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Norman Solomon | Joe Biden's Afghanistan Announcement Is Not What It Appears
Norman Solomon, In These Times
Solomon writes: "There's no good reason to assume the air war in Afghanistan will be over when - according to President Biden's announcement on Wednesday - all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from that country."
The United States may be withdrawing its troops in September, but that doesn’t mean it’s ending its decades-long military engagement.
hen I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma at a refugee camp in Kabul a dozen years ago, she told me that bombs fell early one morning while she slept at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. With a soft, matter-of-fact voice, Guljumma described what happened. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.
Troops on the ground didn’t kill Guljumma’s relatives and leave her to live with only one arm. The U.S. air war did.
There’s no good reason to assume the air war in Afghanistan will be over when — according to President Biden’s announcement on Wednesday — all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from that country.
What Biden didn’t say was as significant as what he did say. He declared that “U.S. troops, as well as forces deployed by our NATO allies and operational partners, will be out of Afghanistan” before Sept. 11. And “we will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”
But President Biden did not say that the United States will stop bombing Afghanistan. What’s more, he pledged that “we will keep providing assistance to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces,” a declaration that actually indicates a tacit intention to “stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”
And, while the big-type headlines and prominent themes of media coverage are filled with flat-out statements that the U.S. war in Afghanistan will end come September, the fine print of coverage says otherwise.
The banner headline across the top of the New York Times homepage during much of Wednesday proclaimed: “Withdrawal of U.S. Troops in Afghanistan Will End Longest American War.” But, buried in the thirty-second paragraph of a story headed “Biden to Withdraw All Combat Troops From Afghanistan by Sept. 11,” the Times reported: “Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the United States will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State threats, current and former American officials said.”
Matthew Hoh, a Marine combat veteran who in 2009 became the highest-ranking U.S. official to resign from the State Department in protest of the Afghanistan war, told my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy on Wednesday: “Regardless of whether the 3,500 acknowledged U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the U.S. military will still be present in the form of thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan, through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of cruise missiles on ships and submarines.”
We scarcely hear about it, but the U.S. air war on Afghanistan has been a major part of Pentagon operations there. And for more than a year, the U.S. government hasn’t even gone through the motions of disclosing how much of that bombing has occurred.
“We don’t know, because our government doesn’t want us to,” diligent researchers Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies wrote last month. “From January 2004 until February 2020, the U.S. military kept track of how many bombs and missiles it dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and published those figures in regular, monthly Airpower Summaries, which were readily available to journalists and the public. But in March 2020, the Trump administration abruptly stopped publishing U.S. Airpower Summaries, and the Biden administration has so far not published any either.”
The U.S. war in Afghanistan won’t end just because President Biden and U.S. news media tell us so. As Guljumma and countless other Afghan people have experienced, troops on the ground aren’t the only measure of horrific warfare.
No matter what the White House and the headlines say, U.S. taxpayers won’t stop subsidizing the killing in Afghanistan until there is an end to the bombing and “special operations” that remain shrouded in secrecy.
A U.S. Secret Service agent in front of the White House. (photo: FedScoop)
DHS Watchdog Declined to Pursue Investigations Into Secret Service During Trump Administration, Documents Show
Carol D. Leonnig, The Washington Post
Leonnig writes:
he chief federal watchdog for the Secret Service blocked investigations proposed by career staff last year to scrutinize the agency’s handling of the George Floyd protests in Lafayette Square and the spread of the coronavirus in its ranks, according to documents and people with knowledge of his decisions.
Both matters involved decisions by then-President Donald Trump that may have affected actions by the agency.
Joseph Cuffari, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, rejected his staff’s recommendation to investigate what role the Secret Service played in the forcible clearing of protesters from Lafayette Square on June 1, according to internal documents and two people familiar with his decision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the discussions.
After the sudden charge by police on the largely peaceful protesters, the Secret Service was able to move Trump to a church at the edge of the park, where the White House staged a photo opportunity for the president.
Cuffari also sought to limit — and then the office ultimately shelved — a probe into whether the Secret Service flouted federal protocols put in place to detect and reduce the spread of the coronavirus within its workforce, according to the records.
Hundreds of Secret Service officers were either infected with the coronavirus or had to quarantine after potential exposure last year as Trump continued to travel and hold campaign events during the pandemic.
DHS investigators argued that both investigations were essential to their office’s duty to hold the department and the Secret Service accountable, according to the people.
The Secret Service has declined to answer questions about the agency’s role in the Lafayette Square episode, though officials have stressed the clearing of protesters was under the direction of the U.S. Park Police.
The agency has also asserted that it followed best practices and federal protocols to try to contain the spread of coronovirus and prioritized the health of its employees.
Cuffari’s decisions not to pursue the probes were revealed in records obtained by the Project On Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group, and shared with The Washington Post.
