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Daniel Ellsberg Disclosure: Risk of Nuclear War Over Taiwan in 1958 Said to Be Greater Than Publicly Known
Charlie Savage, The New York Times
Excerpt: "The famed source of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, has made another unauthorized disclosure - and wants to be prosecuted for it."
hen Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was.
American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die, dozens of pages from a classified 1966 study of the confrontation show. The government censored those pages when it declassified the study for public release.
The document was disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked a classified history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers, 50 years ago. Mr. Ellsberg said he had copied the top secret study about the Taiwan Strait crisis at the same time but did not disclose it then. He is now highlighting it amid new tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testifies before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on May 13. (photo: Mandel Ngan/Reuters)
Biden Administration Reins in Street-Level Enforcement by ICE as Officials Try to Refocus Agency Mission
Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "At the detention centers and county jails that the Trump administration once filled with immigrants facing deportation, thousands of beds are now empty."
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers that President Donald Trump lavished with praise have far less to do on the streets of U.S. cities these days.
Under new Biden administration rules curtailing immigration enforcement, ICE carried out fewer than 3,000 deportations last month, the lowest level on record. The agency’s 6,000 officers currently average one arrest every two months.
ICE under President Biden is an agency on probation. The new administration has rejected calls from some Democrats to eliminate the agency entirely, but Biden has placed ICE deportation officers on a leash so tight that some say their work is being functionally abolished.
The immigrant advocacy groups and lawyers who wield significant influence in the Biden White House are pushing to eliminate more detention facilities and reduce deportations even further, despite a 20-year high in illegal border crossings.
The Biden administration is preparing to release its first Department of Homeland Security budget request this week, and immigrant advocates want deep cuts to ICE. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced plans last week to shutter two ICE detention centers, but in an interview he said he does not want to reduce ICE staffing or funding. He wants to reorient ICE, not shrink it, he said.
“I really am focused on it becoming a premier national security and law enforcement agency,” Mayorkas said. “I really want to elevate all of the other work [ICE] does and also ensure that its civil immigration work is well-focused in the service of the national security and public safety mission.”
That approach has translated to a new set of marching orders, or interim priorities, for ICE deportation officers that have significantly scaled back street-level enforcement. Under Biden’s new rules, deportation officers must seek written authorization from senior-level supervisors to arrest anyone who is not a recent border crosser, a national security threat or an aggravated felon who poses a public safety hazard.
Before placing a “detainer” on an immigrant in a jail or prison — essentially asking another law enforcement agency to hold that person until ICE can assume custody — officers must also seek approval from one of the agency’s most senior regional directors.
ICE officials frustrated with the changes describe a workplace environment where officers spend time doing paperwork, idling or working out, more fearful of facing reprimand for making an arrest than not making one.
One of the priority groups, recent border crossers, are effectively no longer subject to arrest once they reach the U.S. interior. Unaccompanied minors and families are also largely exempt, unless they are convicted of a serious crime.
“It’s a weird, frustrating time,” said one ICE official, who is not authorized to speak to reporters, describing a climate of distrust. “It feels like the administration doesn’t have our backs.”
A final version of ICE’s new priorities was due to be completed this month, but Mayorkas said that his review isn’t finished and that he expects to make “significant changes” when the assessment is complete.
“What those changes will be, I am wrestling with right now, quite frankly,” said Mayorkas, who has indicated at times that the current priorities may be constricting ICE officers too much. In recent weeks, he has held town hall events with ICE officers and staff members to solicit their views.
Mayorkas and other Biden appointees say they are determined to use the agency’s limited resources to improve the quality of its law enforcement work, breaking with the notion that success should be measured based on the number of arrests and deportations ICE racks up.
Democrats to the left of Biden want the White House to move faster with its overhaul. “They have begun to do a lot of things to roll back the worst pieces of Trump administration policies, and their biggest accomplishment has been changing immigration enforcement in the interior to scale back who is being detained,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said in an interview.
Jayapal said the administration still isn’t “where we want them to be,” and urged a full halt to deportations. “We have to have a moratorium to fully assess what’s been going on,” she said.
Biden ordered a 100-day freeze on most deportations when he took office, but the move was blocked in federal court. Republican attorneys general in several states are suing the administration, arguing that their states are being harmed by weakened immigration enforcement.
“The Biden administration and its radical allies are effectively abolishing ICE through administrative acts,” said Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R), listing thousands of crimes committed in his state last year that he said would no longer put an offender on a path to deportation.
Immigrants and their advocates insist that ICE is beyond reforming, saying it is a secretive agency that disproportionately targets people of color. “This agency has to be investigated about abuses and violence,” said Ravi Ragbir, 56, a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago who was allowed to stay in the United States after serving 30 months in federal prison for financial crimes and then two years in immigration detention.
Ragbir, the executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition, a collection of 150 organizations, has accused ICE of attempting to deport him in 2018 after he became an outspoken advocate for immigrants. “No one should be in detention, period,” he said.
Mayorkas has sought to spotlight ICE’s more popular duties. Where the Trump administration erected billboards with mug shots of immigrants it wanted to deport, his agency has promoted ICE’s often overlooked investigative division, a separate unit that arrests Americans and noncitizens alike for crimes such as drug trafficking and sexual exploitation of children. ICE also stopped using the term “alien,” part of Biden’s efforts to take a more humane approach to immigration.
Part of ICE’s image problem — a Pew Research Center poll last year ranked the agency’s public approval rating lower than that of the Internal Revenue Service — is that many in the public do not think the agency is making them safer.
Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.) said at a House budget hearing this month that ICE had billed itself as an agency that focuses on “dangerous individuals” and then targeted people who were not dangerous.
“I want to register the hope and the belief that in the new administration we’re going to see some serious changes,” he said.
ICE acting director Tae Johnson testified at the hearing that the agency is “hyper focused” on serious offenders under the new administration, and the data reflect that. ICE agents arrested 645 people who matched the administration’s new priorities in March, and then more than doubled that number in April, to 1,552, he said.
“The data shows that the individuals with the highest level of criminality is up,” Johnson said. “And while our overall arrest numbers might not ever be as high as they were, I do expect the number of violent offenders to increase because folks are spending their time working on those types of cases.”
Republicans say ICE should continue to do its work unhindered, communicating with local and state police to find out whom they arrest and whether they are eligible for deportation.
“ICE is a crucial component in our ability to enforce immigration, customs and trade laws in our country,” said Rep. Charles J. “Chuck” Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) at the hearing. “To demand that the agency responsible for enforcing those national security laws be dismantled is unconscionable.”
