It’s Not About the Articles, It’s About Progressive Change People lose sight of why they are donating to Reader Supported News. It’s not about the articles. Our mission, what we do, what your donations are used for is an all-out effort to bring about Progressive social change through information. That should be your inspiration, your rational for supporting our work. That’s what we do well. Fundraising has become a real challenge, but it allows that work to continue. Patience and vision please. Marc Ash If you would prefer to send a check: |
19 February 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Cornel West Threatens to Leave Harvard After Being Denied Tenure
Laura Krantz, The Boston Globe
Krantz writes:
arvard University professor Cornel West, the well known philosopher, progressive political activist, and outspoken social critic, is threatening to leave Harvard University after he said the administration disrespected him by denying his request to be considered for tenure.
If West follows through on the threat, it would be his second departure from the university, where he teaches in the law school, divinity school, and Department of African and African American Studies. West first departed in 2002 after a public spat with then-president Lawrence Summers over the quality of West’s scholarship and West’s complaints about the depth of the university’s commitment to affirmative action.
“It is once again this issue of just not putting up with being disrespected,” West said Thursday in his first interview about his possible departure.
West said he has been teaching courses via Zoom during the pandemic from his home in Cambridge. He spent much of 2019 and early 2020 traveling the country as cochairman of Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.
“It’s sad you have to go through this again,” he said. “But I wasn’t raised to put up with being disrespected or tolerate disrespect. I don’t try to negotiate respect.”
A Harvard spokesman disputed West’s characterization of events but did not deny that West’s request for tenure had been declined at this time.
West, 67, said the administration offered him a prestigious endowed chair with a 10-year contract and a pay raise, but he is not interested.
The controversy comes during a time of increased scrutiny of Harvard’s tenure process. In January of last year, more than 100 faculty signed a letter to Claudine Gay, dean for the faculty of arts and sciences, that prompted her to open an inquiry into the process.
The professors called for a review that took into account the university’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Longstanding criticisms of the process boiled over in 2019, when hundreds of scholars protested Harvard’s decision to deny tenure to Lorgia García Peña, an ethnic studies scholar whose work involves race and ethnicity.
West on Thursday said he has watched a number of Black faculty depart over the past year and a half, including history professor Elizabeth Hinton, who left for Yale University, and divinity professor and Memorial Church minister Jonathan Walton, who became dean of Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity.
“I don’t think they really understood how to keep these folk in terms of respect,” West said.
West, who was born in Tulsa, Okla., has long been a provocative figure in academia and involved in outside pursuits. He appeared in two “Matrix” films and has made several spoken-word and hip hop albums. West initially supported Barack Obama for president in 2008 but later became an outspoken critic of Obama’s stances on Israel and the Wall Street bailout, among other issues.
West earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1973, received a PhD from Princeton University, and returned to Harvard to teach in 1994.
When Summers, the former treasury secretary, took over as Harvard president in 2001, he reportedly questioned West’s activities including his rap CD, his role as an adviser to activist Al Sharpton in a possible presidential campaign in 2004, and for allegedly giving students easy A’s in his classes.
The discord led to West’s departure in 2002 and he joined the faculty at Princeton, where he taught until 2012 when he left to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
When West returned to Harvard in 2017, he was appointed as a nontenured professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy appointed jointly to the Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard Department of African and African American Studies.
West said Thursday that the latest dispute began when, after a positive five-year review this year, he asked to be considered for the tenure process. He said his request was denied based on the substance of his work.
“What I’m told is it’s too risky. And these are quotes. It’s too fraught. And I’m too controversial,” he said.
Harvard spokesman Jonathan Swain said he could not comment on the specifics of the offer the university made to West but gave details on the process he recently underwent.
Following normal procedures, a faculty committee from both schools to which West is affiliated recently recommended his reappointment at his current rank, a decision endorsed by the deans of both schools and the university provost, Swain said. West was notified and the university hopes he accepts, he said.
West was also recently appointed to the Victor S. Thomas Professorship of Public Philosophy, an endowed chair position, at the Harvard Divinity School, the university said.
The faculty committee was only in charge of reviewing his reappointment and does not have authority to conduct a review for tenure, the spokesman said.
West said he has no plans yet for what he will do next if he does leave Harvard. He said he would like to return to Princeton or Union Theological Seminary.
West said he has requested a meeting with Harvard President Lawrence Bacow but has not heard back.
“If I cannot be put up for tenure, then it is clear they don’t think I’m worthy of tenure. And I will go,” West said.