Staff argued that the coronavirus investigation should have been a high priority because of the health risks at stake, the people said. Internal DHS reports showed a spike in the number of Secret Service employees who tested positive for coronavirus last summer, a situation that potentially endangered their co-workers, senior government officials and even the president. Trump contracted the coronavirus in the fall, although it is unclear how he was infected.
The DHS inspector general’s office has not launched a probe specifically examining the Secret Service’s performance since the Obama administration.
Erica Paulson, a spokeswoman for the inspector general, said in a statement that Cuffari prioritizes investigations based on a limited budget and greenlights those that target the highest risks and are likely to have the greatest impact.
“Our office does not have the resources to approve every oversight proposal,” she said. “We have less than 400 auditors and inspectors to cover the entire Department of Homeland Security, an agency with almost half a million employees and contractors. Like all IGs, we have to make tough strategic decisions about how to best use our resources for greatest impact across the Department.”
Paulson continued: “In both of these cases, we determined that resources would have a higher impact elsewhere.”
Staffers inside the inspector general’s office privately complained that Cuffari — a Trump nominee confirmed in 2019 who previously worked for two GOP governors in Arizona, Jan Brewer and Doug Ducey — at times appeared skittish about investigations that could potentially criticize the president’s policies or actions, according to the people with knowledge of discussions.
Paulson disputed that, noting that Cuffari launched probes that examined controversial polices of the Trump administration, including those of DHS detention facilities. Cuffari’s office reported last year on the Secret Service’s total spending for Trump’s 2018 visit to the Trump Turnberry Golf Course in Scotland, an audit requested by Congress and launched by Cuffari’s predecessor.
“Evidence that IG Cuffari does not shy away from politically sensitive topics can be found in numerous DHS OIG published reports, as well as ongoing projects,” Paulson said in her statement.
The revelation that he declined to approve the two proposed Secret Service investigations could fuel criticism that Cuffari provided weak oversight of the second-largest federal agency at a time when Trump frequently used the Department of Homeland Security to implement some of his most polarizing policies. The House Committee on Homeland Security, whose chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) has raised alarm about what he considers Cuffari’s failure to conduct thorough investigations, has scheduled an oversight hearing Wednesday on the inspector general’s oversight.
“Cuffari pulled his punches on exactly the type of sensitive reviews his office was created to perform,” said Nick Schwellenbach, senior investigator at the Project On Government Oversight. “It doesn’t look like he’s an independent watchdog.”
Last summer, staff investigators in the inspector general’s office believed they had strong arguments for taking a close look at the Secret Service’s handling of both the Lafayette Square clearing and the agency’s coronavirus protocols.
Both issues had spurred intense criticism — the first for violating Americans’ right to protest and the second for potentially endangering workers’ lives and public health.
According to internal documents, Cuffari’s investigators submitted a draft plan on June 10 to investigate whether the Secret Service violated its use-of-force policies in the June 1 clearing of Lafayette Square, an abrupt move by law enforcement about 30 minutes before Trump marched through the park for a photo op. The staff noted that hundreds of protesters had been shot at with rubber bullets and sprayed with chemical irritants; 60 people had been injured.
Trump and his aides planned the walk across the park to project a look of strength and control over the city amid the civil unrest that followed Floyd’s death. The U.S. Park Police order that came about 6:30 pm to forcibly clear Lafayette Square shocked senior D.C. police officers and National Guard officers on the ground, they have said, because the protesters that Monday had been largely peaceful and did not pose an imminent threat.
But at a June 18 meeting to discuss possible new investigations, Cuffari said the office would not probe the Secret Service’s handling of the protests or clearing of the square, according to the two people familiar with the discussion. Instead, the inspector general suggested that Secret Service Director Jim Murray could look into the episode, they said.
Staff investigators were taken aback. Given that the Secret Service is the primary agency responsible for ensuring the president’s security for any movement he makes in public, the Secret Service’s agents and supervisors would have been directly involved in planning his walk across Lafayette Square.
Paulson said that the inspector general chose not to review the Secret Service’s role in Lafayette Square because he determined the U.S. Park Police played a larger role in the handling of the protests, which the Interior Department’s inspector general planned to scrutinize.
“DHS OIG closely coordinated with Justice and Interior OIGs, who were each planning reviews given the greater presence and participation of their agencies on that day,” she said in her statement.
Two months later, Cuffari moved to curtail another proposed inquiry related to the Secret Service.
At the time, routine internal reports on the numbers of new positive coronavirus cases among DHS employees showed the number of infections among Secret Service employees had risen quickly. On Aug. 10, a special review team submitted a proposal to investigate what steps the Secret Service was taking to prevent the spread of the coronavirus among its workers.
In an Aug. 13 meeting to consider proposed investigations, Cuffari questioned the level of risk involved that the office would be scrutinizing, according to the people familiar with the discussion.
