14 May 21
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: We're Going to See a Whole Lot More NBA Activism
Mark Medina, USA TODAY
Medina writes: "Abdul-Jabbar spoke about the 'Social Justice Champion Award,' receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and NBA players' involvement on the social justice front."
hrough 20 NBA seasons, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar collected trophies that either symbolized his NBA championships (six), his Finals MVPs (two) or his regular-season MVP’s (six).
Amid the NBA legend's ongoing quest to address social justice issues with his written and spoken words as well as community initiatives, Abdul-Jabbar has another award associated with him. The NBA created the “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award,” which will go to a current NBA player that will result in a $100,000 donation to an organization of his choosing. The other four finalists will each select an organization to receive a $25,000 donation.
All 30 NBA teams will nominate a player from their roster for consideration of the award. A seven-member committed composed of NBA legends, league executives and social justice leaders will select the winner and four finalists.
Abdul-Jabbar spoke to USA TODAY Sports about the award, receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and NBA players’ involvement on the social justice front. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What are your expectations on what this award will accomplish?
Abdul-Jabbar: “I hope it gives all players in the league an incentive to see what they can do in their communities to make their communities a better place. We’re giving them money to disperse and giving them an idea with how to affect change. So we can’t lose. It’s just going to keep spreading. We have a few prominent people like LeBron [James], for example, who have done incredible things. But it’s getting to the point where everybody in the league might want to do something. We’ll get a whole lot more done that way.”
What are your takeaways on how NBA players have used their platform in the past year to speak out on social justice issues?
Abdul-Jabbar: “Take LeBron for example. He’s sending a whole school district to school all the way to college. That’s incredible. It’s a wonderful thing. [Former WNBA player] Maya Moore has helped a young man get out of prison after being wrongfully convicted. She has a great idea on how to make the community a better place and used her position to help the young man achieve justice. That is a direct result of this type of activism. We’re going to see a whole lot more of that.”
What was your rite of passage with protesting during the Civil Rights Movement?
Abdul-Jabbar: “I spoke out against the Olympics in 1968. I think that really helped me understand what was at stake. There have been other economic issues. Look at the leadership that Oscar Robertson provided so that we were able to obtain free agency. They were very important to our financial future. We were able to obtain that through the leadership of guys in the NBA. Their leadership goes all over the place.”
Why was it important for you to be a part of the NBA’s PSA’s that encourages people to take the COVID-19 vaccine?
Abdul-Jabbar: “In the Black community, the denial of effective treatment was a common thing. Black people suffered for that. In this instance, Black people would suffer if they are not given the treatment. We have an opportunity to get the treatment to keep our community healthy. We have to take advantage of it. That’s what motivates me.”
What made you comfortable with taking it?
Abdul-Jabbar: “I was just waiting for them to have one that they felt was effective and safe. Once the information came out that these vaccines would work, I went right ahead. I didn’t have any problem with it.”
Have you gotten any feedback from players or from the community?
Abdul-Jabbar: “I haven’t gotten much feedback. I’m just really glad President Biden’s program has been effective as it has been. I think he’s done a good job.”
What’s your message to any NBA players and the community that aren’t comfortable with taking the vaccine?
Abdul-Jabbar: “I would just tell them to go talk to somebody that you respect and trust on if the vaccine is safe and effective. If you’re not satisfied, don’t take it. But I think you’ll find that the vaccine is going to be saving lives and getting us back to normal a lot earlier than we would hope.”
What have you done with the Sky Hook Foundation?
Abdul-Jabbar: “We’ve done a good job with getting people to understand that science, technology and math are where the good jobs are going to be in the 21st century. We’re trying to get that message over to the kids. My foundation has been active since 2009 and we just got some support. We’ll be able to shorten the waiting list now from six years to 2 ½ years. We’re making progress.”
What are the next steps with making more progress for racial equality?
Abdul-Jabbar: “We’ll have to continue to communicate effectively. If we can respect what we hear from our fellow citizens and from the other people that have some input into it, that’s how progress is made. It doesn’t all happen at once. It takes a lot of back and forth. But we can get there.”
What are other projects are you working on?
Abdul-Jabbar: “I’m going to be on the History Channel talking about the history of protest (a one-hour documentary scheduled to premiere in June). We’ll talk about the suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement and some of the labor movements. They all really are precedent for what’s happening now. What’s past is prologue. We did a real good job with that.”
A Palestinian woman walks past a building in Gaza City destroyed by an Israeli airstrike early on May 12, 2021. (photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP)
ALSO SEE: Tax-Exempt US Nonprofits Fuel Israeli Settler Push to Evict Palestinians
US Funds Make Israel's Bombardment of Gaza Possible. When Will They Be Halted?
Joshua Leifer, Guardian UK
Leifer writes: "US public opinion seems to be swinging in support of Palestinian rights, but it must go further to begin real change."
he headlines speak mainly of “clashes”, “conflict”, and “casualties on both sides”. The politicians recite bromides about Israel’s “right to defend itself”– a right that Palestinians seemingly do not have. The US government calls for “all parties to deescalate”, with no acknowledgment that it is US funds – $3.8bn a year – that, in part, make Israel’s bombardment of Gaza possible. This is the familiar American routine when Israel goes to war.
Yet before Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rockets came to dominate the news, what happened over the last week in Jerusalem was perhaps the most substantial Palestinian mass uprising in the city since 2017 – when Palestinian demonstrations led Israeli police to abandon their attempt to install metal detectors at the entrance to the Al Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. Then, as now, it was an uprising centered in Jerusalem but about much more. And though US public attention has been diverted, the Jerusalem uprising is still ongoing. That is important not to forget.
