25 April 21
The Rare But Beautiful $100 Donation
We don’t get many triple digit donations, but they really help when we do. The smaller donations are wonderful but they work much better when matched with a slightly larger matching contribution.
Who can?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
25 April 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Stacey Abrams | While Justice Sleeps Here
Stacey Abrams, Vanity Fair
Abrams writes: "You know Stacey Abrams as the founder of Fair Fight and a leader in the battle for voter rights. She's also a novelist, whose new thriller takes on conspiracy theories, biotech, and the Supreme Court."
is brain died at 11:47 p.m. At nine o’clock on Sunday night, Supreme Court justice Howard Wynn shifted testily in his favorite leather chair, the high-backed Chesterfield purportedly commissioned by Chief Justice William Howard Taft. The wide seat resembled a settee more than a chair, but the latter Howard appreciated the capacious width. Unlike the robust former president, Justice Wynn was built along trimmer lines, a sleek sloop to the fearsome cargo ship of a man who preceded him on the bench. But he enjoyed the chair for its unexpected utility. Extra space at his hip for the books he habitually tucked to his side, on the off chance the chosen tome for his nightly read bored him.
Howard Wynn did not suffer boredom or mediocrity well.
He felt equally dismissive of willful ignorance—his description of the modern press—and smug stupidity, his bon mot for politicians. To his mind, they were a gang of vapid and arrogant thugs all, who greedily snatched their information from one another like disappearing crumbs as society spiraled merrily toward hell. With the current crop of pundits, bureaucrats, and hired guns in charge, America was destined to repeat the cycles of intellectual torpor that toppled Rome and Greece and Mali and the Incas and every empire that stumbled into short-lived, debauched existence. Show man ignoble work and easy sex, and there went civilization.
“A righteous flood, that’s what we need,” he muttered into the dimly lit study. “Drown the bastards out.”
Behind him, a chessboard stood in midplay, the antique wooden pieces beginning to attract particles of dust from disuse. Once, he’d played the game with a ferocity that rivaled that of grand masters, a prodigy in his youth. Careful maneuvers and contemplations of endgames had been sufficient until he learned that he could do the same in real life, when his mind became destined for the law. The game in progress was with a man he’d never met who lived half a world away. But even his new friend had deserted him to this last room of refuge.
The door to the study had been shut tight for hours, leaving him alone in his sanctuary. Beyond the study, an early summer storm rattled the windows. White flashed in the distance, and then came the inevitable bark of thunder. Wynn nodded in weary recognition of the tumult. To drown the thunder, he turned on the small television he kept in the room. As a rule, he despised the idiot box, but now he reluctantly acknowledged its utility. Tonight, it would tell him if he’d destroyed his life’s mission or saved it.
A commercial offered discount car insurance, followed by the opening graphics for a popular evening talk show of comedic and political invective. Wynn watched with hawkish eyes as the host wasted no time before launching his shtick. “And earlier today…the epic meltdown at American University by Justice Howard Wynn…or, perhaps he should be called Justice ‘Where the Hell Am I?’ ”
The studio audience roared with laughter as the screen flickered to a shot of Wynn speaking that afternoon at the university’s commencement ceremony. He’d done this countless times, offering pithy lies about the promise of the next generation. The clip caught him as he leaned over the podium, clad in his academic regalia—simply another meaningless black robe. A tight shot of his face flashed onscreen, mouth sneering. “Science is the greatest trick the Devil ever played on man!” he pronounced to the undergraduates squirming uncomfortably in their metal chairs. The man he watched onscreen lifted his fist in anger. “He let us believe we could control our destiny, but we’ve only built our demise. Breaking the laws of nature to construct a shrine to Satan’s handiwork. We must be stopped!”
The television screen filled to frame a shot of a stone-faced Brandon Stokes, the president of the United States, staring stoically ahead as Justice Wynn raged on. The graduation of the president’s youngest daughter had brought him to the festivities, and he’d graciously agreed to share the podium with the jurist who reveled in swatting down his initiatives and eviscerating the laws signed by his administration. The animus between the men had been the source of great debate at the college—one brought to a head by Zoe Stokes’s unexpected early graduation, fulfilled by a recalculation of her study-abroad hours. With the invitation to the Supreme Court justice already accepted, the college had no graceful way to rescind his speaking engagement.
Wynn stared at the crowd, his face frozen in irascibility. In the next image, clearly realizing her grave error, the college’s president warily approached from the side of the podium, extending her hand in the universal gesture of nice doggy. Her voice was faint but clearly heard by the cameraman. “Justice Wynn? Are you okay?”
Wynn spun around and swatted at the proffered hand, his voice dismissive. “Of course I’m not. I’m trying to warn you of the coming apocalypse, and you want me to tell these children that the world awaits them. What waits is death. It will come for the others first, but the Devil will have his due.”
At that point, uncomfortable murmurs spread through the crowd, peppered with chuckles of derision, and Wynn turned back once more. “Laugh if you will, you carrion of society. But mark my words—hell has come to earth, and your parents have elected its offspring.”
With that, he shoved his hand into his pocket and glared at President Stokes, then marched toward him. Yanking his hand free from his pocket, Justice Wynn stopped in front of Stokes and extended his right hand. The president came awkwardly to his feet and accepted the gesture, and the justice muttered something near his ear.
The video played the strained handshake before the justice stalked offstage, trailed by the clearly distraught college president.
“Not sure what Justice Wynn whispered there, but I think it’s safe to say he won’t be endorsing the president for reelection,” deadpanned the late-night host, to raucous applause. “They call Justice Wynn the ‘Voice of the People,’ but now everyone is wondering if he’s the one hearing voices. He’s known for riding the subway in D.C., but this makes me wonder if he’ll be living in the tunnels soon. Scary that he’s the swing vote on some big decisions the court will make this month. And even scarier is that he’s probably not the worst one. I wonder if they’ll give him his own reality show, Crazy Justice.” Laughter followed, and Wynn flicked off the television.
“Funny man,” he muttered to himself, staring again at the storm raging beyond the windows. “Thoreau had it right about nature versus man. Nature always wins.” As he spoke in the empty room, his voice held no venom, only resignation. Nature, he knew, was a crafty adversary. While a man slept peacefully in his bed, Nature rummaged through tissue and cell down to chromosomes so slight as to be invisible. With a capricious flick, it switched on the time bomb that would explode a man’s life. A man’s brain.
“Leaving me a mewling, puking shadow of myself for others to feed upon like viscera,” he acknowledged morosely. No one replied. Too often, these days, his conversations spun out to meet no response.
They’d all left him. One wife dead, another deserted. His only son despised him.
The court was no better. A collection of sycophants and despisers, plotting against him. Pretending to care about him. But he’d discovered the way to do what must be done, and the few to whom he could entrust the tasks ahead.
Wynn struggled from the chair and crossed to a bookshelf. He shifted the books to the carpet. The task was harder than it should have been. With a glance over his shoulder, he checked that the door was still closed.
“Don’t want that sneaky viper to creep up on me and steal more of my secrets,” he muttered. Wynn entered the combination to the safe. The lock popped quietly and flashed its green entry signal. He tugged at the handle.
Inside, the contents were exactly as he’d left them. Soon, though, he’d forget what lay inside. Worse, he’d forget that he even had a safe and the other hiding places he’d set across the whorish town. Places that might betray him by refusing to be found. Such was his fated end. From brilliant jurist to a hollowed-out shell of a man chased by shadows, betrayed by memory.
Time had winnowed itself down to nothingness. At some point, his enemies would attempt to rush him toward death, but he knew a secret. Between the end and now lay uncharted territory that he alone had begun to map. His enemies would try to follow him, but they would fail. All except the ones who could follow the breadcrumbs.