Investigators told Cuffari that if Secret Service agents and officers were spreading the coronavirus, more of them could get sick and possibly die. It would also increase the risk of exposure for the people the Secret Service protected, including the president.
Cuffari told the team they should narrow the probe, and suggested only examining how the spread of the coronavirus affected the Secret Service’s investigative work rather than its protection assignments.
But coronavirus infections in the Secret Service were falling the hardest on agents and officers working protective roles, who were required to travel around the country to secure public rallies for Trump’s campaign.
Many Secret Service agents who worked near the president opted not to wear masks in the early days of the virus’s arrival in the United States. Some members of the president’s detail urged other agents not to wear masks when they helped secure sites for presidential trips, saying the president didn’t like to see them.
In the end, the investigation was shelved, according to records and the people familiar with the decision.
Paulson said the office has devoted significant resources to examining the handling of the pandemic inside DHS, especially in detention settings.
“COVID-19 was and is a significant risk for DHS and we have numerous investigations, inspections and audits that appropriately address those risks throughout DHS,” she said in her statement.
The reluctance by Cuffari to pursue the Secret Service probes came even as Democratic lawmakers were pushing his office to more aggressively investigate DHS.
In a July letter, the chairs of three House committees asked Cuffari and the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate Homeland Security actions both at Lafayette Square on June 1 and in Portland, Ore. The lawmakers argued federal officials didn’t have unfettered rights to chase off or arrest American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
“The legal basis for this use of force has never been explained,” they wrote of the Lafayette Square clearing. “The Administration’s insistence on deploying these forces over the objections of state and local authorities suggest that these tactics have little to do with public safety, but more to do with political gamesmanship.”
Cuffari’s office did launch a probe related to DHS personnel dispatched to protests in Portland. In November, the office issued an alert on a technical matter, finding that the Federal Protective Service did not properly designate its employees by name who were sent to protect federal property there.
In March of last year, Thompson, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said he was deeply troubled by many failures and factual flaws in an investigation by Cuffari’s office of the death of an 8-year-old boy in U.S. custody after Customs and Border Patrol agents detained him and his father at the border.
Thompson said the report inaccurately stated the cause of the child’s death, left out key details about the detention facility’s delay in treating the child and failed to examine whether the policies at the facility were followed or sufficient to prevent such a tragedy.
Thompson said “the many critical shortcomings in the work of the OIG raise significant concerns about the thoroughness of the office’s reviews as well as the willingness of the office to conduct in-depth examinations of sensitive topics.”
The Post reported last year that the number of investigations conducted under Cuffari’s watch had plummeted, noting that lawmakers from both parties were concerned. At the time, Cuffari’s office was on pace to conduct 40 investigations and audits by the end of the fiscal year that ended in September 2020, the fewest in nearly two decades. That would have represented one-fourth the productivity of the office in the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Productivity has increased markedly since then, according to the list of reports on the inspector general’s public website. The office completed 80 reports by the end of the 2020 fiscal year.
Former U.S. vice president Walter Mondale. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Walter Mondale, Who Rose From Small-Town Minnesota to Vice Presidency, Dies at 93
Patrick Condon, Star Tribune
Condon writes:
alter F. Mondale, a preacher's son from southern Minnesota who climbed to the pinnacle of U.S. politics as an influential senator, vice president and Democratic nominee for president, died on Monday. He was 93.Known as "Fritz" to family, friends and voters alike, Mondale died in Minneapolis, according to a statement from his family.
"As proud as we were of him leading the presidential ticket for Democrats in 1984, we know that our father's public policy legacy is so much more than that," read the Mondale family statement.
Former President Jimmy Carter, who chose Mondale as his running mate in 1976, called his friend "the best vice president in our country's history."
"He was an invaluable partner and an able servant of the people of Minnesota, the United States and the world," Carter said in a statement. "Fritz Mondale provided us all with a model for public service and private behavior."
After serving four years under Carter, Mondale was the Democratic nominee for president in 1984. He lost to the incumbent, President Ronald Reagan, in a historic landslide.
"A night like that is hard on you," Mondale wrote in his 2010 memoir, "The Good Fight."
Even in defeat, Mondale made history by choosing as his running mate Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice president on a major-party ticket. It followed a series of political landmarks in a public career that spanned seven decades.
A protégé of Hubert H. Humphrey, another Minnesota politician who rose to the vice presidency and lost a presidential election, Mondale served as a U.S. senator from Minnesota for a dozen years. He played a lead role in the passage of social programs, civil rights laws and environmental protections that defined President Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society."
As vice president from 1977 to 1981, Mondale transformed the office from what had historically been a punchline into what both he and Carter called a true governing partnership. Mondale's role as chief adviser and troubleshooter, working from a West Wing office near the Oval Office, became a model for successors including George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Dick Cheney and Joe Biden.
"The first person I called was Fritz," Biden once said about the time President Barack Obama offered him the No. 2 position.
