11 May 21
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Charlie Savage | The Rise of Private Spies
Charlie Savage, The New Republic
Excerpt: "What happens when online investigators and detectives-for-hire take on intelligence work?"
s WikiLeaks was riding to global fame a decade ago by publishing archives of leaked American military and diplomatic files, its founder, Julian Assange, liked to call his organization an “intelligence agency of the people.” The slogan conjured an ideal of gathering and disseminating information solely to improve public understanding of the world and to enable democracy to better function, without the presumed machinations of a nation-state spy agency. But by 2016, WikiLeaks had famously been co-opted by Russia’s GRU. Through a front entity, the Russian intelligence agency provided WikiLeaks with Democratic Party emails, stolen as part of a covert hack-and-dump operation intended to manipulate the U.S. presidential election. Assange then stoked the conspiracy theory—apparently concocted by another Russian intelligence agency—that the emails had instead been leaked by a Democratic Party staffer, Seth Rich, who had been murdered in July that year. In fact, as the Mueller report showed, WikiLeaks had corresponded with and received an encrypted file from the actual source of the hacked emails after Rich’s death.
I kept thinking about the big questions raised by the complex tragedy of WikiLeaks’ idealistic rise and later debasement—what label to attach to its various activities as it changed over time, and how difficult it proved for it to stay out of entanglement with nation-state spy games—as I read two new books about other intelligence-style activities being performed outside of government.
We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News, by Eliot Higgins, tells the story of the online collective of activist-investigators he founded in 2014. The group has achieved growing fame and respect for generating breakthrough insights and piercing fogs of disinformation, very often put forward by Moscow. Bellingcat’s achievements include helping to prove that Russian-backed insurgents downed a civilian airliner over Ukraine in 2014, despite the Russian government’s public denials, and figuring out the true identities of the Russian assassins who poisoned former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, in 2018. More recently—and not in the book—the group developed reports implicating Russian intelligence in other poisonings, notably of the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
Celebrating Bellingcat’s work as a series of triumphs for the truth in a world replete with disinformation, Higgins portrays his network’s efforts as a “hive mind of amateur sleuths on Twitter, all converging around the next big question, whether geolocating a fresh photo or parsing the validity of a social-media video.” As citizen journalists, he also writes, “We tended to be detail-oriented obsessives, many of whom had spent our formative years at computers, enthralled by the power of the internet. We were not missionaries out to fix the world, but we had enough of a moral compass to repudiate the other routes to an outsized impact online, such as trolling and hacking. Most of us grew up assuming we would remain peripheral to the issues of the day, that the powers that be could just ignore small people like us. Suddenly, this was not so. It was intoxicating.”
Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies is a decidedly less optimistic book. In it, the investigative journalist Barry Meier scrutinizes well-paid skullduggery and shenanigans by several private investigation firms. (The author and I were simultaneously employed by The New York Times before he left the paper in 2017; however, we were based in different cities and never worked together.) Among Meier’s case studies are two instances of sending undercover operatives to con people into providing information on behalf of dubious clients: Black Cube, which assisted the disgraced film producer and sex criminal Harvey Weinstein in his attempts to discredit his accusers and disrupt investigative journalists on his trail, and K2 Intelligence, which infiltrated and monitored some public health activists working to ban asbestos (and turned out to have a Kazakh asbestos interest as a client). But Meier focuses most on a saga that is quite different, but weird and momentous in its own way: the production of the “Steele dossier,” the notorious compilation of rumors about Donald J. Trump’s purported links to Russia.
Like Higgins, Meier recognizes that performing intelligence work outside government can carry a thrill. But he is scornful of the modern-day private investigations business, which he characterizes as a “scattershot mix of people, drawn to the work by money, the opportunity for travel and adventure, and the heady rush of power that comes from spying on the lives of others.” Retired government spies, ex-law enforcement officials, and onetime journalists make up the industry, along with assorted “misfits, oddballs, also-rans, wannabes, and the occasional sociopath,” he writes. While he concedes that such agencies can take on legitimate assignments, like finding witnesses for lawsuits and performing background checks, he asserts that the industry has an ugly open secret: “the big money is made not by exposing the truth but by papering it over or concealing it.” The people “who are in constant need of the services of private operatives and who pay top dollar” are unlikely to be the good guys. Given how easily nongovernmental intelligence work can go awry, is Bellingcat a rare exception?
The subtitle of the British edition of We Are Bellingcat is An Intelligence Agency for the People. When early promotional materials for the book were unveiled, the close overlap with the old WikiLeaks slogan proved awkward. Facing accusations of conceptual theft, Higgins said it was a coincidence, and that it was his publisher who had come up with the tagline, while noting that versions of the phrase had appeared in print before Assange adopted it. In any case, he also argued, the phrase was a more fitting description of Bellingcat: While WikiLeaks focused on collecting leaked or hacked documents, Bellingcat specializes in sifting for clues within information that is already publicly available, and then verifying and analyzing them—just as a real intelligence agency often performs a lot of processing work to transform raw data into intelligence reports that can be useful to policymakers.
A British college dropout and former office worker, Higgins began to find his niche blogging about the Syrian civil war under the pseudonym Brown Moses. From his keyboard and far from the war zone, he developed a hobbyist’s expertise in different kinds of missiles and guns. Studying social-media videos and photographs from the battlefield, he posted insights about what was happening—like evidence that the Russian-backed Assad government, despite its denials, was responsible for using barrel bombs that maimed and killed many civilians, and that the rebels had received a shipment of anti-tank weapons from the former Yugoslavia. Higgins’s blog posts began attracting the attention of mainstream journalists covering the war, and he also began to link up with other online obsessives.
From that initially ad hoc work, Higgins came to recognize the broader implications of life in the internet era for investigations: Valuable information is hiding in plain sight online, waiting to be recognized for its significance and transformed into evidence. In particular, ordinary participants in and witnesses to important and highly disputed events, like war crimes, often post videos and photographs on social-media platforms in real time about what they are seeing. Investigators often must move quickly to identify and preserve these materials, lest they be deleted when the frightening enormity of the event becomes clear. They can then subject them to painstaking analysis—such as using maps, satellite imagery, background landmarks, shadows, and other clues to figure out when and where a photo was taken. Through these methods, scattered and seemingly random material can be harnessed into an evidentiary trail proving who did what, and who is lying about it.
In 2013, for example, the United States government accused the Assad regime of carrying out a horrific chemical weapons attack that killed many hundreds of civilians in Ghouta, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus. But its public report provided scant supporting evidence for that attribution, leaving a void for online conspiracy theorists to claim that rebels were instead behind the attack. Higgins helped insert facts into the public debate. Among other things, he scrutinized social-media photos of one of the unexploded rockets in the attack, noting that its warhead was equipped to carry liquid and studying details in the background and the angle it had hit the ground. “Bit by bit, I matched everything with satellite imagery from Google Maps,” he writes.
We had the location. And using shadows in the photo, I determined the angle of the rocket, thereby estimating the direction from which it had come. With that, I went to Wikimapia, which allows users to annotate maps by inserting names and types of structures. I traced back the likely trajectory of the rocket to determine who held the area where it had come from. I found a Syrian military installation, largely encircled by rebel-held territory.
On July 14, 2014, Higgins founded Bellingcat as an online clearinghouse for several like-minded internet sleuths. (The name, suggested by a friend, is a reference to a fable about a group of mice who decide to put a bell on a cat so they can hear it coming.) Just three days later came the event that would be the group’s first major crusade: Russian-backed separatist militants in eastern Ukraine mistakenly shot down a civilian airliner, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, killing all 298 people aboard. Rather than owning up to its responsibility and that of the insurgents whom it had recklessly armed, Russia sought to cloud what had happened with denials, distortions, and distractions—including putting out a video that had been doctored to falsely suggest that the missile that shot down the plane had been fired from territory held by the Ukrainian government.
