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Bernie Sanders Launches Blistering Attack on Mitch McConnell in Kentucky
Alice Hutton, The Independent
Hutton writes: "Senator Bernie Sanders accused Republican senator Mitch McConnell of making 'the rich richer' in America."
S Senator Bernie Sanders unleashed a blistering attack on Mitch McConnell during a rally in the Senate minority leader’s home state over the weekend.
The 79-year-old, who shot to fame for his progressive, left-leaning policies during two failed bids for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, appeared at a rally with former state representative Charles Booker in Kentucky on Sunday, who continued to hint at a potential run against Republican senator Rand Paul.
Outside the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, the senator from Vermont focused on Kentucky’s other senator, McConnell, accusing him of obstructing bids to improve health care and decrease poverty whilst reportedly raising funds from banks and corporate giants, as reported by The Courier Journal.
Mr Sanders said: “As we speak, Senator McConnell is leading the effort against the long-term structural changes that working people in Kentucky and throughout our country desperately need.”
Mr Sanders added: “How does it happen that Mitch McConnell is working overtime to block legislation that would improve the lives of so many working-class people in Kentucky, while he is doing everything that he can to make the richest people in America even richer? And the answer is pretty simple: Follow the money.
“It’s a question of whose interests the government represents. It’s a question of whether you fight for the needs of the wealthy and large corporations who fund your campaigns, or the working families of our country.”
A spokeswoman for Senator Paul told The Courier Journal: “It’s no secret that Kentuckians overwhelmingly reject the radical socialist Bernie Sanders agenda of job-killing policies like the Green New Deal and massive tax hikes, Medicare for All, abortion on demand, and taking away our guns.”
She added: “Kentuckians know there is no greater champion for the values they hold dear than Dr. Rand Paul, and like President Trump stated in his recent endorsement, Dr. Paul has a proven record of fighting back against the fringe, socialist, and entirely anti-Kentucky policies of Bernie and his liberal allies.”
Mr Sanders also called on Democrats to approve progressive legislation on Covid-19 and the climate crisis, as well as a $15 minimum wage, cancelling student loan debt and negotiating drug costs with pharmaceutical companies.
He said: “If Republicans refuse to work with us, if Senator McConnell and Republicans in the Senate continue their strategy of obstructionism, it means passing a progressive agenda through the Senate with 51 votes, instead of 60, by using budget reconciliation. And I say that as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. The American people are hurting, they want action and we have got to deliver for them.”
NYPD officers gather in Times Square near a police precinct for a security briefing in New York City on April 20, 2021. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty)
Internal NYPD Documents Show Cops Were Sent to Protests With Barely Any First Amendment Training
Alice Speri and John Bolger, The Intercept
Speri writes: "Most officers at the George Floyd protests received only vague academy training that emphasized arresting protesters over defending their rights."
ast year, after New York officials announced a plan to dispatch 500 additional police officers to the city’s subway system, a coalition of activist groups organized a series of protests. On January 31, they held a “day of transit action” that saw small demonstrations pop up at stations and on trains across the city. “Fuck your $2.75,” a flyer promoting the event read, referring to the cost of a subway ride. “Public transit should be free,” read another, “which means free fares, free of policing, free of accessibility barriers, free to sell churros, free to dance, free to sleep.”
The flyers, along with other protest-related literature on topics like what to do if arrested, ultimately made their way into instructional materials used by the New York Police Department’s Police Academy, the six-month training all aspiring cops go through at the beginning of their career. The protest literature — “propaganda,” as the NYPD referred to it — was included in a Police Academy student guide on civil disorder and came with a warning: “The FTP (F**k the Police) group, also known as ‘Decolonize this place’ and ‘shutitdown,’ considers themselves an activist group that claims to fight for the rights of the poor and ‘indigenous people,’” the guide noted, mischaracterizing what is actually a loose formation of several groups that shared the materials. “This group has been responsible for vandalizing NYPD vehicles and property, entering the transit system without paying, and additional illegal destructive behavior.”
The NYPD student guide on civil disorder was part of a cache of internal documents obtained by The Intercept in response to a public records request for protest-related police training materials. The documents, which we are publishing with this story, also include instructor and student guides as well as class slides and quizzes on the topics of officer discretion, maintaining public order, and custodial offenses, which include resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration, two of the most frequent protest-related charges.
An organizer who is involved with Decolonize This Place told The Intercept he was not surprised to learn that the NYPD’s training included literature by the FTP formation, which can stand for “Feed the People” and “Fight the Power,” in addition to “Fuck the Police.” “There’s a long history of the police or the police state or the intelligence trying to understand the way others do stuff,” said the organizer, who asked for anonymity for fear of being targeted by the NYPD and right-wing media. “What we’ve put out, we think of it as public knowledge that is not readily available for people, to protect privacy and to keep people safe. That it’s perceived as threatening … I don’t know what to say about it.”
No part of the academy’s basic curriculum is specifically dedicated to the policing of protest, even as officers are frequently deployed to do so, leading to frequent abuses and fierce backlash against the department. Instead, lessons about other aspects of the job, like how to take an uncooperative person into custody, include nebulous protest-related tidbits, such as advice on balancing the NYPD’s position as guardian of “public order” and its stated commitment to safeguarding constitutional rights. “It is important in our democratic society that the rights of assembly and the freedom to peaceably protest be protected,” officers are taught, according to the documents obtained by The Intercept. “At the same time, these rights cannot be used as an excuse for violence nor may the exercise of those rights unnecessarily interfere with other important rights, such as those of non-demonstrators.”
The NYPD, the training materials claim, “has a tradition of restraint and great success in handling the most sensitive demonstrations with respect for the rights of both demonstrators and the general public. Time and again, we have earned our reputation as the finest police department for handling demonstrations.”
Together, the documents offer an overview of the NYPD’s protest-related training that is striking for its vagueness and the lack of practical guidance to back the department’s declared commitment to the rights of protesters. “The key to quelling a civil disturbance without a need for force is the threat of force, coupled with tight discipline and control,” one of the documents reads. “A well-disciplined, well-armed unit creates the impression of a powerful, competent police force. Usually, a large, overpowering police presence will stop rioters in their tracks. If force must be used, remember to use only the minimum amount necessary to control the situation.”
Corey Stoughton, an attorney at the Legal Aid Society, which together with the New York Civil Liberties Union has sued the city over the police’s violent response to last year’s George Floyd protests, said the training on protesters’ constitutional rights is practically meaningless. “We’re talking about a maximum 45-minute discussion session on how to protect people’s First Amendment rights at protests,” she said. “The tools you walk out of that training room with, as an officer, are all geared towards finding ways to justify the arrest of protesters, rather than finding practical ways to facilitate peaceful protests and the exercise of free speech rights.”
Stoughton, who reviewed the documents obtained by The Intercept, noted that while they contain “rhetorical commitments” to protesters’ rights, they focus almost exclusively on ways police can limit them: “The only practical information you would leave a training like that with is, ‘How can I arrest protesters?’”
