vague, but the bottom line was he said he was with Hifter,” and that if the CIA didn’t help, Hifter would turn to Russian mercenaries to try to break the stalemate. When the official passed Durrant’s message on to a CIA contact, the agency responded that it didn’t want to speak with Durrant and asked the official not to have further contact with him.
Durrant’s efforts to sway the Trump administration in his favor may have gone even further. In September 2019, Federal Advocates, a Washington lobbying firm, filed a disclosure with Congress after being hired by one of Durrant’s companies, Opus Capital Assets, which is based in the UAE. The initial filing described Opus as a “geopolitical national security firm” and declared that Federal Advocates had been paid $60,000 to lobby the Trump administration “on geopolitical issues in Africa.” Subsequent filings described Opus as an “oil and gas logistics services” entity, and Federal Advocates described its lobbying efforts as “providing educational background to the Administration.” Kevin Talley, one of the lobbyists, declined to comment on Opus or the contract.The U.N.’s Panel of Experts opened an investigation in the summer of 2019. Its findings represent something akin to a grand jury indictment. The panel’s report was submitted to the U.N. Sanctions Committee, which will decide whether or not to approve its findings and designate Prince, Durrant, and others named in the report as weapons smugglers.
Prince’s lawyer denounced the U.N. investigators, claiming they did not give Prince sufficient chance to respond to the report’s allegations. “Given the astounding inaccuracies and falsehoods as reported in the media, and the absolute lack of due process or right to reply, we have requested that the Panel retract its report immediately,” he wrote. The U.N. report described multiple efforts to reach Prince and request his participation in the investigations, and said he never responded.
The panel’s investigators contacted most of the 20 foreign mercenaries detained in Malta and were also met with silence. Durrant’s lawyer, Gordon, told U.N. investigators that he represented Opus and those who fled Libya. Like the lobbying documents filed by Federal Advocates, Gordon claimed that Opus was an oil and gas logistics company; Gordon said that company personnel went to Libya for a commercial job, only to flee when it became too dangerous. The U.N. report described the oil and gas contract as a cover story to hide their true mission.
Investigators were able to slowly piece together the alleged mercenary plot after an African intelligence service tipped them off to fake export documents used to ship some of the replacement helicopters that were sent to Libya, according to a Western official familiar with the investigation. The U.N. panel obtained a copy of an $85 million contract for Opus to conduct a geological survey of Jordan. The document was “counterfeited with the deliberate intent to disguise the true purpose” and led back to companies in which Prince had an ownership interest, according to the U.N. report. (Gordon, Durrant’s lawyer, told The Intercept that Prince had no relationship with Opus.)
The contract was based on a real proposal from a geological survey company, Bridgeporth, whose logo adorns the bottom of each page of the document. In June 2019, when Project Opus was underway, Prince owned a significant share of Bridgeporth through his investment fund, FRG, which helped obscure Prince’s connection.“This is indicative of the complex multi-shells that Erik Dean Prince uses to disguise his control over, and benefits from, trading companies,” the U.N. report noted. After the U.N. inquired about the company’s possible role in the Libya operation, Prince changed his fund’s arrangement with Bridgeporth, making his continued investment less visible.
Prince’s ownership of Bridgeporth was another clue for the U.N. panel. It was not the first time Bridgeporth had been implicated in mercenary force proposals. In 2014, Prince created an assassination plan for Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistence Army in central Africa. The document, which was obtained by The Intercept, proposed using Bridgeporth and an oil and gas survey as the “cover” in the “kill or capture” mission.
U.N. investigators traced three aircraft that made their way to the Middle East in preparation for the operation in Libya. The planes, all three of which were owned or controlled by Prince, were hastily sold to Durrant within days of their intended arrival in Benghazi. The U.N. report found that only Prince “was in the position to approve the sale and/or transfer of all three aircraft to support the operation in such a short time frame,” adding: “One quick transfer could be explained, but not three from different companies, all under the effective control or influence of one individual.”
The Intercept has previously reported on Prince’s drive to weaponize crop duster planes. The scheme involved two prototypes, manufactured by a U.S. company, and secretly modified into paramilitary aircraft. Prince and his partners utilized a front company, called LASA, to help market the converted crop dusters; the name stood for Light Attack Surveillance Aircraft. It was the very type of modified crop duster Prince was discussing with MBZ on his private plane after the 2017 Seychelles meetings.
The U.N. investigation discovered that one of the two LASA T-Birds had been flown to Amman in June 2019 in preparation for the Hifter operation. It was one of two planes that never made it to Libya, after being grounded in Jordan.