“Nothing stirs the online investigative community like fabrications from the powerful,” Higgins writes. “Moreover, contradictory narratives about an event are useful, providing something concrete to either verify or debunk.” Various other players were also working to get at the truth—among them, investigators with the Ukrainian and Dutch governments and journalists. (The majority of the slain passengers were Dutch citizens, on their way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.) But the nascent Bellingcat collective found it could add to the public debate by rapidly sifting clues. Bloggers went to work, among them Iggy Ostanin, a 25-year-old Russian-born student living in the Netherlands, who mined sources like social media posts by bystanders and Russian soldiers. Drawing on this work, Bellingcat pieced together the missile launcher’s path on the flatbed truck from Russian territory to the insurgents—and its return journey with one less missile. His report for Bellingcat was, Higgins writes, the group’s “breakout moment,” and the first major salvo in a grinding effort against propagandists and denialists on the topic.
We Are Bellingcat is essentially a compendium of such investigations, and most of its chapters read like more polished versions of the reports the organization previously published online. These case studies are characterized by showing the group’s deductive homework—walking the reader through the identification and verification of each tile in a gradually appearing mosaic of proof. Sometimes exhaustive discussion of minutiae is necessary to bolster the credibility of the conclusions asserted—rebuttals to the inevitable question: How can you amateurs, just sitting at computers thousands of miles away, know that? As a result, the book can be dense at times. But at its best, it reads like that moment at the end of Sherlock Holmes stories, when the detective explains to his sidekick, Dr. Watson, how he deduced the solution to a mystery from overlooked and seemingly minor clues.
There’s nothing new about private investigators and operatives; as early as the nineteenth century, mill and mine owners paid the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to infiltrate and disrupt labor union movements. But Meier makes the case for taking a close look now at what he calls the “private spy” industry, arguing that operatives-for-hire in the twenty-first century are no longer “content to lurk in the shadows” and have “become more emboldened than ever before.”
The techniques private investigators use, as recounted in Spooked, include some old-school tradecraft, like disguising a surveillance van with a fake business logo and a phone number that a colleague is prepared to answer as if that business exists. They can also include more creepily personal forms of “pretexting,” or pretending “to be someone they are not—a cop, a bank officer, an employer, a distant relative—in order to con a stranger into giving them confidential information.” Of particular interest is their ability to harness the exploding volume of electronic information that is available about people. Meier writes:
Hacking and cyber-spying was growing more common among hired spies because experts who had learned their skill while working for government intelligence agencies or the military were now selling them to private customers. In addition, once-costly electronic surveillance tools developed for use by intelligence agencies or the police had become cheaper and widely available.… To monitor their targets, some operatives-for-hire also piggybacked on a system used by bounty hunters to find fugitives. Several of the major cellphone carriers sold real-time data about the location of a customer’s cellphone to licensed bounty hunters to help them locate their quarry.
Meier’s book compiles and synthesizes several stories about recent private intelligence misadventures. While a fair amount is aggregation—readers of Ronan Farrow’s groundbreaking reporting on Black Cube’s work for Harvey Weinstein, for example, may find portions of that part of the book to be familiar territory—Meier’s research and original interviews flesh out the stories and characters involved. Through his eyes, they are often unsavory people.
The best part of his book, upstaging the other sagas, covers the Steele dossier; in Meier’s telling, no story illustrates quite so clearly “the oversized impact that private spies were suddenly having on politics, business, and our personal lives.” During the 2016 campaign, Democrats financed opposition research into Trump’s links to Russia. They hired Fusion GPS, an investigative firm cofounded by a former Wall Street Journal reporter about whom Meier writes with palpable scorn. Fusion partly subcontracted to another firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, which was run by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official. And Steele, in turn, worked with Igor Danchenko, a researcher who specialized in gathering business-related information involving Russia.
Danchenko traveled to Russia and canvassed for gossip—or, more grandly, “raw intelligence.” He picked up uncorroborated chatter about possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign and relayed it verbally to Steele. After writing this up in a series of reports, Steele gave parts of or claims from this “dossier” not only to his client, but also to the FBI and then to reporters. The FBI included some claims from it in an October 2016 application to wiretap a former Trump campaign aide. And BuzzFeed published the dossier in January 2017, causing a different claim from it, which the FBI had not included in its wiretap request materials—a rumor about a purported blackmail sex tape—to lodge in popular culture. But some of the claims proved to be mistaken, and many others remained thin and murky. In a mirrors-within-mirrors twist, it has since emerged that the FBI received equally uncorroborated reports that Russian intelligence might even have infiltrated Danchenko’s network to sow misinformation—once again showing how hard it can be for nongovernment investigators to avoid entanglement with nation-state spy agencies, or at least the suspicion of it.
Whether you admire Trump or scorn him, this private intelligence product did harm. For Trump supporters, the dossier’s claims were an unfair smear, and the FBI’s use of unverified political opposition research in wiretap applications was outrageous. Yet Trump critics have cause for complaint, too, because the dossier’s flaws helped the Trump camp misleadingly discredit the actual investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and into the nature of myriad interactions between associates of the Trump campaign and Russia. The dossier played no role in the FBI’s decision to open the counterintelligence inquiry; the tainted wiretaps were a minor part of that effort; and the Mueller report did not use information put forward in the dossier. But Trump and his allies relentlessly sought to conflate the two efforts in the public mind.
Danchenko shows up late in Spooked, giving the impression that Meier had already written most of his manuscript when the researcher’s identity became public in the summer of 2020. Although Russian-born, Danchenko did not live in Russia and was not a veteran Russian intelligence official with deep ties to its spy services, as a reader of Steele’s dossier might assume, given the nature of the claims. Instead, he turned out to be a relatively young researcher based in the United States. To Meier, this pedestrian origin of the dossier brought into focus what he sees as a certain flimflam about the entire operatives-for-hire industry.
“Private spies prosper because they operate behind a façade, one that masks the quality of the ‘intelligence’ they sell to clients from scrutiny,” he writes. “That secrecy is the key to the Wizard of Oz nature of the corporate investigations industry. As long as their work never becomes public, operatives can claim to customers that they are selling them ‘strategic intelligence’ when what they are often doing is selling smoke. It becomes plain after the smoke clears that private spies don’t just play their targets. Their customers can get played, too.”
The way that Danchenko’s identity became public is worth pausing over, because it resonates with several aspects of the Bellingcat saga as well. A loose collective of pro-Trump online sleuths had set out to identify Steele’s primary source, sharing insights and theories with one another. But they were unable to figure out who Danchenko was. Then, the user of a brand-new, pseudonymous Twitter account with the handle @Hmmm57474203, who had not previously participated in the collective’s discussions, stepped forward and unveiled Danchenko’s name. He linked to a blog post that claimed to have figured it out from a chain of clues in a heavily censored version of the FBI’s interview report with Danchenko, which the Trump Justice Department had released. The clues included such obscure things as the apparent number of letters in the researcher’s blacked-out name.
When I co-wrote an article about the unmasking for The New York Times, this raised my eyebrows. It made me think of a sneaky law enforcement technique I knew about from writing about surveillance issues: “parallel construction,” which investigators use when they have found some important piece of evidence through a classified or perhaps illegal intelligence capability they do not want to reveal in a courtroom. To mask the true source, they reverse-engineer an alternative path to the same destination for citation in court papers: It’s easy to rediscover the needle when you already know where in the haystack to look. Meier seems to have had a similar thought about the blog post, writing that its author “might have been an investigative genius. Then again, people inside the U.S. government who wanted to out Danchenko might have given him help.”
Meier leaves that thought hanging there. But that summer, I corresponded some on Twitter with @Hmmm57474203, who engaged a bit, although he declined to identify himself. An established member of the pro-Trump internet sleuth community eventually interviewed him and posted the audio online. If that person was something other than what he represented himself to be—a clever, politically motivated amateur—he did a good job faking it.
Bellingcat has faced its own suspicions and aspersions, put forward both by Russian state media and by commentators who tend to be fierce critics of hawkish American and NATO military operations. When not mocking Bellingcat’s researchers as dilettantes, its critics like to insinuate that Bellingcat must be a front for Western intelligence agencies seeking to undermine Russia.