John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for public information, wrote in an email to The Intercept that the NYPD handles five to 10 protests daily, the vast majority without incident. “Policing a peaceful protest requires very little specialized training,” he wrote, adding that the more complex aspects of the training have to do with disorder control. “Finding the right balance in policing protests does not come with certain or obvious answers, it is an ongoing process.”
“Failure to Train”
In the aftermath of the police brutality displayed during last summer’s uprising, a series of official reports denounced the department’s failure to adequately train officers ahead of the protests. Most cops had not received protest-related training since leaving the academy years or even decades earlier. The reviews drew a distinction between the Strategic Response Group, a heavily militarized, rapid-response unit that has an estimated 700 members and receives specialized training, and the rest of the NYPD’s 35,000 uniformed officers.
In a 115-page report, the Department of Investigation, an independent agency overseeing city government, concluded that “other than for personnel assigned to SRG, DOI found that, prior to the Floyd protests, NYPD lacked standardized, agencywide, in-service training related to policing protests.” The DOI added, “NYPD appears to have deployed a large number of front-line supervisors and officers to police the Floyd protests without adequate training.” The conclusion was echoed by the city’s law department, the Office of the Corporation Counsel, which wrote in its own report that “for a majority of the officers who were assigned to the George Floyd protests, their training on policing protests was limited to what they had received as recruits in the Academy.”
When criticized for using force against protesters last summer, the NYPD responded in part by noting that hundreds of its officers were injured in the course of doing their job. Miller, the deputy commissioner for public information, repeated that claim in his statement to The Intercept. “Police officers who received basic training in handling peaceful protests were challenged by situations in which protests often shifted from orderly to disorderly,” he wrote. “While they tried to make arrests of only individuals for specific acts of violence or property damage they often found themselves struggling with groups of people trying to ‘de-arrest’ those individuals.”
Miller also noted that only 69 of the 976 complaints made against individual officers last June and July named SRG officers, which he suggested “may be due to the advanced training SRG officers receive in team tactics for arrests that are specifically geared to reduce injuries to those being arrested and to the police officers arresting them.” Yet the SRG was heavily involved in some of the most brutal repression of protests in the wake of Floyd’s killing last summer, including the violent arrests of at least 263 people police had trapped in the streets at a June 4 protest in the Bronx. Last month, The Intercept published a series of SRG training documents that reflect the unit’s heavy-handed approach to the policing of protest: coaching cops on tactical maneuvers and mass arrest scenarios, as well as providing additional training for SRG’s distinctive armor-clad bike squads.
Facing backlash over its handling of the protests, last summer the NYPD expanded the training it gives all officers on the force. The new training includes subjects like the “the Mobile Field Force, crowd management versus crowd control, crowd psychology, protester roles and tactics, the Handschu agreement” — a consent decree prohibiting the NYPD from engaging in purely political surveillance — “formations, flex-cuffing, mass arrests and team carries,” according to NYPD spokesperson Sgt. Edward D. Riley.
The DOI noted that while it was “unable to conduct a full assessment of the new training,” it determined that much of it appeared to consist of “disorder control” tactics like those deployed by the SRG. (The topics identified by Riley also appear in the SRG’s training materials.) The new training has “limited emphasis on de-escalation and effective communication with protest participants in an attempt to maintain peace and order,” the agency concluded. “That scenario-based training appears focused solely or primarily on crowd control tactics and formations with no discernable reference to managing interactions, facilitating First Amendment rights, and minimizing the use of force.”
Asked whether the new departmentwide training was modeled after the SRG’s, Miller, the deputy commissioner, told The Intercept that it followed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Center for Domestic Preparedness curriculum and includes “protecting and facilitating demonstrations as well as training in the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution regarding the right to protest and equal protection under the law.”
Still, critics of the NYPD’s response to protests are warning against calls for more training that they fear will result in the entire department getting schooled in the ways of its most militarized unit. “One of the open questions is: Is the new training a distillation of the SRG training?” said Stoughton, the Legal Aid attorney. “In which case, what’s the basis for thinking that that’s going to change anything about the NYPD’s response to protests?”
There has been little research on the effectiveness of police training, yet calls for more training regularly follow high-profile instances of police abuse. Critics say this response only directs more resources to police departments while failing to tackle the underlying cultural issues at stake.
“It’s a stopgap cosmetic measure that costs more money,” Joo-Hyun Kang, director of Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition of community organizations, told The Intercept. “Really, the way that we reduce this level of violence is we have to reduce significantly the bloated budget, the outsized power, the scope, the size, and the footprint of the NYPD.”
Grappling With History
The instruction materials obtained by The Intercept offer a glimpse into the way the NYPD conceives of its role and history in relation to protest.
“One of the major reasons that New York City is so frequently selected as the site for National Conventions is this Department’s reputation for handling demonstrations by communicating with all parties,” the materials note. “This has been a dramatic change from the practices of some other police departments, which have emphasized the deployment of SWAT teams and aggressive crowd control techniques.”
The documents credit such success to the 1994 establishment of the Disorder Control Unit, or DCU, the precursor to the SRG, and claim that since its establishment, “New York City has not been the victim of any large-scale civil disorder.” That telling fails to mention that the DCU was central to some of the most brutal repression of protest in city history, including the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests and the 2004 Republican National Convention, where large-scale police abuses led to a historic $18 million in legal settlements.
“There’s really no question that part of what played into the violent response to the protests this summer was the NYPD’s failure to absorb lessons from litigation and complaints that emerged from its response to prior incidents,” said Stoughton. “What the summer made clear was that the NYPD has not fully grappled with that history.”
As documents obtained by attorneys over the years reveal, little has changed about the NYPD’s protest-related training despite countless lawsuits and court rulings critical of its conduct. In a class–action lawsuit seeking to represent hundreds of protesters arrested last summer, attorneys argued that the NYPD failed to train its officers about how to protect First Amendment activity since at least the 1990s, when the DCU was created. “Despite the wealth of evidence of NYPD members’ historical brutality against protesters, [the city] has ignored, and/or failed to utilize, relevant information, including information gleaned from reports and lawsuits, as well as other data points, to identify deficiencies in NYPD training as it relates to constitutionally compliant protest policing.”
While none of that recent history features into the NYPD’s training documents, the materials do refer to the police’s position, historically, as the target of protests they are tasked with controlling. “In fact, most of the riots in this country over the last half-century have been started by what, justifiable or not, were believed by citizens to have been abuses of police discretion,” the documents note. “It is sobering to reflect on all the damage that has been caused by controversial decisions made by police officers on the street.”
The documents briefly acknowledge law enforcement’s role in stirring or exacerbating major instances of civil unrest in the early 1990s, like the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles and the unrest in New York City’s Crown Heights neighborhood. They also note that, in the 1960s, “police had become the source of great controversy” and remark on how, following the civil rights movement, “suddenly, government commissions and scholars found the police very interesting.” The training materials say “in recent years, some of the most serious allegations of police discretion have been claims that it has been abused, and degenerated into racial profiling.”