John Sandweg, who was the agency’s acting director in 2013 and 2014, said ICE officers have become skilled at making lists of people to target for arrest and then going out and finding them. He is among those arguing for a shift to more investigative work, and a major effort to rebuild partnerships with urban police departments in cities where immigrants are often victimized by criminals in their own communities.
“The problem is the agency has always been judged by how many deportations and arrests it makes, which creates pressure to reach numerical benchmarks,” he said.
Thomas Kean, a Republican former governor of New Jersey and former chairman of the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said he wants the U.S. government — an array of agencies, not just ICE — to stop people from using fraudulent means to enter the country, and to be able to track those who overstay their visas in the United States, which he said remains a concern.
“The whole ICE problem is part of a larger problem. And the larger problem is: How are you going to treat the millions of immigrants in this country who don’t have legal status, but are leading very good lives?” he said. “They’re bringing up families and they’re going to be useful to this country.”
ICE has a deportation caseload is more than 3.2 million — which includes people facing deportation and those with final orders to leave the United States. But with the current workforce of 6,000 immigration officers, it would be impossible to deport everyone in the country unlawfully.
And ICE is facing increasing resistance to its work: Hundreds of sanctuary jurisdictions nationwide limit how much police cooperate with ICE. California, home to the largest number of undocumented immigrants in the United States, Washington state and Illinois have banned for-profit immigration detention centers.
Even Biden’s pick to serve as the new ICE director, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez in Harris County, Tex., severed an agreement with ICE because he worried that it impeded public safety.
ICE says most of the people it arrests in the United States — away from the border — come from state or local jails after they have been arrested for a crime. In sanctuary cities that do not allow them inside the jails, they have to search for them after they have been released.
“We cannot perform our jobs without the assistance of state and locals,” Johnson said at the budget hearing. “We’re going to try to find some common ground and ways to encourage greater cooperation.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (photo: AP)
Bernie Sanders Is Trying to Block Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin From Getting $10 Billion NASA Funding for a Moon-Landing Mission
Isobel Asher Hamilton, Business Insider
Excerpt: "Bernie Sanders is trying to stop NASA giving money to Blue Origin, the space exploration company owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos."
Sanders on Monday submitted an amendment to the Endless Frontier Act, an act created in April with the goal of keeping the US space program competitive with other countries.
Sanders' amendment, as spotted by The Verge's Joey Roulette, states its purpose is to: "eliminate the multi-billion dollar Bezos Bailout."
The "bailout" refers to an amendment submitted by Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell earlier this month. Cantwell's amendment addressed NASA's plans to return to the moon, codenamed Project Artemis, and called for an extra $10 billion in funding while instructing NASA to pick a second company to construct the moon landers for Artemis. Elon Musk's SpaceX has already won a contract for the job.
Although Blue Origin is not mentioned in Cantwell's amendment, the company has made a plea for an extra $10 billion in funding to be added to the program, per Ars Technica. Blue Origin is also headquartered in Washington State, which Cantwell represents.
In April, SpaceX won an exclusive $2.9 billion NASA contract to help return astronauts to the moon. Blue Origin filed an official protest with the Government Accountability Office challenging the contract, and the two companies handed out fliers on Capitol Hill last week attacking each other over Cantwell's proposed legislation.
Sanders has a history of sparring with Jeff Bezos, largely over his role at Amazon. In September 2018, Sanders introduced a bill named "Stop BEZOS," aimed at forcing the company to increase pay for workers. In October 2018, Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 per hour.
Sanders was also a vocal supporter of a union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama in March this year.
Emily Wilder was fired by AP for old social media posts criticizing Israeli human rights abuses. (photo: AP)
I Will Not Yield My Values: Fired AP Journalist Emily Wilder Speaks Out After Right-Wing Smears
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "The AP announced Wilder's firing, citing unspecified violations of its social media policy."
MY GOODMAN: The Associated Press news service is facing growing criticism for firing a young reporter after she was targeted by a right-wing smear campaign for her pro-Palestinian activism while she was a college student at Stanford.
Emily Wilder is Jewish. She was a member of Students for Justice in Palestine and also the group Jewish Voice for Peace at Stanford University before she graduated in 2020. She was an intern at The Arizona Republic before the AP hired her for an entry-level role in Phoenix, and was two weeks into her new job when the Stanford College Republicans began highlighting some of her past tweets. Their campaign was then amplified by right-wing media and politicians, including Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton. The AP says it fired Wilder for violating its social media policy. The decision came just days after Israeli forces bombed the building housing the AP’s office in Gaza.
Ten senior AP executives stood by the decision to fire Emily Wilder, noting in a leaked memo to editorial staff, quote, “We did not make it lightly,” referring to the decision. The AP’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, did not sign the memo. She begins her new job next month as executive editor at The Washington Post. She’s making history as the first woman executive editor of The Washington Post. She told NPR she has, quote, “handed over day-to-day operations” at AP, so, quote, “I was not involved in the decision at all.”
Meanwhile, journalists at the AP protested Wilder’s firing in an open letter Monday, writing, quote, “It has left our colleagues — particularly emerging journalists — wondering how we treat our own, what culture we embrace and what values we truly espouse as a company,” unquote.
For more, we go to Phoenix, Arizona, to speak with Emily Wilder in her first television broadcast interview. We’re also joined by Janine Zacharia, who was Emily Wilder’s journalism professor at Stanford University. She’s the former Jerusalem bureau chief for The Washington Post.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Emily, why don’t you just take us through what happened to you?
EMILY WILDER: Absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me.
Last Monday, a group from my alma mater, the Stanford College Republicans, began to post online past posts that I had made on social media, in an attempt to expose my history of activism for Palestinian human rights while I was an undergraduate at Stanford University, and in an attempt to link AP to Hamas. In the next two days, I began to receive a lot of harassment, a lot of pretty heinous harassment, as well as prominent Republicans on the internet began to lambaste me, including Senator Tom Cotton and Ben Shapiro.
I was reassured during this time by my editors that I would not face repercussions for my past activism and that they just wanted to support me while I was facing this smear campaign. But less than 48 hours after the Stanford College Republicans began to post about me, I was fired. The reason given was a supposed social media violation sometime after I joined AP on May 3rd. I was not given an explanation for what social media policy I violated or what tweet had violated policy, and I still have not received an explanation.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Emily, when you were originally hired, what were you told by the Associated Press of what its social media policy was for its reporters?
EMILY WILDER: I was told that reporters must not share opinions online, must not show bias in coverage.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you were covering — what were you covering while you were at the AP?