Donald Trump leaves the White House on Marine One helicopter. (photo: Getty)
Manhattan DA Recruits Top Prosecutor for Trump Inquiry
William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess and Jonah E. Bromwich, The New York Times
Excerpt:
s the Manhattan district attorney’s office steps up the criminal investigation of Donald J. Trump, it has reached outside its ranks to enlist a prominent former federal prosecutor to help scrutinize financial dealings at the former president’s company, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.
The former prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, has deep experience investigating and defending white-collar and organized crime cases, bolstering the team under District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. that is examining Mr. Trump and his family business, the Trump Organization.
The investigation by Mr. Vance, a Democrat, is focused on possible tax and bank-related fraud, including whether the Trump Organization misled its lenders or local tax authorities about the value of his properties to obtain loans and tax benefits, the people with knowledge of the matter said, requesting anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation. Mr. Trump has maintained he did nothing improper and has long railed against the inquiry, calling it a politically motivated “witch hunt.”
Voters at the Dunbar neighborhood center in Atlanta. Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda, said there was no justification for the bill. (photo: Tannen Maury/EPA)
Georgia Republicans in Sweeping New Effort to Make It Harder to Vote
Sam Levine, Guardian UK
Levine writes:
Bill that would restrict early voting on Sundays denounced as ‘concerted effort to suppress the votes of Black Georgians’
eorgia Republicans have unveiled sweeping new legislation that would make it dramatically harder to vote in the state, following an election with record turnout and surging participation among Black voters.
The measure is one of the most brazen efforts to make it harder to vote in America in recent years. The bill would block officials from offering early voting on Sundays, a day traditionally used by Black churches to mobilize voters as part of a “souls to the polls” effort. It would place new limits on the use of mail-in ballot dropboxes, restrict who can handle an absentee ballot, and require voters to provide their driver’s license number or a copy of other identification with their application for a mail-in ballot. It would also require voters to provide the same driver’s license information on the mail-in ballot itself or the last four digits of their social security number if they do not have an acceptable ID.
The bill gives voters less time to request and return mail-in ballots, not only moving up the deadline to return an application but also limiting requests to start 78 days ahead of an election instead of the current 180. It requires election officials to reject ballots mistakenly cast in the wrong precinct and bans organizers from offering food or water to voters standing in line to cast a ballot.
“With exacting precision, the bill targets voters of color,” said Nse Ufot, chief of the New Georgia Project, one of the groups that mobilized voters of color in Georgia. “Georgia Republicans saw what happens when Black voters are empowered and show up at the polls, and now they’re launching a concerted effort to suppress the votes and voices of Black Georgians.”
Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, one of the groups that helped mobilize Black voters last year, said there was no justification for the bill. One of the ways Butler’s group helped voters ahead of the election was by assisting them in returning their absentee ballot applications to election officials. The Republican proposal would prohibit that.
“There’s no reason for it other than this ideology and this misinformation that there was fraud. There was no fraud in the election. The governor, everyone said there was no fraud,” she said in an interview.
In a hearing on Thursday, Barry Fleming, the bill’s sponsor, said the changes to early voting were an attempt to create uniformity across the state. He said the effort to shorten the mail-in voting period was an attempt to make it overlap with in-person voting.
The effort to shorten mail-in voting comes after many voters saw severe delays in getting their mail-in ballots because of delays with the United States Postal Service and overwhelmed election offices. About one-third of early votes in the state were from Black voters and Joe Biden overwhelmingly won the mail-in vote in Georgia.
“His newfound problem with early voting is simple: too many Black Georgians used it, and Republicans were humiliated,” said Seth Bringman, a spokesman for Fair Fight action, the civic action group led by Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate.
“Instead of listening to desires of conspiracy theorists and insurrectionists, he should listen to the thousands of early voters in his district from both parties.”
Republicans pledged the changes in Georgia after Joe Biden narrowly carried the state in November and Jon Ossoff and the Rev Raphael Warnock, both Democrats, won stunning upsets over Republican incumbents in November.
State officials, including Republicans, have said repeatedly there was no evidence of fraud in the elections, but Republicans have vowed to impose new restrictions anyway.
A separate bill under consideration in the state senate would eliminate no-excuse absentee voting, something Republicans wrote into law in 2005, allowing people to vote by mail only if they are 75 or older or have an excuse.
Republicans made the bill public a little over an hour before a hearing, giving the public and lawmakers little time to review what was in it. More than two dozen groups wrote to Fleming on Thursday, urging him to pause further consideration of the measure.