Higgins labels the attacks he has faced as coming from the Counterfactual Community—“a leaderless disinformation campaign, with claims leaping from conspiracy theorists to state propagandists to alternative-media outlets and back,” pushed by a mix of “anti-imperialists, the pro-Assad, the pro-Russian, the alt-right, the alt-left” who share “pathological suspicion of the West, especially the US government.” They presume, he writes, “given how much Bellingcat has discovered, that intelligence agencies must be feeding us stories. This only reveals ignorance about what is possible with online investigation. Verification stands on its own, not on the reputation of Bellingcat, or America, or Russia, or China. If anyone wants to know where we get our material, they can read our reports, click the links and judge for themselves.”
The problem with this rebuttal is that it does not address the possibility of parallel construction. Compounding matters, Bellingcat is increasingly moving away from its founding principle of using only “open source” information, by relying as well on clues in nonpublic data like flight manifests and cell phone records it has purchased on the black or gray market. Higgins acknowledges that collecting and using this kind of evidence—exactly the sort of restricted private data the NSA vacuums up for government spooks to analyze—pose a challenge to his ideal. “All our investigations, we believe, must be founded on open-source information. But in carefully judged situations we will build upon that base,” he writes, adding: “When we go beyond open sources, we are careful never to assume that such information—because secretive—is more likely to be true. On the contrary, we employ heightened skepticism about such material, demanding an extra layer of corroboration.”
It may be that there simply is no airtight assurance that can satisfy those who are inclined to wonder whether non-governmental analysts might occasionally get assistance from spies focused on the same adversary; social mistrust from one quarter or another will inevitably arise in this polarized era. Still, to date, I am not aware of credible evidence for the accusations of planted insights. Bellingcat’s enemies have pointed with insinuation to its acceptance of grant money from the National Endowment for Democracy, an independent nonprofit group that receives funding from the U.S. government. But their efforts have so far left little tarnish on Bellingcat’s image as an independent, transnational collective of researchers, investigators, and citizen journalists—essentially, white-hat freelance intelligence analysts trying to expose bad guys.
This makes for a sharp contrast to the gray- or black-hat private investigators Meier has scrutinized, and whose targets are often journalists, activists, and whistleblowers who are trying to expose bad guys. (The story of the flawed Steele dossier is a very different kind of mess, but Meier justifies his focus on it based on its massive political and cultural fallout.) It seems doubtful, however, that the people who founded or went to work for firms like Black Cube or K2 Intelligence saw themselves as seeking out ways to assist dubious actors. In any field, one can start off with ideals and perform work that is genuinely beneficial or at least respectable, only to find oneself making compromises toward expedient ends that gradually start to chip away at one’s moral foundation. And there seems to be something particularly high-risk about intelligence-style work, attracting both deep-pocketed interests with secrets to cover up and nation-state spy agencies looking for ways to engage in clandestine information warfare.
To be straightforward, if I were a CIA or MI6 operative and wanted, as part of my Spy vs. Spy games with Russian intelligence, to expose something about Moscow’s misdeeds without leaving any fingerprints, it would be an obvious temptation to take an insight that is capable of parallel construction and whisper it into the ear of one of Bellingcat’s contributors. Western intelligence agencies have been known to be shortsighted at times, and an official so inclined might not sufficiently care about the risk that the group’s enemies, whether sincerely or with cynicism and bad faith, would use any subsequent leak about that tip as ammunition in their efforts to damage its idealistic reputation as an intelligence agency just working on behalf of the public, as Higgins’s British subtitle put it.
So Bellingcat must remain vigilant and jealously guard its independence. The tragic arc of WikiLeaks is a warning that the lines between traditional journalists, private detectives, very-online activist-investigators, and nation-state intelligence operatives constantly threaten to blur. That inherent instability provides a backdrop to Meier’s fundamental point that people outside government performing intelligence-style work seem to be having a rising impact. Whether their intentions and actions are noble, or mercenary and corrupt, or somewhere in between—whether they are a Bellingcat or a Black Cube or one of the investigators involved in the Steele dossier—these entities are all operating outside the channels of oversight and accountability, however imperfect, that governments attempt to impose on groups like the CIA. And their influence on politics, business, and other aspects of our lives is escalating.
Mourners during a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Orange shooting outside the offices of Unified Homes in Orange, Sunday, April 4, 2021. (photo: Leonard Ortiz/SCNG)
There Have Been, on Average, 10 Mass Shootings in the US Each Week This Year
Saeed Ahmed, NPR
Ahmed writes: "When a man walked into a birthday party in Colorado Springs, Colo., over the weekend, killing six people and then himself, it was the deadliest mass shooting in the state since March, when a rampage at a grocery store left 10 people dead."
hen a man walked into a birthday party in Colorado Springs, Colo., over the weekend, killing six people and then himself, it was the deadliest mass shooting in the state since March, when a rampage at a grocery store left 10 people dead.
We're just 18 weeks into 2021, and already the U.S. has experienced 194 mass shootings. That averages out to about 10 a week.
The tally comes from the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed, excluding the shooter. The full list can be found here.
While a rise in gun sales and divergence of some public health funding could be linked to the spike in gun violence in recent months, experts say it can be a challenge to isolate any single cause. And advocates against gun violence lament the limited legislative response from Washington so far.
Here are the 11 attacks that took place just this weekend alone:
Sunday, May 9
Colorado Springs, Colorado
A man opened fire at a birthday party in a mobile home park on the east side of Colorado Springs shortly after midnight, slaying six adults before killing himself. Children at the scene were unharmed, police said.
Newark, New Jersey
Two men and two women were shot on a street in Newark on Sunday afternoon, Newark police said. All four were reported to be in stable condition.
Phoenix
A group of people attending an event at a Phoenix hotel got into an argument that led to gunfire. Police didn't say what prompted the argument. One man was killed and seven others were wounded in the shooting, the Arizona Republic reported.
Philadelphia
A shooting in the Olney neighborhood on Sunday afternoon left two people dead — a 17-year-old male and a 23-year-old-male — and injured three others, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, citing police.
Citrus Heights, California
Four people were struck by gunfire after fights broke out at a bar in Citrus Heights, a city in Sacramento County, according to The Sacramento Bee.
Saturday, May 8
Oakland, California
Someone fired shots at a group socializing at a lagoon in Oakland, injuring four people. Bullets also struck nearby buildings and parked cars, according to the East Bay Times.
Detroit
Four people were shot in an alley behind a building early Saturday morning. Their injuries were non-life threatening.
Compton, California
Compton Sheriff's deputies heard shots fired and found two gunshot victims on Saturday. They were both pronounced dead at the scene. Soon after, deputies learned that two other gunshot victims had been taken to a hospital, one in critical condition.
Woodlawn, Maryland
A man set his home on fire, forced his way into his neighbor's home, and shot and stabbed them, police said. He also allegedly shot two more neighbors as they came out of their home in the attack that took place just outside Baltimore. The attack claimed three victims, and the suspect also died after he was shot at by police.
Milwaukee
Four people were injured in a shooting Saturday afternoon. The victim ranged in ages from 23 to 45. They are expected to survive. Police have arrested two men in connection with the shooting.
Friday, May 7
St. Louis
Two people were killed and three others injured in a shooting at a park Friday night, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Police officers face off with Black Lives Matter protesters. (photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
Law Enforcement Groups Drive Anti-Protest Laws, New Analysis Shows
Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Brown writes: "Organizations affiliated with law enforcement constitute the most significant lobbying force fueling the unprecedented number of anti-protest bills introduced by state lawmakers this year, according to an independent researcher."
A separate Greenpeace report looked at corporate support for politicians who pushed anti-protest and voter suppression laws.
rganizations affiliated with law enforcement constitute the most significant lobbying force fueling the unprecedented number of anti-protest bills introduced by state lawmakers this year, according to an independent researcher.