EMILY WILDER: Well, I was hired as a news associate on the West Desk, which covers the western United States, 14 states in the western United States. And my position is not actually a reporting position; it was an entry-level kind of apprenticeship, an editorial and production apprenticeship. And so, I was concerned with assisting coverage in the western United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, in effect, why would these folks at Stanford target you? It seems almost nonsensical they would go after you in this concerted and campaign-like manner.
EMILY WILDER: Well, first of all, this is not my first encounter with this group. During my time at Stanford, they built a reputation as kind of bullies. They antagonized really any student they disagreed with. And I was in their crosshairs more than once. So they knew my name, and I guess they did not forget about me. And I can’t say for certain why they did what they did, but perhaps they learned that I had joined a national news organization at a moment that that news organization was under public scrutiny, and they took it as an opportunity to both smear me and smear the Associated Press.
AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, the union representing Washington Post reporters — now, of course, Emily was working for the AP, but the union representing Washington Post reporters tweeted, quote, “Solidarity with the staff of the @AP and Emily Wilder. We hope management provides swift answers on her termination and clarifies the newsroom’s social media practices,” unquote. The AP said in a memo to staff Monday it plans to review its social media policies. Now, the significance of The Washington Post writers’ union expressing solidarity is that Sally Buzbee, the executive editor of AP, is going to become the first woman executive editor of The Washington Post, beginning in June, which brings us to our next guest, Janine Zacharia, a professor at Stanford University who taught Emily Wilder. You were The Washington Post bureau chief in Jerusalem, is that right, about a decade ago?
JANINE ZACHARIA: That’s correct.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about this controversy?
JANINE ZACHARIA: So, I want to speak about it on two levels. I want to speak personally, as Emily’s instructor at Stanford, what this has been like, and then I want to speak in the macro about what I think is really happening here.
So, personally, I want to say that when Emily called me to tell me that she had been fired by the AP, I literally was shocked. I was really shocked, because — and I really didn’t know what to say. And I said to Emily, “Close your laptop. I need to call you back,” because I really need to think about what’s happening here, what we’re going to do and how am I going to help my brilliant former student continue with a career in journalism, because, yes, I spent most of my career, close to two decades, reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I started my career as a young woman in Jerusalem in an earlier incarnation, in the ’90s, for Reuters. So I am very aware, perhaps more than most, to the sensitivities around the questions of bias and reporting on the conflict.
Nevertheless, as was mentioned, in this case it wasn’t about bias. And it wasn’t even about, I don’t think, social media policies, because if you review what Emily posted since she started at the AP, there was one tweet that mentioned a mild opinion about the question of objectivity on reporting on the conflict and the language we use, and an editor could have come to her and said, “I think you should take down that tweet, because it expresses an opinion in violation of our social media policies. Doesn’t mean you can’t have these opinions, but you can’t broadcast them on social media.” But I think that the bigger issue in this case, if you read the letter of her dismissal, was that it mentions you cannot have any conflict that could be perceived as a bias or leading to accusations of bias. Something to that effect was the language.
And so, when the Stanford College Republicans documented some of her pro-Palestinian activism in college, I think they got a little spooked, because it was in the context, as Emily mentioned, of Israel’s strike on the Gaza bureau and Hamas, and people who wanted to defend that strike were trying to accuse AP of knowingly sharing a building with Hamas — when Hamas rules the Gaza Strip for 15 years; they’re everywhere — and this was a way to continue to fuel that narrative: “Look, you hired this news associate who has pro-Palestinian views.” And so, it really was a full-on disinformation campaign against not only Emily, but the AP. These are actors who are not interested in having a serious conversation about how we cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They want to take down credible, fact-based news organizations.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Janine Zacharia, what are some of the unusual pressures that reporters who are covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have to deal with, especially here in the United States?
JANINE ZACHARIA: You know, I think the number-one one is this perception of — there’s one — there’s a couple, OK? First of all, it’s a conflict of dueling narratives. And when you are trying to do objective reporting on the conflict, you know, you do — and this is the way it is — you try and figure out what’s going on, what do people say happened at that checkpoint, what happened right now with the bombing of the building, whatever, and you evaluate the information that’s given to you.
You know, if you take a walk in my inbox from 2009, 2010, 2011, when I was there for The Washington Post — you know, social media was still in its infancy, but I received so much hate mail. Nothing like what happened to Emily now could have happened to me, because there were no Twitter mobs back then, really. “You’re pro-Zionist.” “You’re pro-Palestinian.” “You’re this.” “You’re that.” And it could be very intense.
You know, I remember when I covered — there was an incident of what was called the flotilla. The Mavi Marmara was an aid shipment going to Gaza, and I was in the Gaza Strip for The Washington Post. And I got woken up around this time, 4 or 5 a.m., and I was told that the Israelis, IDF, had killed — or maybe it was the Navy or whatever, whoever — there was images of them dropping onto this Turkish aid ship — had killed nine people. And so I started writing for The Washington Post. I was doing radio. And I got a call that night from a very senior Israeli official yelling about this A1 story I had written for The Washington Post. And the Israelis hadn’t — the Israelis hadn’t released any information. It was like we were trying to — it was hard, in other words. So you do your best to cover this conflict as best as you can.
And what I do at Stanford is take people like Emily, brilliant students who care about the world, who have deep social conscience, who study history, who know what’s going on in the world, and I try to train them to channel that social conscience into accountability journalism. And what’s so distressing to me about this incident is Emily shouldn’t have to and can never erase who she was — right? — before joining the AP. And if they decide that because she was a pro-Palestinian activist, attacked by a student group, amplified by a right-wing smear campaign against her, then they’re going to — what does this mean? Does this mean that any student who was an activist in college — which is what students do, they’re activists in college — can’t become a journalist? You know, what happens if they’re activists on abortion or climate change? Or is this specifically about Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because of the pressures that these news organizations feel?
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read what Ari Paul, who wrote about Emily Wilder for FAIR, later wrote on Facebook. He said, “She was not some famous firebrand. She wasn’t appointed to some high-level post like Jerusalem correspondent. She’s a college grad who had a low-level job at a domestic bureau. But it’s clear that right-wing organizations are keeping tabs on all sorts of college activists and keeping track of where they end up working. And the right is clearly organized to follow and stalk them and ruin their lives, or at least attempt to.” Emily, can you comment on this? And talk about what the Associated Press said to you before you joined. I mean, it wasn’t a secret that you were part of — you were a Jewish student, you were part of Jewish Voice for Peace, and also you were part of the group for justice in Palestine.