"Just as George Washington set the contours for the presidency, Mondale more than anyone else made the vice presidency into a robust and constructive institution," said vice presidential scholar Joel K. Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University.
Mondale's high profile in the Carter administration as it grappled with inflation, an energy crisis and the 444-day Iranian hostage standoff set him on a path to his party's presidential nomination in 1984. But his overwhelming defeat did not end his public career.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. ambassador to Japan, a post he held for three years. And in 2002, tragedy pulled Mondale back into Minnesota politics.
When Sen. Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash just 11 days before he was up for re-election, Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party put Mondale's name on the ballot in Wellstone's place. He lost to Republican Norm Coleman — the first time he lost a race in his home state. It was the last time Mondale's name appeared on a ballot.
Wry and unassuming, Mondale had an honest, down-to-earth approach that didn't always serve him well as a candidate. Notoriously, in a debate with Reagan, he said he would raise taxes on Americans. He was attempting to argue that he and Reagan both would raise taxes, but that only Mondale was willing to admit it.
"I did what I thought was right," Mondale wrote in his memoir.
Early life
Walter Frederick Mondale was born in Ceylon, Minn., on Jan. 5, 1928, to Theodore and Claribel Mondale. His mother was a music teacher, his father a Methodist minister who admired progressive lions like Minnesota Gov. Floyd B. Olson and Sen. Robert La Follette of Wisconsin.
The family moved to the small town of Elmore, just north of the Iowa border, when Mondale was in elementary school. He later became active in student government — he lost his bid for senior class president — and was a successful high school athlete.
In 1941, Mondale, then 13, visited Washington for the first time. It was a family road trip, with the Mondale parents and their three sons stuffed into a car pulling a homemade trailer stacked with canned food, mattresses and a bedroom dresser. They slept along the road to avoid campground fees.
"We must have looked like a bunch of Minnesota hicks," brother Mort Mondale told People magazine in 1984.
A few years later, when Mondale was an undergraduate at St. Paul's Macalester College, a professor urged him to attend a speech by Humphrey, then the 35-year-old mayor of Minneapolis. In his memoir, Mondale recalled a speech that "had that crowd on fire and the paint blistering off the walls."
Mondale later introduced himself to Orville Freeman, Humphrey's 28-year-old campaign manager, who went on to serve as governor of Minnesota and U.S. agriculture secretary. Soon Mondale was knocking on doors for the young mayor's re-election campaign, and when Humphrey ran for U.S. Senate in 1948, Mondale was the campaign's lead organizer in southern Minnesota.
After his father died, Mondale left Macalester, unable to afford the tuition. He transferred to the University of Minnesota; after graduation he enlisted in the U.S. Army and, following a two-year stint, returned to attend the U Law School.
The ensuing years saw Mondale rise quickly in Minnesota political and legal circles, one in a tight-knit cadre of DFL up-and-comers in Humphrey's orbit as their party overturned decades of Republican dominance in the state.
Those relationships served Mondale well — so much so that his first two political offices came by appointment rather than election.
In 1960, when Minnesota Attorney General Miles Lord resigned, Gov. Freeman appointed Mondale to replace him. Mondale was 32 years old and four years out of law school at the time.
In that job, Mondale led an amicus brief by 23 of the nation's attorneys general in supporting the right to counsel for Clarence Gideon, a man who couldn't afford a lawyer. The Supreme Court's 1963 ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright established for the first time a criminal defendant's right to legal counsel.
Then, in 1965, when Johnson made Humphrey his vice president, Gov. Karl Rolvaag appointed Mondale to the U.S. Senate.
"His style was such that Freeman, Rolvaag, Humphrey and other party seniors would find him politically reliable and personally compatible," former Star Tribune reporter Finlay Lewis wrote of Mondale in a 1980 biography. "Mondale's was the demeanor of a reasonable man who could be counted on not to offend or embarrass his allies. He possessed two of the most valued of all political gifts — caution and good judgment."
Family man
One night in 1955, a law school classmate invited Mondale to dinner with his wife and her sister, Joan Adams. An art history student and the daughter of a prominent Presbyterian minister, Joan "had an elegance that was quite outside my experience," Mondale wrote.
She agreed to a date, and after a total of seven dates over six months, they were married in the Macalester chapel on Dec. 27, 1955.
A partnership of nearly 60 years was born. Joan Mondale would become a lifelong advocate for the arts, leveraging her platform as Second Lady and earning the nickname "Joan of Art."
The Mondales had three children. Ted followed his father into politics, serving in the Minnesota Senate and later leading the Minnesota Sports Facilities Commission. William became a lawyer. Eleanor, a radio and TV personality, died of cancer in 2011. Joan Mondale died in 2014.
On Saturday, Mondale sent a note to a group of former staffers and campaign aides. He knew the end was near.
"Well my time has come," he wrote. "I am eager to rejoin Joan and Eleanor."