It was not a coincidence that the uprising began in Jerusalem. Occupied East Jerusalem exemplifies in miniature the Israeli government’s endeavor to secure “maximum territory, minimum Arabs”, as David Ben-Gurion saw the goals of the Zionist movement. Israel has pursued this goal in East Jerusalem – which it occupied in 1967 and formally annexed in 1980 – by making it nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain permits to build homes, leaving thousands of people vulnerable to displacement and their homes slated for demolition. East Jerusalemites, who are not citizens of Israel but legal residents, face stringent residency requirements that make their legal status precarious. The Israeli government has also empowered Jewish settlers to seize properties inside Palestinian neighborhoods such as Silwan, Abu Dis, a-Tur, and Sheikh Jarrah – part of an explicit strategy to “Judaize” the eastern part of the city.
Israeli officials are increasingly bold about telegraphing these goals to the global public. “This is a Jewish country,” said Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, British-born deputy mayor of Jerusalem, to the New York Times, “[o]f course there are laws that some people may consider as favoring Jews – it’s a Jewish state.” But if Israeli officials are open about the discriminatory logic at Zionism’s core, most US politicians continue to deny it.
Indeed, that discriminatory logic is on full display especially in Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood where Israeli settlers are trying to evict several Palestinian families from their houses. These eight families, who fled their original homes during the war of 1948, have lived in the neighborhood for more than half a century. Now, Israeli settler organizations – funded significantly by American Jewish donors – are claiming that because such homes were once owned by Jewish groups, the Palestinian families must be forced out. Yet no reciprocal right exists for Palestinians seeking restitution for properties they left behind during the Nakba, when roughly 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled their homes during the 1948 war. Under Israel’s Absentee Property Law, the property of Palestinian refugees is controlled by the Israeli state.
The ongoing Israeli efforts to cleanse Jerusalem of a Palestinian presence, particularly in Sheikh Jarrah provided the spark for the latest uprising. But it was not only in Sheikh Jarrah where Palestinians have also resisted other Israeli efforts to excise them from the city landscape. After Israeli forces set up barricades at the Damascus Gate esplanade – a popular place for Palestinians to gather, especially during Ramadan, and a main point of access to Jerusalem’s Old City – successive nights of largely youth-led demonstrations eventually led the Israeli police to remove the metal gates (though not before Israeli police allowed far-right Jewish extremists to march through the streets of Jerusalem chanting, “Death to Arabs!”).
Like in 2017, Palestinian access to the Al Aqsa Mosque has also been a focal point of the protests. Over the past week and a half, Israeli police have repeatedly stormed the Haram al-Sherif/Temple Mount complex, firing rubber-coated bullets, tear gas, and stun grenades at Muslim worshipers: videos on social media show Israeli forces shooting flashbangs and less-lethal rounds directly at people praying. Israeli police violence has injured several hundred people during these nightly raids, which have also taken place on some of the holiest nights of Ramadan. Elsewhere in East Jerusalem, Israeli police have soaked the streets and buildings with foul-smelling “Skunk” water, a chemical crowd dispersal tool. And under the tolerant eye of the Israeli police, Jewish settlers and far-right activists have attacked Palestinian protesters, going so far as to open fire on them with live ammunition.
It was the repeated Israeli police incursions into the Al Aqsa Mosque, combined with rising settler violence in Sheikh Jarrah and other East Jerusalem neighborhoods, that prompted a response from Hamas, the Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip. Hamas leaders had already warned that they would respond to continued Israeli violence in Jerusalem with violence of their own. On Monday, Hamas’s armed wing issued an ultimatum: Israeli forces must leave the Al Aqsa Mosque and Sheikh Jarrah or face the consequences. Seemingly underestimating Hamas’s seriousness or military capacity, the Israeli government chose the latter.
To be sure, there was no small degree of opportunism on the part of Hamas here. In early April, the Palestinian authority president Mahmoud Abbas announced that the legislative elections planned for 22 May would be delayed indefinitely. With the factions of Abbas’s Fatah badly split, Hamas was likely to have a strong showing. By taking up the mantle of defending Al Aqsa, Hamas’s leadership may have sought a show of leadership that might have otherwise been achieved through electoral means.
But the Jerusalem uprising was not Hamas’s doing. It was led by young east Jerusalemites, many of them born after the Oslo Accords were signed. And their demonstrations were successful. Before the skies darkened further, the Palestinian protests had not only led Israeli police to remove the barricades near the Damascus Gate; at the request of Israel’s attorney general, Israel’s high court postponed a hearing on the eviction of the families from Sheikh Jarrah, and Israeli police blocked the inflammatory, ultranationalist “March of Flags” from passing through Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem’s Old City. “The Jerusalem uprising had no Hamas or Fatah leadership,” tweeted Palestinian writer Aziz Abu Sarah. “Both groups want to capitalize on it and gain some popularity, knowing that their actions will hurt those they claim to want to help most.”
If there is any reason for hope, it is that public opinion in the US seems to be swinging, belatedly, in support of Palestinian rights. For the time being, such a position is hardly represented in the halls of US power. Only a handful of Democratic members of Congress have issued statements condemning Israel’s attempts to displace the Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah. But US politicians, and Democrats in particular, will not be able to ignore the calls to halt US military assistance to Israel forever. Of course, the US halting such support to Israel cannot alone end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem or the siege on Gaza. It is, however, a place to start.
Lawyers were stopped while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and questioned by counterterrorism agents. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty)
Documents Show Trump Officials Used Secret Terrorism Unit to Question Lawyers at the Border
Dara Lind, ProPublica
Lind writes: "In newly disclosed records, Trump officials cited conspiracies about Antifa to justify interrogating immigration lawyers with a special terrorism unit. The documents also show that more lawyers were targeted than previously known."
aylor Levy couldn’t understand why she’d been held for hours by Customs and Border Protection officials when crossing back into El Paso, Texas, after getting dinner with friends in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in January 2019. And she didn’t know why she was being questioned by an agent who’d introduced himself as a counterterrorism specialist.