EMILY WILDER: I think that that post is absolutely right, especially considering my post was in the western United States. My beat was totally unrelated to the Middle East. Like Janine said, yes, I have opinions about the Israel-Palestine conflict as a citizen of the world, but also as a Jewish American who grew up in a Jewish community. And, yes, I have history of activism on that issue. Neither of those facts prevent me from being able to do fair, credible, fact-based reporting, especially when the beats are entirely unrelated to the Middle East.
But also, I want to take it a step further and say that the values that led to my activism, the values of compassion and justice that compelled me to speak out loudly and advocate for Palestinian human rights, those values are powerful assets in my reporting. And I don’t think newsrooms should try to get me to yield those values. And I really hope that I can continue to channel those values in accountability journalism, like Janine said.
AMY GOODMAN: I also want to point out that more than a hundred Associated Press employees signed a letter in support of you, Emily, that read, in part, quote, “Wilder was a young journalist, unnecessarily harmed by the AP’s handling and announcement of its firing of her. We need to know that the AP would stand behind and provide resources to journalists who are the subject of smear campaigns and online harassment.”
I also wanted to ask both Emily and Professor Zacharia about this timing of when this happened. You know, I was watching — while Sally Buzbee said she’s not involved with day-to-day now at AP because she’s going over to The Washington Post to head that news organization, she was on television talking about the bombing of the AP offices in Gaza, talking about calling for an investigation, and the intimidation this meant for the fact that there would be fewer voices reporting out of Gaza, and how critical that was. Emily, if you could talk about this? And then I’d also like to ask Janine Zacharia to go broader, both of you, on the coverage of Israel and Palestine. There was just a major petition that was signed by many to Canadian journalism organizations talking about the fact that they’re not even supposed to use the word “Palestine.”
EMILY WILDER: I can’t really speak to which executives within the Associated Press were involved in the decision to fire me, partly because I received so little information when I was fired. And still I have received so little information. But I agree with you, the timing is really important to the story here. I mean, it’s a perfect storm. We have the event in Gaza with the AP office a couple days ago. We have — people have made links between my treatment and the treatment of other journalists, like Chris Cuomo on CNN. And this is also happening within a moment that newsrooms are reckoning with this question about social media objectivity, past activism, diversity of life experiences. And I think that that’s why, you know, my former colleagues at the Associated Press — that’s partially why they felt so compelled to speak out. And seeing that is really encouraging and uplifting as a young journalist.
AMY GOODMAN: I should also point out that — and a number of others have done this — Wolf Blitzer, a main anchor on CNN, formerly worked for AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He hasn’t been fired or prevented from reporting on Israel and Palestine. Professor Janine Zacharia, would you like to comment?
JANINE ZACHARIA: You know, I just — there’s so many things that are upsetting about all this. But, you know, if you’re going to go down the road of — in general, of, “OK, well, Emily was with Jewish Voice for Peace, and Wolf Blitzer was for AIPAC,” the answer has to be, you know, judge your reporters based on their work. Right? Because it’s insane to think that journalists don’t have passions and opinions, because the very people who go into journalism, as you very well know, Amy, are people who are passionate and have opinions about things in the world. And so, it’s just — that’s distressing.
And also, I just want to echo something that Emily said about how they still haven’t told her really what’s going on. To me, as her instructor, as someone who maybe feels like I entrusted my young student with them, this is shocking to me that they didn’t do more to sort of talk to her about it. And I think it’s because it really wasn’t about social media policy.
And this is something that the AP and other news organizations really need to think about. Who are we going to let work in our newsrooms? How are we going to deal with — I mean, if you have, for example, a whole generation of students who went to Black Lives Matter protests last summer, and then they come and take my journalism class at Stanford or another university, and they say, “You know what? I want to be a journalist,” and their lives live on TikTok and Instagram and all that, are all these journalists not — are these students not going to be able to be journalists now? I mean, are there not top managers in news organizations who were in anti-Vietnam protests in the ’60s, and their lives live on in Instagram?
Or is this specific to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Which, as you noted, the coverage is shifted the very week that Emily got caught up in this. You had the bombing of the AP bureau in Gaza. You had a very visceral reaction by the American public to the Israeli attacks in Gaza, in a way that you did not have in 2014 when 2,200 Palestinians were killed. You didn’t see this kind of reaction. You had, on the A1 of The New York Times on Sunday, a story about the brutality of life under Israeli occupation. These are all very unusual. Look on The New York Times today in terms of a letter from Gaza that really calls into question a lot of the Israeli narrative about Hamas and what’s really happening in Gaza. I mean, there’s just — there’s a major shift going on.
And so, you know, I think that Emily, in a way, the reason that she’s seeing a lot of support is — I was worried. I wanted to make sure she had support. And you’re seeing that because it’s coming at that moment. Thank God, because I can’t tell you again how distressing this has been for me as her instructor and someone who cares so deeply about her.
AMY GOODMAN: A major —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Emily —
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Juan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Emily, I wanted to ask you: How has this, the last few days, shaped your view of journalism and what you want to do as a journalist?
EMILY WILDER: Yeah, it’s really rocked my perspective, honestly, I mean, obviously. You know, I wanted to join the AP because — while, like everybody on this Earth, I do have opinions, and those opinions fuel my passion for journalism, I wanted to join the AP because I am capable at doing fact-based accountability journalism. That is what I really excelled at at The Arizona Republic, and that’s why the AP hired me. And they were aware that I cared about the world. They were aware that I had a commitment to justice and marginalized communities. So, I thought I would be welcome in a newsroom like AP.
But, you know, I was also aware of this broader history, that I’m just one example in, of media institutions unfairly applying these rules about objectivity and social media haphazardly, when expedient, in a way that generally comes down hardest on journalists of color, journalists who have ever spoken out on Israeli policy, and in a way that just reinforces status quo politics. So I was aware of that, and I was witnessing these shifts in the industry. I thought I’d be welcome.
But now I know that I — this experience, I guess, could have made me question my commitment to those values that compel me to do journalism, but I will not yield them. And now I know that I need to channel them into journalism in a team, in an organization, that is similarly aligned.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting, when you follow the money, as journalists are supposed to do. The Stanford Review, a conservative publication, was co-founded over 30 years ago by the venture capitalist and conservative philanthropist Peter Thiel, who went on to speak at Trump’s first Republican National Convention. He didn’t contribute a lot to Republican senators, but he did contribute to the one who attacked you, Emily, and that was Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, and also has a lot of ties to the Stanford College Republicans.
But I also wanted to thank you for a piece that you did in The Arizona Republic that Juan and I followed up on, that you broke for them, which became a major national story. And that’s the story of Kristin Urquiza, whose father, Mark Anthony Urquiza, was a supporter of Donald Trump and died after believing the president’s assurances that the coronavirus pandemic was under control. He died of COVID. In October, we spoke to Kristin Urquiza, after you highlighted her in your piece in The Arizona Republic about losing her father. And I just want to play that clip for you.