“It contains a set of proposals that would have devastating consequences for voting rights in Georgia,” they wrote. “It is absolutely unacceptable that legislators, voting rights advocates, and the people of Georgia have been blindsided by this release.”
The effort in Georgia comes amid a nationwide push, led by Republicans, to enact a wave of new voting restrictions after the 2020 election. There are at least 165 bills pending in 33 states that would make it harder to vote, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.
“The right lost! So now they are trying to change the rules and make it harder to vote,” Deborah Scott, the executive director of Georgia Stand-Up, another group that worked to mobilize Black voters, said in an email. “It is a shame that in 2021 Black and brown people in Georgia have to continue to fight for our citizenship rights.”
Water protectors are seen at Oceti Sakowin camp on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on Dec. 1, 2016. (photo: Helen H. Richardson/Denver Post)
Indigenous Standing Rock Activist Imprisoned for Resisting Grand Jury
Natasha Lennard, The Intercept
Lennard writes:
ollowing President Joe Biden’s executive order to revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, activists and organizers are escalating calls for similar actions to shutter other major pipelines. They are addressing projects like Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline, which run through and devastate Indigenous lands and lives, threatening water sources and our collective futures. Just this month, celebrities joined Indigenous leaders and environmentalists in urging the president to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline.
While Biden’s action on Keystone XL and court rulings over Dakota Access constitute victories for the Indigenous-led climate movement, water protectors who stood on the frontlines of these battles continue to face grave repression and punitive consequences from the government.
A full four years since the powerful Oceti Sakowin prayer camp at Standing Rock fought the pipeline’s construction, Indigenous water protector Steve Martinez was jailed this month in relation to his presence there — although he has not been convicted or even accused of a criminal offense. In no uncertain terms, Martinez’s current detention by federal authorities makes clear that state violence against Indigenous climate struggle is far from a thing of the past.
Martinez is being held for his refusal to give testimony before a federal grand jury, a notoriously secretive judicial process that has historically been weaponized against activist communities. Grand jury resisters like Martinez are detained under a torturous peculiarity in U.S. law that permits a judge to hold a person in contempt of court if they refuse to cooperate with a grand jury subpoena. The grand jury resister can then be imprisoned with the express purpose of coercing testimony. If it can be shown that the coercion will not work, and the imprisonment is thus punitive, rather than coercive, such incarceration becomes illegal. It was for grand jury resistance that the incoercible Chelsea Manning was also recently imprisoned for over a year.
In Martinez’s case, the grand jury appears to fit within a pattern of the state using such processes to browbeat activists engaged in struggle. The grand jury ostensibly revolves around a 2016 incident in which another water protector at Standing Rock, Sophia Wilansky, was seriously injured; Wilansky has claimed that the police were responsible. Though grand juries are opaque, the authorities seem to have convened this latest assembly in an effort to prove a fanciful theory that the injury was caused by water protectors themselves — perhaps even the injured young woman. This is the context of Martinez’s resistance.
“The state should not be intimidating people and trying to blame us for harm they caused,” Martinez said in a statement released by supporters. “I didn’t want to lose my freedom, but they are not going to break me.”
The U.S. is near unique among nations for its continued use of grand juries. The U.N. Special Rapporteur for Torture last year suggested that coercive confinement to force people to testify against their conscience meets the definitional criteria of torture and violates international human rights law. For over a century in the U.S., federal grand juries have been used to investigate and intimidate social movements — from the late-19th-century labor movements, to the Puerto Rican independence fighters and black liberationists of the last century, to environmentalists, anarchists, and Indigenous activists more recently. The grand jury before which Martinez has been called to testify appears particularly suspect.
While the black-box nature of such proceedings permits the government dangerous secrecy over its prosecutorial intents, this grand jury ostensibly relates to the investigation of events leading to the maiming of Wilansky in November 2016. Wilanksy almost lost her arm when she was struck by a high-impact munition during a standoff with police during the Standing Rock protests. Martinez, who had access to a car and was near the scene, drove a bleeding Wilansky, bone and tissue protruding from her mutilated arm, to meet an ambulance at a nearby casino.
Wilansky and those present with her that night insist that her grave injury was caused by a concussion grenade lobbed by a sheriff’s deputy of the Morton County, North Dakota, sheriff’s office, whose officers were attacking water protectors that night. Morton County has continuously denied accusations of excessive force, blaming the water protectors, and even Wilansky herself, for her injury. The county claims that it was a protester’s propane canister that exploded and ripped through Wilansky’s arm, despite the fact that medical reports deemed that the injuries are not consistent with a propane tank explosion.