Levy was part of the legal team representing the father of a girl who’d died the previous month in the custody of the Border Patrol, which is part of CBP. “There was so much hate for immigration lawyers at that time,” she recalled. “I thought that somebody had put in an anonymous tip that I was a terrorist.”
The truth was more troubling. Newly released records show that Levy was swept up as part of a broader than previously known push by the administration of President Donald Trump to use the federal government’s expansive powers at the border to stop and question journalists, lawyers and activists.
The records reveal that Levy and attorney Héctor Ruiz were interrogated by members of CBP’s secretive Tactical Terrorism Response Team. The lawyers were suspected of “providing assistance” to the migrant caravan that was then the focus of significant attention by the administration and right-wing media. Officials speculated in later reports that immigration lawyers were seeking to profit by moving migrants through Mexico, and that “Antifa” may have been involved.
The records were provided to ProPublica by the Santa Fe Dreamers Project, a public interest law firm and advocacy group that received them after filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit about the stops of Levy and Ruiz at the border in El Paso.
Following revelations two years ago by NBC 7 San Diego that some journalists and others were targeted for questioning when crossing from Tijuana, Mexico, the Trump administration maintained that the incidents were limited to San Diego and a handful of U.S. citizens. But the new documents prove the operation went further — and raise questions about how many others were targeted.
While the records are heavily redacted, they provide a window into exactly how the targeting worked. They also show that the push was based in part on claims that were simply wrong — for example, that Levy met with members of the caravan in Mexico while they were traveling towards the border.
“This whole thing is COINTELPRO for dummies,” said Mohammad Tajsar, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, referring to a notorious domestic spying program from decades ago. Tajsar is representing some of the San Diego activists who were stopped. An “intel-gathering apparatus was shared and deployed through a number of different agencies and resulted in a dragnet that ensnared a whole bunch of people.”
Responding to questions from ProPublica, a CBP spokesperson said in a statement: “In response to incidents in November 2018 and January 2019, which included assaults against Border Patrol Agents, CBP identified individuals who may have information relating to the instigators and/or organizers of these attacks. Efforts to gather this type of information are a standard law enforcement practice.” The statement does not address the targeting of Levy and Ruiz or what role investigators suspected two lawyers in El Paso of playing in attacks on federal agents that were in San Diego.
The administration of President Joe Biden is continuing to fight several lawsuits filed against the Trump administration over the operation. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general promised to investigate the allegations in 2019, as the CBP spokesperson noted to ProPublica, but it has not published its findings. The current head of U.S. Border Patrol is a career agent who was in charge of the San Diego sector when agents there were helping lead the surveillance effort.
Neither Levy nor Ruiz were told why they were being questioned. What they were asked about didn’t give them many clues. Both were questioned about their activities in Mexico — specifically, if they had been to Tijuana recently. They were questioned about their jobs and educational backgrounds; Ruiz was asked about the funding of the Santa Fe Dreamers Project, where they work as an attorney.
Both lawyers also recall being asked about their beliefs. Levy remembers an agent asking her why she worked for a Catholic aid organization if she didn’t believe in God, while Ruiz told ProPublica they were asked about their opinions of the Trump administration and the economy. Government notes of their interviews provided as part of the suit don’t reference those questions, but they do cite comments from both Levy and Ruiz criticizing Trump’s border policies.
Ruiz ultimately agreed to a phone search, despite their concerns about agents reading privileged attorney-client communications, which is exactly what the agents did. The records note the use of WhatsApp to communicate with people described as “foreign national” — Ruiz’s clients.
Ruiz didn’t tell anyone about their late-night interrogation for weeks after it happened. When they learned the same thing had happened to Levy, and when the NBC 7 story appeared two months later showing that similar episodes in San Diego had been part of a deliberate targeting effort, the El Paso lawyers sought to find out if they had been on the same watchlist. So Ruiz’s then-colleague Allegra Love filed a Freedom of Information Act request followed by a lawsuit.
This spring, they finally got a complete-enough set of documents to piece the truth together.
In late November 2018, writing up an interview with a migrant who’d traveled with the “caravan,” San Diego-area border agents identified Levy and Ruiz as two of “three attorneys/legal assistants that most likely traveled to meet with the caravan.” The redacted notes leave it unclear whether the migrant identified the two by name, or whether agents made the connection on their own. Either way, by the time that email was forwarded to San Diego’s Border Intelligence Center, the two were identified as “ASSOCIATED TO THE MIGRANT CARAVAN DEC 2018.”
In fact, Levy had not only never met with people in the caravan, colleagues recall she’d vocally criticized the caravan at the time. Ruiz had conducted some legal workshops for caravan migrants weeks before their arrival in Tijuana, when they’d been staying in a soccer stadium in Mexico City. Ruiz and Love told ProPublica they had encouraged migrants with tenuous asylum claims not to attempt to come to the U.S. and didn’t have any further involvement with the group.
According to emails obtained in the lawsuit, agents were instructed to flag Levy and Ruiz (as well as three others whose information is redacted) in the system for screening people coming through U.S. ports of entry.
When Ruiz came back to El Paso after a night out in Ciudad Juarez in December, and when Levy returned from that January dinner, the port officer checking their passports saw an alert that they should be interrogated by a member of CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team.
The team’s stated mission is to stop suspected foreign terrorists from entering the country. But the government has expanded powers at the border that allow it to stop and question civilians entering the U.S. Records produced in an ongoing ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit about the unit have shown that its members frequently question American citizens. (CBP did not respond to questions about the role of the terrorism teams.)
What exactly the interrogations of Levy and Ruiz were trying to uncover still isn’t clear. Levy and Ruiz both got the impression that they were being accused of “coaching” asylum-seekers to lie to border agents. The newly disclosed records don’t include anything about that, at least not in the unredacted text, but they do say that Ruiz “admitted to facilitating the migrant caravan by providing legal guidance free of charge and educate the migrant’s with the Asylum process.”