In search of which companies were lobbying for the bills, researcher Connor Gibson watched hours of hearings and reviewed lobbying records from more than two dozen states. Yet Gibson identified hardly any companies. Instead, he found example after example of law enforcement officers, including representatives of police unions, showing up to advocate for legislation. “That is the only trend I could find,” he said, noting that police influence varied significantly from state to state and bill to bill.
Law enforcement organizations — mostly police unions — also collectively contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaigns of state lawmakers who went on to sponsor dozens of anti-protest bills this year, data included in a separate, report by Greenpeace shows.
Gibson’s police lobbying analysis, which he completed for the Proteus Fund, and the Greenpeace report provide the most complete picture yet of the moneyed interests that have fueled the proliferation this year of anti-protest and voter suppression bills. State lawmakers introduced 361 voter suppression bills in all but three states as of late March, while more than 80 anti-protest bills have been introduced in 34 states.
The bills also bear the fingerprints of corporations, but understanding the corporate money requires examining campaign contributions. The Greenpeace report reveals that the same set of companies represent the biggest contributors to sponsors of both types of legislation. Two telecommunication giants, two tobacco corporations, and an insurance company are among the top 10 corporate contributors to sponsors of both voter suppression bills and anti-protest bills. They include AT&T Inc., Comcast, Philip Morris’s parent company Altria Group, Reynolds American Inc., and United Health Group.
“It was eye-opening to me as a consumer of AT&T,” said Folabi Olagbaju, Greenpeace’s democracy campaign director. The telecommunications giant is based in Texas, where, at 3 a.m. on Friday morning, a voter suppression bill passed in the state House of Representatives.
While Greenpeace is calling on companies to support what it considers pro-democracy legislation, like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the new report is focused on corporate support for the bills that the group opposes. Olagbaju said, “We want them to stop funding politicians who support anti-protest and anti-voter measures.”
Police Fuel Anti-Protest Bills
Separate phenomena are to some degree driving the uptick in voter suppression and anti-protest bills. Voter suppression bills respond to President Donald Trump’s repeated efforts to undermine the 2020 election by spreading false claims of voter fraud. In turn, state lawmakers introduced bills that contain a range of provisions: eliminating automatic voter registration, making voting by mail and absentee voting more difficult, requiring IDs for voting, shrinking the number of ballot drop box locations, or creating systems for regularly purging voter rolls.
The proliferation of anti-protest bills is driven by fears surrounding the uprisings against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of law enforcement agents last summer. The bills include measures such as broadening the definition of unlawful assembly, barring protesters from public benefits, providing legal protections for people who run over demonstrators with vehicles, and allowing protest participants to be held without bail.
For many of the anti-protest bill sponsors, no outside law enforcement influence was necessary. In 19 states where anti-protest bills have been introduced since June 2020, former law enforcement officers-turned-lawmakers acted as sponsors. Four of the co-sponsors of Arizona’s pending anti-protest bill, for example, have law enforcement ties.
Law enforcement groups did support many of the efforts, though. Such organizations donated $342,602 in the 2019-2020 election cycle to sponsors of anti-protest bills in 2021. The vast majority of those on the list are police and correctional unions. The Southern States Police Benevolent Association and Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York were the top two law enforcement donors to anti-protest bill sponsors, contributing $39,300 and $38,350 respectively. Neither group responded to a request for comment. Also included were a handful of campaign funds for sheriff’s office candidates.
The most meaningful demonstration of an organization or interest group’s support for a bill is to lobby for it. In 13 states, law enforcement officers or police unions have expressed support for at least one anti-protest bill since June, according to Gibson, the researcher. Among them are Arkansas, Florida, and Indiana, where bills recently passed into law, and Arizona, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin, where bills are still being considered.
There is a set of exceptions to the trend of corporations failing to show up to lobby for anti-protest bills. A subset of the bills claim to protect so-called critical infrastructure, such as utilities or energy infrastructure, like oil pipelines. The bills would enhance penalties for trespassing on property containing such infrastructure, for impeding the operation of the facilities, or for conspiring with an individual to do so. Those bills are a reaction to Indigenous-led movements to halt pipeline construction, such as the ongoing fight against the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. According to the Greenpeace analysis, all of the top 10 most prolific lobbyists for critical infrastructure bills since 2017 are fossil fuel corporations.
AT&T Mum as Texas Bill Advances
After Trump supporters broke into the Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to halt the certification of President Joe Biden’s election, a spotlight was placed on corporate support of anti-democratic movements. Organizers are increasingly pressuring companies to stop funding and publicly disavow lawmakers who advance efforts to override election results or prevent people from voting. But there has been less focus on funding for supporters of anti-protest legislation.
The Greenpeace report targets that blind spot as well as the disconnect between companies’ rhetoric and the lawmakers they fund. “These legislators are not paying any price for what they are doing to undermine our democracy and undermine our right to protest,” said Olagbaju.
(Of the five companies that were among Greenpeace’s top 10 corporate contributors to sponsors of both anti-protest and voter suppression legislation, only Comcast responded to The Intercept, saying, “We believe that all Americans should enjoy equitable access to secure elections and we have long supported and promoted voter education, registration and participation campaigns across the country to achieve that goal. Efforts to limit or impede access to this vital constitutional right for any citizen are not consistent with our values.”)
In the wake of the Capitol insurrection, numerous Fortune 500 corporations promised to pause contributions to federal legislators who voted against certifying the vote for Biden — or to pause contributions to federal candidates altogether. Among those that pledged were four of the five top corporate contributors to state anti-protest and voter repression bills (the Intercept could find no record of Reynolds American making such a pledge), as well as at least 43 other corporations that had also recently contributed to future sponsors of voter suppression bills.
AT&T stands out for the size of its contributions and its lackluster attempts to respond to the moment. The corporation was the largest corporate donor in the 2019-2020 election cycle to Republicans who voted against election certification, and it is also among a small set of companies that have already broken their commitment to cease contributions to objectors, an analysis by the Los Angeles Times showed. An AT&T spokesperson asserted to the Times that they’d been assured that their money wouldn’t go to anyone who voted against election certification when they contributed to a multi-candidate PAC chaired by one such objector.
None of the group of five signed a statement created by the Black Economic Alliance condemning state voter suppression bills. AT&T has also evaded local organizing efforts. The Dallas-based telecommunications giant became the target of protest for its failure to strongly oppose Texas’s voter suppression bill. The corporation continued to sit on the sidelines this week, even as two dozen corporations signed a statement by Fair Elections Texas urging lawmakers to “oppose any changes that would restrict eligible voters’ access to the ballot.”
What AT&T has said was tepid. “We understand that election laws are complicated, not our company’s expertise, and ultimately the responsibility of elected officials,” CEO John Stankey said. “We are working together with other businesses through groups like the Business Roundtable to support efforts to enhance every person’s ability to vote. In this way, the right knowledge and expertise can be applied to make a difference on this fundamental and critical issue.” Voter rights groups argue that it isn’t enough.
“The fact that they do give money on both sides of every issue makes it more critical for AT&T to state its own position,” said Devin Branch, lead organizer on the Texas Organizing Project’s Right2Justice campaign for Harris County, which includes Houston, where voter turnout increased 10 percent in 2020 with no evidence of fraud. The bill seeks to prevent a fundamental shift in power in Texas, Branch said. “This is Jim Crow 2.0. This is not a partisan issue.”
AT&T is also the largest contributor to lawmakers who sponsored anti-protest bills — something that has gotten less attention.
Branch said it only heightens the urgency for the corporation to take a stand. “It is only through protest and the vote that Black and Latino working-class people have made any advances toward equality in this society,” he said. “It is hypocritical for politicians and corporations like AT&T to say that they stand for equality and racial equity and social justice while undermining the only peaceable means we have to achieve it.”
The Greenpeace report points out that, despite the distinct driving factors, 44 state legislators have sponsored at least one anti-protest bill as well as at least one voter suppression bill. The two types of bills have a similar impact: They are both expected to hit hardest communities of color.