The documents warn officers that “demonstrators feel strongly about their cause” and call on them to “recognize this intensity, treat it objectively and professionally, and not allow ourselves to be ‘hooked’ into the emotion of the moment.”
Even when protesters’ criticism is directed at police themselves and “takes the form of chanted curse words and personal insults,” the documents encourage officers not to “lose control and overreact to the verbal abuse.” The documents say, “Regardless of your personal feelings towards the demonstrators or the object of their protest, you must remain neutral. A lack of professionalism or the use of unnecessary force against civilians damages the relationship between the Department and the community, as well as the Department’s image.”
“Do As You Are Told”
While police officers generally have broad discretion to decide how to address a situation, the documents emphasize that such individual discretion can be taken away during protests. “At some demonstrations, you may be directed to follow orders scrupulously and to exercise no individual discretion whatsoever,” one module notes. “Do as you are told.”
That exception to the rule also appears in the SRG training documents published by The Intercept, making clear that protest-related decisions during the Floyd protests — like ones to surround protesters in a controversial maneuver known as “kettling,” or to make mass arrests — were not made by individual officers. The resulting violence, the documents suggest, was not a matter of lone cops going rogue but policy deliberately sanctioned by department leadership.
“Before every demonstration, the Department’s operational and intelligence experts try to find out everything possible about the demonstrators and their cause, and how they intend to get their point across,” the documents state. “Based on this analysis, the Department develops a very precise strategy for policing the demonstration. At times, this may require that every officer play a specific and defined role, as part of a highly coordinated team effort that allows for no variance.”
The training materials make repeated references to court rulings in favor of protesters’ right to assemble and warn that “attempts to regulate activities that are classified as pure speech have failed constitutional muster.” These statements, however, are invariably followed by examples of things police can do, within the bounds of the law, to restrict protests. “The fact that conduct may be permitted under the First Amendment does not mean that the government cannot regulate that conduct in some way if the overwhelming needs of the rest of society require it,” the documents note, citing “traffic congestion, pedestrian congestion and inconvenience to others” as justification for intervention.
The documents then elaborate on how officers can arrest protesters in a legally defensible way. “The general policy of the New York City Police Department is to warn non-violent demonstrators before making arrests,” the training notes. “Otherwise, an immediate arrest will be viewed as an attempt to interfere with the rights of the protesters.”
That kind of approach — implying that constitutional rights should only be protected enough to avoid legal repercussions — are indicative of an underlying antagonism by police toward protesters that no amount of training can fix, critics have long maintained. A better solution to avoid violent repression of protest, they add, is considering whether police need to be there in the first place.
“Why are there so many police at protests? Do we even need police at protests?” asked Kang, of Communities United for Police Reform, adding that, at best, police at protests handle traffic control that can easily be left to civilians, and at worst, they escalate tensions and infringe on protesters’ rights. “There’s a much bigger question of, what’s their role, and should police even have a role?”
The debate on waiving an international intellectual property agreement that protects pharmaceutical trade secrets is both a political and a practical problem for President Biden. (photo: Saul Martinez/The New York Times)
"Millions of Lives Are at Stake": Pressure Grows on Biden to Back WTO Waiver on Vaccine Technology
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Pressure is growing on the Biden administration to support a temporary waiver on intellectual property rights for COVID-related medicines and vaccines at the World Trade Organization."
MY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. You can sign up for our daily news digest email by texting “democracynow” — one word, no space — to 66866 today. That’s “democracynow” — one word — to 66866. This is Democracy Now!
Pressure is growing on the Biden administration to support a temporary waiver on intellectual property rights for COVID-related medicines and vaccines at the World Trade Organization. The WTO has just begun two days of talks in Geneva. India and South Africa first proposed the waiver in October, but it was blocked by the United States and other wealthy countries of the WTO. Big Pharma, the pharmaceutical companies, have also come out against the proposal and has lobbied Washington to preserve its monopoly control. Supporters of the waivers say they’re critically needed to gear up the production level of vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests so desperately needed in the Global South. More than a hundred countries have supported the waivers at the WTO.
The majority of House Democrats here in the U.S. have also signed a letter to Biden urging him to back the waivers. The letter reads, in part, “Your Administration has an incredible opportunity to reverse the damage done by the Trump Administration to our nation’s global reputation and restore America’s public health leadership on the world stage,” unquote.
On Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders voiced support for the waivers during an appearance on Meet the Press.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: We should deal with this issue through the World Trade Organization of protecting the intellectual property rights of the drug companies. And I think what we have got to say right now to the drug companies, when millions of lives are at stake around the world, yes, allow other countries to have these intellectual property rights so that they can produce the vaccines that are desperately needed in poor countries. There is something morally objectionable about rich countries being able to get that vaccine, and yet millions and billions of people in poor countries are unable to afford it.
AMY GOODMAN: This all comes as Pfizer has just announced its COVID-19 vaccine brought in $3.5 billion in revenue in the first three months of 2021. Pfizer expects to make $26 billion in revenue this year.
Joining us in Washington, D.C., is Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. She and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently co-wrote a piece in The Washington Post headlined “Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish.”
Explain why, Lori. And explain what needs to be done.
LORI WALLACH: Good morning.
The big problem is simply not enough vaccines are being produced. And that’s because a handful of vaccine-originating pharmaceutical corporations have monopoly control over the production, and they’re unwilling and have actually rejected requests from qualified manufacturers around the world to pay them to be able to make more doses. The world needs 10 to 15 billion doses to reach herd immunity, and right now all of the global production together is on track to make about 6 billion doses this year.
So, at issue is a proposal that India and South Africa put forward in October at the World Trade Organization. The World Trade Organization has rules, in a thing called the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property — it’s called the TRIPS Agreement, for short — that requires all of the WTO members to guarantee the pharmaceutical companies monopoly control of production. So the proposal is simply to temporarily, for the COVID emergency, waive four parts of that agreement that cover the four specific types of intellectual property now protecting the vaccines from being made in greater volume, as well as treatments and diagnostic tests, and basically to allow countries around the world to have producers make, in each region, enough vaccine so everyone can actually get vaccinated.
It’s not just the morally necessary thing to do, with millions of lives at stake; it is selfishly in the interest of the United States, because we can vaccinate everyone. And the Biden administration is doing a great job, but if there is any outbreak anywhere, it’s where vaccine-resistant, more deadly, more infectious variants of the virus can hatch. And we’ll all end up in a global lockdown if we don’t get everyone immunized in shorter order.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can I ask you about the Biden administration’s links to Big Pharma? Many ties to the vaccine makers: the White House adviser Anita Dunn, co-founder of the consulting firm SKDK, which works closely with Pfizer; Biden’s domestic policy adviser Susan Rice holds up to $5 million in Johnson & Johnson; White House science adviser Eric Lander holds up to a million dollars in shares of BioNTech, which co-developed Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine. On Monday, I spoke to The Intercept's Lee Fang about the ties and also about the Albright Group, that many in Biden's inner circle come from. This is what he said.