Each term, the U.S. Supreme Court held its hearings and issued its edicts like gods from Olympus. By law, they commenced their deliberations on the first Monday in October, parceling out times for lawyers and the wretched they represented to beg the indulgence of him and his fellow jurists. But the clock struck midnight at the end of June, shutting the door on deliverance or condemnation. By tradition, they parceled out their weightiest decisions in those final weeks, occasionally eking into July, but never during his tenure. No, June 30 was his D-Day, his Waterloo, his checkmate.
He slammed the safe door shut and leaned heavily against the cold metal, his forehead pressed against his lifted arm. What if she couldn’t finish it? If they too got lost, like he had. Perhaps if he told the chief what he’d done, what he’d learned, she’d be able to help him. But if she knew, she’d be honor-bound to stop him. Deny him this last act of penance.
Part of him recognized the argument swirling in his head. A vicious tug-of-war he scarcely recalled from day to day. The neurologist had warned him that the symptoms would worsen. That the shadows in his once-clear mind would grow fangs and horns. That he would see enemies.
No, he reminded himself. There were enemies. Enemies he had to fight. Because if he told the truth, they might not believe him. Worse, they would destroy the truth. Too many doctors whispering about his deteriorating health, about paranoia and anxiety and conspiracy brought on by neurological disease.
It was better this way, to wait and see if his opponents accepted his king’s gambit. An opening sacrifice to strengthen his game. The White House thought itself so clever. Use his body’s own betrayal against him. Send in a spy to watch his moves and figure out what he’d learned. Executive privilege versus the great jurist Howard Wynn? Pah!
Filled with adrenaline, Wynn replaced the books, opened the study door, and returned to his chair. His mind was made up. Again. He would play the labyrinthine game the law demanded, and he would win. They wouldn’t stop him.
Abruptly, the anxiety sharpened, its razor claws slicing through reason in his suddenly clouded thoughts. Wynn jerked upright and hissed into the empty room, “You want to kill me, don’t you? Silence me?” He punched the air with an angry, shaking fist. “I know what you’ve done. How you’ve lied to us! Soon enough, I’ll prove it, and even your guard dogs won’t be able to save you!”
“Justice Wynn? Who are you talking to?” At the doorway to the study, his nurse appeared and frowned at the outburst. “Are you on the phone?”
The clouds receded, and he snarled, “I am conversing with Nature, woman. Smartest companion I am likely to encounter in this house.”
Unconvinced, his nurse, Jamie Lewis, crossed the threshold. She plastered on a smile. “It’s time for your medication and for bed, Justice. You need your rest. You had a long day today, and I don’t want you too tuckered to go to work tomorrow. Busy week.”
Wynn slapped the arm of the Chesterfield chair with a satisfying crack. “I’m not a goddamned child, Nurse Lewis. I don’t need to be coaxed into bed like a whelp in diapers. I sit on the bench of the United States Supreme Court.”
“Yes, you do.” Jamie edged closer, her crepe-soled shoes silent on the hardwood. Only her pale yellow skirt made a whisper of sound as she closed the distance between them. With the dulcet smile that she knew would irritate, she cooed, “You’re a fine lawyer, Justice Wynn. God knows, I’ve met enough of them, thanks to Thomas.” She gave a false laugh. “Perhaps I should have married a doctor, not a salesman.”
“A doctor? Scoundrels!” This time, the smack of his hand echoed for an instant. “Damned charlatans…refusing to do an honest day’s labor. Off golfing and finding diseases that were never lost.”
“Doctors are important, Justice. As important as lawyers, I’d wager. They’re keeping you here, aren’t they?”
“There’s no comparison,” he barked. “Jurisprudence is one of the last pure métiers of Western creation, like the blues or bid whist. I find modern physicians only slightly more capable than leeches and witches’ cauldrons. Eight years of training, and still they only barely practice at their craft!”
“Don’t lawyers practice the law?”
“When we stumble, no one dies.” His hand trembled as he flipped defiantly through the musty pages of Faust and knew he had lied. “Doctors are nothing but cranks and convicts roaming the earth, telling lies to the healthy. Gathering corpses for their experiments.”
Bushy eyebrows, twin shocks of alabaster against bronzed skin, lifted and lowered in rage. “But then, that’s not much better than this new crop of lawyers roaming the court. A generation laid to waste by the putrescence of their own thoughts. Not an incisive mind among them. Computer-addled miscreants who’d rather be told the answer than investigate. Can barely find one smart enough to fetch my coffee.”
“I thought you liked Mr. Brewer and Ms. Keene,” Jamie reminded him, standing at his elbow. His rant slid into a cough, and soon would warble off into mutterings. To urge the sequence along, she poked: “Just yesterday, you told me Ms. Keene was a bright young scholar worth watching.”
“I said no such thing!” He levered himself into a fighting stance and spat, “Don’t tell me I’ve said things I didn’t say. Especially about persons whom you are ill-equipped to hold small talk with, let alone discuss their relative cerebral merit, Nurse Lewis.” He sneered her title and clutched her arm, desperately afraid that he had indeed paid the glowing compliment about one of his clerks.
Too often, these days, he could not remember his own words from moment to moment. Or from afternoon to night.
Wynn glanced up to find the nurse watching him, checking him for signs of dementia or the coming of death. Had he finished his sentence? How long had he been silent? “Stop staring at me!” he snapped and tightened his hold on her muscular arm.
Jamie obliged and looked away before he could see her worry. His lapses were coming more frequently now. One day, the lapse would freeze in time. She’d seen it once before. Boursin’s syndrome was the name of the disease, and she could read its trek in Justice Wynn’s panicked eyes. Gently, she probed, “What were we discussing, Justice?”
“Why? So you can report me to the president or whatever goon sent you to spy on me?” He snorted derisively. “Did I go too far at the graduation? Have they told you to kill me?”
The nurse blanched. “Sir?”
“Of course you’re spying on me,” he told her gruffly. “I may be paranoid and dying, but I am not stupid.”
“You believe I would kill you?”
“Nothing so bold and direct. You simply write down your observations and pass them along, in violation of medical privilege, building their case against me.”
“Sir—”
“I assume they make you report on my impending demise on a regular basis. Probably have you reading my papers at night, snapping photos so they know what I’m doing. Would love to have you tape me, but their surveillance can’t get inside. That interloper in the White House is afraid I’m going to crush his dreams, and they sent you to keep tabs on me. My speech today must have him cursing my name.”
Her eyes widened. “I don’t know what—”
“Don’t lie to me!” he barked. “For God’s sake, be the last exemplar of honesty left in this house.” A cough rattled through him, and he bowed his head as his lungs struggled for air. “How did they turn you? A bribe or a threat? Did they use your husband?”
The flush turned pale and the nurse’s head hung slightly. “Thomas is in trouble again. They’re considering arresting him for some scam. He swears he didn’t do it,” she whispered. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“You had a choice, Nurse Lewis,” he corrected tersely. “You simply chose the living over the dead.”
“They want to know if you can do your job, sir. If you still have the capacity to function. That tantrum at the commencement didn’t help.”
“That was no tantrum, you silly cow! It was strategy. It’s all strategy. Opening move of the king’s gambit! Every breath is a movement toward the endgame.” His eyes widened, and he shook his fist. “Did you tell them about my research? That I know what happened?”
Jamie frowned in genuine confusion. “Research? For the court?”
“Of course for the court! Why else would they have you here? I am a threat to national security, but one they can’t prove without admitting what they’ve done. So the White House trespasser sends in his carrier pigeons to watch me like a hawk. I know their secret!”
“Justice, you’re not making sense. Please, sit down.”
“I won’t sit, and I won’t be silenced!” The bellow carried an edge of hysteria. He thought again about his estranged son. “They can’t kill my boy with their lies!”
“No one is trying to kill Jared,” Jamie soothed, her hand stroking his stiffened back. “Please, Justice, calm down.”