Olagbaju said, “There is a clear racial justice connection between voter suppression and anti-protest bills.”
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/AP/Shutterstock)
The Supreme Court Considers an Important Showdown Over Abortion This Week
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "We're likely to find out this week whether the Court will dismiss [a very significant abortion case] and that decision could tell us a great deal about how fast the Court plans to move in rolling back abortion rights."
The Court has been surprisingly hesitant to weigh in on abortion. But a pending case is likely to force its hand.
he Supreme Court has been sitting on a potentially very significant abortion case for the last two months, one that the Court’s rules say it should dismiss. We’re likely to find out this week whether the Court will dismiss this case, however, and that decision could tell us a great deal about how fast the Court plans to move in rolling back abortion rights.
In February, about a month after President Joe Biden took office, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear three consolidated cases challenging a Trump administration policy targeting abortion clinics.
A 1970 federal law, often referred to as Title X, provides federal grants to health providers who offer “family planning” care such as birth control and infertility treatments. In 2019, the Trump administration imposed several strict limits on providers who receive Title X grants.
Among other things, these providers are forbidden from referring any patient to an abortion provider. Title X grant recipients may provide a list of health providers to a patient, but only a minority of the providers on this list may perform abortions — and the list may not “identify which providers on the list perform abortion.”
Additionally, Title X grant recipients that also perform abortions must impose a “clear physical and financial separation” between any program funded by Title X and abortion services. Planned Parenthood estimated that the cost of complying with this “physical separation” requirement would be “nearly $625,000 per affected service site.”
Many providers, including Planned Parenthood, dropped out of the Title X program altogether because they considered the Trump administration’s rules too burdensome.
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear these cases, which are consolidated under the case name American Medical Association v. Becerra, was somewhat surprising because President Biden had already begun the process of repealing the Trump-era policy when the Court announced that it would take up this case. Biden directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to “review” Trump’s policy and to “consider, as soon as practicable, whether to suspend, revise, or rescind” it a little over a week after taking office.
Though repealing this Trump-era effort to reduce access to abortion will take months — the Biden administration must complete a lengthy process known as “notice and comment” — the current administration predicts that it will complete this process in the early fall, rendering American Medical Association moot long before the Court is likely to decide the case.
Indeed, in March, the Biden administration filed a joint request alongside the various parties challenging the Trump administration’s Title X rule, which asked the Court to dismiss American Medical Association. That should have been the end of the case, as the Supreme Court’s rules provide that “whenever all parties file with the Clerk an agreement in writing that a case be dismissed,” the Court “will enter an order of dismissal.”
And yet, the Court has held onto the case — at least for now — even though the Court typically does not agree to hear cases that it knows will become moot before the case can be briefed, argued, and decided. And it rarely holds onto a case after all the parties have asked for the case to be dismissed.
We’re likely to learn very soon what the justices plan to do with American Medical Association. In late April, the Court called for briefs explaining whether the Biden administration plans to enforce the Trump administration’s rule until the new regulations rescinding that rule are finalized. The last of these briefs is due this week, so the justices are likely to rule very soon on whether they will dismiss the case.
If the Court does hold onto the case, that would be a deeply worrying sign for supporters of abortion rights. It would suggest that the justices may race to hand down a decision upholding the Trump administration’s rule before the Biden administration can rescind it. And it may also allow the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority to expand the government’s ability to restrict abortion.
A brief history of Title X and the anti-abortion “gag rule”
Title X provides about $286 million in funding every year for “comprehensive family planning and related preventive health services,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services, with “priority [...] given to persons from low-income families.”
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and advocacy group that supports broad access to reproductive care, Title X “supports nearly 4,000 service sites nationwide, serving approximately four million people per year.”
By law, no Title X grant money “shall be used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning,” so the money cannot be used directly to provide abortion care. But past administrations have disagreed on just how much separation must exist between health providers who receive Title X funds and abortion providers or facilities.
In 1988, the Reagan administration handed down some fairly strict restrictions on Title X providers — including that projects funded by Title X “may not provide counseling concerning the use of abortion as a method of family planning or provide referral for abortion as a method of family planning.” This 1988 rule was often referred to as the “gag rule,” and the Supreme Court upheld it in Rust v. Sullivan (1991).
But a few months after the Supreme Court decision, President George H.W. Bush backed away from the gag rule, writing in a 1991 memo to HHS that referrals “may be made by Title X programs to full-service health care providers that perform abortions,” provided that abortion wasn’t the provider’s “principal activity.” Then, in 1993, President Bill Clinton took office, and he swiftly rescinded the Reagan era “gag rule.” In 2000, the Clinton administration issued a final rule that required Title X programs to provide “information and counseling” about “pregnancy termination,” and to provide a referral to an abortion clinic “upon request” by the patient, a rule that stayed in place throughout the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.
Then, in 2019, the Trump administration implemented its rule, which imposed strict limits on Title X recipients similar to the ones imposed by the Reagan-era gag rule.
The legal arguments in American Medical Association, briefly explained
The plaintiffs in American Medical Association and the consolidated cases raise several challenges to the Trump administration’s rule.
Congress enacted two laws in the years following Rust which arguably limit the government’s power to reinstate the 1988 version of the gag rule. The first was a 1996 budget rider which clarified that Title X funds “shall not be expended for abortions,” but that also provided that “all pregnancy counseling shall be nondirective” — directing patients neither toward abortions nor away from them. And a provision of the Affordable Care Act, which President Barack Obama signed in 2010, provides that HHS “shall not promulgate any regulation that ... interferes with communications regarding a full range of treatment options between the patient and the provider.”
The plaintiffs argue the Trump rule violates both the 1996 “nondirective” requirement and the Affordable Care Act’s requirement.
They also argue that the Trump administration didn’t provide an adequate justification for many parts of its rule. Under the “notice and comment” process, an agency that intends to hand down a new regulation typically must announce its proposed regulation in advance and give members of the public an opportunity to comment on it. While the agency isn’t required to scrap a proposal simply because some of these comments disagree with it, federal agencies do have some obligation to provide a response to commenters and an explanation for any concerns raised by the commenters.
Several commenters expressed concerns that the Trump administration’s requirement that abortion services be physically separated from Title X programs would impose unreasonable costs on providers — as mentioned above, Planned Parenthood estimated that it would have to pay an average of $625,000 per facility to comply with this requirement.
Yet the Trump administration claimed, without any apparent justification, that it would only cost Title X providers $30,000 to comply with the physical separation requirement. As a lower court explained in striking down this requirement, “there is no justification in the Final Rule for the $30,000 amount,” and a lawyer for the Trump administration was only able to offer a vague explanation for where this number came from. “For all we can tell,” the lower court concluded, “this number was pulled from thin air.”
The court also concluded that, in relying on this seemingly arbitrary $30,000 estimate, the Trump administration did not meet its obligation to explain why it was implementing the new rule and to offer a reasoned response to commenters.
So there are strong legal arguments against the Trump-era rule. Nevertheless, lower court judges have largely split along party lines when asked to answer whether this rule should be upheld.
A conservative 11-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, for example, upheld the Trump-era gag rule — largely relying on the argument that Rust remains good law and that it wasn’t displaced by the 1996 or 2010 laws governing the relationship between providers and patients. The four Democratic members of this panel dissented.
Similarly, the left-leaning Fourth Circuit split entirely along party lines in its decision striking down the Trump rule — with every Democratic appointee joining that result and every Republican appointee in dissent.
So what’s at stake in American Medical Association?
Given this partisan divide among lower court judges, it’s not hard to guess how the Supreme Court — where Republicans hold six of the nine seats — is likely to decide American Medical Association if given the opportunity to do so. The uncertain question in American Medical Association isn’t how these justices will view the legal issues presented by the case, it’s whether the Supreme Court will honor the parties’ request to dismiss the case.
If the justices do not honor that request, that could set off an unseemly race where the Court rushes to hand down its decision before the Biden administration rescinds the Trump-era rule and renders the case moot.