The Great Society
Mondale, following directly in Humphrey's footsteps, was at the forefront of national politics during an era he would later call "a high tide of American liberalism." Johnson's overwhelming win in the 1964 presidential election set the stage for a strengthening of the social safety net and advances in civil rights, conservation and other progressive goals.
In the U.S. Senate, Mondale shepherded into law a bill to ban racial discrimination in housing, which became known as the Fair Housing Act. In their statement announcing his death, his family called that "one of his proudest — and hardest fought — achievements … we are grateful that he had the opportunity to see the emergence of another generation of civil rights reckoning in the past months."
Mondale was a leading driver of major environmental reforms, pushing legislation to protect Minnesota's Boundary Waters and rivers and streams around the country from commercial development.
Even after Johnson left office, Mondale continued to lead on major legislation. In 1974, he sponsored the first federal law to crack down on child abuse. He was an important player in the creation of Title IX, the federal law that gave women equal access to publicly funded sports programs. And he served on the Senate's Church Committee, one of the first major congressional crackdowns on abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies.
At times, Mondale's views put him at odds with Johnson and Humphrey. He kept publicly quiet about his growing opposition to the Vietnam War before the 1968 election. As a top adviser to Humphrey, then the Democratic presidential candidate, Mondale counseled his mentor to support a bombing halt in North Vietnam.
After Republican Richard Nixon won the White House that November, Mondale came out fully against the Vietnam War.
'Equal partner'
Mondale announced in 1973 that he was considering a run for president in 1976. But by 1974 he changed his mind, in typically self-deprecating fashion: "I had pulled about even with 'None of the Above' in national opinion surveys, and I dropped that bid — to widespread applause," Mondale later wrote.
Soon Mondale was on the shortlist of running mates for James Earl Carter Jr., a Georgia governor who became the Democratic nominee in 1976. A centrist and a Washington outsider, Carter found in Mondale a savvy D.C. player with credibility on the party's left.
"He needed some help in the official Democratic arena," Mondale recalled in a 2015 interview with the Star Tribune. "And I'd been in more union halls and to more Democratic dinners than any living American."
Both men have written of their immediate affinity for one another, growing up as they did in religious, small-town families. Mondale told Carter he'd join the ticket only with assurances of a significant role in the new administration, and Carter agreed.
"Fritz Mondale was an equal partner with me in every single thing I did," Carter said in 2001, when the University of Minnesota named its law school building after Mondale.
At Carter's side when he negotiated a historic peace accord between Egypt and Israel, Mondale was closely involved in foreign policy decisions. In 1979, Mondale persuaded world leaders to intervene and help thousands of Southeast Asian refugees known as "boat people." Many settled in Minnesota, laying the groundwork for Minnesota's thriving Hmong community.
Mondale has said he didn't agree with every major decision Carter made. He pleaded with him not to deliver what came to be known as the "malaise speech," meant to calm Americans' fears about high gas prices, high unemployment and inflation.
But Mondale in later years took issue with dim views of the Carter presidency, calling him "a brilliant, courageous leader and a strong president." Their political partnership created a lifelong friendship.
Landslide loss
When Carter lost his 1980 re-election bid to Reagan, Mondale quickly emerged as the Democratic front-runner for the 1984 election. He birthed an early political meme when, in a Democratic debate, he diminished a rival's vague proposals with a quip lifted from a popular fast-food commercial of the time: "Where's the beef?"
But Mondale's focus on social justice and his promise to raise taxes to reduce the federal deficit did little to win over voters charmed by Reagan's genial conservatism. In the end, Reagan carried 49 states; Mondale won only Minnesota and the District of Columbia.
"You know, in 1984, I might have voted for Reagan," Mondale later told a reporter. "They hit the right theme at the time: 'It's morning in America. Let's feel good. There are no problems.' I was the sort of guy reminding people that there had to be some sacrifices. … Reagan just resonated so much better than I did."
Geraldine Ferraro died in 2011, but Mondale lived to see a woman become vice president when Kamala Harris assumed the office in 2021.
Following their loss, Mondale went back to practicing law; he and Joan soon settled back in the Twin Cities. Other than the three years they lived in Tokyo during Mondale's ambassadorship, they called the area home.
In 1990, some prominent DFLers urged Mondale to run again for Senate from Minnesota. He opted not to, saying it was time for a new generation of DFL leaders. That cleared the way for Wellstone's ascent.
'Uncanny good luck'
When Humphrey died in January of 1978, Mondale eulogized him in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, calling him the "country's conscience."
Humphrey was like a father to him, Mondale later wrote. Humphrey, in an interview late in his life, offered a concise appraisal of his protégé's own political success.
"I think this is one of the great elements of mystery in Fritz's life," Humphrey said. "He has the uncanny good luck of being able to be at a certain point at a certain time, and the time and the point are both right for the circumstances."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
Bernie Sanders Says Putin Is Murdering Navalny 'in Front of the World'
John Haltiwanger, Business Insider
Haltiwanger writes:
en. Bernie Sanders of Vermont did not mince words as he backed growing calls for the Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to receive proper medical treatment.