“It’s a prisoner’s dilemma,” he whispered as his voice shook. “My son’s life for their defeat. But I’ve outsmarted them. Lasker-Bauer, which they will never suspect.”
“Lask Bauer? Who is he?”
“Not he, you simpleton. In the middle game, both bishops will die to save him. To save the endgame.”
“Who are the bishops?” Jamie frowned in confusion and gripped his shoulder. “Justice Wynn, who am I?”
“Leave me be!”
Jamie leaned closer and demanded, “Who am I?”
His eyes snapped to hers, his mind clearing. He snarled, “Someone I cannot trust. I can’t trust anyone anymore.”
“I’m here to help you.”
“Liar. You’re telling them I’m crazy. That I’m infirm. I am still strong, madam. Stronger than he is.” Still, agitation knotted his belly. If the call came on the right day, a day when he’d forgotten his plan, he might accept their demands and ruin everything he’d so carefully plotted.
Not yet. By God, not yet. Forcing his once-agile mind to focus, Justice Wynn summoned the thread of his conversation with Nurse Lewis. “Stop staring at me.”
“What were we talking about?”
“Before you admitted your perfidy, we were discussing the intellectual capacity of my law clerks, and I made a reference to a strategy beyond your grasp. And for the record, Ms. Keene is no better and no worse than the rest of her kind. Her sole differentiation is the glimmer of potential she tries to hide. Otherwise, she is as bright as one can expect given the utter absence of scholarship among her tutors.”
Jamie closed plump, steady fingers around Justice Wynn’s upper arm and steered him to the open door. “I thought she went to Yale? Isn’t that a good school?”
“A cesspool, just like Harvard, Stanford, or any other bastion of education in this end of days. A sea of sloppy thinking posing as legal education.” He stumbled and caught himself on the hallway wall. “No wonder lawyers want strict construction of the Constitution. Hell, that way, it’s already written down for their feeble minds.”
At the staircase, Jamie nudged him to the left. Wynn halted beneath a framed photo displaying a sweep of glacier, the blue vibrant and grand. Remembering their earlier exchange, he shook his head. “Knowing the law isn’t about the school. It’s about the mind. The heart. About understanding what the law intends as much as reading beneath what it says. Knowing how to find one’s way to the truth.” He breathed deep, resting more of his weight on Jamie’s sturdy frame, confident she’d hold.
He lifted his eyes to meet hers. Staring intently, he demanded, “Do you like Avery?”
She nodded hesitantly. “She’s impressive. Well-spoken.”
“That’s all you can say?”
With a shrug, Jamie countered, “Well, she has a bit of an attitude, if you ask me. Tough. Not like that charming Mr. Brewer. He’s going places. I can tell.”
“Brewer will build shallow empires,” Wynn snorted. “But Ms. Keene is a smart girl. Very smart. A bit preoccupied with proving herself, but she’s got a brain that she occasionally puts to use. Could be brilliant if she were a more precise thinker.”
“More precise?”
“Precise, Nurse. A condition you have yet to stumble into.” Forcing his spine erect, he yanked his hand free. “I’m not an invalid. I can take myself to bed. Get me those pills of poison they’ve told you to foist upon me.”
“Yes, sir.” She propped open the bedroom door and waited as he lumbered through. “Why don’t you slip into your pajamas, and I’ll bring your medication in two shakes?”
“Don’t condescend to me, woman. I’m dying, not senile. I can hear your feeble attempts at patronization before they pass your lips.”
“I’ve laid the black pajamas on the bed. Do you need any help?”
“Only if it means I get a replacement for you.” Wynn glared at her retreating form. “Bring me a goddamned whiskey with my death pills.”
Eleven o’clock arrived before the private nurse crept into his room and discovered the open, vacant gaze, felt the reedy pulse that slouched through veins constricted by disease. She knelt beside him and winced as something bit into her flesh. Shifting her knee, she reached for the lamp with one hand and for the foreign object with the other. Her fingers closed over a pill bottle top that had fallen to the carpet. Raising it to the light, she saw the colored stripe she’d placed there herself and gasped. She reached under the bed, searching frantically for the bottle she knew she’d find.
The plastic bottle knocked against her hand and she drew it out, the label confirming her worst fears. He’d taken pills prescribed for the seizures that occasionally convulsed his limbs. Alone, the medication was dangerous, but when combined with his other meds and alcohol, the dose could be lethal. She groped under the bed, scooping up fallen pills, but she wouldn’t know how many were missing until she checked her charts.
But the evidence was clear. Justice Wynn had tried to kill himself.
Guilt clutched at her throat, forcing her eyes to the man she’d come to respect, even like, despite his fiery temperament. The promise of freedom and stability for her husband, Thomas, funded by the U.S. government, had seemed adequate justification for betrayal when she had accepted the post and her instructions. Become caretaker for a powerful but sick old man whose illness was slowly rendering him a security risk. Monitor his writings, report on his status weekly, and act when instructed. But that had been before she knew Howard Wynn.
Now her hands clenched around the disposable cell phone.
The number she was supposed to call, once she had confirmation that he was near death, had been drilled into her. A call, once made, that would guarantee he never awoke. She hesitated, unwilling to be the one to betray him as he suspected, but she told herself it was done now. Too late to undo the bargain she’d made. First, though, she’d check and be sure.
Pressing her stethoscope to his lungs, she heard labored breath sounds. The plastic cuff around his leaden arm registered a low blood pressure. She flicked the pen light with practiced care. Minimal response to light. In short order, she ran each test that would confirm his imminent death.
The whispered words caught her by surprise. “She has to finish it. For him.”
Instruments tumbled to the carpet, and she knelt again, this time in shock. “Justice Wynn?”
A feeble hand jerked up and seized her sleeve. “I’m not dead. Though you can try.”
“I didn’t want to—” Her fingers closed over the cold, trembling ones on her arm. “You took pills—”
“No time for excuses.” A hacking cough shook through him. “Avery has to save us. Swear it!”
“Let me call the ambulance,” she whispered, fumbling. “I’m so sorry!”
“It’s too late for apologies,” he wheezed as his eyes flickered. “Promise me. You’ll deliver a message. Just in case. Swear it.”
Too shocked to object, she responded, “I swear.”
“Tell her…tell her to look to the east for answers. Look to the river. In between. Look in the square. Lask. Bauer. Forgive me.”
“Justice? I don’t understand.” Frantically, Jamie leaned closer. “Who is Mr. Bauer?”
“Tell Avery. East. River.” He gasped then, choking on a bitter gulp of air. “Between. Square. Forgive me.”
Jamie shook his shoulders, trying to rouse him once more, to make sense of what she’d heard. But the irises stared out blankly into the tepid light, unresponsive. She moved his hand back to the bed.
“No. No,” she muttered aloud. “They won’t make me kill you.” She lifted the bedside phone and punched the speed dial assigned for such a moment.
“U.S. Marshals. What’s your emergency?”
“Justice Howard Wynn is unconscious. He needs immediate medical attention.”
“Identify yourself.”
“Nurse Jamie Lewis,” she answered tersely. “Now send an ambulance. He’s dying.”
“Please stay on the line.”
Once she was sure the ambulance was en route, she reached for the other phone and dialed the man she’d never met. She waited mere seconds for a connection.
“Is it done?”
“I think he took an overdose.”
“On purpose?”
“Maybe.” She hesitated. “Pulse is weak, and he’s in and out of consciousness. He’s near death.”
“Do nothing. I will arrive in 20 minutes.”
Her eyes squeezed shut. “I can’t.”
“You can’t do what?”
“I can’t do nothing. It’s not right.”
A long silence, then: “Leave the house, Nurse Lewis. At once.”
“I said I can’t. An ambulance is on the way,” Jamie confessed. “I had no choice.”
“This is a national security matter. You were told not to contact anyone except for me. Not to take heroic measures to prolong his life. Did you misunderstand?”
“No. But I had to help him. He needs a doctor.”