The accusation that telling asylum-seekers about how U.S. law works is “facilitating” their entry reflected a broader suspicion that asylum-seekers were trying to subvert U.S. law rather than accessing a legal right. One Border Patrol email from the San Diego side of the targeting operation, obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by NBC 7 and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and shared with ProPublica, referred to crossing the border to claim asylum as exploiting “a loophole.”
A Border Patrol intelligence report from El Paso, written several months after Levy and Ruiz were interrogated and included in the newly released documents, cast further aspersions on asylum lawyers. The report states, “Mass migration from South America into the United States is said to be coordinated at some level by non profit organizations who wish to line their pockets with proceeds deriving from migrants transportation fees up to the U.S Mexico border, and ultimately proceeds deriving from the migrants paying for their asylum case lawyers once they have arrived to the United States.” It goes on to associate this effort with “other groups such as Antifa.”
The report also asserts, inaccurately, that Levy and Ruiz were “seen in Tijuana assisting with the migrant caravan.”
Now that the lawyers know more about why they were stopped — and by whom — they are all the more concerned it could happen again. Levy has since moved to California but told ProPublica she fears retaliation for this article.
Ruiz still crosses the border multiple times a week for work. “I’m still super fearful,” they told ProPublica. “I don’t know if this is the day they’re going to detain me again.” The caravans and Trump are both gone, but “I’m still doing this work. And I don’t know what sort of false accusations they can throw going forward.”
The U.S. Department of Defense is conducting warrantless surveillance of Americans using commercial data. (photo: iStock)
Pentagon Surveilling Americans Location Data and Internet Browsing History Without a Warrant, Senator Reveals
Joseph Cox, VICE
Cox writes: "The Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden."
A letter obtained by Motherboard discusses internet browsing, location, and other forms of data.
he Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by Motherboard.
Senator Wyden's office asked the Department of Defense (DoD), which includes various military and intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for detailed information about its data purchasing practices after Motherboard revealed special forces were buying location data. The responses also touched on military or intelligence use of internet browsing and other types of data, and prompted Wyden to demand more answers specifically about warrantless spying on American citizens.
Some of the answers the DoD provided were given in a form that means Wyden's office cannot legally publish specifics on the surveillance; one answer in particular was classified. In the letter Wyden is pushing the DoD to release the information to the public. A Wyden aide told Motherboard that the Senator is unable to make the information public at this time, but believes it would meaningfully inform the debate around how the DoD is interpreting the law and its purchases of data.
"I write to urge you to release to the public information about the Department of Defense's (DoD) warrantless surveillance of Americans," the letter, addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, reads.
Wyden and his staff with appropriate security clearances are able to review classified responses, a Wyden aide told Motherboard. Wyden's office declined to provide Motherboard with specifics about the classified answer. But a Wyden aide said that the question related to the DoD buying internet metadata.
"Are any DoD components buying and using without a court order internet metadata, including 'netflow' and Domain Name System (DNS) records," the question read, and asked whether those records were about "domestic internet communications (where the sender and recipient are both U.S. IP addresses)" and "internet communications where one side of the communication is a U.S. IP address and the other side is located abroad."
Netflow data creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. DNS records relate to when a user looks up a particular domain, and a system then converts that text into the specific IP address for a computer to understand; essentially a form of internet browsing history.
Wyden's new letter to Austin urging the DoD to release that answer and others says "Information should only be classified if its unauthorized disclosure would cause damage to national security. The information provided by DoD in response to my questions does not meet that bar."
The questions were specifically sent to the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security in February 2021, Wyden's letter adds. Beyond the NSA and DIA, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security provides oversight to a range of agencies including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). A Wyden aide said it is not clear if the answers go beyond the agencies that act under the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
The DoD did not respond to a request for comment.
Wyden's questions came in response to Motherboard's reporting on special forces purchasing location data, a Wyden aide said. Specifically, Motherboard previously revealed that U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) bought access to a tool called Locate X that uses location data harvested from ordinary phone apps installed on peoples' phones. Motherboard also found that a National Guard unit tasked with carrying out drone strikes bought the same tool.
A Wyden aide said the office sent its original query to SOCOM's legislative affairs section. That department then said that the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security would respond, the aide added.
As part of Wyden's office's own parallel investigation into the location data selling space, the DIA said in a memo its analysts have searched commercial databases of smartphone location data without a warrant in five investigations over the past two and a half years, The New York Times reported in January.
"Other than DIA, are any DoD components buying and using without a court order location data collected from phones located in the United States?" one of Wyden's questions reads. The answer to that is one that Wyden is urging the DoD to release.
The DIA memo said the agency believes it does not require a warrant to obtain such information. Following this, Wyden also asked the DoD which other DoD components have adopted a similar interpretation of the law. One response said that each component is itself responsible to make sure they follow the law.
Wyden is currently proposing a new piece of legislation called The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act which would force some agencies to obtain a warrant for location and other data. Current sponsors include Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT., and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn, Wyden's office previously told Motherboard.
Kaedin Janvier poses for a portrait with a sign honoring Tamir Rice, following a silent protest in Boston on June 6, 2020. (photo: Getty)
Tamir Rice's Family Is Pressuring the Biden Administration to Reopen a Federal Investigation Into His Death
Ryan Brooks, BuzzFeed
Brooks writes: "The family of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was shot and killed by Cleveland police officers in 2014, is escalating pressure on the Justice Department to reopen the federal investigation into his death."
“We’ll keep everything going until they give me some answers,” Tamir Rice’s mother said this week.
“It means everything to me and my family that we get some justice for Tamir,” Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother, said on an organizing call this week with community members. “What that looks like for me is accountability, and an indictment, and a conviction. So I’m keeping the pressure on — we’re going to keep doing the work and we’ll keep everything going until they give me some answers.”