Under the Court’s ordinary procedures, the earliest the justices could hear this case is next October — not nearly soon enough to win the race if the Biden administration is correct that its new rule will be finalized in early fall. So the Court would need to depart from its ordinary procedures, either by scheduling a rare summer oral argument or bypassing oral arguments altogether, in order to decide this case before it becomes moot.
Because it remains unclear whether the case will be dismissed or not, the parties have not even briefed the case. Indeed, it’s not even clear who the Court would appoint to argue in defense of the Trump administration’s rule, although a coalition of Republican state attorneys general and another coalition of conservative and religious health groups seek the right to do so.
Without full briefing, it’s also not entirely clear what’s at stake in the case; we don’t yet know what the rule’s defenders will ask for in their briefs. At the very least, however, the Court could firmly reject the various legal arguments against the gag rule and permit a future Republican administration to reinstate the Trump-era rule shortly after taking office.
The Court could also potentially include language in its opinion suggesting that the gag rule is required by federal law. In a 2020 opinion concerning the Trump administration’s interpretation of a provision of Obamacare, Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion included a bunch of gratuitous language suggesting that several important provisions of Obamacare are unconstitutional. The Court could repeat this performance in the American Medical Association case, effectively using it as a vehicle to limit access to abortion during Democratic administrations.
In the worst-case scenario for abortion rights, the Court could even include some language in its opinion suggesting that both the states and the federal government have broad authority to restrict abortion.
In any event, the obvious course of action is that the Court should dismiss this case. That’s what the Court’s rules call for, and dismissal is especially appropriate because the case is about to become moot.
If the justices decide not to take this obvious course of action, that could be a very worrisome sign about the future of abortion rights.
People walk along Wall Street. (photo: AP)
US Millionaire CEOs Saw 29% Pay Raise While Workers' Pay Fell, Report Finds
Lauren Aratani, Guardian UK
Aratani writes: "The millionaire chief executives of some of the American companies with the lowest-paid workers saw an average pay raise of 29% last year while their workers saw a 2% decrease, according to a report released Tuesday."
Workers saw 2% decrease as companies gave leaders bonuses and forgiving performance benchmarks amid pandemic
he millionaire chief executives of some of the American companies with the lowest-paid workers saw an average pay raise of 29% last year while their workers saw a 2% decrease, according to a report released Tuesday.
The Institute for Policy Studies calculated that the average CEO compensation in 2020 was $15.3m, when looking at the 100 companies with the lowest median wage for workers in the S&P 500 index.
The median worker pay was $28,187. This means that chief executives saw a 29% pay raise compared to 2019, while workers saw a 2% decrease. For all 100 companies, median worker pay was below $50,000 for 2020.
The compensation hike came as companies gave their top leaders hefty bonuses and forgiving performance benchmarks during the pandemic, allowing the top executives to cash in while their low-wage employees were essential workers.
Hilton’s CEO, Christopher Nassetta, had a compensation package worth $55.9m in 2020, the highest of the executives analyzed in the report, while median pay at the company was $28,608, down from $43,695 in 2019. Since the pandemic affected the company’s expected performance, and thus Nassetta’s expected compensation, the company’s board restructured its stock awards to give its CEO ample pay in 2020, according to the report.
Other CEOs were met with friendly treatment from their respective corporate boards. Chipotle’s board removed the company’s poor financial results from the peak of the shutdown and excluded Covid-related costs when calculating CEO Brian Niccol’s compensation. Niccol received $38m last year, which is 2,898 times more than the company’s median worker pay of $13,127.
David Gibbs, the CEO of Yum Brands, parent company to KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, ended up with a $1.4m cash bonus and stock grant valued at more than $880,000 after the company changed his performance metrics. The bonus was over twice the $900,000 of his salary Gibbs announced he would forgo to fund one-time $1,000 bonuses to the general managers of his company’s restaurants last March. Gibbs’ 2020 compensation was $14.6m while the company’s median pay was $11,377, according to the report.
The authors of the report urge support for a bill introduced in March by Bernie Sanders, called the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, which would incentivize companies to narrow the pay gap between workers and top executives by imposing a tax rate on companies with high gaps. Publicly traded companies are required to report the ratio between their CEO and median worker pay to the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
“During the pandemic, millions of people are struggling to put food on the table, [and a] handful of billionaires are becoming richer,” Sanders said in March, when introducing the bill. “Is that the America that we want? I don’t think so.”
Such a tax rate already exists in Portland, Oregon, where the city has a 10% tax surcharge on companies that pay their CEOs 100 to 250 times more than their median workers and a 25% surcharge to companies whose ratio is over 250. In 2019, the tax raised $2.4m from 153 companies who acknowledged the tax liability.
Voters in San Francisco last year approved a ballot measure of a similar tax based on pay ratio, to start in 2022. The city expects the tax to generate up to $140m in revenue.
People stand at the site of a blast in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 8, 2021. (photo: Reuters)
Afghanistan in Mourning After School Bombing in Kabul Kills 85, Mostly Hazara Shiite Girls
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "At least 85 people, mostly young girls, were killed after several bombs exploded outside a school in the capital Kabul Saturday. Survivors said the bombs were timed to go off as the girls left their classrooms."
t least 85 people, mostly young girls, were killed in Afghanistan after several bomb blasts outside a school in the capital Kabul. Survivors said the bombs were timed to go off as the girls left school for the day. The neighborhood where the attack occurred is mostly populated by the minority Hazara Shia community, and the Afghan government blamed the Taliban, though the group denies responsibility. The massacre came one week after U.S. and NATO forces started their military withdrawal from Afghanistan and amid a surge in violence. We go to Kabul to speak with Basir Bita, a mentor with Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers whose brother is a survivor of the attack, and Afghan American scholar Zaher Wahab. “Women and children continue to be the main victims of this occupation and invasion and the mayhem,” Wahab says, but he dismisses justifications for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as “protecting women and girls.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. You can sign up for our daily news digest by emailing the word “democracynow” — without a space, “democracynow” — text that word to 66866 today, and you’ll get our news alerts and daily headlines.
This is Democracy Now!, as we go to Afghanistan. At least 85 people, mostly young girls, were killed after several bombs exploded outside a school in the capital Kabul Saturday. Survivors said the bombs were timed to go off as the girls left their classrooms.
SURVIVOR: [translated] The school time was over, and we were coming out, when a car exploded in front of us.
AMY GOODMAN: Devastated families buried their loved ones amidst mounting despair and anger.
MOHAMMAD SADIQ: [translated] She was 15 years old and in eighth grade. She was very intelligent and didn’t miss a single day of school. Yesterday her mother told her to not go to school, but she said, “No, mother, I will go today but not go tomorrow.” She told the truth, and we buried her today.
AMY GOODMAN: The blasts occurred in a neighborhood of Kabul mostly populated by the minority Hazara Shia community. The Afghan government blamed the Taliban, but the group denied responsibility. The massacre came one week after U.S. and NATO forces began their military withdrawal from Afghanistan and amidst a surge in violence. Elsewhere in the country, at least 11 people were killed and dozens, including women and children, were injured in a bus bombing in southern Zabul province late Sunday.
Meanwhile, a new report has found 40% of all civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan in the last five years were children. The organization Action on Armed Violence estimates U.S. and Afghan airstrikes have killed 785 children and injured 813 since 2016.
We go first to Kabul, Afghanistan, where we’re joined by Basir Bita, a mentor with Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. His brother is a teacher who survived the bombing outside his school Saturday.
Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you describe what happened and tell us about the girls? Basir, can you hear me?
BASIR BITA: Yes, I can hear you.
AMY GOODMAN: Ah, OK. Can you tell us about what happened this weekend? Describe this school for girls in Kabul. The death toll is just staggering, at at least 85 right now.