The admission of the former Army nurse told the man on the line that her usefulness was at an end. “Understood.”
Nonplussed by the response, she asked, “What happens now?”
“Take him to the hospital, and then you are relieved of duty. You’ll receive your payment tomorrow.” The line disconnected.
Jamie stared at the phone. She was free? Relief snaked through her, and her knees gave way. She sank onto the bed, her hip against the limp hand that had grabbed her only minutes ago.
A dying man had made a request of her. A last request. Her eyes fell on Justice Wynn, a man who’d served his country well. All he’d asked in his last moments of lucidity was for her to deliver a message. Save us.
Smoothing down the wrinkles in her uniform, Jamie dialed the cell phone again. In for a penny…
This time, it was the number she’d learned after months in his office. The rings gave way to a short greeting and then a tone. Jamie repeated the message the dying man had offered. She spoke quickly, her eyes on his. Then she finished: “Avery, his last words were Forgive me.”
A man lays flowers at a memorial in Yerevan, Armenia, on April 24 in remembrance of Armenians massacred by the Ottoman foces in 1915. (photo: Karen Minasyan/AFP/Getty Images)
US President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Recognizes the 1915 Armenian Genocide
John Hudson and Kareem Fahim, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "President Biden recognized the massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as a genocide Saturday, a designation that U.S. presidents long avoided for fear of damaging the U.S.-Turkey relationship."
The decision follows a lengthy lobbying campaign by members of Congress and Armenian American groups eager to see the White House use a term embraced by many scholars of early 20th century history.
“The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said in a statement. “Let us renew our shared resolve to prevent future atrocities from occurring anywhere in the world. And let us pursue healing and reconciliation for all the people of the world.”
Historians estimate that 1.5 million Armenians were killed in a campaign of forced marches and mass killings born out of Ottoman concerns that the Christian Armenian population would align with Russia during World War I, abetting an archnemesis of the Ottoman Turks.
Turkey has acknowledged that many Armenians were killed in fighting with Ottoman forces beginning in 1915 but disputes the larger casualty counts, denies that the events constituted genocide and considers such claims a slander against its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, immediately criticized Biden’s remarks.
“We entirely reject this statement,” he wrote on Twitter. “We have nothing to learn from anybody on our own past. Political opportunism is the greatest betrayal to peace and justice.”
The move comes amid worsening relations between the United States and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over Turkey’s purchases of Russian military equipment, human rights abuses and interventions in Syria and Libya.
Biden called Erdogan on Friday, but a White House readout of the conversation did not mention the 1915 massacres. Biden conveyed his interest in a “constructive bilateral relationship with expanded areas of cooperation and effective management of disagreements,” the statement said.
The Turkish readout of the call said Erdogan raised his objections about U.S. support for Kurdish forces in Syria, whom Turkey considers terrorists, and the case of Fethullah Gulen, a religious leader who lives in exile in the United States.
Biden’s recognition came on April 24, the date Ottomans seized Armenian leaders and intellectuals in Istanbul in 1915 in what many scholars view as the opening phase of the first genocide of the 20th century.
In his statement honoring the victims of the massacre, Biden praised the contributions of the Armenian diaspora, including in the United States.
“With strength and resilience, the Armenian people survived and rebuilt their community,” Biden said. “Over the decades Armenian immigrants have enriched the United States in countless ways, but they have never forgotten the tragic history that brought so many of their ancestors to our shores.”
Armenian American groups hailed the long-sought move on Saturday.
“President Biden’s affirmation of the Armenian Genocide marks a critically important moment in the arc of history in defense of human rights,” said Bryan Ardouny, executive director of the Armenian Assembly of America. “By standing firmly against a century of denial, President Biden has charted a new course.”
President Ronald Reagan referred to the massacre as a genocide early in his first term, but his successors had not out of concern for alienating Turkey, a NATO ally that was for years considered a strategically valuable member of the military alliance.
Several U.S. presidents, even those who had promised on the campaign trail to issue a declaration, remained mindful of this sensitivity and instead called the killings a “massacre” or “horrific tragedy.”
Besides Biden’s avowed commitment to human rights, analysts say the president had a freer hand than prior U.S. presidents because of the continued drift in the U.S.-Turkish relationship under Erdogan’s leadership.
In past years, the Defense Department and the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs would advise presidents against labeling the atrocity a genocide. But U.S. officials, particularly at the Pentagon, have been furious with Erdogan over his purchase of the Russian S-400 missile-defense system, which they say is incompatible with NATO’s military equipment and a threat to the alliance’s security.
“The Defense Department was Turkey’s biggest fan,” said Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey scholar at the Washington Institute, who also noted strong disagreement over Turkey’s actions in Iraq and Syria. “Now the opposite is true.”
Lawmakers in Congress, including those with large Armenian American constituencies, hailed the decision.
“I commend President Biden’s decision to formally recognize the Armenian Genocide,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “Calling this atrocity what it was — genocide — is long overdue. We must recognize the horrors of the past if we hope to avoid repeating them in the future.”
In Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, people laid flowers and gathered at a hilltop memorial with an eternal flame to the victims of the massacres and deportations by the Ottomans.
Armenia’s deputy foreign minister, Avet Adonts, said at the memorial Saturday that Biden’s declaration was an “important step.”
“It will also serve as an example for the rest of the civilized world,” he said, the Associated Press reported.
In Turkey, the Foreign Ministry posted videos and messages commemorating the deaths of Turkish diplomats who were killed in decades past by Armenian militants. Erdogan sent a message to Bishop Sahak Mashalian, the head of the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul, evoking what he said was the “centuries-old culture” of coexistence between Turks and Armenians and warning against “politicization” of the relationship by “third parties,” according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.
A coronavirus lockdown in Istanbul prevented gatherings to commemorate the mass killings, including what has become an annual pilgrimage to the gravesite of Sevag Balikci, a Turkish Armenian soldier who was killed on April 24, 2011, in what the authorities initially called an accidental shooting and what Armenian activists said was a hate crime.
The annual gatherings have also included another Istanbul landmark: the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, which more than a century ago was the Ottoman police station where hundreds of Armenian intellectuals were held after being rounded up in the city on April 24, 1915.
While Turkish authorities have permitted some of the commemorations, in recent years they have prevented other gatherings, as part of a wider crackdown by the government on protests or expressions of dissent.
Garo Paylan, a Turkish parliament member who is Armenian, said: “I am not happy with Biden’s decision, and I am not sad. I feel sorry because of the denial which has been going for 106 years. My pain is the subject of other parliaments, of other leaders.” His political party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, was the only major Turkish political party to acknowledge the genocide in a statement Saturday, drawing angry rebukes from Turkish government officials.
“I believe the only country where Armenians can find justice is Turkey,” he added. “And Turkey is far away from justice. Mr. Biden’s decision is not going to heal our wound.”
In a lengthy statement, Turkey’s Foreign Ministry asserted that Biden’s decision was made “under pressure of radical Armenian circles and anti-Turkey groups.” With regards to the events of 1915, it added, “none of the conditions required for the use of the term ‘genocide’ that is strictly defined in international law are met.”
“This statement of the US, which distorts the historical facts, will never be accepted in the conscience of the Turkish people, and will open a deep wound that undermines our mutual trust and friendship,” it said.
A COVID-19 vaccine. (photo: AP)
Nina Burleigh | Why We Forget Epidemics and Why This One Must Be Remembered
Nina Burleigh, Tom Dispatch
Burleigh writes: "The second Moderna shot made me sick - as predicted. A 24-hour touch of what an alarmed immune system feels like left me all the more grateful for my good fortune in avoiding the real thing and for being alive at a time when science had devised a 95% effective vaccine in record time."
