16 May 21
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15 May 21
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Ken Klippenstein | Pentagon List of Extremism Experts Includes Anti-Muslim and Conservative Christian Groups
Ken Klippenstein, The Intercept
Klippenstein writes: "A Pentagon working group established in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot to root out domestic extremists has circulated a list of prospective partners that includes representatives of a conservative Christian group and an anti-Muslim extremism group, according to an internal Defense Department document obtained exclusively by The Intercept."
The Pentagon’s Countering Extremism Working Group has circulated a list of prospective partners that includes individuals associated with anti-Muslim group MEM
Pentagon working group established in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot to root out domestic extremists has circulated a list of prospective partners that includes representatives of a conservative Christian group and an anti-Muslim extremism group, according to an internal Defense Department document obtained exclusively by The Intercept. In several cases, these potential partners were themselves involved in the misidentification of Muslims as terrorists.
On April 9, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the establishment of the Countering Extremism Working Group, which would “receive information from both internal and external Subject Matter Experts,” who would serve as consultants. The document shows that those experts could include representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, anti-hate groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, as well as the conservative First Liberty Institute and the anti-Muslim Middle East Media Research Institute.
The document, which was provided to The Intercept by a Pentagon source on condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal, is not dated, but the source said that it was disseminated late last month. The document states, “The Countering Extremism Working Group (CEWG) would like to partner with experts on counter extremism and counter terrorism to better understand the scope of the problem and inform the 90-day report for the Secretary of Defense. These experts may come from advocacy groups, academia, and other areas that contribute the to the fight against terrorism.”
The Middle East Media Research Institute has been described as “the Islamophobia network’s go-to place for selective translations of Islamist rhetoric abroad,” according to a report by the Center for American Progress. (One of the report’s authors, Lee Fang, is now a reporter at The Intercept.) MEMRI was founded in 1997 by Yigal Carmon, formerly a high-ranking intelligence officer for the Israeli military, who served as a counter-terrorism adviser to Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir. MEMRI came to prominence after the September 11 attacks by publishing English language translations from Arab media and disseminating them among major Western media outlets. But according to critics, MEMRI cherry-picked quotes to exaggerate the threat posed by Islamic radicalism. As the Center for American Progress report notes, Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik cited MEMRI over a dozen times in his manifesto.
The Pentagon document references one MEMRI staffer in particular, Anat Agron. Last year, the New York Times retracted claims it had made which were central to its award-winning podcast series, “Caliphate,” whose main character was a young Canadian Muslim who falsely claimed to have committed gruesome crimes as an Islamic State fighter in Syria. The podcast’s lead reporter Rukmini Callimachi explained that she had found out about the young man “through a researcher named Anat Agron.”
In an email received after this article was published, Agron disputed Rukmini Callimachi’s characterization of her involvement with the “Caliphate” podcast: “The NYT did shoddy to non-existent vetting of the Canadian jihadi in question. The title of my report which I gave to [Callimachi] had the word ‘alleged’ in it.” Agron disputed the characterization of MEMRI as anti-Muslim and stated that she has never advised the Pentagon.
Steven Emerson, perhaps best known as producer of “Jihad in America,” formerly served on MEMRI’s board of directors and falsely blamed the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing on Middle Eastern terrorists. (The bombing was in fact carried out by Timothy McVeigh, who held white supremacist views.) Shortly after the bombing took place, Emerson said on CBS that the attack was intended “to inflict as many casualties as possible,” which he identified as “a Middle Eastern trait.” This would not be the last time that Emerson jumped the gun and misidentified a terror perpetrator. After the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, Emerson claimed on Fox News that a Saudi national was considered a suspect before fleeing to Saudi Arabia. When Glenn Beck echoed similar claims, the Saudi man sued for slander and defamation, for which a settlement was later reached.
The document mentions Michael Berry, who serves as general counsel for First Liberty Institute, a Christian conservative legal organization. The group has litigated many high-profile cases of interest to the religious right, including the case of a Colorado cake store owner who refused to bake a wedding cake for for two gay men, citing religious opposition to gay marriage. First Liberty has ties to former President Donald Trump. Its former senior counsel, Ken Klukowski, served on Trump’s presidential transition team, and both its former general counsel, Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, and its deputy general counsel, Jeff Mateer, were nominated by Trump for federal judicial appointments. (Kacsmaryk was confirmed, but Mateer withdrew his nomination after comments surfaced in which he called transgender children “Satan’s plan” and advocated for judicial discrimination for reasons including sexual orientation.)
In a phone interview with The Intercept, Berry said he was not aware of his inclusion in the military working group’s list of experts. He also expressed concerns about respecting service members’ constitutional rights. “Eliminating extremism from the military is certainly a noble goal but it’s going to be important that we have a good definition of what extremism is such that we protect constitutional rights,” Berry said.