LEE FANG: The fact that the number three, four undersecretaries of the State Department were at a consulting firm, Albright Stonebridge Group, that represented Pfizer, that Anita Dunn — you know, she’s not someone who’s mentioned a lot in the media recently, but she’s one of the closest advisers to the Biden administration. She was the de facto campaign manager for his presidential campaign. Her consulting firm represents Pfizer, engages in a lot of the PR and advertising for that firm.
These are serious conflicts of interest, and they deserve some scrutiny, given the fact that Pfizer is looking at this product, this vaccine, as its massive moneymaker. One estimate shows that Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, under even the kind of negotiated prices that are deeply discounted this year for U.S. consumers, that will bring in something like $15 billion a year, making it one of the highest-grossing pharmaceutical products of all time. And they’re already talking about raising prices. So, Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, they have so much money at stake. They’re leaning on lobbyists, they’re leaning on former Democratic aides and on potentially some of these folks who they have ties with in the White House, to push back on any effort to allow a generic vaccine.
AMY GOODMAN: So, there you have Lee Fang of The Intercept. Your response to this sort of cocoon of — you know, Eisenhower talked about the military-industrial complex — the drug-industrial complex in this country, the pharmaceutical-industrial complex? Is Biden and his inner circle protecting their benefactors?
LORI WALLACH: Here’s the bottom line. This decision is going to be made by President Biden. And President Biden, personally, to the camera, directly, promised America, in a conversation with Ady Barkan, heroic, challenged by ALS, healthcare activist, super activist, that he would not allow the intellectual property rights of Pharma to interfere with the world getting access to these vaccines. And throughout Congress, throughout the activist world, the Vatican, everyone is saying to Biden, “Mr. Biden, deliver on this promise.”
Whomever he is surrounded by, regardless of what is truly a tsunami of Pharma lobbyists — they’re here all the time. Amy, they have a ratio where they have one lobbyist for every 20 members of Congress. It’s not just that we all are running around as citizens trying to get our members of Congress to do something; they are so thick on the ground that they’re always trying to get their way. But here’s the difference. Sixty percent of the U.S. public, as divided as we are, has said absolutely there should be a waiver. The opposition to it in the U.S. is minuscule. To some degree, if you’re not for it, it’s because you don’t know about it. It’s not rocket science. It is a first critical step to having the chance to end this pandemic as quickly as possible. So it’s on Biden to follow through regardless of who is speaking in his ear. And many people in the administration, by the way, are for the waiver.
So, today in Geneva, the U.S. is going to have to take a position. And here’s what’s the worst piece of this whole thing. They’re not blocking adoption of a specific waiver. Since October, starting with Trump, the United States of America has blocked more than 100 other countries merely having a negotiation about the text of a waiver. We have stopped the negotiations. The WTO works by consensus. To launch a new negotiation, you can’t have any major country blocking it. The U.S. blocked it. The European Union and Switzerland and the U.K. snuck up behind and said, “Us, too.” So, as soon as the U.S. gets the hell out of the way — that’s all we’re saying: Stop blocking the negotiations. Because there is a text. It’s a draft. If there are problems in it, the negotiations can address specific problems. That then needs to still be adopted. The U.S. doesn’t have to be the cheerleader for it. They need to get out of the way.
What is the look of the U.S.? Thanks to the Biden administration stepping up, we’re all going to — anyone who needs a vaccination and wants one will have one by the summer. And yet we are the country that is going to block a hundred-plus countries being able to do the initiative they say is necessary for them to have the same thing we already have. And the only potentially upset party is a handful of Pharma companies that got billions in our taxpayer money. They had no risk in this. They got billions in advance. And then they’re making billions, as Lee Fang said. So, in this moment, it is not just the morally right thing; it is the only thing to be done to stop the pandemic, is to get vaccines into everyone. And this waiver is part of the answer to that.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet you have people like — well, one of the Democrats backed by Big Pharma who opposes signing the waiver is the senator from President Biden’s home state, Delaware, his very close ally, Chris Coons. Coons ranks 16th among congressional recipients of pharmaceutical industry lobbying money. During an address last month to the Washington think tank Center for Strategic International Studies, he echoed the drug companies’ talking points. When Senator Coons refers to IP, he means intellectual property. This is what he said.
SEN. CHRIS COONS: If we were to simply open up to the world all of the IP at the core of these groundbreaking developments, I think we would then be at risk of losing the private sector investment and development that’s critical to this moment of personalized medicine, of breakthrough vaccines, of breakthrough medical diagnostics. And I think, frankly, the world would suffer as a result.
So, as I said, I don’t think that waiving IP rights will suddenly enable other countries the ability to ramp up the manufacturing of complex vaccines. Instead, I am urging that the Biden administration and the private sector work together in a coordinated effort to manufacture, distribute and administer vaccines rapidly and equitably globally. …
Let me close by being optimistic about our ability to invest in innovation, science and competitiveness here in the United States. … A central part of being successful in this competition is continuing with our constitutionally created, protected — protected property right of a patent, something I’ve long believed in.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. Your response, Lori Wallach?
LORI WALLACH: There are some outliers, who are corporate-funded Democratic hacks, about this. There’s no doubt about it. There are a couple in the House, as well. The bottom line of all of this is the vast majority of Americans, of Democratic members of Congress, of countries around the world, don’t buy that ridiculous argument.
I mean, one very important thing, separate from just the moral imperative of, you know, we’re — if this were a movie, this is where we’re facing the zombie apocalypse. Everyone is going to die, yet there is a solution, if greed can just be gotten out of the way — to just cut to the chase of what is going on here.
But this sort of thinking that he has is premised on just a false claim that the mRNA, this terrific, new, newly exploited technology for the vaccine, is somehow U.S. technology. Number one, it’s not new. The original breakthrough was by a Hungarian scientist in the early '80s. And, number two, it's not U.S. So, the patent, that is the Pfizer drug’s key mRNA technology, is held by two Turkish people who live in Germany. That’s the BioNTech company. But also, around the world, this research has been happening. So, for instance, right now in third-stage trials, China has its own mRNA platform vaccine underway. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is being made under contract for Chinese use by a Chinese firm.
So, this sort of nationalistic notion of “it’s ours, and we shouldn’t share,” in the face of death and destruction — by the way, Senator Coons, destruction of the U.S. economy, that is so integrated in the global economy. If you want to just be crass about it, look at the International Chamber of Commerce study that said under a scenario where rich countries are vaccinated but developing countries aren’t, in 2021, the global losses to the global economy, $9.2 trillion — with a T, trillion — half of it in the rich countries. This is avoidable if we can get herd immunity vaccination and end the pandemic. And that is not going to happen unless more vaccine is made.