With today’s piece comes a special one-week offer. Any reader willing to contribute at least $100 to TomDispatch ($125 if you live outside the USA) can get a signed, personalized copy of Nina Burleigh’s superb new book on our pandemic moment, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic. Given our lives right now, vaccinated or not, I simply can’t imagine a more timely or appropriate volume — and let me remind you that, whether you want such a book or not, giving to this website couldn’t be more timely or appropriate as well. Eighteen-plus years later, TomDispatch still offers a version of the news of our world as it really is that you just can’t read elsewhere. So check out our donation page and consider what you might do to keep us afloat in genuinely tough times. One small p.s.: Burleigh’s book won’t be published until May 18th, so those who contribute for a copy will have to be patient. You won’t get it until perhaps the end of May. Tom]
World War I was, however faintly, still part of my life when I grew up in the Cold War years. I can remember being hoisted on my father’s shoulders to see the aging American veterans of that global conflict during what must have been a Veterans Day parade down New York City’s Fifth Avenue. My parents talked about their memories of both world wars, as well as the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression when I was growing up. But there was one thing they had lived through as children that they never mentioned, not once: the devastating great influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 that killed so many more Americans than died in both world wars. I had no idea it had even happened, though it was far more devastating than the present pandemic globally (horrific as Covid-19 is).
And I’m not alone in having that blankness in my past. None of the parents of my friends spoke to them of it either. A horror of our history, it had been deep-sixed in a striking way when, in 2005, John Barry published his groundbreaking book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (which hit the bestseller lists then, and again in 2020). In it, Barry wrote, “Before that worldwide pandemic faded away in 1920, it would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history… In a world with a population less than one-third today’s… that influenza likely caused at least fifty million deaths worldwide and possibly as many as one hundred million.”
Imagine such a horror wiped out of our collective memory! Now, 16 years after that book was published, we again find ourselves mired in a disastrous global pandemic, one that we should never forget, especially given the ongoing pandemic dangers on this planet. With that in mind, journalist Nina Burleigh has bravely written her own striking book, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic, on the unfolding of Covid-19 in America not nearly a century after the disease hit us, but right in the middle of the nightmare itself. And this time, as she says in today’s piece, forgetting should be inconceivable. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Great Forgetting
Why We Forget Epidemics and Why This One Must Be Remembered
he second Moderna shot made me sick — as predicted. A 24-hour touch of what an alarmed immune system feels like left me all the more grateful for my good fortune in avoiding the real thing and for being alive at a time when science had devised a 95% effective vaccine in record time.
To distract myself from the fever as I tried to sleep, I visualized strands of synthetic messenger RNA floating into my cells to produce the alien spike protein that attracted my warrior T-cells. I drifted off envisioning an epic micro-battle underway in my blood and had a series of weird nightmares. At about two a.m., I woke up sweating, disoriented, and fixated on a grim image from one of the studies I had consulted while writing my own upcoming book, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic, on the Covid-19 chaos of our moment. In his Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver, Arthur Allen described how, in the days of ignorance — not so very long ago — doctors prescribed “hot air baths” for the feverish victims of deadly epidemics of smallpox or yellow fever, clamping them under woolen covers in closed rooms with the windows shut.
Mildly claustrophobic in the best of times, my mind then scrabbled to other forms of medical persecution I’d recently learned about. In the American colonies of the early eighteenth century, for example, whether or not to take the Jenner cowpox vaccine was a matter of religious concern. Puritans were taught that they would interfere with God’s will if they altered disease outcomes. To expiate that sin, or more likely out of sheer ignorance, medical doctors of the day decreed that the vaccine would only work after weeks of purging, including ingesting mercury, which besides making people drool and have diarrhea, also loosened their teeth. “Inoculation meant three weeks of daily vomiting, purges, sweats, fevers,” Allen wrote.
To clear my thoughts, to forget, I opened my window, let in the winter air, and breathed deep. I then leaned out into the clean black sky of the pandemic months, the starlight brighter since the jets stopped flying and we ceased driving, as well as burning so much coal.
Silence. An inkling of what the world might be like without us.
Chilled, I lay back down and wondered: What will the future think of us in this time? Will people recoil in horror as I had just done in recalling, in feverish technicolor, the medically ignorant generations that came before us?
The Glorious Dead
When America reached the half-million-dead mark from Covid-19 at the end of February, reports compared the number to our war dead. The pandemic had by then killed more Americans than had died in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined — and it wasn’t done with us yet. But the Covid dead had not marched into battle. They had gone off to their jobs as bus drivers and nurses and store clerks, or hugged a grandchild, or been too close to a health-care worker who arrived at a nursing home via the subway.
Every November 11th, on Veterans Day, our world still remembers and celebrates the moment World War I officially ended. But the last great pandemic, the influenza epidemic of 1918-1920 that became known as “the Spanish flu” (though it wasn’t faintly Spain’s fault, since it probably began in the United States), which infected half a billion people on a far less populated planet, killing an estimated 50 million to 100 million of them — including more soldiers than were slaughtered in that monumental war — fell into a collective memory hole.
When it was over, our grandparents and great-grandparents turned away and didn’t look back. They simply dropped it from memory. Donald Trump’s grandfather’s death from the Spanish flu in 1919 changed the fortunes of his family forever, yet Trump never spoke of it — even while confronting a similar natural disaster. Such a forgetting wasn’t just Trumpian aberrance; it was a cultural phenomenon.
That virus, unlike Covid-19, mainly killed young healthy people. But there are eerie, even uncanny, similarities between the American experience of that pandemic and this one. In the summer of 1919, just after the third deadly wave, American cities erupted in race riots. As with the summer of 2020, the 1919 riots were sparked by an incident in the Midwest: a Chicago mob stoned a black teenager who dared to swim off a Lake Michigan beach whites had unofficially declared whites-only. The boy drowned and, in the ensuing week of rioting, 23 blacks and 15 whites died. The riots spread across the country to Washington, D.C., and cities in Nebraska, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas, with Black veterans who had served in World War I returning home to second-class treatment and an increase in Ku Klux Klan lynchings.
As today, there were similar controversies then over the wearing of masks and not gathering in significant numbers to celebrate Thanksgiving. As in 2020-2021, so in 1918-1919, frontline medics were traumatized. The virus killed within hours or a few days in a particularly lurid way. People bled from their noses, mouths, and ears, then drowned in the fluid that so copiously built up in their lungs. The mattresses on which they perished were soaked in blood and other bodily fluids.
Doctors and nurses could do nothing but bear witness to the suffering, much like the front-liners in Wuhan and then New York City in the coronavirus pandemic’s early days. Unlike today, perhaps because it was wartime and any display of weakness was considered bad, the newspapers of the time also barely covered the suffering of individuals, according to Alex Navarro, editor-in-chief of the University of Michigan’s Influenza Encyclopedia about the 1918 pandemic. Strangely enough, even medical books in the following years barely covered the virus.
Medical anthropologist Martha Louise Lincoln believes the tendency to look forward — and away from disaster — is also an American trait. “Collectively, we obviously wrongly shared a feeling that Americans would be fine,” Lincoln said of the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. “I think that’s in part because of the way we’re conditioned to remember history… Even though American history is full of painful losses, we don’t take them in.”
Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland argues that pandemic forgetting is a human response to seemingly pointless loss, as opposed to a soldier’s death. “A mass illness does not invite that kind of remembering,” he wrote. “The bereaved cannot console themselves that the dead made a sacrifice for some higher cause, or even that they were victims of an epic moral event, because they did not and were not.”
Instead, to die of Covid-19 is just rotten luck, something for all of us to forget.
Who Will Ask Rich Men to Sacrifice?
Given the absence of dead heroes and a certain all-American resistance to pointless tragedy, there are other reasons we, as Americans, might not look back to 2020 and this year as well. For one thing, pandemic profiteering was so gross and widespread that to consider it closely, even in retrospect, might lead to demands for wholesale change that no one in authority, no one in this (or possibly any other recent U.S. government) would be prepared or motivated to undertake.