"Make no mistake about what is happening here: activist Aleksei Navalny is being murdered in front of the world by Vladimir Putin for the crime of exposing Putin's vast corruption. Navalny's doctors must be allowed to see him immediately," Sanders said in a tweet on Sunday.
The Russian embassy in Washington, DC, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
The Vermont senator's criticism of the Russian president came after Navalny's doctor said he could "die at any moment." The Biden administration has told Russia there will be consequences if Navalny dies.
Navalny has been on a hunger strike for weeks, demanding he receive proper medical care over complaints of back pain and numbness in one of his legs.
The anti-corruption campaigner on Monday was transferred to a prison hospital at a separate penal colony from where he was being held. Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service said Navalny's condition was "satisfactory," according to ABC News.
Meanwhile, Navalny's allies have said his health is rapidly deteriorating and have pushed against referring to the facility he was transferred to as a "hospital."
"Please stop writing that Navalny has been transferred to a hospital. It's not a hospital, it's just a different penal colony that has the same torturous conditions, same everything, apart from the fact that there are few formally qualified doctors on-site. This changes nothing," Maria Pevchikh, an investigator at Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, said in a tweet.
In August, Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok, which can cause lingering health effects. Navalny blamed Putin for the incident. Leaders across the world condemned Putin over the poisoning. The Russian president's critics have often been killed in violent or mysterious ways.
In September, Navalny was taken to Germany for medical treatment. Upon returning to Moscow in January, he was arrested and accused of violating parole - including while he was in Germany - over a 2014 suspended sentence for fraud. Navalny, who's maintained all charges against him are politically motivated, was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison.
F-35s on the HMS Queen Elizabeth will stand ready as Russia builds forces near Ukraine. (photo: EPA)
UK Warships to Sail for Black Sea in May as Ukraine-Russia Tensions Rise - Sunday Times
Kanishka Singh, Reuters
Singh writes:
ritish warships will sail for the Black Sea in May amid rising tensions between Ukraine and Russia, the Sunday Times newspaper reported, citing senior naval sources.
The deployment is aimed at showing solidarity with Ukraine and Britain's NATO allies, the newspaper reported https://bit.ly/32pc4BK.
One Type 45 destroyer armed with anti-aircraft missiles and an anti-submarine Type 23 frigate will leave the Royal Navy's carrier task group in the Mediterranean and head through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea, according to the report.
RAF F-35B Lightning stealth jets and Merlin submarine-hunting helicopters will stand ready on the task group's flag ship, the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, to support the warships in the Black Sea, the report added.
Tensions between Moscow and Kyiv have been rising amid a build-up of Russian troops along the border and clashes in eastern Ukraine between the army and pro-Russian separatists.
Officials at the UK Ministry of Defence were not immediately available for comment.
A ministry spokesman told the newspaper that the UK government was working closely with Ukraine to monitor the situation and continued to call on Russia to de-escalate.
"The UK and our international allies are unwavering in our support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity", the newspaper quoted the spokesman as saying.
Members of the French Jewish community met in Paris' Place de la Republique in January 2020 to demand a trial for the murder of Sarah Halimi, who was killed in 2017. (photo: Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA)
France: Muslim Man Who Murdered Jewish Woman Can't Stand Trial Because He Smoked Cannabis Before Killing
Joshua Zitser, Insider
Zitser writes:
rance's top court ruled on Wednesday that the killer of an elderly Jewish woman will not go on trial, France24 reported.
Kobili Traoré admitted to murdering his neighbor, Sarah Halimi, in 2017. He shouted "Allahu Akbar," or "God is great" in Arabic, and "I killed the devil," shortly before throwing her off the balcony of her third-floor Paris apartment, The New York Times said.
On Wednesday, the Court of Cassation - France's final court of appeal - affirmed two prior judgments that ruled that Traoré could not be held criminally responsible for his actions because he was in a state of drug-induced psychosis.
Traoré, a drug dealer, smoked pot every day for 13 years and had up to 15 joints a day, Israel Hayom reported. Toxicological analysis revealed the presence of cannabis in his blood on the day he was arrested, the French newspaper Libération said.
The court noted that "a person is not criminally responsible if suffering, at the time of the event, from psychic or neuropsychic disturbance that has eliminated all discernment or control," The Times said.
Whether the disturbance was brought on through voluntary drug use is not a legally important distinction, the court said.
In December 2019, President Emmanuel Macron made a rare intervention by criticizing the Paris appeals court for saying that Traore was unfit for trial.
"Even if, in the end, the judge decided that there was no criminal responsibility, there is a need for a trial," Macron said in 2020.
The country's top magistrates then criticized Macron for impacting the "independence of the justice system," The Times of Israel reported.