Is part of where it should be made here? Absolutely. We should make as much as we can here, and we should send it elsewhere. But it will not be sufficient. The World Health Organization, scholars around the world agree. There need to be regional hubs — we can help fund them — but they need access to the technology, the recipes, the know-how to be able to make these drugs.
Just yesterday, at a high-level webinar, the ambassadors from India and South Africa repeated data that’s been in lots of U.S. publications. A billion more doses could be made now, in the shorter term, in months, if this information — if the waiver happened and the information was public, because there’s unused existing capacity in Global South producers that are top-notch, already highly qualified, make very technical biologic drugs for AIDS, the HPV vaccine, etc. So, already in the short term, more can be made, but there’s going to have to be investment, in the U.S., around the world, to have more production capacity. And the first step is getting the information, which, by the way, Amy, we already paid for. One hundred and ten billion dollars globally have been invested, have been transferred to the pharmaceutical industry from governments, in the U.S., in Europe, and yet we don’t have the vaccines we need.
AMY GOODMAN: And they are deploying that in lobbying Congress. And let’s not forget the media. Coons’ speech won him rare accolades from the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, which wrote it hoped President Biden, quote, “ignores the left and heeds Mr. Coons.” You have The Washington Post coming out with a piece against the waiver yesterday, an editorial. And then you have White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, who also just weighed in against the waivers, telling the Financial Times, “Going back and forth, consuming time and lawyers in a legal argument about waivers—that is not the endgame. People are dying around the world and we have to get vaccines into their arms in the fastest and most efficient way possible.” Lori, your response?
LORI WALLACH: I was on a call last week with Dr. Fauci. And actually, he says that, and he says that after “Of course we need to do a waiver, but we can’t waste all our time fighting over the waiver.” There are so many other steps. Yes, we need to share the know-how, and then we need to get the investment, and then we need to get the different centers around the world going, and then we have to get the companies to actually share the know-how. So, there has been an effort, for a month, by the pharmaceutical industry to make it seem like Fauci is against the waiver. And actually, I think I can hear in my head the very context in which that statement was made, in the context of what he’s said over and over, which is, “Of course, we need to share the know-how and the technology and get vaccines made.”
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what is your understanding, Lori, of the battle that is going on within the Biden administration right now over these waivers? And again, this is the critical moment, because the World Trade Organization is having these two days of meetings, today and tomorrow, in Geneva.
LORI WALLACH: So, there are some interests that are against the waiver. There are two camps. There is the Pharma corporate camp. You can see that in the Trademark and Patent Office in the Commerce Department. And then you have the camp of “We should focus on getting more shots into people. Let’s focus on our domestic vaccination rollout,” as if making sure that a variant that undoes our domestic vaccine rollout — if there is a vaccine-resistant strain that emerges because there are raging outbreaks anywhere, you can vaccinate 70% of the American public, as the president said yesterday, and we’re still locked down again, because a vaccine-resistant variant can brew anyplace there are major outbreaks going on. So it’s very shortsighted, that “us first, them later.”
On the other hand, there are several key agencies, many people in the White House, who are for the waiver and want to get past the waiver, in the sense that that is a key step, but that is certainly not going to translate, like that, into having more vaccines. There’s so much more work that has to happen, which is why it is so critical that today the United States stop blocking a hundred-plus countries that simply want to have a negotiation about what they deem as critically important for their people to be able to have what we have — access to the vaccine that can save their lives — but also to contribute to the global fight to crush this pandemic. We do not want this to be an endemic problem that is raging around the world, much less in the current apartheid form of rich countries getting vaccinated and poor countries being left to die, but also, in addition to the moral implication of that, to not be able to help in what has got to be a global effort of a race against vaccines versus variants. And if that does not — if humans don’t win that, then there is no place — not here, not with our vaccines — that will be safe.
AMY GOODMAN: Lori Wallach, we want to thank you for being with us, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, wrote the recent Washington Post op-ed with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, “Preserving intellectual property barriers to covid-19 vaccines is morally wrong and foolish.” We will link to it at democracynow.org.
Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. (photo: Getty)
Karen J. Greenberg | Can Guantanamo Ever Be Shut Down?
Karen J. Greenberg, TomDispatch
Greenberg writes: "The Guantánamo conundrum never seems to end."
It seemed obvious enough to me in 2006. When you included the CIA’s “black sites” around the globe (where prisoners from the war on terror were being kept and regularly tortured), American military prisons like the shocking Abu Ghraib in Iraq, which had just then been emptied, and the huge military prison camps named Bucca and Cropper, which remained in use, as well as military prisons in Afghanistan, and the already infamous detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the United States had, by my calculation then, at least 15,000 prisoners, most “being held… most beyond the eyes of any system of justice, beyond the reach of any judges or juries.” In other words, as I put it at the time, the Bush administration had established its very own offshore “Bermuda triangle of injustice” beyond the reach of any conception of American law. It was, put bluntly, an all-American mini-gulag, filled with grotesque acts, whose offshore “crown jewel” was, of course, Guantánamo.
As I wrote then,
“Whatever the discussion may be, whatever issues may seem to be gripping Washington or the nation, whatever you’re watching on TV or reading in the papers, elsewhere the continual constructing, enlarging, expanding, entrenching of a new global system of imprisonment, which bears no relation to any system of imprisonment Americans have previously imagined, continues non-stop, unchecked and unbalanced by Congress or the courts, unaffected by the Republic, but very distinctly under the flag ‘for which it stands.'”Six years later, in 2012, Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, who had by then produced a grim and striking book on the first days of that prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, arrived at TomDispatch. She soon began writing on American global torture practices and how, for instance, the “thou shalt nots” that Barack Obama had entered the Oval Office with, including thou shalt not keep Guantánamo open, had sadly become thou shalts. Still, if you had asked either of us then whether, almost a decade later, that crown jewel in Cuba would still be open, we both would have doubted it. And yet here we are in May 2021, in the early months of the fourth administration since its establishment, and open it is. With that in mind, it seemed all too obvious and appropriate, as President Biden begins to deal with this country’s never-ending war on terror, to call on Greenberg to consider the subject of the prison from hell’s closure once again and hope that it doesn’t outlive us all. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Can Guantánamo Ever Be Shut Down?
Dealing with the Forever Prison of America's Forever Wars
he Guantánamo conundrum never seems to end.
Twelve years ago, I had other expectations. I envisioned a writing project that I had no doubt would be part of my future: an account of Guantánamo’s last 100 days. I expected to narrate in reverse, the episodes in a book I had just published, The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, about — well, the title makes it all too obvious — the initial days at that grim offshore prison. They began on January 11, 2002, as the first hooded prisoners of the American war on terror were ushered off a plane at that American military base on the island of Cuba.
Needless to say, I never did write that book. Sadly enough, in the intervening years, there were few signs on the horizon of an imminent closing of that U.S. military prison. Weeks before my book was published in February 2009, President Barack Obama did, in fact, promise to close Guantánamo by the end of his first year in the White House. That hope began to unravel with remarkable speed. By the end of his presidency, his administration had, in fact, managed to release 197 of the prisoners held there without charges — many, including Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the subject of the film The Mauritanian, had also been tortured — but 41 remained, including the five men accused but not yet tried for plotting the 9/11 attacks. Forty remain there to this very day.