For Martinez, the latest grand jury constitutes a demand to assist the government’s effort to blame water protectors for Wilansky’s injury. Martinez had already resisted a grand jury subpoena in 2017, which the government withdrew before he could be jailed for contempt. It beggars belief that the government is in earnest calling a new grand jury for a criminal investigation around Wilansky’s injury, four years after the fact.
Prosecutors say that the delay is due to their previous inability to locate Martinez — a preposterous claim, given that the water protector has since 2017 primarily been living in the small city of Bismarck, North Dakota, a town of just 70,000, where the federal court is small enough to share a building with the post office.
This grand jury’s timing is all the more suspect: It was assembled hurriedly just four days after a significant ruling in the civil case brought by Wilansky against Morton County. A judge ordered that the parties involved in the civil case could subpoena federal law enforcement to hand over shrapnel taken from Wilansky’s arm during her eight-hour surgery. FBI agents visited Wilansky in the hospital and seized both shrapnel and items of the young woman’s clothing. Ever since, Wilansky has been fighting to have the items returned; the shrapnel is expected to serve as dispositive evidence that she was struck by a law enforcement grenade.
Since 2018, attorneys for Wilansky have expressed concerns that the FBI may have damaged or even lost the evidence. The government, meanwhile, justified their refusal to return the property with reference to an ongoing criminal investigation, although no arrests were made, and indeed no available evidence suggests that anyone but law enforcement bears responsibility for her injuries. In calling a grand jury now, the government has grounds to claim that it cannot hand over the shrapnel for the civil case, as it requires the evidence for its own federal investigations.
Moira Meltzer-Cohen, one of the attorneys representing Martinez, who has defended a number of previous grand jury resisters, including Manning, told me that it is “inherently suspect that they” — the federal government — “expect us to buy that, after four years, after voluntarily withdrawing one subpoena, that they are suddenly interested in pursuing a criminal investigation, just four days after they are put on notice that they may now, finally, be compelled to hand over the critical evidence in this matter.”
“There is a long history of grand juries being used to intimidate politically disfavored groups, from abolitionists to union organizers, anti-war advocates, and civil rights activists,” Meltzer-Cohen said in a separate statement. “This grand jury, which criminalizes movements for native sovereignty and environmental justice, is one more instance of such abuse.”
Given the secretive nature of federal grand jury proceedings, the government is under no obligation to prove the legitimacy of its actions. Martinez, meanwhile, is caged as collateral damage: yet another victim of this country’s unending violence against Indigenous life. He can be held for the length of the grand jury, up to 18 months. If the overseeing judge agrees with what is clearly the case — that Martinez will not be coerced to speak — he should by law be immediately released.
Martinez’s lawyers are challenging his incarceration on both procedural terms and by stressing that it is already punitive and thus illegal. The contempt statute governing grand jury witness incarceration explicitly states that coercive imprisonment must be at a “suitable place.” In the midst of a global pandemic in which prisons serve as petri dishes and incarcerated people are contracting Covid-19 and dying in vastly disproportionate numbers, the excessively punitive nature of any imprisonment is undeniable. Martinez has a number of health issues that place him at high risk for complications were he to contract Covid-19, including hypertension and diabetes. Numerous incarcerated individuals with similar health issues who have been convicted of crimes have been given compassionate release due to the coronavirus pandemic. Martinez’s continued imprisonment, without criminal charge or conviction, is, as Meltzer-Cohen put it, “definitionally punitive.”
Anyone who cares about the fight for life against environmental devastation should recognize the necessary centrality of Indigenous-led struggle. Appeals to the Biden administration for robust climate policies cannot overlook those who have been, and remain, on the very frontlines: the water protectors like Martinez who continue to face and fight repression.
“Standing Rock may have been four years ago, but it’s not over,” said Martinez’s partner, Leta Killer, an Oglala Lakota and Arikara water protector, in a video rallying supporters. Killer, who met Martinez at the Oceti Sakowin camp, added in a statement: “Feds are still grasping straws trying not to be held accountable for the terrible things law enforcement did to peaceful, prayerful Water Protectors.”
U.S. soldiers. (photo: Hubert Delaney/Getty)
Pentagon Report Reveals Inroads White Supremacists Have Made in Military
John M. Donnelly, Roll Call
Donnelly writes: "A soldier in the Florida National Guard who co-founded a murderous fascist group was chatting with a fellow white supremacist in the extremist 'Iron March' online forum in 2016 when the guard member made a remarkable statement."