The Rice family and community organizers launched Tamir’s Campaign last month, an effort asking the public to request that the case be reopened and for the House Judiciary Committee to launch a separate investigation into the actions of former president Donald Trump’s DOJ, which quietly closed the case in December and announced there would be no federal charges against two Cleveland officers.
The family, who have been at odds with some national police reform groups and Black Lives Matter leaders, are acting with the support of dozens of members of Congress, and they’re doing so at a time when President Joe Biden’s Justice Department begins a wave of action around policing.
The family’s lawyers sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland in April, highlighting reports that political interference had stopped progress on the case even as career attorneys at the agency requested to convene a grand jury. The Rice family attorneys urged that there was no statute of limitations that would prevent former Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann from being charged for violating Rice’s civil rights when he shot him in 2014.
Loehmann, who was fired from the police department for lying on his job application, asked the Ohio Supreme Court to review his termination last month.
The push to reopen the federal investigation and to charge Loehmann for violating Rice’s civil rights is seen as one of the last ways to hold the former officer accountable after a grand jury declined to criminally charge two police officers in 2015.
“We are mindful that no one can guarantee a conviction and that prosecutions against police officers present special challenges,” the attorneys wrote. “But it is vital for [the] DOJ to establish that those who enforce our laws are subject to our laws.”
Subodh Chandra, an attorney representing the Rice family, said they have not received a response from the DOJ.
Organizers with the campaign said they’d begun planning to pressure the DOJ last winter following Biden’s victory. They have some reason for optimism: In just the last month, Biden’s Justice Department announced it would investigate the killing of Ahmaud Arbery as a federal hate crime and opened investigations into policing in Minneapolis and Louisville following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
“It makes all the difference in the world,” Chandra told organizers on the call detailing the careers of the new DOJ leadership. “We know that there are going to be people in these positions who’ve devoted their lives to the cause of equal justice and ensuring there is solid police accountability.”
Organizers with the campaign say they want the Justice Department to reopen the investigation before Tamir’s birthday on June 25.
Sen. Sherrod Brown and a group of three Ohio representatives sent a letter to Garland in late April requesting that the case be reexamined. On the same day, Rep. Jamaal Bowman sent a letter signed by 41 other House members to Garland, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, and the White House asking for the same.
“We fully support carrying out Samaria Rice’s appeal to DOJ immediately, and we further urge that the results of the investigation be made public immediately upon completion,” the representatives wrote.
Organizers with the campaign said they were not familiar with any actions by national police reform advocacy groups to assist the campaign.
Samaria Rice and other family members of people killed by police have publicly feuded with prominent police reform advocates recently. Rice called out activists and groups like Black Lives Matter Global Network, Tamika Mallory, and prominent attorneys after Mallory, the cofounder of Until Freedom, appeared to speak about police brutality during a performance at the Grammys in March.
“The national organizers and lawyers who've had criticism of the comments that Miss Rice has made about the movement should put those criticisms aside and support and show up for her on her own terms in her fight toward getting justice for her son,” Molly Nagin, an organizer with the campaign, told BuzzFeed News. “Maybe if you build trust by showing up for her, some of those criticisms that she's raising won't be as applicable, but right now they're very applicable."
Rep. Rashida Tlaib. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Watch Rep. Rashida Tlaib Blast US Aid for Israel and Attack on Gaza in Dramatic House Floor Speech
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "As the death toll in Gaza reaches at least 119 amid Israel's escalation of its aerial assault, Congressmember Rashida Tlaib of Michigan delivered a powerful speech on the House floor Thursday to denounce the violence and attempted erasure of the Palestinian people."
s the death toll in Gaza reaches at least 119 amid Israel’s escalation of its aerial assault, Congressmember Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress, delivered a powerful speech on the House floor Thursday to denounce the violence and attempted erasure of the Palestinian people. “I am the only Palestinian American member of Congress now,” Tlaib said. “I am a reminder to colleagues that Palestinians do indeed exist.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The death toll in Gaza has reached at least 119 as Israel escalates its aerial assault and fires heavy artillery at the besieged territory. Israel is also threatening to send in ground troops. Israel has so far killed at least 31 Palestinian children, many under the age of 10. Gaza authorities report 40% of the victims in the Israeli assault have been women and children. Over 830 Palestinians have been wounded so far this week, but Gaza’s hospital systems are on the verge of collapse as doctors face shortages of medicine and recurring power outages. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports more than 24 Palestinian schools have also been damaged in the Israeli strikes.
Eight people have died in Israel as Hamas continues to fire rockets from Gaza. Israel has rejected calls for a ceasefire.
Meanwhile, the United States has blocked the U.N. Security Council from holding a meeting today on the crisis. Earlier in the week, the U.S. twice blocked the Security Council from issuing statements on the violence. On Thursday, President Biden said Israel’s actions do not represent a, quote, “significant overreaction.”
Meanwhile, Israeli authorities have arrested dozens of Palestinians living in Israel, in an attempt to quell an unprecedented uprising. Many are being held without access to legal counsel. Jewish mobs have been filmed attacking Palestinians across Israel, some on live television. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Al Jazeera reports more than 40 Palestinians have been injured, both by the Israeli military as well as mobs of Jewish settlers.
This all comes as Palestinians are planning to mark the 73rd anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe, as they call it, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes after the state of Israel was formed.
Later in the program, we’ll be joined by two leading Palestinian figures, the historian Rashid Khalidi and the longtime diplomat and politician Hanan Ashrawi. But we begin with the words of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. She became the first Palestinian American woman to be elected to Congress in 2018. She spoke Thursday on the floor of the House.
REP. RASHIDA TLAIB: I am the only Palestinian American member of Congress now, and my mere existence has disrupted the status quo. I am a — so personal for me. I am a reminder to colleagues that Palestinians do indeed exist, that we are human, that we are allowed to dream. We are mothers, daughters, granddaughters. We are justice seekers and are unapologetically about our fight against oppressions of all forms.