While it is unclear which of the individuals or groups mentioned in the Pentagon document will end up consulting, there are signs that some already have been doing so. Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League, thanked the Army War College for inviting him to speak on extremism in tweets posted yesterday.
The Pentagon, MEMRI, and the ADL did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Voting rights activists gather during a protest against Texas legislators who are advancing a slew of new voting restrictions in Austin, Texas, on 8 May 2021. (photo: Mikala Compton/Reuters)
ALSO SEE: Republicans Oppose Kristen Clarke for
Top Civil Rights Job at DOJ in Latest Attack on Voting Rights
Leaked Video Shows Conservative Group Bragging About Secretly Helping Republican State Legislatures Restrict Voting
Kelsey Vlamis, Business Insider
Vlamis writes: "A conservative group told its top donors that it has been quietly working to help state legislatures pass voting laws that will 'right the wrongs of November,' according to a leaked video."
conservative group told its top donors that it has been quietly working to help state legislatures pass voting laws that will "right the wrongs of November," according to a leaked video.
Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, said during a private meeting in Arizona last month that the group has even drafted some of the legislation that's been signed into law.
"We're working with these state legislatures to make sure they have all of the information they need to draft the bills. In some cases, we actually draft them for them," she said in the video, which was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and published by Mother Jones on Thursday.
Republican-controlled legislatures nationwide are seeking to pass voting rights reform, largely fueled by the false and unsubstantiated claims about widespread voter and election fraud in the 2020 election. GOP lawmakers say the bills are about election integrity and restoring trust, while Democrats say they are restrictive and give credence to baseless claims of fraud.
Iowa passed a law in March that cut the state's early voting period and closed the polls earlier on election day, after Iowans turned out in record numbers in the fall. Georgia passed a high-profile and controversial law overhauling its elections that critics blasted as oppressive.
Texas is also considering new election-related measures that could restrict voting.
"Iowa was the first state that we got to work in, and we did it quickly, and we did it quietly. Honestly, nobody noticed," Anderson told the group's donors.
"At the end of the day, the bill that Gov. Kemp signed, and the Georgia legislature marshaled through, had eight key provisions that Heritage recommended," she said. Another bill being considered in Texas had "19 provisions" that were written by Heritage Action, Anderson said.
The Associated Press reported it was known that Heritage Action, which is a sister organization of the influential conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, was working with lawmakers, but that "it is rare to hear a leader detail how a group masks involvement to give the bills the appearance of broad political support."
Anderson told AP in a statement that the group is "proud of our work to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat."
"That work begins at the state level through our grassroots and continues in state legislatures throughout the country," she said.
Anderson, who also worked in the Trump administration, has pushed unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the past. On Fox News in December, in reference to Georgians newly registering for the runoff election, she said "this is exactly the type of fraud that we have been raising the red flag for months now," without citing any evidence of fraud. She added "we know that the fraud is real."
The group, along with former president Donald Trump's campaign and the US Justice Department, have been unable to find evidence of widespread fraud. But Anderson said the group is motivated by what it believes went wrong in the last election.
"We are going to take the fierce fire that is in every single one of our bellies to right the wrongs of November," she said in the new video.
Amazon has routinely denied an ulterior motive for requesting the United States Postal Service mailbox, saying it was installed to help ensure robust turnout. (photo: Phil Noble/Reuters)
Report: Amazon Had Keys to USPS Mailbox Used for Union Ballots
Spencer Soper and Matt Day, Bloomberg
Excerpt: "Security guards at an Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in Alabama had keys to a mailbox the company encouraged employees to use to mail their ballots in a high-profile union election earlier this year, a worker said Friday in a National Labor Relations Board hearing."
The mailbox, located near the entrance of Amazon’s facility, has emerged as a key piece of evidence in a union bid to overturn election results.
ecurity guards at an Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in Alabama had keys to a mailbox the company encouraged employees to use to mail their ballots in a high-profile union election earlier this year, a worker said Friday in a National Labor Relations Board hearing.
Kevin Jackson, who has worked at the warehouse in Bessemer for more than a year, said he saw two guards approach the mailbox and use keys to open one of its doors. The mailbox, located near the entrance of the Amazon facility, has emerged as a key piece of evidence in a union bid to overturn the election results.
In an April 16 complaint, the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union accused Amazon of misconduct — including issuing anti-union threats, firing an employee for distributing union cards and pressuring workers to use the mailbox to cast their votes.