KRISTIN URQUIZA: My dad, first and foremost, was great and did not deserve to die alone in a hospital with just a nurse holding his hand. He was also a lifelong Republican who was politically aware. He watched television news programming fairly regularly, read the newspaper, and engaged me as a young kid in politics, which is kind of where I got my interest in the world around me from. He was a Trump supporter and voted for Trump and believed him in what he had to say.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Kristin Urquiza talking about losing her father. But, you know, you had major impact as a young reporter at The Arizona Republic. And if also you could go back to commenting on Peter Thiel?
EMILY WILDER: Yeah, that story was really formative in my time at The Arizona Republic. It was pretty early on in my time at the Republic. And it represents exactly the kind of journalism that I excel at and that I want to continue doing, which is highlighting the undertold, underrepresented or suppressed stories of certain communities and linking those experiences to a larger investigative context, to a larger — to the situation that we’re in, where communities of color are the most at risk for COVID-19. So, I was really grateful to have been a part of that and to have broken such an important story. And, you know, that’s what I — I try to continue to do impactful storytelling like that.
And in terms of the connection with Peter Thiel, yes, this organization does have powerful and wealthy connections in the conservative ecosystem. But I also want to make sure that people understand that this is just a group of college-aged trolls, honestly, and they did not have to become relevant. They should not have — the Associated Press should not have felt threatened by them. I truly believe they would have gone away — they would have spun their wheels on this and gone away, if the Associated Press had not fired me and had not sort of empowered them and empowered their bullying, empowered their disinformation.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Professor Janine Zacharia, what are you going to teach your students, as they come back to Stanford now, about what this means for journalism? In the end, because of Emily’s outspokenness and bravery in taking this on instead of slinking away, do you think journalism will advance in this country, and particularly around the Israel-Palestine issue?
JANINE ZACHARIA: Well, I scrapped my class in foreign correspondence on Thursday that I had planned, and we’re devoting it to this, because it’s so important, obviously. Emily is a peer and a friend of many of the students in my current class, who have been very traumatized by this whole thing, wondering, again, you know, whether they have a future in journalism, reaching out to me quite shell-shocked. And so, I feel the need as their instructor to talk about what’s happened.
But I don’t know what to say, you know, truthfully, Amy, because what I do, as someone who started at Reuters and worked at The Washington Post, the conventional media, you know, what I train them to do, I don’t know — I just don’t know what to say right now. I’m still processing it all. But what I will do is hold up Emily as an example of what I believe they all should do, is use their brilliance and channel their convictions into amazing reporting that gets picked up by Amy Goodman and others. She had another story, by the way, about wait times for COVID testing, that was featured on Rachel Maddow, as an intern. Right? So, in the end, you know, I’ll stress that this is really the AP’s loss, and whoever hires her next is going to be so very fortunate.
AMY GOODMAN: Maybe she’ll be Sally Buzbee’s first hire at Washington Post —
JANINE ZACHARIA: That would be nice.
AMY GOODMAN: — and then follow in your footsteps. Emily — I want to thank you both for being with us, Emily Wilder, fired by AP, which has fired up the journalism community, not only in the United States, and others for more just reporting around the world, and Janine Zacharia, Emily Wilder’s journalism professor at Stanford University who is the former Washington Post Jerusalem bureau chief.
Congressional Republicans. (photo: Getty)
White Male Minority Rule Pervades Politics Across the US, Research Shows
Alexandra Villarreal, Guardian UK
Villarreal writes:
rom county officials and sheriffs to governors and senators, white male minority rule pervades politics in the United States, according to a new report published on Wednesday.
White men represent 30% of the population but 62% of officeholders, dominating both chambers of Congress, 42 state legislatures and statewide roles across the nation, the analysis shows.
By contrast, women and people of color constitute 51% and 40% of the US population respectively, but just 31% and 13% of officeholders, according to the research by the Reflective Democracy Campaign, shared exclusively with the Guardian.
“I think if we saw these numbers in another country, we would say there is something very wrong with that political system,” said Brenda Choresi Carter, the campaign’s director.
“We would say, ‘how could that possibly be a democratic system with that kind of demographic mismatch?’”
Two factors perpetuate white male control over virtually every lever of US government: the huge advantage enjoyed by incumbents, and the Republican party’s continued focus on mostly white male candidates.
As the US barrels toward a minority-white population within a matter of decades, some believe elected officials will inevitably become more diverse. But that logic is flawed: women have always been half of the country, and they are still chronically underrepresented in government.
Meanwhile, politicians who currently hold office can make election laws and draw districts in their favor. This legislative cycle, Republican state lawmakers have devised a barrage of new voter restrictions that have targeted left-leaning communities, vulnerable voters and people of color.
“It’s no accident that the pursuit of antidemocratic measures is happening in this moment of really profound demographic change,” Choresi Carter said. “The fact that it’s in that context that efforts to make the United States even less democratic than it already is are happening, that’s not a coincidence.”
But perhaps the greatest testament to the US’s striking power imbalance is who can actually run. Even with women vying for office in record numbers, white men still overwhelm the candidate pool, despite the fact that “primary candidates in all demographics win elections at just about the same rate,” according to the report.
In primaries for statewide office and the House, women and people of color actually do better than their white male opponents, busting a common myth about white men’s “electability” advantage that has often dogged high-profile women’s campaigns.
However, because women and people of color have been largely disenfranchised until relatively recent history, most incumbents are still white men, the report explains. And, during the 2020 primary elections, 96% of incumbents won their races.
Last November, 96% of congressional incumbents held on to their seats, suggesting that officeholders who win their primaries benefit from a similar edge during the general election.
“We have, you know, a political system in general that is not built to include new voices and perspectives. It’s a system built to protect the people and the interests already represented in it,” Choresi Carter said.
“It’s like all systems. It’s built to protect the status quo.”
Another obstacle to a more representative government comes from the Republican establishment, which does not run candidates reflective of the nation. In the 2020 primaries, 93% of Republican candidates were white, and fewer than one in four were women.
Democratic candidates, on the other hand, were 44% women and 32% people of color – still shy of a one-to-one match with the country’s overall demographics, but far more inclusive than the GOP’s virtual erasure of entire communities.
That partisan divide – plus the incumbency problem – bolster a cycle where commonsense policies supported by the majority of Americans make little headway, including popular solutions such as gun control, automatic voter registration and universal pre-K education.