And, colleagues, Palestinians aren’t going anywhere, no matter how much money you send to Israel’s apartheid government. If we are to make good on our promises to support equal human rights for all, it is our duty to end the apartheid system that for decades has subjected Palestinians to inhumane treatment and racism, reducing Palestinians to live in utter fear and terror of losing a child, being indefinitely detained or killed because of who they are, and the unequal rights and protections they have under Israeli law. It must end. One of Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations, B’Tselem, has declared Israel an apartheid state. Human Rights Watch recently recognized it, too. This is what Palestinians living under Israel’s oppression have been telling us for decades.
I have been told by some of my colleagues who dispute the truth about segregation, racism and violence in Israel towards Palestinians that I — that I need to know the history. What they mean, unintentionally or not, is that Palestinians do not have the right to tell the truth about what happened to them during the founding of Israel. They are, in effect — effect, they erase the truth about ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Israel, that some refer to as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
As Palestinians talk about our history, know that many of my Black neighbors and Indigenous communities may not know what we mean by Nakba, but they do understand what it means to be killed, expelled from your home, land, made homeless, and stripped of your human rights. My ancestors and current family in Palestine deserve the world to hear their history without obstruction. They have a right to be able to explain to the world that they are still suffering, still being dispossessed, still being killed as the world watches and does nothing. As Peter Beinart, an American of Jewish faith, writes, quote, “When you tell a people to forget its past you are not proposing peace. You are proposing extinction.” The Palestinian story is that of being made a refugee on the land you call home. We cannot have an honest conversation about U.S. military support for the Israeli government today without acknowledging that for Palestinians, the catastrophe of displacement and dehumanization in their homeland has been ongoing since 1948.
To read the statements from President Biden and Secretary Blinken, General Austin and leaders of both parties, you’d hardly know Palestinians existed at all. There has been no recognition of the attack on Palestinian families being ripped from their homes in East Jerusalem right now or home demolitions; no mention of children being detained or murdered; no recognition of a sustained campaign of harassment and terror by Israeli police against worshipers kneeling down and praying and celebrating their holiest days in one of their holiest places — no mention of Al-Aqsa, being surrounded by violence, tear gas, smoke, while people pray. Can my colleagues imagine if it was their place of worship filled with tear gas? Could you pray as stun grenades were tossed into your holiest place?
Above all, there has been absolutely no recognition of Palestinian humanity. If our own State Department can’t even bring itself to acknowledge the killing of Palestinian children is wrong, well, I will say it for the millions of Americans who stand with me against the killing of innocent children, no matter their ethnicity or faith. I weep for all the lives lost under the unbearable status quo, every single one, no matter their faith, their background. We all deserve freedom, liberty, peace and justice, and it should never be denied because of our faith or ethnic background. No child, Palestinian or Israeli, whoever they are, should ever have to worry that death will rain from the sky. How many of my colleagues are willing to say the same, to stand for Palestinian human rights as they do for Israelis’?
There is a crushing dehumanization to how we talk about this terrible violence. The New York Post reported that Palestinian death row — reported the Palestinian death toll as Israeli casualties. ABC says that Israelis are, quote, “killed,” while Palestinians simply, quote, “die,” as if by magic, as if they were never human to begin with. Help me understand the math. How many Palestinians have to die for their lives to matter?
Life under apartheid strips Palestinians of their human dignity. How would you feel if you had to go through dehumanizing checkpoints two blocks from your own home to go to the doctor or travel across your own land? How would you feel if you had to do it while pregnant in the scorching heat as soldiers with guns controlled your freedom? How would you feel if you lived in Gaza, where your power and water might be out for days or weeks at a time, where you cut — were cut off from the outside world by inhumane military blockade?
Meanwhile, Palestinians’ rights to nonviolent resistance have been curtailed and even criminalized. Our party leaders have spoken forcefully against BDS, calling its proponents anti-Semitic, despite the same tactics being critical to ending the South African apartheid mere decades ago. What we are telling Palestinians fighting apartheid is the same thing being told to my Black neighbors and Americans throughout that are fighting against police brutality here: There is no form of acceptable resistance to state violence.
As long as the message from Washington is that our military support for Israel is unconditional, Netanyahu’s extremism, right-wing government will continue to expand settlements, continue to demolish homes and continue to make the prospects for peace impossible. Three hundred and thirty of my own colleagues, Democrats and Republicans here, 75% of the body here, signed a letter pledging that Israel shall never be made to comply with basic human rights laws that other countries that receive our military aid must observe.
You know, when I see the images and videos of destruction and death in Falastin, all I hear are the children screaming from pure fear and terror. I want to read something a mother named Eman in Gaza wrote two days ago. She said, quote, “Tonight, I put the kids to sleep in our bedroom. So that when we die, we die together and no one would live to mourn the loss of [one another].” The statement broke me a little more because of my country’s policies and funding will deny this mother’s right to see children live — her own children live without fear and to grow old without painful trauma and violence.
We must condition aid to Israel on compliance with international human rights and end the apartheid. We must, with no hesitation, demand that our country recognize the unconditional support of Israel has enabled the erasure of Palestinian life and the denial of the rights of millions of refugees and emboldens the apartheid policies that Human Rights Watch has detailed thoroughly in their recent report.
I stand before you not only as a congresswoman for the beautiful 13 District strong, but also as a proud daughter of Palestinian immigrants and the granddaughter of a loving Palestinian grandmother living in the occupied Falastin. You take that, and you combine it with the fact that I was raised in one of the most beautiful, Blackest cities in America, a city where movements for civil rights and social justice are birthed, the city of Detroit. So I can’t stand here — I can’t stand silent when injustice exists, where the truth is obscured. If there’s one thing Detroit instilled in this Palestinian girl from Southwest, it’s you always speak truth to power, even if your voice shakes. The freedom of Palestinians is connected to the fight against oppression all over the world. Lastly, to my sitty in Falastin, ’ashanek ’iinaa iaquf huna [phon.]. I stand here because of you. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, speaking on the House floor Thursday. She’s the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress.