In just the pandemic year 2020, this country’s billionaires managed to add at least a trillion dollars to their already sizeable wealth in a land of ever more grotesque inequality. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos alone packed in another $70 billion that year, while so many other Americans were locked down and draining savings or unemployment funds. The CEOs of the companies that produced the medical milestone mRNA vaccines reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in profits by timing stock moves to press releases about vaccine efficacy.
No one today dares ask such rich men to sacrifice for the rest of us or for the rest of the world.
The pandemic might, of course, have offered an opportunity for the government and corporate leaders to reconsider the shareholder model of for-profit medicine. Instead, taxpayer money continued to flow in staggering quantities to a small group of capitalists with almost no strings attached and little transparency.
A nation brought to its knees may not have the resources, let alone the will, to accurately remember how it all happened. Congress is now investigating some of the Trump administration’s pandemic deals. The House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis has uncovered clear evidence of its attempts to cook and politicize data. And Senator Elizabeth Warren led somewhat fruitful efforts to expose deals between the Trump administration and a small number of health-care companies. But sorting through the chaos of capitalist mischief as the pandemic hit, all those no-bid contracts cut without agency oversight, with nothing more than a White House stamp of approval affixed to them, will undoubtedly prove an Augean stables of a task.
In addition, looking too closely at the tsunami of money poured into Big Pharma that ultimately did produce effective vaccines could well seem churlish in retrospect. The very success of the vaccines may blunt the memory of that other overwhelming effect of the pandemic, which was to blow a hole in America’s already faded reputation as a health-care leader and as a society in which equality (financial or otherwise) meant anything at all.
Forgetting might prove all too comfortable, even if remembering could prompt a rebalancing of priorities from, for instance, the military-industrial complex, which has received somewhere between 40% and 70% of the U.S. discretionary budget over the last half century, to public health, which got 3% to 6% of that budget in those same years.
The Most Medically Protected Generation
For most Americans, the history of the 1918 flu shares space in that ever-larger tomb of oblivion with the history of other diseases of our great-grandparents’ time that vaccines have now eradicated.
Until the twentieth century, very few people survived childhood without either witnessing or actually suffering from the agonies inflicted by infectious diseases. Parents routinely lost children to disease; people regularly died at home. Survivors — our great-grandparents — were intimately acquainted with the sights, smells, and sounds associated with the stages of death.
Viewed from above, vaccines are a massive success story. They’ve been helping us live longer and in states of safety that would have been unimaginable little more than a century ago. In 1900, U.S. life expectancy was 46 years for men and 48 for women. Someone born in 2019 can expect to live to between 75 and 80 years old, although due to health inequities, lifespans vary depending on race, ethnicity, and gender.
The scale of change has been dramatic, but it can be hard to see. We belong to the most medically protected generation in human history and that protection has made us both complacent and risk averse.
The history of twentieth-century vaccine developments has long seesawed between remarkable advances in medical science and conspiracy theories and distrust engendered by its accidents or failures. Almost every new vaccine has been accompanied by reports of risks, side effects, and sometimes terrible accidents, at least one involving tens of thousands of sickened people.
Children, however, are now successfully jabbed with serums that create antibodies to hepatitis B, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis — all diseases that well into the twentieth century spread through communities, killing babies or permanently damaging health. A number of those are diseases that today’s parents can barely pronounce, let alone remember.
Remembering Is the Way Forward
The catastrophe of the Spanish flu globally and in this country (where perhaps 675,000 Americans were estimated to have died from it) had, until Covid-19 came along, been dropped in a remarkable manner from American memory and history. It lacked memorial plaques or a day of remembrance, though it did leave a modest mark on literature. Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter’s elegiac short story, for instance, focused on how the flu extinguished a brief wartime love affair between two young people in New York City.
We are very likely to overcome the virus at some point in the not-too-distant future. As hard as it might be to imagine right now, the menace that shut down the world will, in the coming years, undoubtedly be brought to heel by vaccines on a planetary scale.
And in this, we’ve been very, very lucky. Covid-19 is relatively benign compared with an emergent virus with the death rates of a MERS or Ebola or even, it seems, that 1918 flu. As a species, we will survive this one. It’s been bad — it still is, with cases and hospitalizations remaining on the rise in parts of this country — but it could have been so much worse. Sociologist and writer Zeynep Tufekci has termed it “a starter pandemic.” There’s probably worse ahead in a planet that’s under incredible stress in so many different ways.
Under the circumstances, it’s important that we not drop this pandemic from memory as we did the 1918 one. We should remember this moment and what it feels like because the number of pathogens waiting to jump from mammals to us is believed to be alarmingly large. Worse yet, modern human activity has made us potentially more, not less, vulnerable to another pandemic. A University of Liverpool study published in February 2021 found at least 40 times more mammal species could be infected with coronavirus strains than were previously known. Such a virus could easily recombine with any of them and then be passed on to humanity, a fact researchers deemed an immediate public health threat.
In reality, we may be entering a new “era of pandemics.” So suggests a study produced during an “urgent virtual workshop” convened in October 2020 by the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (ISPBES) to investigate the links between the risk of pandemics and the degradation of nature. Due to climate change, intense agriculture, unsustainable trade, the misuse of land, and nature-disrupting production and consumption habits, more than five new infectious diseases emerge in people every year, any one of which could potentially spark a pandemic.
That ISPBES study predicted that “future pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, do more damage to the world economy, and kill more people than Covid-19, unless there is a transformative change in the global approach to dealing with infectious diseases.”
Is our species capable of such a change? My inner misanthrope says no, but certainly the odds improve if we don’t delete this pandemic from history like the last one. This, after all, is the first pandemic in which the Internet enabled us to bear witness not only to the panic, illness, and deaths around us, but to the suffering of our entire species in every part of the globe in real time. Because of that alone, it will be difficult to evade the memory of this collective experience and, with it, the reminder that we are all made of the same vulnerable stuff.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
This undated selfie photo provided by family members Don Bryant and Paula Bryant shows Ma'Khia Bryant and her mother Paula. (photo: AP)
Ma'Khia Bryant's Death Puts Spotlight on Frequency of Police Shootings in Columbus, Ohio
Matthew Allen, theGrio
Allen writes: "In the aftermath of the police killing of Ma'Khia Bryant's, more attention is being paid to the city where it took place: Columbus, Ohio."
ozens of fatal police shootings have occurred in Ohio’s capital of Columbus since 2015
In the aftermath of the police killing of Ma’Khia Bryant‘s, more attention is being paid to the city where it took place: Columbus, Ohio.
The city has a troubled history of police violence and the latest incident has prompted scrutiny about use of force by law enforcement.
Bryant was killed on Tuesday after police responded to a 911 call regarding an attack. Her family says Bryant herself placed the request for law enforcement.
When police arrived, an officer shot Bryant as she appears to be lunging at another woman with a knife. The incident was captured by a bodycam for Nicholas Reardon, who pulled the trigger. Bryant’s death occurred the same day that Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, was convicted for killing George Floyd. It’s now the latest in a string of police-related shootings in Columbus over the years.
In December, Andre Maurice Hill, a 47-year-old Black man, was killed by Columbus police, theGrio reports. Officers were responded to a noise complaint about a car in a garage being turned on and off. Hill had come out of a garage to approach the officers when he was fatally shot. Adam Coy, the ex-officer who pulled the trigger, claims he thought Hill was holding a weapon in his hand. That alleged weapon turned out to be a cell phone.
Coy was later fired and charged with murder.
Dozens of people have been fatally shot in Ohio’s capital city by law enforcement since 2015. At the time, Coy was the 32nd person killed by police in Columbus. Of those incidents, 27 died at the hands of the Columbus Division of Police, according to WCMH-TV.