The ruling has angered French politicians and France's Jewish community, the largest in Europe.
Dozens of French senators have reacted by proposing a revision to the law that exonerates a crime due to a drug-induced psychosis, The New York Times said.
Aitkin County sheriffs arrest water protectors during a protest at the construction site of Enbridge's Line 3 oil pipeline near Palisade, Minnesota, Jan. 9, 2021. (photo: Kerem Yucel/Getty Images)
Local Cops Said Pipeline Company Had Influence Over Government Appointment
Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Brown writes: "As part of its permit to build Line 3, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, or PUC, created a special Enbridge-funded account that public safety officials could use to pay for policing Enbridge's political opponents."
Sheriffs in Minnesota worried about who would oversee an escrow account, funded by pipeline giant Enbridge, to reimburse the costs of policing protests.
s the Canadian oil pipeline company Enbridge awaited its final permits last summer to begin construction on the Line 3 tar sands oil transport project, Minnesota sheriff’s offices along the route fretted. With an Anishinaabe-led movement pledging to carry out nonviolent blockades and demonstrations to prevent the pipeline’s construction, local police worried they’d be stuck with the costs of policing and wanted Enbridge to pay instead.
As part of its permit to build Line 3, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, or PUC, created a special Enbridge-funded account that public safety officials could use to pay for policing Enbridge’s political opponents. The police were concerned about who state officials would hire to decide which invoices to pay or reject.
Last June, Kanabec County Sheriff Brian Smith wrote an email to other sheriffs along the pipeline route. “I think we need to let the PUC know that the person selected needs to be someone that we also agree upon,” Smith wrote. “Not a member of the PUC, not a state, county or federal employee, but someone that has an understanding of rioting and MFF operations” — referring to mobile field force operations, or anti-riot policing.
In response, Enbridge offered reassurances, according to other police on the email chain. “I had a discussion with Troy Kirby (Enbridge Chief of Security) this morning, and expressed concern over that position and the escrow account,” Aitkin County Sheriff Daniel Guida replied. “He indicated they have some influence on the hiring of that positon [sic] and he would be involved to ensure we are taken care of, one way or another.”
The exchange between the sheriffs is an example of the public-private collaborations between law enforcement and fossil fuel companies that have raised alarms for civil rights advocates and environmental activists across the U.S. Oil, gas, and pipeline corporations have forged a range of creative strategies for funding the police who respond to their political opponents, from paying elected constables for work as private security to creating an entire police unit dedicated to protecting infrastructure. Other industries have found ways to route money to police, but corporate law enforcement funding related to pipeline projects is among the most pervasive. Civil liberties advocates say the corporate cash raises troubling questions about private influence over the public institution of policing, noting that growing anti-pipeline protest movements have been met by heavy-handed police tactics.
With opposition to the Line 3 pipeline mounting, public records obtained by The Intercept shed new light on the depths of the cooperation between Enbridge and public safety officials in Minnesota — especially law enforcement agencies along the route. “They are being incentivized to carry out the goals of a foreign corporation, and they’re being taken care of for doing it,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Center for Protest Law and Litigation, which is representing Line 3 pipeline opponents. She said the dynamic was on view in the sheriff’s description of Enbridge influence over the escrow account hire: “That communication is defining of the relationship between the Enbridge corporation and law enforcement in Northern Minnesota.”
Guida, the Aitkin County sheriff, told The Intercept that, at the time of the email, sheriffs were concerned the account liaison appointment was taking too long and believed Kirby, the Enbridge security head, could speed up the process. Asked for comment, Enbridge directed questions about the account to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. In a statement, PUC spokesperson Will Seuffert said, “Enbridge had no input into the Escrow Account Manager selection.” The panel that made the appointment included two commission staff members and one from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety who worked “without any involvement from Enbridge, or any other parties,” he said.
In February, Richard Hart, a former official at the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and a former deputy chief of police in Bloomington, Minnesota, was hired for the role. So far, he has approved more than $900,000 in Enbridge funding for law enforcement agencies and other public safety institutions.
For Indigenous water protectors, the cooperation between law enforcement and pipeline companies is part of a long history of public security forces being leveraged against Native tribes for private gain, going back to the violent westward expansion of the United States. Tania Aubid, an anti-Line 3 organizer and a member of the Rice Lake Band, which is part of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, said, “It’s keeping on with the Indian Wars.”
Money for Tear Gas
Chief among the law enforcement officers’ concerns about the escrow account, according to emails obtained through public records requests, was a rule in the Line 3 permit limiting how the funds can be used. Sheriff’s offices can use the account to pay for any public safety services “provided in and about the construction site as a direct result of the construction and removal of the pipeline,” but they cannot use it to pay for equipment, unless it’s personal protective gear.