BASIR BITA: Yes. It happened yesterday — two days ago in the afternoon. I was shocked when I heard the story. I quickly tried to reach my brother over phone, and he didn’t pick up when I reached him three times. And I was super shocked. And after a while, I managed to reach to my brother. And he said, “I’m shocked.” He couldn’t speak — his colleagues told me that he couldn’t speak for one hour, too, because he was totally shocked. And yesterday, my wife and I went to the very place that the incident took place. And all I saw was that people, mothers, sisters, brothers, just speaking out, crying, crying and crying. This is a story of [inaudible].
AMY GOODMAN: We’re having a little trouble hearing you. We’re going to try to clear up that line. We’re also on with Zaher Wahab, who’s an Afghan American professor who taught for four decades at Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and for seven years at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, goes back and forth between Afghanistan and the United States.
Professor Wahab, thanks for rejoining us. You’re a professor of education. Just if you can talk about this school — it is horrifying to say “this target” — and what this means, and what the girls were doing at this school?
ZAHER WAHAB: Yes. Good morning, Amy, and thank you for having me. And I want to commend you for your wonderful journalism.
This was actually not the first time that a school had been attacked. The school is located in what is called Barchi, which is in the western part of Kabul, sort of in the suburbs. And this is mainly populated by the Hazara population, which constitute about a third of the Afghan population and all of them being Shiites. This particular school was a mixed school, and apparently it operates actually three shifts per day, for boys and for girls, and it’s a high school. It’s called the Shuhada high school.
And the explosion occurred — the car apparently was parked at 1 p.m. And when the students were out at 4:30 p.m., somehow word got around that there’s a charity organization in front or near the gate of the school distributing some goods and so forth. And so, most of the girls, hundreds of girls, gathered around at the entrance. And at that point, the car bomb in a Toyota, which was packed with [inaudible] apparently, car explodes. And then, a few minutes, there were two subsequent explosions via IED, improvised explosion devices. So, this is what happened.
And then, of course, you know, you said that some 83 girls were killed and more than 150 were injured. And apparently, the explosion was so strong that some of the students completely evaporated. They disappeared. They couldn’t be found. And then, other than that, you know, people were maimed and dismembered. You know, you found heads without bodies and bodies without heads, limbs and so forth.
And then the people rushed, and apparently this was a mile — a kilometer from a police station. And it took the police station about an hour to respond to the explosion. So, people were very, very angry. When the police and ambulances arrived, some of the people actually began attacking the police and the ambulances and talked to — you know, to sort of curse the government and blame the government for its indifference and lack of attention to the security of the school.
But, as I said, this was at least the third time that a mass murder had occurred in this very same area, which is populated by Hazaras and the poor Hazaras. You know, there was an attack exactly a year ago by a maternity hospital, killing a lot of people. Then there was an attack on a judo club where a lot of people were killed. And then there was an attack in the last year on a main tutoring center where a lot of students were killed. But we should also point out that just in the last few months, there was a major attack on Kabul University in the city itself, in the capital, on the law school, which killed at least 24 students. And then, on April 1st, there was an attack, a car bomb attack, on high school graduates who had gathered in Logar province, which is not very far from Kabul, and they were getting ready to take the entrance examination. So, such mass murders or massacres are sort of the usual thing in Afghanistan, unfortunately, other than the targeted assassinations all over the country of judges, lawyers, professors, journalists, civil society people, and also the war that is currently raging in 13 states.
So, I will stop there, but also I want to point out that one glimmer of hope seems to be that just last night, both the Taliban and the government announced a three-day ceasefire to take place during the Eid al-Fitr.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the early justifications, Professor, for the invasion of Afghanistan was protecting women and girls from Taliban misogyny. I remember Laura Bush would often come out to talk about this. You’re highly critical of this pretext. What is your message to those who say now, “See, the U.S. has to stay in Afghanistan once again to protect girls”?
ZAHER WAHAB: I think this is sort of wrong, and it’s not really exactly true, because if you look at the statistics in the last 20 years, a lot of women and a lot of children, as you pointed out, have been killed. But also, right now there’s no safety or security anywhere. I mean, it’s very interesting to read the United States State Department advisory, you know, which advises Americans to leave Afghanistan but also advises Americans and others not to go to Afghanistan. And the advisory lists, you know, specifically, all kinds of places — schools, universities, clubs, restaurants, mosques, sports events, etc. — that these are all all over the country unsafe and that people should not go to Afghanistan.
But also, you know, we should remember that the initial assault on October 7, 2001, by the United States was really a retaliation. You know, it wasn’t a planned action or invasion or occupation, I should say. But it was simply a reflexive response to the crime of 9/11. So, later, of course, the American government had to have these justifications, and the liberation of — so-called liberation of women was one thing.
But we have to point out that women continue — women and children continue to be the main victims of this occupation and invasion and the mayhem. If you look at, for example, 85% of the women in the country are still illiterate. Child marriage is very common. Polygamy is very common. And poverty amongst women is very, very common. And altogether, 70% of the people are poor. So, whether it was the so-called liberation of women or ending the narcotics or bringing peace, prosperity and democracy to Afghanistan, all of these were, I think, sort of for television, for the American audience, because the facts on the ground are entirely different.
And it is very questionable, and it’s being said by observers: What happened to the $135 billion aid package by the United States? And where is the development? Because, you know, right now most people — and women, in particular — live in the Middle Ages. You know, they’re poor. They’re widowed. They’re, you know, brutalized. And it’s not really true, although a few women, we should point out — a few women in the major cities are going to school, and some to the universities, and have government jobs and travel. But for most women, like most Afghans, people live in pain and suffering.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to see if we can — if we have a clearer line with Basir Bita, again, mentor with Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, your brother just barely surviving this attack on the girls’ school in Kabul. The Taliban have not claimed responsibility, though they have been blamed for this. Who do you think is responsible? And overall, the significance of the U.S. leaving?
BASIR BITA: You know, there are different stories. Like, I’m hearing different stories from different sources saying that — some claim that the ISIS or Taliban are responsible for the incident, but some other people claim that the responsibility goes to the central government, because, you know, almost two or three weeks ago, I remember clearly, at the same school that the incident took place, along with one or two other schools in the area, the students and the teachers and school administrators ran onto the streets and shouted out that “We need more resources. We need textbooks. We need teachers.” They lack facilities, educational facilities. And you would see that within three or two weeks, such a big incident takes place on the very school that the students and teachers rallied on the streets. And it’s unclear who is responsible for this incident.
AMY GOODMAN: Human Rights Watch has put out a statement warning that groups should not be abandoning support, financial support, for women, warning Afghan women’s access to healthcare is at risk due to cuts in international aid. The group said, quote, “donors are locked in a waiting game to see whether the withdrawal of foreign troops will result in the Taliban gaining greater control of the country. But this is no excuse for cutting funds for essential services that aid groups have managed to deliver in insecure and Taliban-controlled areas.” So often these nonprofits will link up with the military. And when a military leaves, the nonprofits also leave. They find it harder to get funding. Your final comment, Basir Bita?
BASIR BITA: That this is a vicious circle that has been played since the U.S. invasion in 2001. How long are we going to need for the U.S. involvement, financially, economically, politically and militarily, in Afghanistan? There was no development plan. There was no clear action plan for Afghanistan when the U.S. planned to invade Afghanistan. And it is still — I believe that the final solution will be the involvement of Afghan people, Afghan government, civil society organizations and activists, along with the Taliban and other insurgent groups, to come up with a very clear, useful and applicable plan for the future of Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN: Basir Bita, I want to thank you for being with us, mentor with Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. His brother is a teacher at the high school in Kabul, Afghanistan, who survived Saturday’s attack. Thank you for joining us from Afghanistan. He visited the site over the weekend. And Zaher Wahab, Afghan American professor, speaking to us from Portland, Oregon.
When we come back, we speak to Ari Berman about the latest Republican attacks on voting rights, the voter suppression laws that are being passed in state after state in this country. Stay with us.
A pig on a farm. (photo: Civil Eats)
Air Pollution From Farms Leads to 17,900 US Deaths Per Year, Study Finds
Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post
Kaplan writes: "The smell of hog feces was overwhelming, Elsie Herring said. The breezes that wafted from the hog farm next to her mother's Duplin County, N.C., home carried hazardous gases: methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide."