Another incident includes the killing of Tyre King, a 13-year-old, in September 2016. The teenager was shot by Columbus police after reports of an armed robbery, CNN reports. Police pursued King and shot him several times after seeing what looked like a weapon. It turned out to be a BB gun. King died at the hospital.
In Franklin County, which includes the city of Columbus, Bryant’s death is just one in nearly 40 police-related shooting deaths. The county has been saturated with such events since 2015, according to The Guardian.
Between 2015 and 2020, 38 police shooting deaths took place in Franklin County, according to a report by the Ohio Alliance for innovation and population health. The report stated that Black people in Ohio were killed by police at a rate 339% higher than white people.
In December, Casey Goodson was killed by a Franklin County deputy, according to an article published in theGrio. The deputy fired several shots at Goodson as he was entering his grandmother’s home after the deputy “reported witnessing a man with a gun” during an investigation in tandem with a U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force. Goodson, who was licensed to carry a firearm, was not the fugitive they were looking for.
Columbus Police Division Chief Thomas Quinlan stepped down in January following the death of Hill, as reported by NBC News. As expressed by community organizer Jasmine Ayres, it seems conditions have not improved.
“Now that we’re here and we’ve had a consistent decade of patterns and practices of ineptitude and racism, our call is for the Justice Department to investigate,” Ayres told NBC.
She has been working with the mayor’s office in efforts to create a police review board.
An F-15C Eagle from the California Air National Guard flies over Death Valley National Park. (photo: Ben Margot/AP)
California Guard Members Feared Armed Fighter Jet Would Be Ordered to Fly Low to Frighten and Disperse Protesters
Paul Pringle and Alene Tchekmedyian, Los Angeles Times
Excerpt: "In March of last year, California National Guard members awaited orders from Sacramento headquarters to make preparations for any civil unrest that might arise from the outbreak of the coronavirus."
n March of last year, California National Guard members awaited orders from Sacramento headquarters to make preparations for any civil unrest that might arise from the outbreak of the coronavirus.
The members expected directives to ready ground troops to help state and local authorities respond to disturbances triggered by resistance to stay-at-home rules or panic over empty store shelves.
But then came an unusual order: The air branch of the Guard was told to place an F-15C fighter jet on an alert status for a possible domestic mission, according to four Guard sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
Those sources said the order didn’t spell out the mission but, given the aircraft’s limitations, they understood it to mean the plane could be deployed to terrify and disperse protesters by flying low over them at window-rattling speeds, with its afterburners streaming columns of flames. Fighter jets have been used occasionally in that manner in combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, they said.
Deploying an F-15C, an air-to-air combat jet based at the Guard’s 144th Fighter Wing in Fresno, to frighten demonstrators in this country would have been an inappropriate use of the military against U.S. civilians, the sources said.
They said the jet was also placed on an alert status — fueled and ready for takeoff — for possible responses to protests over the murder of George Floyd by a police officer and to any unrest sparked by the Nov. 3 presidential election.
“It would have been a completely illegal order that disgraced the military,” one source said. “It could look like we’re threatening civilians.”
“That’s something that would happen in the Soviet Union,” said a second of The Times’ sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation from their superiors. “Our military is used to combat foreign aggressors.”
The sources said the directives from Guard headquarters made their way down orally or in text messages, rather than in formal written orders, which was unusual and heightened their concerns that the jet would be used inappropriately.
Maj. Gen. David Baldwin, who leads the California Guard, did not respond directly to interview requests for this story. A spokesman for Baldwin, Lt. Col. Jonathan Shiroma, denied that the F-15C was placed on an alert status for a potential response to civil disturbances.
“We do not use our planes to frighten or intimidate civilians,” Shiroma wrote in reply to emailed questions from The Times.
Shiroma also said that assigning jets at the 144th Wing to respond to civil unrest would have required the approval of First Air Force, which oversees the air defense of the continental United States for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). He said the California Guard “never made such a request.”
He released a list of aircraft that he said were “postured to support any potential civil unrest missions” leading up to the election; it included two planes — a C-130J and an HC-130J — but no fighters.
“No F-15s were contemplated,” Shiroma wrote.
But The Times reviewed other internal Guard documents that show the jet was placed on an alert status for a possible election-week mission and that officers discussed concerns in March 2020 as well as that summer about using the F-15C for domestic purposes, including to intimidate civilians.
The week before the election, a lieutenant colonel sent a message to Guard members who maintain the F-15C, advising them that a jet must be “ready to take off within two hours,” beginning the Monday morning before the election. That meant a pilot and launch crew had to be available to reach the Fresno base within 90 minutes or so of receiving an order to deploy the jet, the sources said.
The message also said “aircraft availability” for a domestic mission would be “at a premium next week with the election. We may need to work on Saturday and maybe Sunday to ensure we have ... aircraft availability” for the potential mission. The sources said the aircraft in question was the F-15C.
With concern mounting among Guard officers and others, the then-commander of the 144th Wing, Col. Jeremiah Cruz, sent an email to several officers, saying that “there is no expectation that the F-15C will be used in any way in support of civil unrest.” He went on to instruct the recipients to keep him apprised of “any requests or upcoming requests” from California Guard headquarters in Sacramento.
While that order never came, the sources said, the fact that their leaders might even consider using the F-15C over civilian crowds alarmed Guard members.
“It’s a war machine, not something you use for [suppressing] civil unrest,” a third source told The Times. He said readying the F-15C for potential deployment over a protest was “definitely unprecedented” in his experience.
Cruz did not respond to interview requests.
The F-15C can hit supersonic speeds, fires air-to-air missiles and is outfitted with a 20-millimeter cannon. It is expensive to operate, costing nearly $25,000 per flight hour, according to the Guard.
At Fresno, the jets are used to train pilots for combat, and a few are kept on around-the-clock alert to respond immediately to attacks by enemy aircraft on orders from the Pentagon as part of NORAD. That federal alert mission is separate from any use of the jets for civilian purposes.
“That jet has one mission and one mission alone — to go up and shoot down other airplanes,” said retired Gen. David Bakos.
The Defense Department and First Air Force were not involved in any decision to place the F-15C on an alert status for civilian disturbances, military spokespersons said. Army Lt. Col. Christian Mitchell, a Pentagon spokesman, said deploying the jet “for dispersing crowds would not be an appropriate use of the F-15.”
As the head of the California Guard, Baldwin reports to Gov. Gavin Newsom. A spokeswoman said that Newsom never authorized the use of the F-15C for a response to civil unrest, and that the possibility of that type of mission for the jet “was never a consideration before the governor’s office.” If it had been, the spokeswoman added, Newsom “would not have approved it.”
This isn’t the first time questions have been raised about the Guard’s use of aircraft in times of civil unrest. In October, The Times reported that the Guard had sent an RC-26B reconnaissance plane to monitor Floyd-related protests in June in the affluent Sacramento suburb of El Dorado Hills, where Baldwin lived.
Other states’ Guard units deployed RC-26B planes to fly over protests in Minneapolis, Phoenix and Washington, D.C. Unlike the small and peaceful protests in El Dorado Hills, however, the demonstrations in those cities were large and sometimes involved property destruction and street clashes.
Members of Congress voiced concerns that the planes were used inappropriately to surveil civilians. A resulting investigation by the Air Force inspector general’s office concluded in August that the RC-26Bs did not violate rules barring the military from collecting intelligence on U.S. citizens, and said the aircraft wasn’t capable of capturing “distinguishing personal features of individuals.”
Baldwin told The Times last fall that he didn’t recall whether he had approved the deployment of the RC-26B to El Dorado Hills. He said the fact that he lived there had “nothing to do with” the mission.
A Newsom spokesman said later that the deployment of the surveillance craft “should not have happened. It was an operational decision made without the approval — let alone awareness — of the governor.”