The assassination unit PowerPoint that the U.N. obtained depicts Jordanian helicopters of the make that Opus wanted to provide to Hifter alongside an odd-looking airplane. It is shown in various illustrations flying over a map of northern Libya: gathering digital signals, supporting the assassination and strike teams, hunting some enemy — real or imagined. The document lists the aircraft as the “LASA T-Bird.” There are only two such planes in the world, both created by Prince.
United States Postal Service worker. (photo: Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images)
As USPS Delays Persist, Bills, Paychecks and Medications Are Getting Stuck in the Mail
Jacob Bogage and Hannah Denham, The Washington Post
ark Currie of Virginia had three checks snagged in postal delays in three months. In New Jersey, Lois Fitton says she was forced to pay interest on a credit card balance because the bill never arrived. Jim Rice says two insurance companies canceled policies for his property management business in Oklahoma after the payments got lost in the mail.
As the service crisis at the U.S. Postal Service drags into its eighth month, complaints are reaching a fever pitch. Consumers are inundating members of Congress with stories of late bills — and the late fees they’ve absorbed as a result. Small-business owners are waiting weeks, even months, for checks to arrive, creating cash-flow crunches and debates on whether to switch to costlier private shippers. Large-scale mailers, such as banks and utilities, are urging clients to switch to paperless communication, a shift that would further undercut the agency’s biggest revenue stream.
The growing outcry adds another dimension to the agency’s myriad crises: a clogged processing and transportation network, severe staffing shortages and $188.4 billion in liabilities. The prolonged performance declines have eroded the reputation of the few government agencies that boasts generations of broad public support.
“The industry’s faith and confidence in the USPS to perform is critical; without that confidence, alternatives for mailers throughout our coalition will become more attractive out of necessity,” Joel Quadracci, chief executive of Quad, one of the nation’s largest direct mailing firms, testified Wednesday during a House hearing on mail issues. “And, unfortunately, the industry’s confidence in USPS has been shaken.”
Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio, went further, telling Postmaster General Louis DeJoy at the same hearing that he’s personally “lost all confidence in the postal system.” He described making an “embarrassing” call to J.C. Penney to avoid a late fee because the bill arrived nearly a month after its due date. “My goal is to be able to get to the point where I put my mailbox in the garbage can.”
The agency’s delivery times have sunk to historic lows since DeJoy took over in June. In most states, it took at least five days for a piece of first-class mail — such as a bill or paycheck — to arrive last month, according to data provided by mail-tracking vendor GrayHair Software. Going back 90 days, into the heart of holiday shipping season, it took more than six days on average for first-class delivery nationwide. The Postal Service aims to deliver local mail in two days and nonlocal mail in three to five days.
At the end of December, the agency had an on-time rate of 38% for nonlocal mail, according to data it reported to a federal court. Traditionally, that number is around 90 percent. The Postal Service has not discloses 2021 metrics.
The delays stem from DeJoy abrupt reorganization of the Postal Service in July and residual holiday backlogs, leaving consumers and small businesses to contend with the consequences and few alternatives.
“The Postal Service has a monopoly on mail. So if you want to send a letter or a bill, you have to use the Postal Service,” said Michael Plunkett, president and chief executive of PostCom, a national postal commerce advocacy group.
Small-business owners like Rice, who owns Arzon Development Co. in Stillwater, Okla., are wary of shifting to higher-cost shippers because the added expense will be passed on to their customers. “Incidences of lost mail have gone from happening one to two times per year to an almost weekly issue. As a company reliant on the mail, the service has taken an obvious and painful turn for the worse.”
DeJoy acknowledged the Postal Service “fell far short” during the holiday season. “Too many Americans were left waiting weeks for important deliveries of mail and packages,” he said at Wednesday’s hearing. “This is unacceptable, and I apologize to those customers who felt the impact of our delays.”
DeJoy is pressing forward with a strategic plan to combat years of “financial stress, underinvestment, unachievable service standards and lack of operational precision,” even as congressional Democrats clamor for his removal. That plan — which will to include higher prices and slower delivery standards, according to people briefed on the details — will come out in March, DeJoy told the House panel.
“It sounds like your solution to the problems we’ve identified is just surrender,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said at the hearing.
Later Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced he would nominate two Democrats and a voting rights advocate to fill three vacant seats on the Postal Service’s governing board. If confirmed, it would shift the balance of power potentially the votes to remove DeJoy. On Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the agency “needs leadership that can and will do a better job.”