Extent of the military’s own extremism problem has yet to be tracked, Pentagon officials acknowledge
The guard member said he felt free to be a neo-Nazi in the U.S. Army.
“Are you worried at all about being found by your mates or someone, now being in the U.S. military?” he was asked. “You’ll be straight f---ed surely.”
To that, the soldier replied: “I was 100% open about everything with the friends I made at training. They know about it all. They love me too cause I’m a funny guy.”
A large database containing this and many other Iron March chats was published in 2019 on the Ars Technica news site. A screenshot of the neo-Nazi guardsman’s exchange is spotlighted in a previously unpublicized October 2020 Pentagon report to Congress that details the military’s efforts to keep extremists, particularly fascists, out of the military.
The report, obtained by CQ Roll Call, paints a stark picture of white supremacist inroads in the U.S. military. And it reveals several steps the Pentagon is now reviewing to kick such people out and help keep them out — from accessing an FBI database of extremist tattoos to improving security clearance questions.
While neo-Nazis and other extremists are rare in the U.S. armed forces, exactly how rare is not known. And military veterans who adhere to supremacist beliefs have been overrepresented in recent American violence — including in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The Pentagon report said U.S. military personnel and veterans are “highly prized” recruits for supremacist groups, and leaders of those groups try to join the military themselves and get those already in their groups to enlist. Their goal is to obtain weapons and skills and to try to borrow the military’s bravado and cachet, the authors suggested.
Extremism is a “threat” of unclear dimensions in the U.S. military, not only because of possible violence but also because it endangers morale, they said.
“Despite a low number of cases in absolute terms, individuals with extremist affiliations and military experience are a concern to U.S. national security because of their proven ability to execute high-impact events,” the report stated. “Access to service members with combat training and technical weapons expertise can also increase both the probability of success and the potency of planned violent attacks.”
Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., a member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and a former member of the Armed Services Committee, wrote the requirement for last fall’s Pentagon report in the fiscal 2020 defense authorization law.
Aguilar said in an interview Tuesday that he plans to introduce legislation on Thursday that would require the Pentagon to implement the report’s recommendations.
“What the report made clear is that white supremacists are using our military to further their hateful and violent agenda,” Aguilar said. “We need further collaboration between agencies like the DoD and FBI to make sure that we’re keeping extremists away from our servicemembers and keeping our communities safe as well.”
‘Obscure fascist logo’
The Pentagon report’s authors did not name any of the personnel or veterans who were cited in the document, including the National Guard member in the Iron March exchange. But the report makes it abundantly clear who it is: a co-founder of Atomwaffen Division, a group that once comprised 80 members in several states and has been implicated in several hate-fueled murders.
The report also described the soldier as a Florida National Guard member who was sentenced in 2018 to five years in jail for possessing bomb materials. And a footnote refers to an AP story about that person, Brandon Russell, a loner from Tampa who was 22 at the time of his sentencing.
While Russell was serving in the Guard, officials later told reporters, he displayed on his right shoulder a tattoo bearing the radiation-warning symbol — the insignia of the Atomwaffen Division.
But neither the tattoo nor his purported statements to his Army colleagues raised a red flag prior to his arrest, a command investigation later found. Army Guard officials said they lacked a database of extremist tattoos they could refer to, according to press reports at the time.
The Pentagon report also describes other communications from white supremacists in the U.S. military.
Another user of the Iron March chatroom, a self-described infantryman with neo-Nazi views, described how it is possible to find “our kind” in the military’s ranks.
“A good way people in the military find other rightists is to simply wear a shirt with some obscure fascist logo,” the person wrote. “The symbols of SS units are especially common, even on things as public as cars, flags and helmets.”
Proposed responses
The report recommends several steps to combat the problem. One proposal is to ask more specific questions of security clearance applicants and their neighbors because merely asking if the applicants are involved in “terrorism,” for example, is too imprecise to be useful.
Another idea is to give Defense Department personnel access to an FBI database of extremist tattoos like the Atomwaffen sign and to use other FBI tools and training.
A third possible action is to establish a special designation on military discharge and separation forms for people who are booted out of the service for extremist behavior. Only the Navy has such a designation today.
In addition, social media can be surveilled for signs of extremism, the report’s authors said, adding that there are civil liberties challenges in doing so. Data companies can help, the report said, but data must supplement well-trained recruiters and investigators.
Matthew Donovan, who was the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness last year, said in a cover letter for the October report that the Defense Department is implementing most of its proposals.