It was widely understood — and a particular source of frustration — that so-called less-lethal munitions, such as tear gas, would not be reimbursed through the account. “We do know for absolute certain that munitions will NOT be an allowable expense,” noted Carlton County Sheriff Kelly Lake in a November 19 email to fellow members of the Northern Lights Task Force, a coalition of law enforcement and public safety officials set up primarily to respond to anti-pipeline demonstrations.
“So, we can get reimbursed for trafficking but not equipment needed to protect our community’s? [sic]” wrote Cass County Sheriff Tom Burch a few days later, in reply to an email that said Enbridge funds could be used to address an expected increase in human trafficking related to the arrival of hundreds of temporary workers.
The funding gap for less-lethal munitions was important enough that law enforcement officials raised it with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. In early October, Walz set up a phone call with the sheriffs along the Line 3 route. Ahead of the calls, Lake, the Carlton County sheriff, distributed a handful of talking points to the group. Among them was the problem of tear gas funding.
“One identified resource we know that will aid in response should the protests become violent and out of control is the use of less lethal munitions such as gas,” the talking points said. “We have been told by the PUC that this absolutely will not be an allowable expense for reimbursement through the Public Safety Escrow Account. Enbridge has said they would not directly reimburse this expense as they have put funds aside into the Public Safety Escrow Account already to be utilized to reimburse public safety for response.”
It continues, “If counties along the pipeline route face mass crowds of violent protests that are prolonged events, the small resources of munitions that we may have will be very quickly depleted. Without these less lethal options, there is an incredibly increased risk for responders, protestors, and the community as a whole.”
The governor apparently offered words of comfort. “Dave’s assessment is that it went very well and he believes that the Governor will figure out the funding piece and the munitions,” Lake said in an email after the call, referring to Dave Olmstead, a retired Bloomington police commander who serves as Minnesota’s special events preparedness coordinator for Line 3, overseeing the public safety response to the project. “It sounds like his staff was already trying to line up a meeting internally for them to discuss it.”
A spokesperson for the governor’s office did not answer a question about the phone call and directed all queries about state funding to the Department of Public Safety, which did not respond to a request for comment. Guida told The Intercept that his department has received no additional funding from the state to pay for less-lethal weapons.
Enbridge Funding Equipment
Regardless of what funding the governor arranged, less-lethal weapons, including tear gas, are baked into law enforcement’s plans for Line 3.
A Northern Lights Task Force document laying out the overarching police strategy for Line 3 protests, also obtained through a public information request, repeatedly notes the importance of protecting free speech rights, urging officers to “make reasonable efforts to employ ‘non-arrest’ methods of crowd management” and to target leaders and agitators, rather than detaining people en masse.
If targeted arrests fail to disperse a group, according to the document, then chemical weapons are allowed, including smoke, pepper spray, or a combination of the two, followed by longer-range pepper spray, pepper blast balls, and tear gas. Impact munitions, firearms-fired projectiles in the less-lethal category like sponge rounds, marking rounds, and pepper spray-tipped rounds can only be targeted at individuals whose actions put others in danger of injury. The use of dogs requires permission from local law enforcement commanders.
Guida justified planning for the use of less-lethal munitions by comparing the Line 3 opposition to the movement against the Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. “It seemed that without less than lethal munitions, when they lost control, that things would have continued to spiral out of control,” Guida said.
Verheyden-Hilliard is part of the legal team representing Dakota Access pipeline opponents in a class-action civil rights lawsuit against law enforcement officials in North Dakota, including a woman who lost vision in one eye after police shot her in the face with a tear gas canister. “If we want to look at what happened with DAPL, I think that’s a good idea,” she said. “The lesson we can learn from there is in fact that equipping all these local sheriffs with these very powerful and very indiscriminate and very dangerous weapons causes substantial injury and harm to people.”
None of the weapons have yet been deployed, but counties have stocked up. Beltrami County, which is located near but not on the pipeline route, even submitted an invoice requesting reimbursement from the Enbridge-funded escrow account for more than $10,000 in less-lethal weapons, including batons, pepper spray, impact munitions, and tear gas grenades, despite the restriction.
Hart rejected those requests but approved $911,060 in other reimbursements, including approximately $170,00 worth of equipment: mostly tactical and crowd control gear, as well as miscellaneous items. Reimbursements, for example, were made for port-a-potty rentals, which are considered personal protective equipment because, according to Hart, “the toilets protect jail employees from biological exposure during jail overcrowding.” Among other approved “personal protective equipment” are baton stops, which attach a baton to officers’ duty belts, and gas masks, which protect officers from the tear gas they deploy.
Shanai Matteson, an opponent of the Line 3 who is from Guida’s county, said it feels inevitable that tear gas and other munitions will be used. “What you practice for, and the mindset you have, is what you bring. They’re soldiering up to protect a private company’s assets, so what do we think is going to happen?” Matteson said. “Stopping work on a project that’s destroying the place that we live is not the same as violence that would warrant this kind of a response.”
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