Nearly 20 years after it began, the war in Afghanistan that launched this country’s Global War on Terror and the indefinite detention of prisoners in that facility offshore of American justice is now actually slated to end. President Biden recently insisted that it is indeed “time to end America’s longest war” and announced that all American troops would be withdrawn from that country by September 11th, the 20th anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States.
It makes sense, of course, that the conclusion of those hostilities would indeed be tied to the closure of the now-notorious Guantánamo Bay detention facility. Unfortunately, for reasons that go back to the very origins of the war on terror, ending the Afghan part of this country’s “forever wars” may not presage the release of those “forever prisoners,” as New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg so aptly labeled them years ago.
Biden and Guantánamo
Just as President Biden has a history, dating back to his years as Obama’s vice-president, of wanting to curtail the American presence in Afghanistan, so he called years ago for the closure of Guantánamo. As early as June 2005, then-Senator Biden expressed his desire to shut that facility, seeing it as a stain on this country’s reputation abroad.
At the time, he proposed that an independent commission take a look at Guantánamo Bay and make recommendations as to its future. “But,” he said then, “I think we should end up shutting it down, moving those prisoners. Those that we have reason to keep, keep. And those we don’t, let go.” Sixteen years later, he has indeed put in motion an interagency review to look into that detention facility’s closing. Hopefully, once he receives its report, his administration can indeed begin to shut the notorious island prison down. (And this time, it could even work.)
It’s true that, in 2021, the idea of shutting the gates on Guantánamo has garnered some unprecedented mainstream support. As part of his confirmation process, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, for instance, signaled his support for its closure. And Congress, long unwilling to lend a hand, has offered some support as well. On April 16th, 24 Democratic senators signed a letter to the president calling that facility a “symbol of lawlessness and human rights abuses” that “continues to harm U.S. national security” and demanding that it be shut.
As those senators wrote,
“For nearly two decades, the offshore prison has damaged America’s reputation, fueled anti-Muslim bigotry, and weakened the United States’ ability to counter terrorism and fight for human rights and the rule of law around the world. In addition to the $540 million in wasted taxpayer dollars each year to maintain and operate the facility, the prison also comes at the price of justice for the victims of 9/11 and their families, who are still waiting for trials to begin.”
Admittedly, the number of signatories on that letter raises many questions, including why there aren’t more (and why there isn’t a single Republican among them). Is it just a matter of refusing to give up old habits or does it reflect a lack of desire to address an issue long out of the headlines? Where, for example, was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s name, not to mention those other 25 missing Democratic senatorial signatures?
And there’s another disappointment lurking in its text. While those senators correctly demanded a reversal of the Trump administration’s “erroneous and troubling legal positions” regarding the application of international and domestic law to Guantánamo, they failed to expand upon the larger context of that forever nightmare of imprisonment, lawlessness, and cruelty that affected the war-on-terror prisoners at Guantánamo as well as at the CIA’s “black sites” around the world.
Still, that stance by those two-dozen senators is significant, since Congress has, in the past, taken such weak positions on closing the prison. As such, it provides some hope for the future.
For the rest of Congress and the rest of us, when thinking about finally putting Guantánamo in the history books, it’s important to remember just what a vast deviation it proved to be from the law, justice, and the norms of this society. It’s also worth thinking about the American “detainees” there in the context of what normally happens when wars end.
Prisoners of War
Defying custom and law, the American war in Afghanistan broke through norms like a battering ram through a gossamer wall. Guantánamo was created in just that context, a one-of-a-kind institution for this country. Now, so many years later, it’s poised to break through yet another norm.
Usually, at the end of hostilities, battlefield detainees are let go. As Geneva Convention III, the law governing the detention and treatment of prisoners of war, asserts: “Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.”
That custom of releasing prisoners has, in practice, pertained not only to those held on or near the battlefield but even to those detained far from the conflict. Before the Geneva Conventions were created, the custom of releasing such prisoners was already in place in the United States. Notably, during World War II, the U.S. held 425,000 mostly German prisoners in more than 500 camps in this country. When the war ended, however, they were released and the vast majority of them were returned to their home countries.
When it comes to the closure of Guantánamo, however, we can’t count on such an ending. Two war-on-terror realities stand in the way of linking the coming end of hostilities in Afghanistan to the shutting down of that prison. First, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Congress passed right after the 9/11 attacks was not geographically defined or limited to the war in Afghanistan. It focused on but was not confined to two groups, the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as anyone else who had contributed to the attacks of 9/11. As such, it was used as well to authorize military engagements — and the capture of prisoners — outside Afghanistan. Since 2001, in fact, it has been cited to authorize the use of force in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.Of the 780 prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay at one time or another, more than a third came from Afghanistan; the remaining two-thirds were from 48 other countries.
A second potential loophole exists when it comes to the release of prisoners as that war ends. The administration of George W. Bush rejected the very notion that those held at Guantánamo were prisoners of war, no matter how or where they had been captured. As non-state actors, according to that administration, they were exempted from prisoner of war status, which is why they were deliberately labeled “detainees.”
Little wonder then that, despite Secretary of Defense Austin’s position on Guantánamo, as the New York Times recently reported, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby “argued that there was no direct link between its future and the coming end to what he called the ‘mission’ in Afghanistan.”
In fact, even if that congressional authorization for war and the opening of Guantánamo on which it was based never were solely linked to the conflict in Afghanistan, it’s time, almost two decades later, to put an end to that quagmire of a prison camp and the staggering exceptions that it’s woven into this country’s laws and norms since 2002.
A “Forever Prison”?
The closing of Guantánamo would finally signal an end to the otherwise endless proliferation of exceptions to the laws of war as well as to U.S. domestic and military legal codes. As early as June 2004, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor flagged the possibility that a system of indefinite detention at Guantánamo could create a permanent state of endless legal exceptionalism.
She wrote an opinion that month in a habeas corpus case for the release of a Guantánamo detainee, the dual U.S.-Saudi citizen Yaser Hamdi, warning that the prospect of turning that military prison into a never-ending exception to wartime detention and its laws posed dangers all its own. As she put it, “We understand Congress’ grant of authority for the use of ‘necessary and appropriate force’ to include the authority to detain for the duration of the relevant conflict, and our understanding is based on longstanding law-of-war principles.” She also acknowledged that, “If the practical circumstances of a given conflict are entirely unlike those of the conflicts that informed the development of the law of war, that [the] understanding [of release upon the end of hostilities] may unravel. But,” she concluded, “that is not the situation we face as of this date.”
Sadly enough, 17 years later, it turns out that the detention authority may be poised to outlive the use of force. Guantánamo has become an American institution at the cost of $13 million per prisoner annually. The system of offshore injustice has, by now, become part and parcel of the American system of justice — our very own “forever prison.”