The first-of-its-kind report pinpoints meat production as the leading source of deadly pollution
he smell of hog feces was overwhelming, Elsie Herring said. The breezes that wafted from the hog farm next to her mother’s Duplin County, N.C., home carried hazardous gases: methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide.
“The odor is so offensive that we start gagging, we start coughing,” she told a congressional committee in November 2019. Herring, who died last week, said she and other residents developed headaches, breathing problems and heart conditions from the fumes.
Now, a first-of-its-kind study shows that air pollution from Duplin County farms is linked to roughly 98 premature deaths per year, 89 of which are linked to emissions directly caused by hogs. Those losses are among more than 17,000 annual deaths attributable to pollution from farms across the United States, according to research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Animal agriculture is the worst emitter, researchers say, responsible for 80 percent of deaths from pollution related to food production. Gases associated with manure and animal feed produce small, lung-irritating particles capable of drifting hundreds of miles. These emissions now account for more annual deaths than pollution from coal power plants. Yet, while pollution from power plants, factories and vehicles is restricted under the Clean Air Act, there is less regulation of air quality around farms.
“The food system has really flown under the radar” as a source of deadly pollution, said University of Minnesota professor Jason Hill, the lead author of the new report. “But what we eat affects not just our own health, but the health of others. We’re showing that directly.”
Jim Monroe, a spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council, criticized the study as “highly suspect,” saying it “irresponsibly draws conclusions based on modeling and estimates.”
“U.S. pork producers have a strong track record of environmental stewardship,” he wrote in an email, citing a 2019 study from Harper Consulting and Southern Utah University that found significant reductions in ammonia content from pig farms.
A spokesman for Smithfield Foods, which operates industrial hog operations in Duplin County, referred The Washington Post to a 2019 report in which the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality said it did not find significant air-quality problems in the region.
Ethan Lane, vice president of government affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, also questioned the methodology of the study, which utilized relatively new air-quality models. “It appears to be based on faulty assumptions and riddled with data gaps,” he said in a statement.
This is the first major report to link air-pollution deaths to specific food items, Hill said. While greenhouse gases cause the same amount of warming no matter where on the planet they’re produced, the health effects of air pollution are dependent on atmospheric chemistry, local weather and the size and health of communities living nearby. Only with advanced new air-quality models has it become possible to pinpoint the consequences of pollution produced hundreds of miles away.
“Agriculture is a tough industry” to monitor, said environmental scientist Maya Almaraz, who was not involved in the study. “They’re already working at such thin margins, and really important to the economy. Regulations are not taken lightly in those systems.”
But, she added, “we have to be working with those systems to protect the people who live in those communities.”
Farm pollution is most dangerous when it occurs upwind of densely populated areas, Hill said. Most of the deaths in his analysis happened in California’s Central Valley, eastern North Carolina and the Corn Belt of the Upper Midwest.
The most insidious kinds of air pollution are known as particulate matter (PM) 2.5 — tiny particles one-thirtieth the width of a human hair, which can become lodged in lungs or absorbed into the bloodstream. Exposure to PM 2.5 can lead to asthma and other breathing problems, and over the long term increases the risk of dying of heart disease, cancer and stroke.
These particles are directly produced when farmers till fields or burn crops before harvest. They can also come in the form of dust kicked up by livestock in large animal feeding operations.
This “primary” PM 2.5 is associated with about 4,800 premature deaths per year, the study found.
But “secondary” particulate matter, which is generated when emissions from farms interact with other gases in the atmosphere, is even more problematic. This is especially true for ammonia, a highly reactive molecule released by manure and fertilizer, which can combine with other pollutants such as nitrogen and sulfur compounds to create small, hazardous particles.
“Of all pollutants, ammonia is the one that has the greatest impact on mortality,” Hill said. His analysis suggests that ammonia emissions contribute to about 12,400 deaths per year.
This is what makes pollution from animal agriculture so dangerous, Hill added. At many beef, pork and dairy facilities, animal waste is stored in massive “lagoons,” such as the one near Herring’s mother’s home in Duplin County. There, the microbes that break down feces release huge amounts of ammonia. Many facilities spray nitrogen-rich liquid waste on nearby farm fields, another source of contamination.
Ammonia is also produced from over-application of fertilizer on such crops as corn. Since much of the nation’s corn goes to animal feed, Hill counted those emissions toward animal agriculture’s footprint.
All those emissions added up to make meat the biggest source of deadly emissions, Hill said. Per serving, the rate of air-pollution deaths linked to red meat was twice as high as that of eggs, three times higher than dairy and at least 15 times higher than all fruits and vegetables.
“This type of research is extremely important,” said Blakely Hildebrand, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center who has fought emissions from North Carolina hog farms. “The lagoon system that has existed for decades harms people and harms the environment and it’s time for a change.”
Yet because ammonia is so reactive, it’s difficult to detect unless huge amounts are released at once. When the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality agreed to monitor air pollution in Duplin County as part of a settlement with Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help (REACH) and other civil rights groups, it found just five instances of elevated ammonia levels, none of which were high enough to trigger federal action. The program was discontinued after a year, when the department said it found no significant air-quality problems.
But the survey was criticized as inadequate because the environment department intentionally sited its monitoring stations far from hog farms. Almost all Duplin County residents live within three miles of at least one of these operations.
And the health disparities in Duplin County and places like it are substantial. A 2018 study by researchers at Duke University found that mortality rates in North Carolina communities with hog farms were 30 percent higher than in the rest of the state. California’s San Joaquin Valley, another hot spot for ammonia pollution, has the highest rate of childhood asthma in the United States, according to the American Lung Association.
“You go through the central valley and it’s just this thick layer of gray,” said Almaraz, who is the program manager for the Working Lands Innovation Center at the University of California at Davis.
Although California has some of the country’s strictest air-quality standards for cars and smokestacks, she said, “we’re not really doing anything at a regulatory standpoint to decrease emissions coming from farms.”
“But recognizing these sources really provides mitigation opportunities,” she added. “Now that we know this is an important source, what can we do about it?”
Hill and his colleagues found that farmers could halve the number of air-pollution deaths from food production by changing their practices. Instead of leaving manure to decompose in lagoons, they could incorporate it into soil as fertilizer. Covering lagoons, separating urine from feces and controlling the acidity and temperature of lagoons would also reduce ammonia emissions.
“We know the technology is there,” said Devon Hall, an environmental justice advocate who co-founded REACH in Duplin County. “And we would hope that the industry would do the right thing.”
Targeted fertilizer applications would reduce the amount of ammonia released into the air on croplands, Hill said. Reducing tillage and burning of waste and cutting emissions from equipment could also lead to small health gains.
But the greatest power to save lives lies with consumers, the scientists found. If Americans switched to a “flexitarian” diet, getting at least half their calories from fruits and vegetable and limiting animal protein to just a few meals per week, air-pollution mortality from agriculture would fall 68 percent.
That cultural shift would deliver a host of other benefits. Research suggests that reducing meat consumption could reduce global mortality by 6 to 10 percent — preventing hundreds of thousands of premature deaths.
Meat production is also the most resource-intensive form of agriculture. A whopping 30 percent of Earth’s ice-free land mass is used for pasture for livestock, and red meat requires more water and carbon than any other food. If Earth’s biggest beef eaters limited their intake to 1.5 hamburgers a week, they could avoid about 5.5 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year — twice the annual emissions of India.
Discussions about dietary changes are always sensitive, Hill acknowledged. When Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) declared a “MeatOut” day in March, Republican state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer called it an attack against her county and the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association called for people to flock to restaurants and order meat dishes.
But Hill hoped the study would give consumers one more thing to consider when they’re putting food on their plates.
“It’s one thing to eat a low carbon diet,” he said. “But it’s another to say, ‘Gosh if I eat this delicious lentil dish instead of a hamburger it might be better for my own health but also for other people.’ ”
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