The success of DeJoy’s plans is contingent on restoring commercial mailers’ confidence in the system, as they have an outsized effect on the Postal Service’s bottom line. The bulk of its first-class mail revenue originates from businesses. And the vast majority of nonbusiness first-class mail stems from consumers replying to businesses. If larger mailers start diverting products away from the Postal Service, the agency would lose two big chunks of revenue that industry experts say are unlikely to return.
Some of DeJoy’s proposed changes, along with existing delays, already are scaring consumers who have long preferred — or lack viable alternatives to — the mail system.
When Kristofer Goldsmith orders refills for his regular array of prescriptions from the Veterans Affairs hospital in the Bronx, it usually arrives on his doorstep in Pleasantville, N.Y., in two days. But his December order took a month and a half to arrive, and he went weeks without the medications. His primary care provider couldn’t even find a bar code to track the original order, which he said arrived the same day as the replacement.
“I’m relatively lucky that I can live with symptoms flaring up,” he said. “But there have been other points in my life when living without my medications could impact me catastrophically.”
Earlier this month, Postal Service apologized to a New Hampshire landscaping business for delays that held up dozens of invoices for up to 45 days, according to the New Haven Register. The business owner, Dan Thornberg, said 80 pieces of mail were delivered at once; 50 of them were checks. The delays, he said, nearly drove his company into a financial collapse.
Tiffini Travis, a research librarian at California State University in Long Beach canceled her Citibank credit card after her December bill payment arrived one day late because the company locked her card.
Amani Baskeyfield in Glenn Dale, Md., said she started managing her mother’s credit card bills last month after a mailed payment showed up late and Citibank shuttered the account without notice. She’s already switched her mother’s account to paperless billing and statements.
Citibank spokeswoman Jennifer Bombardier said that the company has advised customers about digital banking options and acknowledged that mail issues may impact payment schedules.
“We realize that, from time to time, there are circumstances outside of our customer’s control,” she said in an emailed statement. “In those circumstances, we work with our customers on an individualized basis to address the matter.”
Discover Card Senior Vice President Dennis Michel said in an emailed statement that about 10 percent of customers’ payments are mailed, and that the company noticed an uptick in customer service calls about mail delays in late December and January,
American Express sent an email to cardholders on Feb. 3 with the subject line “Your mail from us may be delayed,” and encouraged customers to use online tools to access account information. A spokesperson said the company has not seen an increase in customer calls related to mail service.
Electric utility company Exelon said in a statement that customers assessed late fees because of mail problems should call the company to have them rescinded.
But the mail slowdowns — especially for credit card bills and payments — threaten to further burden American consumers already weighed down by debt. In 2020, 33% of cardholders were charged a late fee, according to data gathered by Bankrate.com, and 47% asked for it to be waived.
Credit experts caution consumers not to worry too much about the impact of mail delays. A late payment will only impact your credit score if it’s at least 30 days behind, a lengthy threshold in the credit world, but one some mail consumers say cuts very close given the current timetables. If consumers are worried, said Bankrate credit card analyst Ted Rossman, they should be proactive and tell lenders that the check is in the mail.
“Maybe try to pay it online or over the phone or at least give customer service a heads up,” he said.
But many consumers and small-business owners say they are frustrated by the mail delays and the patchwork of approaches that utilities, lenders, insurers and other firms apply with regard to late and missing billing statements. Rice, the Oklahoma business owner, said he is transitioning to online payments when possible, but said he has no control over the fact that many of his vendors submit invoices through the mail, and that many of his tenants pay rent that way as well.
“I understand that the USPS undoubtedly needed a review of procedures,” he said. “What I cannot accept or excuse is a total breakdown in reliability.”
'A full 40 percent of all hired dairy workers in Wisconsin are estimated to be immigrant workers.' (photo: Cap Times)
The US Immigration System Treats Workers as Disposable
Arvind Dilawar and Julie Keller, Jacobin
Countless sectors in the US, like the dairy industry, couldn’t run without undocumented workers. Yet those same workers are denied their basic rights and subjected to the constant threat of deportation — dehumanizing and terrorizing them while weakening the power of the broader working class.
n the course of researching her book, Milking in the Shadows: Migrants and Mobility in America’s Dairyland, sociologist Julie Keller interviewed Henry, the owner of a large dairy farm in Wisconsin that employed ten migrant workers from Mexico. Henry (Keller uses pseudonyms for the subjects of her book) explains that he worked out an arrangement with local law enforcement through his nephew, an officer: if his undocumented employees, who are not eligible for drivers’ licenses in Wisconsin, would keep their grocery runs to before midnight, they would not be pulled over.