“We have this incredibly limited perspective represented in the halls of power when these decisions are being made,” Choresi Carter said.
“And most Americans don’t share that experience, and actually, you know, want different outcomes than they’re seeing.”
In this April 1, 2021 photo provided by Dawei Watch news outlet, a man raises his hand with a clenched fist as he carries the coffin of 17-year old Kyaw Min Latt during a funeral procession in Dawei, Myanmar. (photo: Dawei Watch/AP)
AP Investigation: Myanmar's Junta Using Bodies to Terrorize
Robin McDowell and Margie Mason, Associated Press
Excerpt: "An analysis by The Associated Press and the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab looked at cases where bodies of those targeted indiscriminately by police and the military are being used as tools of terror."
wo black pickups speed down an empty city street in Myanmar before coming to a sudden stop. Security forces standing in the back of the trucks begin firing at an oncoming motorbike carrying three young men.
The bike swerves, crashing into a gate. More shots are fired as two of the passengers run away, while the third, Kyaw Min Latt, remains on the ground. Moans are heard as officers grab the wounded 17-year-old from the pavement, throwing his limp body into a truck bed before driving off.
The incident lasted just over a minute and was captured on a CCTV camera. It is part of a growing trove of photos and videos shared on social media that’s helping expose a brutal crackdown carried out by the junta since the military’s Feb. 1 takeover of the Southeast Asian nation.
An analysis by The Associated Press and the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, looked at cases where bodies of those targeted indiscriminately by police and the military are being used as tools of terror. The findings are based on more than 2,000 tweets and online images, in addition to interviews with family members, witness accounts, and local media reports.
The AP and HRC Lab identified more than 130 instances where security forces appeared to be using corpses and the bodies of the wounded to create anxiety, uncertainty, and strike fear in the civilian population. Over two-thirds of those cases analyzed were confirmed or categorized as having moderate or high credibility, and often involved tracking down the original source of the content or interviewing observers.
Since the military takeover, more than 825 people have been killed — well over two times the government tally — according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a watchdog organization that monitors arrests and deaths. The junta did not respond to written questions submitted by AP.
The HRC Lab examined hours of footage posted online over a two-month period showing dead bodies being snatched off the streets and dragged like sacks of rice before being thrown into vehicles and driven to unknown destinations. Some people have been disappeared or arrested one day and returned dead the next, their corpses mutilated with signs of torture, witnesses confirmed to AP.
Autopsies have been carried out without the permission of families. And some death certificates blame heart attacks or falls after violent attacks, contradicting witness accounts and images captured by protesters, journalists, or residents, including some who have been stealthily recording incidents with mobile phones through windows or from rooftops.
Cremations and exhumations of the deceased have been secretly conducted in the middle of the night by authorities. Other times, grieving families have been forced to pay military hospitals to release their loved ones’ remains, relatives and eyewitnesses told the AP.
Though the incidents may seem random and unprovoked — including kids being shot while playing outside their homes — they are actually deliberate and systematic with the goal of demobilizing people and wearing them down, said Nick Cheesman, a researcher at Australian National University, who specializes in the politics of law and policing in Myanmar.
“That,” he said, “is exactly the characteristic of state terror.”
Taking a page from the army’s historical playbook, experts say the violence also appears aimed at keeping the death toll artificially low and concealing evidence. But unlike past violence, the attacks are being captured on smartphones and surveillance cameras in real-time and could one day be used against the regime before international criminal courts, as has happened elsewhere in the world.
“It has always been the military’s strategy to hide the mass crackdown there, the mass killing of the protesters,” said Van Tran, a Cornell University researcher who studied the bloody 1988 and 2007 uprisings in Myanmar. “There are always large-scale operations in order to either cremate the bodies of people that were shot down or ... bulldoze and bury those bodies. So a lot of the time, families do not know where their children went.”
Almost a quarter of the recent cases with known locations analyzed by the HRC Lab involved injured people or dead bodies snatched by security forces in the country’s biggest city, Yangon, followed by Mandalay and Bago.
The largest number of those incidents, documented through posts on social media, was reported on March 27. Celebrated annually as Armed Forces Day, it commemorates the start of the military’s resistance to Japanese occupation during World War II after more than a century of British colonial rule.
This year protesters dubbed it “Anti-Fascist-Resistance Day,” and came out in large numbers in a stand against the military takeover.
It was on that day that motorbike rider Kyaw Min Latt was shot, though his family told AP the young carpenter had not been to a demonstration but was instead heading home from the job site to grab an early lunch with two friends.
Using satellite visuals, reverse image searches, and a sun-shadow calculator, the HRC Lab was able to verify that the shooting took place at 10:38 a.m. in front of a high school on Azarni Road in the southern town of Dawei. In the footage, two shots are heard and Kyaw Min Latt, who was sitting between the driver and a fellow passenger, is seen grabbing his head and falling sideways. Officers chased after the two other riders with guns raised. Another bang is then heard.
Sixteen minutes later, a passerby posted a picture on Facebook of blood-soaked concrete and flip flops near the white motorbike that security forces had carefully propped back up before taking Kyaw Min Latt’s body.
Within two hours, the CCTV footage was also being shared widely across social media platforms.
That’s how the teen’s father received the news. He told AP he later learned his son had been taken to a military hospital. He rushed there to see him that afternoon and said the teen was still alive, but unconscious.
“He was badly wounded,” Soe Soe Latt said. “He opened his eyes when we were at the hospital, but could not say any words.”
The boy died soon after, and his father said army doctors wanted to perform an autopsy. The family fought against it, but said the hospital would only release the body if they signed a paper saying their son died of head injuries from falling off the motorbike.
A photo published online before Kyaw Min Latt’s funeral by Dawei Watch, a local news outlet, told a different story: There was a gaping wound in the teen’s neck.
Myanmar has a long, tumultuous history of coups, military control, and ethnic conflicts.
A junta seized power in 1962, ending 14 years of civilian rule. That began five decades of censorship, mass arrests, disappearances, and dark isolation, resulting in harsh international sanctions that placed it roughly on par with North Korea.
Then in 2011, the country became the darling of the Obama administration and other Western governments when it started moving toward quasi-civilian rule and implementing political reforms as part of its long-promised “roadmap to democracy.”
But, despite the newfound freedoms and political reforms in the past decade — from the first ATMs and KFC restaurants to high-speed Internet and smartphones — the military never really relinquished control.
A quarter of the seats in parliament were reserved for those in uniform, and the armed forces held onto key ministries. Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, now chairman of the junta’s State Administrative Council, also had the power to impose a state of emergency if he felt national security was at risk.