When we come back, we’ll be joined by two leading Palestinian figures: the historian Rashid Khalidi and the longtime diplomat and politician Dr. Hanan Ashrawi. Stay with us.
A man fishes near docked oil drilling platforms, Friday, May 8, 2020, in Port Aransas, Texas. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
Big Oil Is Trying to Make Climate Change Your Problem to Solve. Don't Let Them
Amy Westervelt, Rolling Stone
Westervelt writes: "A new Harvard study highlights a decades-long trend - how industry creates systemic problems and then blames consumers for it."
or decades, various industries have weaponized American individualism, laying the blame for systemic issues at the feet of individual citizens. Tobacco companies wouldn’t exist without smokers, the story goes. Litter wouldn’t exist without us litterbugs. Cars wouldn’t crash if we weren’t such speed freaks. And, of course, climate change wouldn’t exist if we weren’t all such gluttons for fossil fuel energy.
The framing of climate change, in particular, as something that wouldn’t be an issue if “we” had all just made better consumer choices has been persistent and effective. Every Earth Day, we’re bombarded with tips about how to minimize our personal carbon footprints; meanwhile, it’s 2021 and the GOP is still suggesting tree-planting as climate policy.
A new paper from Harvard science historians Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran shows that this sort of framing is no accident, it was by design. Oreskes was the co-author of the landmark 2010 book The Merchants of Doubt, which exposed that some of the same scientists who had spun and downplayed the health risks of smoking for tobacco companies had pushed climate denial for oil companies. The new paper, published this week in One Earth, focuses on the subtle rhetorical techniques of ExxonMobil, which is currently a defendant in more than two dozen lawsuits over its role in concealing and confusing the issue of climate change since the 1980s.
ExxonMobil says this study is “part of a litigation strategy” against it and claims that Oreskes is on retainer for one of the law firms bringing these cases. Oreskes says that is untrue — she once reviewed a briefing for the firm, for historical accuracy, and billed them for 3.5 hours, back in 2017. But she says this sort of response is in keeping with Exxon’s strategy. “ExxonMobil is now misleading the public about its history of misleading the public,” she wrote in a statement.
Oreskes and Supran looked at a total of 212 documents spanning the years 1972 to 2019 — a mix of internal documents, scientific reports, and advertorials — which the authors said, to their knowledge, constitute “all publicly available internal and peer-reviewed ExxonMobil documents related to anthropogenic global warming.” They ran those papers through an algorithm, looking for words that showed up within five words before or after the phrases “global warming” or “climate change.” The words that turned up most were “risk” and “demand.”
Supran, a member of Oreskes’ research team and the lead author on the paper, says “risk” was used to subtly introduce uncertainty about climate science. And the heavy use of the word “demand” ties into the oil industry’s long-standing efforts to position itself as simply supplying a demand for its product, and consumers as the real drivers of runaway climate change. The authors point out that the tobacco industry used this strategy successfully for years, too.
Of course, consumers aren’t entirely blameless, particularly the world’s wealthiest individuals, but the idea that oil is a purely demand-side industry is ridiculous. In the 1980s, for example, when the oil crisis was finally over (oil prices had risen by 300 percent at one point) oil companies were very worried about the fact that Americans had gotten good at saving energy, so good that demand seemed to have permanently dipped. Did they reduce supply accordingly? No, they looked for ways to drive demand back up, tinkering with production and lobbying for policies that would incentivize increased fossil fuel use. More recently, as companies have grappled with a natural gas glut, they have not stopped fracking, but merely found a new revenue stream — plastic.
It’s not just ExxonMobil telling us that it’s consumers, not companies, who are responsible for climate change, of course. Chevron regularly highlights how it’s keeping the lights on for all of us. Shell leans on consumers to “do their part” by choosing carbon neutral energy. And BP famously invented the ultimate tool for pinning greenhouse gas emissions on individual consumers: the carbon footprint calculator.
This is also not a new tactic. The gun industry has deployed it since the 1920s (yes, they’ve been on the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” thing that long), and back in the 1970s the infamous “crying Indian” ad, funded by a cohort of packaging companies, made wasteful packaging a littering problem, caused by people thoughtlessly refusing to pick up after themselves, not companies unnecessarily wrapping their products in trash.
But the “hey, we just sell stuff” narrative dates back even further than that, to Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the world’s first publicist, who used this strategy on behalf of the fossil fuel industry more than 100 years ago. Working for utilities, coal companies, and Standard Oil, Lee emphasized to the public how fundamental his clients’ products were to their lives as a way to distract from pollution, labor abuses, and safety concerns.
“Lee’s efforts to make visible the public purpose of heavy industry relied on promoting a national consciousness of consumer and political reliance on energy,” says Melissa Aronczyk, a media studies researcher at Rutgers University.
Supran points to this as a sort of necessary precursor to blaming the public for the negative impacts of a product. He and Oreskes call this the “Fossil Fuel Savior” framing: First, remind people that they are dependent on your product for all sorts of good things, then convince them that the negative impacts of that dependence are their fault, not the company’s. And finally, swoop in to magnanimously save the day (this last bit is all over the industry’s ads today, and even in ExxonMobil’s official response to this study, which highlights its support of the Paris Climate Agreement and investment in a carbon capture “concept”).
The strategy of shifting responsibility to the public is far less blatant than climate denial, but that’s part of what makes it so effective. It taps into American ideas about personal responsibility on the one hand, and the purity complex of activists on the other. So instead of pushing collectively for systemic change — accountability for fossil fuel companies, for example, which could be anything from requiring them to contribute to a climate fund to enacting a carbon tax to decommissioning fossil fuel infrastructure to all of the above and more — concerned citizens might feel like they need to focus on going zero waste or zero carbon in their own lives first. This rhetorical framing flourishes not only because it taps into America’s individualistic identity, but also because it presents easy solutions: simply buy different things in your own life, walk or bike a bit more, and everything will be fine!