The difficulty of closing Guantánamo has shown that once you move outside the laws and norms of this country in a significant way, the return to normalcy becomes ever more problematic — and the longer the exception, the harder such a restoration will be. Remember that, before his presidency was over, George W. Bush went on record acknowledging his preference for closing Guantánamo. Obama made it a goal of his presidency from the outset. Biden, with less fanfare and the lessons of their failures in mind, faces the challenge of finally closing America’s forever prison.
With all that in mind, let me offer you a positive twist on this seemingly never-ending situation. I won’t be surprised if, in fact, President Biden actually does manage to close Guantánamo. He may not do so as a result of the withdrawal of all American forces from Afghanistan, but because he seems to have a genuine urge to shut the books on the war on terror, or at least the chapter of it initiated on 9/11.
And if he were also to shut down that prison, in the spirit of that letter from the Democratic senators, it would be because of Guantánamo’s gross violations of American laws and norms. While the letter did not go so far as to name the larger war-on-terror sins of the past, it did at least draw attention directly to the wrongfulness of indefinite detention as a system created expressly to evade the law — and one that brought ill-repute to the United States globally.
That closure should certainly happen under President Biden. After all, any other course is not only legally unacceptable, but risks perpetuating the idea that this country continues to distrust the principles of law, human rights, and due process – indeed, the very fundamentals of a democratic system.
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.
Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and author of the forthcoming Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump (Princeton University Press, August). Julia Tedesco helped with research for this piece.
In this June 12, 2020, file photo from a screen grab taken from body camera video provided by the Atlanta Police Department Rayshard Brooks, right, speaks with Officer Garrett Rolfe, left, in the parking lot of a Wendy's restaurant, in Atlanta. (photo: Atlanta Journal-Constiution)
Fired Atlanta Police Officer Who Shot Rayshard Brooks Is Reinstated
Christian Boone, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Boone writes: "Former Atlanta Police Department officer Garrett Rolfe, charged with murder in the fatal shooting of Rayshard Brooks, has been reinstated by the city's Civil Service Board."
ue to the City’s failure to comply with several provisions of the Code and the information received during witnesses’ testimony, the Board concludes the Appellant was not afforded his right to due process,” the board concluded. “Therefore, the Board grants the Appeal of Garrett Rolfe and revokes his dismissal as an employee of the APD.”
The ruling doesn’t mean Rolfe will be back on the streets. In fact, he won’t actually be allowed to return to work, as his bond prevents him from possessing a firearm or being around other officers, said attorney Lance LoRusso, who represented the 28-year-old officer in front of the civil service board.
In a statement, APD confirmed Rolfe will be placed on administrative leave.
“The Civil Service Board (CSB) has reversed the termination of officer Garrett Rolfe only on the basis that they were not done in accordance with the Atlanta City Code,” read the statement. “It is important to note that the CSB did not make a determination as to whether officer Rolfe violated Atlanta Police Department policies. In light of the CSB’s rulings, APD will conduct an assessment to determine if additional investigative actions are needed.”
Rolfe was fired last June one day after he shot Brooks in a Wendy’s parking lot. A scuffle followed after Brooks struck the other officer on the scene, Devin Brosnan, hard enough to cause a concussion, grabbed his Taser and aimed it at Rolfe, who then fired.
Brooks’ death led to widespread unrest in the city; the Wendy’s was torched and later razed. Activists opposed to Rolfe’s reinstatement have planned a protest for 5 p.m. outside Atlanta City Hall.
Lo Russo said Rolfe is concerned his return to the force will lead to more division.
“He loves this city,” LoRusso said.
Rolfe, said his attorney, has received several death threats and has essentially been in hiding since last summer.
Though he got his job back, he wonders if he’ll ever truly get to be a cop again, LoRusso said.
“Obviously it would be dangerous for him to be on the streets,” he said. “He can’t even work in a traditional job, in a store or something like that, out of concern for his safety.”
Brooks’ attorneys are holding a press conference at 1 p.m. to respond to the board’s ruling.
Rolfe was charged with felony murder within a week of Brooks’ death by former Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard. Brosnan, who wasn’t fired, faces lesser charges including aggravated assault.
That case remains in limbo, however, as Howard’s successor, Fani Willis, has sought to recuse her office. Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr denied Willis’ recusal, and a judge has yet to decide what happens next.
At Rolfe’s hearing two weeks, LoRusso argued his client was dismissed “without a proper investigation” by the city. It was revealed that then-Atlanta police chief Erika Shields did not sign Rolfe’s dismissal form. She stepped down as chief that same day, eventually resigning. Assistant Chief Todd Coyt signed the dismissal form in Shields’ place.
Coyt told the board he believed Rolfe and Brosnan “acted accordingly and … were trying to show compassion and did everything they could to calm the situation down.”
But Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was unequivocal, telling reporters the circumstances of Brooks’ death required immediate action.
“It is clear that we do not have another day, another minute, another hour to waste,” she said at the time.
That left Rolfe with no time to offer a defense, LoRusso argued. Atlanta Police Department Sgt. William Dean, an internal affairs investigator, testified that Rolfe’s hearing was scheduled to accommodate a 5 p.m. press conference by the mayor announcing Rolfe’s termination.
Rolfe testified he didn’t find out about his “employee response hearing” until 3:45 p.m. He was more than an hour outside the city at the time and said he feared for his safety, as video of Brooks’ shooting had been widely circulated.
The city’s hasty response was necessary, said its attorney, Allegra Lawrence-Hardy. City policy allows for dismissal when an officer’s presence “impairs the effectiveness of others,” she said.
“Keeping (Rolfe) active would’ve been extremely disruptive,” Lawrence-Hardy said.
In February, the civil service board reinstated officers Mark Gardner and Ivory Streeter, who were fired last June after video surfaced showing them deploying Tasers on two college students during last summer’s protests in downtown Atlanta. The veteran officers face a variety of criminal charges, including aggravated assault and simple battery.
A family visiting a memorial to the victims of the 1981 massacre in El Mozote, El Salvador. (photo: Fred Ramos/The New York Times)
15 Salvadoran Military Officers Could Soon Go on Trial for the El Mozote Massacre
Belén Fernández, Jacobin
Fernández writes: "The 1981 El Mozote massacre was one of the most horrific crimes in the US-backed dirty war in El Salvador. Fifteen retired military officers could soon go on trial for the crime - spotlighting again the blood-drenched horrors of US imperialism in Central America."
n April, El Salvador began the final phase of pretrial hearings in the criminal case against the accused perpetrators of the 1981 El Mozote massacre. The massacre, which took place during the country’s civil war of 1980–1992 and killed some one thousand civilians in and around the village of El Mozote — most of them children — was carried out by the US-trained and -funded Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran military. If the judge concludes that there is sufficient evidence to move ahead with the trial, fifteen retired military officers could face prison sentences.