A Pentagon spokesman had yet to provide a progress update this week.
Washington pays attention
Experts say violent right-wing extremism has surged in the United States in the past several years. But the extent of the military’s own extremism problem has yet to be tracked, Pentagon officials have acknowledged.
This is the case despite periodic reports of hate-inspired violence by military veterans and despite recent Military Times polls finding that about one-third of active-duty personnel have witnessed signs of white supremacy in the ranks — and nearly half consider it more of a threat than North Korea and nearly as menacing as foreign terrorism, according to a 2020 survey by the paper.
The George Floyd protests highlighted the issue of racism within the military. And the overrepresentation of current and former military personnel among the Jan. 6 rioters at the Capitol — about 15 percent of the more than 230 people criminally charged so far, according to news reports — has intensified public scrutiny of the matter. White supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys were pivotal players in the Jan. 6 attack, and NPR reported that one Proud Boys rioter was an Army veteran of the Iraq War.
Aguilar’s bill arrives this week amid a stepped-up focus on extremism in the military.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III recently ordered that each of the armed services stop training and other activities in the next two months to take stock of the matter.
The problem has been a focus in the last couple of defense authorization bills, or NDAAs. Aguilar has written provisions aimed at improving screening procedures in the past two such laws. The most recent NDAA also creates a new deputy inspector general in the Pentagon to oversee diversity and anti-extremism efforts. The fiscal 2020 NDAA law required a federal report on domestic extremism that is nearly a year overdue.
Amid racial unrest last year, the Pentagon created a diversity task force that in December recommended a review of efforts to keep fascists out of the military. The panel also urged creation of a separate article in the military’s criminal code barring extremist acts of violence.
Sean O’Donnell, the acting Pentagon inspector general, is conducting his own assessment of the problem.
Lethal weapons
Russell’s three roommates in Tampa were also Atomwaffen members. One of them, Devon Arthurs, was charged with shooting and killing the other two roommates in 2017, but Arthurs has since been found medically unfit to stand trial because of conditions that include schizophrenia and autism.
Other group members have also been charged with murders.
Even though police found explosives in Russell’s garage, they inexplicably released him after he said it was for model rockets.
But they rearrested him later, after he and another Atomwaffen member were found driving to the Florida Keys with a pair of rifles and 1,000 rounds of ammunition but no luggage or food, ProPublica and the PBS program “Frontline” reported in 2018.
Since Russell’s conviction, several other current or former military personnel have been charged with, or convicted of, acts of extremist violence, in addition to those involved in the Jan. 6 attack.
The cases have involved various lethal threats: amassing weapons to attack public figures, killing a federal security officer, trying to spark violent protests and planning to murder fellow troops.
Pentagon guidance bars active participation in extremist groups or public advocacy of such views, although merely belonging to a group such as Atomwaffen Division is not explicitly against the rules.
While sporting an extremist group’s tattoo is not allowed, the ban is only enforceable if military leaders have access to an updated database of tattoos — something they currently lack.
Further complicating the task of screening extremists is the fact that some of the most destructive military veterans in the past have not been affiliated with any particular extremist group. Leading this list is Timothy McVeigh, an Army veteran with anti-government beliefs who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 using a bomb filled with ammonium nitrate — one of the explosives that Russell reportedly was amassing in his garage.
People take a stroll by the seaside with a backdrop of the Dubai skyline in the United Arab Emirates, in January. (photo: Giuseppe Cacace/Getty)
Princess of Dubai's 'Hostage' Videos Shine Light on United Arab Emirates' Human Rights Record
Saphora Smith, NBC News
Smith writes:
“There’s absolutely no freedom of expression,” Devin Kenney of Amnesty International said. “You absolutely cannot speak without fear in the UAE.”
ew videos purporting to show the daughter of Dubai’s powerful ruler saying she is being held against her will have placed a spotlight on human rights violations in the United Arab Emirates.
“I don’t want to be a hostage in this jail villa, I just want to be free,” Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum says in a video, one of several released by the BBC that appear to show her in a barricaded home in the UAE’s glittering city-state, Dubai.
“I don’t know what they’re planning to do with me,” she adds.
NBC News has not independently obtained or verified the videos. But a spokesman for the Free Latifa campaign, a group that has long called for her release, confirmed that two of the people behind the drive had shared the videos with the British broadcaster.
Neither her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, nor authorities in the UAE have responded to the videos.
Latifa has accused her father of holding her hostage in Dubai after she was caught trying to flee the city in 2018.