It’s a startling admission of nepotistic corruption, but it also highlights how the US immigration system is set up to deny immigrant workers rights and provide employers with a more exploitable labor force. If Henry could protect his undocumented workers from the law, the inverse was also implicitly true: he could subject them to it, especially if they fell out of his favor.
As in many other sectors of the US economy, undocumented immigrants have become essential to the dairy industry. Wisconsin, where Keller focused her research from 2011 to 2012, is second only to California in dairy production, with more than nine thousand farms — one-fifth of whose workers are thought to be undocumented. Yet they’re denied workplace protections, see their organizing rights trampled upon, and face the constant threat of deportation. The result: a dehumanizing system that terrorizes the undocumented while also undercutting the power of the broader working class.
Jacobin contributor Arvind Dilawar recently spoke with Keller about the dairy industry’s reliance on undocumented immigrants and why both the state and business interests prefer porous — yet brutal — border security. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
AD: How much of the dairy industry workforce in Wisconsin is comprised of undocumented immigrants?
JK: In my book, I was relying on a study conducted in 2008, and that’s really the most accurate information we have. A full 40 percent of all hired dairy workers in Wisconsin are estimated to be immigrant workers. From there, it’s just a matter of how we estimate the proportion of that group that would be undocumented. The standard go-to is the national agricultural workers survey that’s conducted every few years or so, which assumes that 50 percent of agricultural workers are undocumented.
What I will say, though, is that because there’s no legal avenue for dairy workers to be in the industry, because they’re excluded from the temporary agricultural worker visa, I would expect that number would be higher than just 50 percent.
AD: Where do they hail from?
JK: That same study, which was conducted by the sociologist Jill Harrison and some other folks, did ask about country of origin. They found that, of the immigrant dairy workers that they had surveyed in Wisconsin, 89 percent were from Mexico, 3 percent from Honduras, 2 percent Ecuador, 2 percent Guatemala, and it just got smaller from there. So really the vast, vast majority come from Mexico.
AD: What kind of work do they do? In your book, you write that the labor regime is pretty caste-based, with certain workers doing certain work.
JK: It was quite unusual to find immigrant workers doing anything but the lower-tier tasks on the farm. Milking cows was the big necessity for employers. You’ll also see immigrant workers doing related tasks, like bringing the cows into the milking parlor to be milked or cleaning up the parlor and the barns, scraping manure.
If there weren’t jobs available as milkers, you would also see immigrant workers taking jobs feeding calves. From what I observed, it seemed like a stepping-stone to milking cows. But they were all low-level tasks.
AD: The growth of undocumented workers in Wisconsin’s dairy industry is a relatively new trend. When did it start?
JK: In my book, I discuss the time frame of the late ‘90s to the early 2000s, because that’s what I was hearing when I talked to farmers. Part of that kind of depended on whether they were one of the early adopters, maybe you’d say “pioneers,” who started to hire immigrant workers when hardly any other farmers were doing it. Those folks would definitely be more in the 1990s. And then, as word spread and other farmers began catching wind that this was an option, they would reach out to farmers who had done it to get advice — and to get workers, too.
Why specifically was it around the ’90s and the early 2000s? In your book, I believe you mention the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) having some role in driving workers to the United States, but also the growth of large-scale dairy operations that require more workers.
JK: I specifically focused on one part of Mexico, a group of indigenous villages in [the southern state of] Veracruz. There are two different sides to this: what farmers have to say about why they began hiring immigrant workers, and what workers had to say about what led them to leave their villages. There wasn’t a single worker who told me, “NAFTA, we’re experiencing the pressures of NAFTA” — they simply talked about economic need.
I linked that to other scholarship on the role of NAFTA and the economic pressures in Mexico in changing immigration patterns to the United States. You might have at first seen the majority of Mexican migrants coming from states closer to the border, but then, with the ripple effects of economic pressures from NAFTA and other financial pressures, eventually you saw folks leaving from other parts of Mexico, including Veracruz. Migration from Veracruz just shot up from the 1990s to 2000s.
From the farmers’ side, they definitely weren’t discussing anything about NAFTA either. Rather, they talked in terms of financial necessity to expand their operation, starting in the 1990s and into the early 2000s. In that expansion, they had to find a larger workforce.
What I found was that it was not just about finding more workers, but of finding different kinds of workers that they saw as more reliable to keep up with the speed of this newer, fast-paced expansion.