In his book Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador’s Dirty War, former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner cites the recollections of massacre survivor Rufina Amaya, whose blind husband and three daughters were slaughtered:
From her hiding place in the trees, she heard the soldiers’ conversation: “Lieutenant, somebody here says he won’t kill children,” said one soldier. “Who’s the son of a bitch who said that?” the lieutenant answered. “I am going to kill him.”
The day after the bloodbath began, soon-to-be Iran-Contra convict Elliott Abrams took up a post as Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs and set about denying that the massacre had ever happened. Even after the civil war ended, Abrams insisted that the Reagan administration’s legacy in the Central American nation had been one of “fabulous achievement” — this despite the loss of upward of 75,000 lives, with the vast majority of atrocities attributed to the US-backed state and allied paramilitary formations and death squads.
During the current round of pretrial hearings, political scientist and El Salvador expert Terry Karl testified that US military adviser Allen Bruce Hazelwood was present in the department of Morazán, where El Mozote is located, with Atlacatl Battalion commander Domingo Monterrosa when the massacre transpired. The Salvadoran investigative journalism site El Faro — which has offered nonstop, bilingual coverage of the case, in contrast to a US press that generally can’t be bothered — quotes Karl as asserting that had Hazelwood’s presence “come to light at the time, it would have cut off United States aid.” Instead, a massive cover-up was orchestrated, and the gringos proceeded with their fabulous achieving.
Granted, there’s no understating US willingness to flout its own aid certification laws. On January 28, 1982, for example — a month and a half after El Mozote — Reagan certified that El Salvador’s government was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.” This certification allowed military assistance to the country to continue and military advisers to remain stationed there. As Bonner writes in Weakness and Deceit, Reagan’s celebration of Salvadoran efforts took place precisely one day after both the Washington Post and the New York Times had run stories about the massacre; according to a tally by the archdiocese’s legal aid office, in the year preceding the certification “13,353 Salvadorans had been murdered by the Salvadoran Army, security forces, and paramilitary groups.”
But, hey, there was a communist menace to be vanquished. And what do you know: some hard-right Vietnam War veterans lent a helping hand, offering mercenary services to the Atlacatl Battalion in particular, as Karl documented in her recent testimony. She also brought up — speaking of Vietnam — the battalion’s use of a smattering of napalm bombs in El Mozote. While not accounting for the bulk of the massacre’s carnage — characterized more by things like throwing small children in the air and bayoneting them as they descended and shooting elderly women in their beds — the napalm factor is still striking in connecting the bloody imperial dots.
It’s even more striking given that the bombs were supplied by US partner-in-crime Israel, which long ago detected lucrative opportunities in making life hell for other human populations, not just Palestinians. The Israeli connection was confirmed in 1983 by then Salvadoran air force commander Rafael Bustillo to a visiting US congressional delegation, as the New York Times reported: “We bought it [the napalm] from Israel several years ago, and used it until 1981. If we hadn’t done that, I might not be sitting here today.”
The article went on to note that “the delegation’s report appeared in The Congressional Record of May 26, 1983, shortly after the delegation’s trip, but attracted little notice.”
As for the victims of El Mozote who aren’t sitting here today — and who haven’t been sitting here for nearly forty years — obstacles to justice have ranged from a postwar amnesty to pandemic-related delays to obstructive machinations by current Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele of the “New Ideas” party, who appears to be under the impression that fascism is a new idea.
The judge in the case is himself effectively under assault and is facing two requests that he recuse himself. As El Faro explains: “If one of those requests succeeds, the hearings will be canceled and the process left in limbo.”
A Salvadoran friend of mine, who runs a small shop at a school in San Salvador, recently told me about a cousin of his who joined the Atlacatl Battalion seven years after El Mozote, and whose commander had assured him at the end of the war that the peace accords were a farce and that they’d be back in business at any moment. My friend remarked: “The poor bastard died waiting to return to war; he always carried a hand grenade, and he saw ‘terrorists’ everywhere — even in his soup.”
In many ways, indeed, the Salvadoran war never ended. And whatever ultimately happens with the El Mozote trial, it’s already an indictment of a US foreign policy that is fundamentally criminal.
The first photograph of the Bornean Rajah scops owl in the wild. (photo:Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center)
Could Rediscovery of Rare Owl Be a Hopeful Sign for Other 'Lost Birds'?
Emily Denny, EcoWatch
Denny writes: "During a bird evolution study on the island of Borneo in May of 2016, a research team discovered an owl that hadn't been seen in the wild since 1892."
Quickly grabbing their cameras, the researchers captured the first-ever photos of the rare bird, identifying it as the rare Bornean subspecies of the Rajah scops owl, native to southeast Asia.
At the time of its re-discovery, the elusive owl was roosting just a meter above the ground. "It was a pretty rapid progression of emotions when I first saw the owl — absolute shock and excitement that we'd found this mythical bird, then pure anxiety that I had to document it as fast as I could," Andy Boyce, an avian ecologist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, told the Smithsonian's National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute.
The island of Borneo, which is divided politically among Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, is a hotspot for biodiversity — home to orangutans, clouded leopards and pygmy elephants, according to the UN Environment Programme. It's also home to the Otus brookii brookii, one of the two sub-species and "far more elusive" Rajah scops owls, according to the Global Wildlife Conservation. The other sub-species, Otus brookii solokensis, is found in Sumatra and is well documented.
Researchers were able to identify the owl based on its distinct characteristics, such as its orange irises, small ear tufts and speckled brown and black crown, the GWC reported. But to their surprise, the researchers found that the feather colors and patterns of the O. brookii brookii varied from its Sumatran counterpart, meaning that the two owls may actually be entirely different species.
If the owl is endemic to only Borneo and is its own species, conservation action is more likely, Boyce explained. But researchers haven't been able to find the owl since and reckon its one-time sighting could mean its numbers are low in the wild.
"Unfortunately, we are only good at conserving what we know and what we name," Boyce said, according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute. "Our sole sighting during this intensive study confirms this owl lives in mature montane forests, likely above or below the survey area… To protect this bird, we need a firm understanding of its habitat and ecology."
Only half of Bornean forest cover remains today, the UN Environment Programme reported. As climate change, deforestation and expansion of palm oil continue to threaten the owl's habitat, researchers, with almost no data of the owl's vocalizations, distribution, breeding biology and population size, are running out of time to shine a light on the mysterious species.
Additional studies on the owl "could have important conservation implications," yet its rarity makes these studies "impossible," the researchers wrote in their findings, published last week in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology. Finding another individual or population is necessary to learn more about the Bornean Rajah scops owl and protect them from increasing climate-related threats.
John Mittermeier, director of threatened species outreach at the American Bird Conservancy, said the important thing about rediscovering lost birds "is the excitement and interest they generate," according to the GWC. "The idea that there's a mysterious species out there that no one can find at the moment should be a call to action for birdwatchers in the area, and it's a way of getting people excited to search new areas and help make discoveries."
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