In the case of the F-15C, the sources said Guard officers told crews during the coronavirus lockdown to have the jet fully fueled and assigned a pilot around the clock. Who in the Guard chain of command would have had the authority to order the jet dispatched on a civilian mission was not clear in the directives, the sources said. They added that the jet designated for the task was not armed with missiles and its cannon was not loaded.
In addition to the preelection message, The Times reviewed two written communications circulated among Guard members that referred to the order to ready the jet for a domestic mission known as Defense Support of Civil Authorities. That category of mission includes the deployment of troops and equipment for nonmilitary emergencies, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, as well as to help police agencies respond to violent protests.
The first communication, circulated shortly after the COVID-19 outbreak, posed the question of whether the Guard was preparing to use the F-15C as a “show of force,” which the sources said was a reference to flying it low over crowds.
A second communication in July contained a discussion of using the F-15C to survey infrastructure damage, but it also refers to the possibility of the jet being used as a “show of presences.” The sources said that phrase also refers to using aircraft to intimidate people on the ground.
In his statement to The Times, Shiroma said the F-15C has been used in the past to survey earthquake damage because it can reach remote locations faster than other aircraft.
Retired and active officers who spoke to The Times said it would make no sense to place an F-15C on a 24-hour alert to respond to earthquakes or other natural disasters. That task, they said, is far better suited to the Guard’s helicopters and surveillance aircraft, which are cheaper to operate.
Dan Woodside, a retired Guard pilot who has flown the F-15C, said that on the few occasions the fighter jet was deployed to assess earthquake damage, it proved nearly useless because it isn’t designed for that purpose. The jet has a camera-equipped targeting pod to zero in on enemy aircraft in flight, but F-15C pilots are not trained to use it for air-to-ground surveillance, Woodside said.
The sources said the targeting pod was ordered removed from the F-15C for the domestic mission after the Guard was criticized for deploying the RC-26B spy plane over El Dorado Hills.
Woodside, who held the rank of major, said he “absolutely would have disobeyed” any order to use an F-15C to buzz a civilian crowd during unrest.
“The decibel level alone from an F-15C demonstrating a show of force can break windows, set off car alarms and cause more fear than shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” he said.
If the Guard leaders were allowed to deploy the jet to help quell civil unrest, Woodside added, “you could have these warplanes buzzing all around the state of California.”
Sunday Song: Judy Collins | Anathea (Hootenanny)
Judy Collins, YouTube
Collins writes: "Laszlo Thea stole a stallion. Stole him from the misty mountains."
Portrait of young Judy Collins circa, early 1960s. (photo: Unknown)
Laszlo Thea stole a stallion
Stole him from the misty mountains
And they chased him and they caught him,
And in iron chains they bound him.
Word was sent to Ana Thea
That her brother was in prison
Bring me gold and six fine horses
I will buy my brother's freedom.
Judge, oh, judge, please spare my brother
I will give you gold and silver
I don't want your gold and silver
All I want are your sweet favors
Ana Thea, oh my sister
Are you mad with grief and sorrow?
He will rob you of your flower
And he'll hang me from the gallows
Ana Thea did not listen
Straight way to the judge went running
In his golden bed at midnight
There she heard the gallows groaning
Curses be that judge so cruel
Thirteen years may he lie bleeding
Thirteen doctors cannot cure him
Thirteen shelves of drugs can't heal him
Ana Thea, Ana Thea
Don't go out into the forest
There among the green pines standing
You will find your brother hanging
The island of Barbuda after Hurricane Irma. The intensity of tropical storms will be increased by global heating. (photo: Jose Jimenez/Getty Images)
Wealthy Nations 'Failing to Help Developing World Tackle Climate Crisis'
Fiona Harvey, Guardian UK
Harvey writes: "Rich countries have failed to provide the financial assistance needed for the developing world to cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of climate breakdown, poorer nations have warned, after a US summit of world leaders ended with few new funding promises."
Warning comes after lack of new funding pledges at virtual summit attended by 40 world leaders and hosted by White House
ich countries have failed to provide the financial assistance needed for the developing world to cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of climate breakdown, poorer nations have warned, after a US summit of world leaders ended with few new funding promises.
The failure leaves billions of people at risk from the worsening ravages of extreme weather, as poor countries struggle with the Covid-19 crisis and rapidly mounting debt.
US president Joe Biden brought together more than 40 world leaders for a two-day virtual White House summit on the climate crisis. The US led with a bold new target of halving carbon emissions this decade, while countries including Canada, Japan and South Africa also strengthened their emissions targets.
The president also set a goal of increasing US climate finance to $5.7bn a year by 2024, twice the amount provided under Barack Obama, and in stark contrast to the approach of Donald Trump, who halted US contributions.
Biden said: “Meeting this challenge requires mobilising financing on an unprecedented scale. The private sector has already recognised this… [But] the private sector cannot meet these challenges alone – governments need to step up, and may need to lead.”
The other major economies at the summit were largely silent on funding. South Korea announced it would stop financing coal-fired plants overseas, and the UK reiterated existing pledges but made no new promises. Rich countries are already behind on a longstanding pledge, made in 2009, to give $100bn a year in climate finance to the developing world from 2020.
Without climate finance, poor countries face a bleak future of extreme weather, water and food shortages, and climate-driven migration, which all threaten to reverse decades of progress in lifting people out of poverty. Many governments are also being wooed by fossil-fuel developers eager to exploit coal, oil or gasfields in exchange for cash.
The problem is compounded by new waves of the Covid-19 pandemic, and poor countries are seeing debts soar and the cost of borrowing rise.
Gaston Browne, who is prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda and chairs the Alliance of Small Island States – representing the 37 countries most vulnerable to inundation from climate breakdown – told the summit the problem was spiralling out of control: “The debt of small states has risen to unsustainable levels because of repeated borrowing to rebuild and recover from natural disasters arising from climate change.”
Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, said Africa was losing between $7bn and $15bn a year because of climate breakdown, and this would rise to $50bn a year by 2040. “Africa is not at net zero [the emissions target]; Africa is at ground zero. We must therefore give Africa a lift to get a chance of adapting to what it did not cause.”
Sonam Wangdi, chair of the Least Developed Countries group, formed of 46 governments with a combined population of more than 1 billion people, made an impassioned plea: “The LDCs are counting on support from the whole international community to help implement our ambitious climate plans, that will safeguard the lives and livelihoods of our people and their children, allowing us all to thrive with nature. Developing countries and particularly LDCs must be provided with support measures to address the climate crisis. Our people are already suffering.”
The failure of the White House summit to produce a breakthrough on climate finance throws the spotlight on the G7 meeting in Cornwall in June, to be hosted by Boris Johnson. The UK has pledged £11.6bn in climate finance over the next five years, and is hoping to encourage other rich countries to increase their pledges.
The prime minister knows that the G7 represents one of the last chances to get climate finance right before Cop26, the UN climate summit in Glasgow in November. Developing countries can block agreement at Cop26 if they feel they have been let down on aid, so gaining their trust and cooperation will be vital.
In that effort, Johnson faces a hurdle of his own making: his decision to slash overseas aid spending from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5% has been viewed with despair and disbelief by climate experts and developing countries, who fear it will by copied by other rich countries. Alok Sharma, the UK’s Cop26 president, has repeatedly emphasised that climate spending is ringfenced within the UK aid budget, but that has cut little ice amid the broader shock at the UK’s stance.
The failure of other countries to come up with climate finance pledges at Biden’s summit bodes ill for Johnson’s chances. Several veterans of the talks told the Observer that Johnson should find a face-saving compromise that would let him restore at least part of the cut – perhaps through stressing the fact that it was originally presented as a temporary measure.
Mary Robinson, chair of the Elders group of international leaders, former president of Ireland and twice a UN climate envoy, put it starkly: “People are very shocked at what the UK has done. They can’t see why the UK chose this moment to do this. The cut should be reversed as soon as possible. Developing countries are key to Cop26. ”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.