It also provides a purity test that no climate activist can possibly pass. It’s the perfect setup for oil companies: The problem is consumers, not industry, and no consumer can ever reduce their carbon footprint enough to be a credible critic. This sort of thing is rampant — tweet about climate and you can expect to be criticized for using a phone; attend a climate conference and prepare to defend yourself if you drove or flew there. Rightwing politicians and pundits delight in pointing out “climate hypocrites,” from Scott Walker criticizing Al Gore for having a mansion to Dinesh D’Souza gotcha-ing Pete Buttigieg for “faking” a green lifestyle by biking to work after getting dropped off nearby in a car. Jeremy Jones, the professional snowboarder-turned-climate activist who started Protect Our Winters, says every time he mentions climate publicly, he gets a wave of it. “People love to tell me to shut up until I’ve stopped manufacturing snowboards or taking flights,” he says.
“Those accusations of hypocrisy leveled at climate academics and activists alike who criticize the fossil fuel industry, that’s the ground level manifestation of this, this brainwashing, frankly,” says Supran. “I think that’s the really profound thing, that it manifests itself at all scales and all segments of society.”
Skewing the discourse toward individual action is a way to soft-pedal what futurist Alex Steffen calls “predatory delay,” a strategy to intentionally delay climate action in order to continue profiting from fossil fuels, even though it will result in catastrophic damage. In the same way that agreeing to a net zero target in 2060 when you know it needs to be more like 2030 is a predatory delay tactic, focusing the public’s attention on individual carbon emissions is a way to further delay progress toward a large-scale energy transition that gives everyone better options.
This tactic also lays the groundwork for a defense of the industry’s behavior in court. Tobacco companies, after subtly grooming the public to take personal responsibility for the health impacts of their products for years, used that as an aggressive legal defense. “They used consumer demand as ‘liberty’ when they were talking to the public, but in court flipped the script and talked about demand as blame,” says Supran, who points to the potential for oil companies to do the same as they face dozens of liability and fraud claims.
In fact, that’s already happening. In the climate liability case that San Francisco and Oakland brought against the oil companies, Judge William Alsup requested a “climate science tutorial,” during which he asked both sides to present a brief history of climate science. Chevron’s attorney, Ted Boutrous, speaking on behalf of all the oil company plaintiffs, argued that asking the courts to hold oil companies responsible for their role in climate change was akin to “challenging the way human civilization has developed to this date,” and then he laid the blame at the feet of consumers, arguing that there’s no evidence consumers would have changed their behavior had oil companies been truthful about climate change back in the 1980s. “Would people have changed their behavior? No one has changed their behavior now after five IPCC reports,” he said, referring to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Boutrous made that argument in May 2018. Just a few months later, the most direct and strongly worded IPCC report yet was released, warning of a stark 12-year timeline to avoid a disastrous level of climate change, and helping to galvanize a global climate movement unlike anything we’ve seen before. Had fossil fuel companies not worked so hard to hijack the IPCC process in the decades prior, we might have seen that sort of action much earlier.
Nonetheless, the judge in the San Francisco climate case bought the argument. At one point he said, “We’ve been using fossil fuels for the entire industrial revolution. We won the Second World War with fossil fuels. If we didn’t have fossil fuels, we would have lost that war and every other war. Airplanes couldn’t fly, ocean liners couldn’t fly, the trains wouldn’t run, and we would be back in the Stone Age. And so we have gotten a huge benefit from the use of fossil fuels, right?”
An oil company advertorial couldn’t have said it better.
Nobody is doubting that the world needs energy, but does it have to come from burning fossil fuels? No. Does the fact that we’ve benefited from fossil fuels in the past mean we have to keep using them? No. Does that benefit excuse any and all behavior from fossil fuel companies, even lying to the public? No. And is it really a consumer “choice” when for decades there was no option but to consume fossil fuels? No — especially when that lack of choice was driven largely by fossil fuel lobbying.
“The idea that we’re all responsible for climate change because of our individual decisions is a profoundly unsociological understanding of how behavior is formed through cultural influences, behavioral influences, and economic factors,” says environmental sociologist Robert Brulle. “For example, if you want to ride your bike to work and there are no bike paths and no provisions for you to take your bike on the road, every time you bike to work you take your life in your hands. The idea that we can individually choose to go to a low-carbon transportation system is blaming the victim for the real decisions that are made about how we structure our cities, how we set energy policy, how we set the cost of automobiles. It obscures the power of vested interests to be able to shape our lives.”
Supran says he hopes making people more aware of the fact that there is a clear strategy here to offload responsibility for the climate crisis onto individuals will help get people out of what rhetorician Jen Schneider calls “the hypocrites trap” — the paralysis that can come when people think they can’t say anything at all about climate, or about the bad behavior of fossil fuel companies, unless they’ve rid their own lives of fossil fuels.
“If you’re really focused on your own sense of guilt and responsibility, you become hamstrung from acting to hold the systemic failures to account that are locking us into this fossil fuel status quo society,” Supran says.
Which again, is not to say that no individual actions matter. It’s absolutely worth it for people to reduce their carbon emissions where they can and model low-carbon options for their neighbors. It’s even more worth it to think about individual actions that are not purchases, a thing that gets left out of this debate infuriatingly often. Talk to people, organize, campaign, hound your political representatives, agitate for more bike paths. There are any number of ways to contribute individually to collective change that have nothing at all to do with spending money.
But equally, it’s important to lay the blame for climate change where it belongs. And that’s not some silly game of finger pointing, it turns out. It has enormous influence over who’s held accountable for climate change, and who’s expected to act to address it. The industry knows that; it’s why they’ve been pointing the finger at us for decades.
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