But after the party headed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide election last November, the military, known as the Tatmadaw, cried voter fraud. That triggered the February takeover and an emergency declaration, transferring all power to the top commander, on the morning the new parliament was set to begin.
Suu Kyi — who earlier supported security forces during their violent crackdown on ethnic Rohingya Muslims — and other leaders of her National League for Democracy party were put under house arrest. Hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life poured into the streets nationwide in protest.
Soon after, other NLD members were hauled in for questioning. Some of them would never return alive. Party officials said that family members were prohibited from collecting the body of one man who died at an interrogation center. Two other NLD members were returned as corpses to relatives the next day, drawing a sharp rebuke from the U.S. State Department.
Photos and videos posted on social media from several locations, and analyzed by the HRC Lab, show they appear to have been tortured, with the skin partially peeled from one man’s face. Another had dried blood on his head and bruises covering his body.
“Just tell people he had a heart attack and died,” a man who attended the cleaning of one victim’s body told AP, recalling what doctors told family members.
Despite the attacks on NLD members, the anti-military demonstrations continued. Ordinary citizens soon found themselves targets of soldiers and police.
This month, relatives of one man in Bago Region’s Pyay Township said security forces arrived at their home with guns drawn.
After beating 33-year-old Aung Khaing Myit, his sister told AP they took him away for questioning about his suspected involvement in a bomb blast. She said the officers swore nothing would happen to him, but he was heard screaming in a nearby room before falling silent.
The next day, the family was taken to a military hospital. They were told Aung Khaing Myit died while trying to jump out of a transport vehicle and that he was already placed inside a coffin. His sister said they were allowed to look at his bruised face, but not his entire body, and then authorities took him away for cremation over their objections.
“We knew they beat him to death,” she said. “But they tried to lie to us.”
And even if bodies are returned to families, it doesn’t mean they will be buried and left to rest in peace.
Nineteen-year-old Kyal Sin, better known as Angel, became a high-profile case after being shot in the head March 3 during a protest in Mandalay, galvanizing supporters to wear T-shirts and banners bearing her image. Thousands, outraged by her death, gathered for her funeral the next day.
But later that night, the flowers were removed from her grave and MRTV state television said her body had been exhumed by authorities so an official autopsy could be carried out, exonerating the police. All that remained at the site afterward was a bloody latex glove and other strewn debris.
Authorities later released a death certificate saying the bullet that killed her didn’t match the caliber used by police, and that it came from the wrong direction for security forces to be responsible.
Shootings by soldiers and police were the reason Ye Yint Naing’s mother had forbidden him to join a protest in northern Shan State. But that didn’t stop the 15-year-old — he simply skipped breakfast that morning and snuck out while she was busy washing clothes in the back of the house.
He quickly met up with friends and headed to the rally, but an hour later tensions began to explode. After activists set a car on fire, Myanmar security forces responded by shooting into the crowd.
Ye Yint Naing was hit and fell to the ground. As he lay bleeding and calling for help, his friends watched paralyzed for two hours, unable to reach him because they feared they would be shot by a sniper standing watch, his brother told AP.
When the gunfire finally stopped, Ye Yint Naing’s motionless body was loaded into an ambulance and driven away. Social media posts provided the first clues for family members about what happened to him.
A picture posted on Facebook by a sympathetic worker at a local cemetery showed them where the body was ultimately taken. Once there, Ye Yint Naing was cremated — which goes against Muslim burial customs — following an order by police.
“They actually wanted to hide the dead body,” his brother said, adding he was able to get a bag with ashes and bits of bone to bury. “I have to say, ‘Thank you,’ to the person who cremated the body and took the photo. If not, it would have been hard for our family to find my younger brother because we would not know where he was taken.”
Other secret cremations were confirmed in a mountainous trading town in the same state. Military trucks carrying soldiers and police rumbled into Aungban to stamp out a protest early on March 19th, firing off tear gas and bullets that left at least eight people dead, a witness told the AP.
Images from the scene posted on social media, showed one bloodied body lying next to a curb, and video captured men dressed in black uniforms kicking debris and randomly shooting their guns.
Security forces brought most of the corpses to the local cemetery that night and days later. They broke locks on the crematorium and used car tires to burn several bodies, witnesses said, until “all that remained was ash.”
Terrified that their loved ones will not receive proper burials, some family members have started hiding bodies, racing to get them buried before security forces can claim them.
That was the case with 13-year-old Htoo Myat Win. He was hit in the chest by a stray bullet while sitting inside his home in the central town of Shwebo, Sagaing Region.
Video posted online showed security forces shooting while walking through the street, and a neighbor who witnessed the boy’s death confirmed to AP that they were “spraying bullets” at houses.
Authorities came to ask the family for the boy’s body, but they refused to hand it over and instead hid it at a local temple, the neighbor said, declining to give his name fearing retribution. “They cremated him the next day.”
Junta spokesman Zaw Min Tun said there is a clear legal procedure in place when people die. Families are informed and autopsies are carried out.
“We never hide this number,” he said at a press conference earlier this month.
However, the military has put the total killed nationwide at about 300, stressing that nearly 50 police have also died in the violence. Earlier, state-run TV called the more widely used figures from AAPP “fake” news, even though the highly regarded Thailand-based monitoring group often includes the victims’ names, ages and photographs. It also details how and where they died as part of its tally, helping bolster the credibility of those numbers.
Ko Bo Kyi, the group’s co-founder, noted the junta also claimed hundreds — instead of thousands — died during some of the country’s biggest pro-democracy protests in 1988. He added that, just as in the past, their goal now is to maintain a climate of fear and uncertainty that immobilizes people and breaks their will.
“They believe if they kill, torture, and arrest the protesters, they can stop the demonstrations,” he said.
But access to technology and social media since the recent military takeover could eventually be used to help build an international criminal case against the junta, while also making it difficult for foreign donors and developed nations to turn a blind eye to what could one day be classified as crimes against humanity.
“It’s a whole new ballgame in terms of evidence in a way that will make prosecution possible many years from now if need be,” said Richard Dicker, International Justice director at the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, noting that video footage from smartphones has also been used in other uprisings and conflicts, including crimes committed in Syria. “That wouldn’t have been viable (in the past) because the evidence would have disappeared.”
Still, despite the fact that security forces are aware their actions are being filmed, posted online, and seen around the world, they have continued their attacks on civilians unabated. Dicker said authoritarian governments have long silenced their opponents.
Normally, he added, these kinds of atrocities occur at night in the shadows. “What’s new is that it is taking place on the streets and in public view.”