AD: How much of the characterization by farmers of American workers as bad and Mexican workers as good is really just a description of how much they can be exploited?
JK: There were degrees of it. Not every farmer said, “American workers are lazy.” But they would use particular words like, “They don’t show up,” or “They’re not as reliable.” And then it did go to the extreme, when one farmer said, “You know, these American workers expect to be getting $15 an hour.” (At the time, it may have been less.) I found that sort of characterization of American workers to be pretty common, against the characterization of Mexican workers as dependable, as reliable, as not saying anything when they’re asked to work long hours.
One farmer I talked to said, when she started hiring Mexican workers, “I’ve never seen the parlor floor look so clean. You could eat off of it.” For them, it was a boon. They had come upon a kind of miracle workforce.
AD: In Milking in the Shadows, you describe the cycle of undocumented immigrants traveling between their home villages in Veracuz, Mexico, and Wisconsin’s dairy farms as an “informal guest worker program.” How do both workers and employers organize these arrangements?
JK: What seemed to be happening was that, once farmers established a relationship with a worker, they were more willing to go out of their way to help that worker — giving them rides to places or loaning them money.
The pattern of circular migration that I saw was that migrants would arrive in Wisconsin, work at a dairy farm or a couple of dairy farms for a few years, and then return back home to Mexico, to their village, where they would work on investing the money they had saved in building a house or a business or something like that. Workers would then choose one of their family members to head up to the United States in their place: a nephew or uncle or whomever. The workers themselves were, in a lot of cases, responsible for finding their own replacements, which largely worked, it seemed, for the farmers.
But then there’s this question of how that uncle or nephew is going to come up to “the North,” and how they are going to be able to afford the journey — paying a coyote, a smuggler? What I did see was farmers lending money to workers in order to make that passage happen. It was not a gift, it was a loan, so that loan would be taken out of their wages.
AD: You summarize the work of fellow researchers when writing that “isolation is the effect of US immigration policies, as the state achieves its productive function of accumulating capital by constructing ‘ideal’ and ‘compliant’ workers by ‘deepening migrants’ condition of deportability.'” How is US immigration policy intended to make workers more exploitable?
JK: In so many ways, we see the state working hand in hand with business interests and keeping a group of workers vulnerable to satisfy business owners. There’s lots of ways to characterize the state, but I think that’s definitely the unstated goal of a lot of immigration policy.
I wish I had my hands on some data on length of stay of undocumented workers who had been traveling back to Mexico more frequently prior to Donald Trump and how their plans shifted after the Trump administration. Not to say there was no border enforcement under Barack Obama, but there was definitely a ratcheting up. I wish that I had been out there collecting data and talking to participants, but at that point, I was done collecting data and finishing up the book.
AD: Despite the threats to their livelihoods, undocumented workers in the dairy industry have been organizing. What are the most promising organizing efforts currently underway?
JK: Definitely Migrant Justice in Vermont and their “Milk with Dignity” code of compliance. It’s been phenomenal following their efforts and seeing how they’ve been able to achieve broad change in a few years.
It was just in 2017 that Ben & Jerry’s signed an agreement committing to source their milk from farms that would comply with this code of ethics. Ben & Jerry’s is now sourcing their milk from sixty farms that have signed up for the “Milk with Dignity” program. It includes a long list of requirements to be part of that program, and if a farm is found not to be in compliance, they’re kicked out of the program, and they can’t sell their milk to Ben & Jerry’s. There’s also a new change in that code of conduct, which is a minimum wage that they are requiring farmers to pay.
Migrant Justice was working with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as their model. It takes time, but we are seeing some efforts to replicate these successful models. There is Voces de la Frontera in Wisconsin. And there’s United Farm Workers on the West Coast. They’ve been trying to organize dairy workers for some time now.
A kangaroo is surrounded by hazy smoke in Canberra, Australia. (photo: Lukas Coch/Reuters)
'Existential Threat to Our Survival': See the 19 Australian Ecosystems Already Collapsing
Dana M Bergstrom, Euan Ritchie, Lesley Hughes and Michael Depledge, The Conversation
n 1992, 1,700 scientists warned that human beings and the natural world were "on a collision course." Seventeen years later, scientists described planetary boundaries within which humans and other life could have a "safe space to operate." These are environmental thresholds, such as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and changes in land use.Crossing such boundaries was considered a risk that would cause environmental changes so profound, they genuinely posed an existential threat to humanity.