The daring escape attempt saw her drive to Oman, before she boarded a yacht bound for India. From there, she planned to fly to the United States and seek asylum. But after a week, the vessel was intercepted by Indian commandos and Emirati agents who arrested everyone on board. Latifa was eventually returned to Dubai.
Emrati officials have previously said Latifa's case was a family affair and that she had not been detained.
Her father, who also serves as the prime minister and vice president in the hereditarily ruled UAE, is widely welcomed in Western capitals and has been pictured alongside the likes of the U.K.'s Queen Elizabeth II.
However, rights campaigners hope the new videos will not only renew pressure on the country to release the princess, but will also highlight wider abuses in the kingdom that is more often associated with sunny vacations and big business.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, tweeted that Dubai's "high rises and playground reputation" should not obscure the fact that Mohammed had "locked up his daughter, Princess Latifa, for wanting to escape from his control."
The wealthy Gulf nation detains those who criticize authorities and hundreds of activists and academics are serving lengthy sentences, in many cases following unfair trials on vague charges, according to Human Rights Watch.
Emirati laws also discriminate against women, migrants and LGBTQ individuals, the organization says, adding that the families of detained activists are also often harassed by the state security apparatus.
“There’s absolutely no freedom of expression,” said Devin Kenney, a Gulf researcher at Amnesty International. “You absolutely cannot speak without fear in the UAE.”
Hamad al-Shamsi, an Emirati rights activist, who in 2012 was among 94 people accused of plotting to overthrow the UAE’s government, said the country had been successful in using public relations to dissuade Western lawmakers and the media from highlighting abuses in the country.
“The UAE is one of the few countries that widely violate human rights and can easily get away with it,” said al-Shamsi, who lives in Turkey. In 2013, he was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison in the Gulf nation, he added.
Saudi Arabia’s rights record was "not worse" than the UAE, said al-Shamsi, although there has been a steady stream of coverage of rights violations in the kingdom since the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
“The difference is in the PR work and lobbying,” said al-Shamsi, adding that programs like the UAE's recent mission to Mars were part of an effort to "beautify its image in the West, despite the wide documented human rights violations."
Last year, Ivanka Trump was among the high-profile women to speak at a Global Women’s Forum in Dubai that was attended by Mohammed, even as his daughter was reportedly detained in the same city.
“Western allies have definitely failed to give any kind of sustained attention to human rights in the country,” Kenney, of Amnesty International, said.
In the closing months of the Trump administration, officials negotiated the largest-ever arms sale between the U.S. and the UAE, worth about $23.37 billion.
At the time, rights groups called to halt the sale, pointing to Emirati links to rights abuses in Yemen, among other issues. The Biden administration has paused the arms sale as it examines the deal.
Embassies for the UAE in Washington and London did not immediately respond to a NBC News request for comment, nor did the Dubai Media Office.
America's coal producers are fighting to keep their industry alive. (photo: AP)
The Coal Industry Is Doubling Down Against Biden's Climate Agenda
Geoff Dembicki, VICE
Dembicki writes: "Denial, misinformation, and political organizing: How U.S. coal producers are fighting a last-ditch battle to keep their industry alive."
s a huge winter storm knocked out power for millions of people in Texas, a group representing the coal industry saw an opportunity. “Houston, we have a problem,” the organization Friends of Coal wrote on Facebook. “Coal is the solution.” Another post showed a solar panel covered in snow. “You are warm today because of a coal miner and a pipeline,” it read.
The posts are part of a torrent of conservative statements blaming renewable energy failures for the Texas blackouts. And though such attacks can be easily debunked (the main source of the energy shortfall is natural gas) they serve a larger political purpose: rally a political base that can take back Congress from the Democrats in next year’s midterm elections.
“Everyone must help all across America within the industry,” the coal publication Coal Zoom wrote earlier this year. “The majority of the House must be won back in 2022.”
The U.S. coal industry is in financial freefall due to competition from natural gas and renewables, as well as the economic shock of the pandemic. Production last year was at its lowest in nearly 60 years. Regulations on power plants and other climate policies proposed by the Biden administration could hasten the decline.
But coal’s leaders are planning for a fight. Industry publications show their strategy includes leveraging connections on Capitol Hill to slow down the transition from fossil fuels, publishing research claiming carbon dioxide is good for humankind, and activating a “grassroots” movement—Friends of Coal—that can help coal-supporting Republicans regain power.
“This is not the time to waive the white flag,” said Coal Zoom.