A 2008 photo of a mountaintop removal mining site at Kayford Mountain, W.Va. with Coal River Mountain, left, in the background. (photo: Jeff Gentner/AP)
West Virginia's Coal Mine Cleanup Process Is an Underfunded 'House of Cards'
Ysabelle Kempe, Grist
Kempe writes: "In West Virginia, the question of who foots the bill for mine cleanup has gotten messy, with bankrupt coal companies, insurers, and the state government lacking the capital to pay for full-mine reclamation."
Environmental groups want the federal government to do something about it.
etsy Lawson was young and in love when she moved to the outskirts of Morgantown, West Virginia, in 1978. The 24-year-old and her soon-to-be husband bought 11 acres of land covered in green pastures and thriving woodland. They ate deer hunted by their neighbors* and fish caught out of nearby streams.
But in 2007, coal mining companies began buying up land near her property, seeking to turn a profit on the energy sources stored underneath the community. Lawson threw herself into trying to prevent mine construction — attending public hearings and sending letters to decision makers — but the industry won out. She remembers being told that the companies would be required to clean up the land after they were done mining it, leaving it in better condition than before.
That didn’t happen. Shafer Brothers Construction Inc., the company that ran the coal mine closest to Lawson’s home, filed for bankruptcy in 2014 and abandoned the mine. Today, Lawson looks out her window at an enormous mountain of excavated rocks and dirt. There are cracks in her floors from the frequent explosions companies used to blast their way down into the earth. She and her husband no longer eat local fish and deer — the streams and rivers have taken on a bright orange color from the heavy metals that drain out of the mine.
“That’s what we’re left with,” said Lawson, who is now 67 years old. “What used to be a really attractive, traditional farming community now looks more like an industrial wasteland.”
It’s possible to clean up, or reclaim, abandoned mines like the ones around Lawson’s home, but the costs can be mind-bogglingly high, sometimes totaling tens of millions of dollars for a single mine. In West Virginia, the question of who foots that bill has gotten messy, with bankrupt coal companies, insurers, and the state government lacking the capital to pay for full-mine reclamation.
The state’s reclamation funding system is broken and needs to be improved immediately — at least that’s the argument laid out in a lawsuit filed last week by the Sierra Club and West Virginian environmental groups against the U.S. Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation, and Enforcement, or OSMRE.
“All of the backstops that are supposed to be in place to make sure that at the end of the day nobody has to live next to an abandoned coal mine — all of those backstops are now threatened,” said Peter Morgan, a senior attorney for the Sierra Club.
In their complaint, filed in the Southern District of West Virginia, the Sierra Club, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, and West Virginia Highlands Conservancy accused OSMRE of failing to require the state to improve its dangerously underfunded coal mine reclamation program. Under the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, or SMCRA, states are encouraged to develop their own programs to reclaim abandoned mines, but the federal government oversees the programs and is obligated to require amendments when necessary.
Before a coal mining company begins operating in West Virginia, it must post a penal bond with an insurance company to cover a portion of the mine cleanup costs. The amount of the bond, however, is not based on an estimate of the real cleanup cost, but rather a per-acre rate of $1,000 to $5,000. “The understanding is it’s always going to be smaller than the actual cost,” Morgan said. “That’s where the bond pool comes in.” The state also maintains a bond pool, which coal mining companies pay into through a tax on every ton of coal mined. West Virginia can dip into this bond pool when mine reclamation costs are higher than the penal bond posted by a mining company. Morgan said this system is flawed, since it was created on the premise that there would always be a robust demand for coal — an assumption that has been proven false as the industry has tanked in recent years.
This growing financial gap is worrisome to environmentalists. Of the 636 mines that have been shuttered in West Virginia in recent decades, 118 still have yet to be reclaimed. And without proper funding, could they remain that way?
“The problem is now that we are seeing the permanent decline of the coal industry, the bond pool is being threatened from both sides,” Morgan said, likening West Virginia’s program to a house of cards. “Fewer tons of coal are being mined in West Virginia every year, so there’s less and less money coming into the fund. At the same time, the risk of abandonments and the state being responsible for paying for reclamation out of the fund is just increasing.”
Last year, the cracks in this funding system became starkly apparent. The coal mine operator ERP Environmental Fund Inc., which owns over 100 in-state coal mines, was financially drowning. Rather than allowing the company to go bankrupt, leaving cleanup costs to its penal bond and the bond pool, the state took matters into its own hands. “West Virginia said ‘We cannot let ERP go down that path,” Morgan said. “‘Instead, we’re going to take the extraordinary step of getting the state to appoint a special receiver to take control of the company.” The appointment shielded ERP from lawsuits by creditors, and the special receiver was permitted to prioritize the cleanup of some sites over others, since state regulators acknowledged it didn’t have enough money to begin reclamation of all sites at once.
In the lawsuit West Virginia was required to file in order to appoint the special receiver, the state’s then-Director of Mining and Reclamation, Harold Ward, filed affidavits stating that ERP’s inability to pay its debts threatened the state’s own mine reclamation funding program. It was the smoking gun environmental groups needed to show that the program is teetering on the edge of disaster.
“West Virginia, in pursuing the extraordinary step of getting that special receivership, had to make certain statements on the record,” Morgan said. “And so that provides all the evidence we need to bring this lawsuit.”
This isn’t the first time alarm bells have been raised over the instability of reclamation funding in coal country. Many states across Appalachia have similar financial sets up as West Virginia, including Kentucky, Virginia, and Ohio. In 2018, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a report recommending changes be made to bonding systems so that states aren’t on the hook for reclamation funding when companies go bankrupt.
Last year, after West Virginia appointed a special receiver to ERP, the same environmental groups who filed this most recent lawsuit sued the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, arguing that it had failed to notify the federal surface mining office, OSMRE, that its reclamation program was underfunded. The groups dropped last year’s suit after the state DEP made the requested notification in December. However, they filed last week’s lawsuit because they believe the federal agency should have required improvements to West Virginia’s reclamation program after being notified of its risky funding status. Neither the West Virginia DEP nor OSMRE responded to Grist’s requests for comment by the time of publication.
If the environmental groups win this most recent lawsuit and West Virginia is required to amend their mine reclamation bond program, the state will go through the time-consuming process of holding public hearings and getting federal approval for those changes. That’s why Morgan of the Sierra Club wants the case to be handled urgently. While the government and courts deliberate, people like Lawson will be staring out their window at the carcass of what was once farmland, a forest, or grazing land for wild animals.
“I don’t think it’ll ever look like it did when we first moved here,” Lawson said. “That’s the curse of West Virginia, that in so many places, the coal companies just declare bankruptcy and disappear.”
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