This grave reality is what our major research paper, published Thursday, confronts.
In what may be the most comprehensive evaluation of the environmental state of play in Australia, we show major and iconic ecosystems are collapsing across the continent and into Antarctica. These systems sustain life, and evidence of their demise shows we're exceeding planetary boundaries.
We found 19 Australian ecosystems met our criteria to be classified as "collapsing." This includes the arid interior, savannas and mangroves of northern Australia, the Great Barrier Reef, Shark Bay, southern Australia's kelp and alpine ash forests, tundra on Macquarie Island, and moss beds in Antarctica.
We define collapse as the state where ecosystems have changed in a substantial, negative way from their original state – such as species or habitat loss, or reduced vegetation or coral cover – and are unlikely to recover.
The Good and Bad News
Ecosystems consist of living and non-living components, and their interactions. They work like a super-complex engine: when some components are removed or stop working, knock-on consequences can lead to system failure.
Our study is based on measured data and observations, not modeling or predictions for the future. Encouragingly, not all ecosystems we examined have collapsed across their entire range. We still have, for instance, some intact reefs on the Great Barrier Reef, especially in deeper waters. And northern Australia has some of the most intact and least-modified stretches of savanna woodlands on Earth.
Still, collapses are happening, including in regions critical for growing food. This includes the Murray-Darling Basin, which covers around 14% of Australia's landmass. Its rivers and other freshwater systems support more than 30% of Australia's food production.
The effects of floods, fires, heatwaves and storms do not stop at farm gates; they're felt equally in agricultural areas and natural ecosystems. We shouldn't forget how towns ran out of drinking water during the recent drought.
Drinking water is also at risk when ecosystems collapse in our water catchments. In Victoria, for example, the degradation of giant Mountain Ash forests greatly reduces the amount of water flowing through the Thompson catchment, threatening nearly five million people's drinking water in Melbourne.
This is a dire wake-up call — not just a warning. Put bluntly, current changes across the continent, and their potential outcomes, pose an existential threat to our survival, and other life we share environments with.
In investigating patterns of collapse, we found most ecosystems experience multiple, concurrent pressures from both global climate change and regional human impacts (such as land clearing). Pressures are often additive and extreme.
Take the last 11 years in Western Australia as an example.
In the summer of 2010 and 2011, a heatwave spanning more than 300,000 square kilometers ravaged both marine and land ecosystems. The extreme heat devastated forests and woodlands, kelp forests, seagrass meadows and coral reefs. This catastrophe was followed by two cyclones.
A record-breaking, marine heatwave in late 2019 dealt a further blow. And another marine heatwave is predicted for this April.
What to Do About It?
Our brains trust comprises 38 experts from 21 universities, CSIRO and the federal Department of Agriculture Water and Environment. Beyond quantifying and reporting more doom and gloom, we asked the question: what can be done?
We devised a simple but tractable scheme called the 3As:
- Awareness of what is important
- Anticipation of what is coming down the line
- Action to stop the pressures or deal with impacts.
In our paper, we identify positive actions to help protect or restore ecosystems. Many are already happening. In some cases, ecosystems might be better left to recover by themselves, such as coral after a cyclone.
In other cases, active human intervention will be required – for example, placing artificial nesting boxes for Carnaby's black cockatoos in areas where old trees have been removed.
"Future-ready" actions are also vital. This includes reinstating cultural burning practices, which have multiple values and benefits for Aboriginal communities and can help minimize the risk and strength of bushfires.
It might also include replanting banks along the Murray River with species better suited to warmer conditions.
Some actions may be small and localized, but have substantial positive benefits.
For example, billions of migrating Bogong moths, the main summer food for critically endangered mountain pygmy possums, have not arrived in their typical numbers in Australian alpine regions in recent years. This was further exacerbated by the 2019-20 fires. Brilliantly, Zoos Victoria anticipated this pressure and developed supplementary food — Bogong bikkies.
Other more challenging, global or large-scale actions must address the root cause of environmental threats, such as human population growth and per-capita consumption of environmental resources.
We must rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero, remove or suppress invasive species such as feral cats and buffel grass, and stop widespread land clearing and other forms of habitat destruction.
Our Lives Depend On It
The multiple ecosystem collapses we have documented in Australia are a harbinger for environments globally.
The simplicity of the 3As is to show people can do something positive, either at the local level of a landcare group, or at the level of government departments and conservation agencies.
Our lives and those of our children, as well as our economies, societies and cultures, depend on it.
We simply cannot afford any further delay.
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