These actions are unlikely to revive the coal industry. The financial institution Morgan Stanley in early February predicted that coal’s share of U.S. energy generation could be 0 percent in 2033—at which point it will have been completely replaced by renewables.
“It’s not looking real good for the coal industry,” Stan Kaplan, a long-time energy expert and former senior manager in the U.S. Department of Energy, told VICE News. “What you do in a situation like this, is that you seek to get whatever cash you can out of the business, and you try to preserve whatever value you can.”
That goal is made easier with the unwavering support of Republicans. West Virginia Rep. David McKinley recently explained to coal leaders that the best way to keep their industry on life-support is through bipartisan legislation advertised as boosting clean energy.
“How can Republicans support fossil fuels in this toxic political environment?” McKinley told a mid-January conference organized by West Virginia Coal Association. “We're going to need to build coalitions with moderate Democrats and educate the public on the shortcomings of renewables.”
A bipartisan bill McKinley introduced last year would fund research into wind, solar, and other alternatives to coal, while weakening Biden’s target of eliminating 100 percent of emissions from the economy by 2050 to an 80 percent reduction.
“Clean energy technologies are simply not ready for widespread use across the country,” McKinley said in a statement to VICE News. “Until issues like that are resolved, we’ll need to maintain our fossil fuel fleet to ensure a reliable and operational grid.”
Powerful Democrats such as Joe Manchin agree. “Bipartisanship, guys, I have to tell you, that has to be the new normal,” the West Virginia senator and chairman of the Energy and Natural Resource Committee told the January coal conference. “You can't have a cleaner environment by eliminating fossil fuels,” he added.
Meanwhile, the coal industry is trying to convince people they don’t need to worry about carbon emissions. Coal Zoom last month published several papers making the misleading claim that greenhouse gases are good for the environment because they promote plant growth.
The materials were produced as part of a campaign called “Saving U.S. Coal,” whose goal is to stop “false CO2/climate apocalypse scare stories as advanced by the UN” and Democratic politicians. The campaign is a partnership between Coal Zoom and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide, an organization that has attacked the scientific consensus on global temperature rise for more than two decades and has received funding and support from the coal producers Murray Energy and Peabody Energy, as well as the pro-Trump billionaire Robert Mercer. (The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Giving platforms to fringe scientific theories like this is a delay tactic, said Kert Davies, the founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center, which tracks denial campaigns. “It causes noise in the system to doubt the science around climate change,” he said. “Any doubt of the urgency of climate change slows down the gears of the policy machine.”
Davies said that spreading misinformation about renewables can achieve a similar outcome. When the Texas storm first hit, Friends of Coal claimed on Facebook that “13,000 taxpayer subsidized windmills have become nothing more than prominent eyesores in Texas.” In reality, wind has overtaken coal as the second largest source of energy in Texas after gas. Wind turbines supplied 23 percent of the state’s energy last year.
Friends of Coal was set up by industry groups in 2008 to fight against Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan and other policies that would make the electric grid greener. By sponsoring car shows, football games and other community events, it was able to convince many people across coal-producing regions that they were victims of a “War on Coal.”
Appealing to coal miners was a big part of Donald Trump’s 2016 election strategy. Despite West Virginia experiencing its worst coal mining job losses in 60 years and a rapidly growing renewables industry that could create thousands of new jobs there, the state still voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020. “Even if I don’t go back to this industry, I’m still with him,” one laid-off coal mine electrician said at the time.
Now with Biden in charge, a prominent coal leader says people “must band together and do everything imaginable” to fight against the forces “plotting the demise of our industry.”
“Given the obvious rough waters ahead and challenges that will be coming out of Washington of proportions we have not seen, we must act now, today, to demonstrate the value and critical nature of our business to policymakers everywhere,” Chris Hamilton, president of West Virginia Coal Association, explained in an open letter in December.
“We are asking all coal economy stakeholders to begin contacting your local, county, state, and congressional representative to express concern over the potential loss of your job and what you believe is about to happen going forward,” Hamilton wrote. He didn’t respond to an interview request.
Prolonging the use of coal could have devastating consequences. If the U.S. doesn’t cut its emissions in half within the next nine years, the best-case scenario of stabilizing global temperature rise at 1.5 degrees C would be impossible, locking in warming that could damage food and water supplies for hundreds of millions of people.
“We’re in a race against the clock and we’re already behind schedule,” Adam Wells, a Virginia-based regional director with the environmental organization Appalachian Voices, told VICE News. “A year or six months (delay) could make a huge difference.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.