The mailbox was provided by the U.S. Postal Service at Amazon’s request, and union officials accused the company of having the box installed to keep an eye on workers voting. Federal law restricts surveillance of employees’ union election activities. The union also alleges that the installation of the mailbox created the impression that Amazon “controls the mechanics of the election,” according to an April 30 order from the labor board’s acting regional director.
Amazon has routinely denied an ulterior motive for requesting the mailbox, saying it was installed to help ensure robust turnout. “This mailbox — which only the USPS had access to — was a simple, secure, and completely optional way to make it easy for employees to vote, no more and no less,” the company said in a statement last month.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Jackson’s allegation.
The “cluster” mailbox has several doors with locks. Jackson said that when he was leaving work one morning he saw security guards approach the box, after which one of them used a key to open a large box on the bottom labeled “1P.” “What he was getting out or looking for, I’m not sure,” he said.
Amazon employees voted 1,798 to 738 against joining the union in a seven-week mail-in election that ended in March. The labour board has the authority to invalidate election results in response to conduct that could have changed the outcome and prevented employees from making a free choice about whether to unionize.
Israeli forces have targeted and harassed journalists covering the rising tensions. (photo: AFP)
Israel Targets Palestinian Journalists Covering Crackdown on Protests
Shatha Hammad, Middle East Eye
Hammad writes: "Israeli authorities have led an unprecedented crackdown on local journalists attempting to cover the tense developments on the ground since the outbreak of Palestinian protests in Israel last week."
Using live ammunition and spraying with 'skunk water,' Israeli forces have hindered journalists from carrying out their work
sraeli authorities have led an unprecedented crackdown on local journalists attempting to cover the tense developments on the ground since the outbreak of Palestinian protests in Israel last week.
The protesters have been voicing their rejection of an Israeli court's decision to imminently evict a number of Palestinian families in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
In addition to the violent dispersal of protests, police and armed forces have beaten and fired live ammunition on journalists covering the unfolding of events, particularly following attacks on al-Aqsa Mosque and Israel's deadly bombardment of Gaza since Monday.
In the West Bank, photojournalists have been hit with steel bullets while doing their job at the northern entrance to the city of al-Bireh, near the settlement of Beit El. Many journalists, including Hisham Abu Shakra, Mutasim Saqf al-Heit, Issam Al-Rimawi and Ramiz Awad, were heavily wounded as a result.
Raed al-Sharif, from the West Bank, told Middle East Eye that he and other journalists, including Mahoor al-Wahwah and Jamil Salhab, were covering the confrontations in the city of Yatta on Friday when they were shot by snipers.
"We felt fear, and found ourselves being targeted directly, which prompted us to leave the place and stop our coverage," he said.
Violent tactics have been used to quash the protests around the West Bank and other regions in recent weeks, including beatings, the use of teargas, sound grenades and rubber bullets.
Many people have reported difficulties in breathing as a result of the continued use of teargas, with some needing medical attention.
"Skunk water," which has been used by Israeli forces as a tactic to disperse crowds, has also targeted journalists, forcing them to evacuate areas and hindering their ability to carry out their job. Skunk water, a crowd-control weapon developed by an Israeli company, is described as a concoction of chemicals that causes intense nausea, obstructing normal breathing, causing violent gagging and vomiting
In Sheikh Jarrah, which has been a flashpoint of tension in recent days, large numbers of heavily armed police have been deployed in an effort to quell any gatherings of protesters.
Israeli police have also been seen intimidating members of the press covering the events, as well as disrupting reports and footage coming from the ground.
Anadolu Agency's Middle East news editor, Turgut Alp Boyraz, was shot twice by Israeli police while reporting. Two other journalists from the same agency were targeted in the Gaza Strip on Thursday.
On 12 May, Israeli air strikes destroyed the al-Jawhara tower, a multi-storey building in Gaza City that houses offices of over a dozen media organisations, including Palestine Newspaper, Al Kufiya Channel, Bawaba 24 and the Palestinian Media Forum.
Another building, the al Shorouk Tower, which housed seven media outlets, was also destroyed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza on the same day.
According to the Palestinian Prisoners Society, 90 people have been arrested in the West Bank since tensions escalated earlier this week.
The Palestinian Authority's Commission of Detainees Affairs also said that over the past three weeks Israeli authorities have carried out a mass campaign of arrests against Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The Palestinian government agency estimates that Israel has carried out around 600 arrests in the past few weeks, with the majority of them being in the Israeli town of Lod, known to Palestinians as Lydd, as well as in Jerusalem and Ramleh.
'Disproportionate' force
Israel has been widely condemned for its intense crackdown on journalists covering the escalations on the ground over the past week.
In a statement on Thursday, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) denounced the "disproportionate" use of force against local journalists.
The head of RSF’s Middle East desk, Sabrina Bennoui, urged the Israeli authorities to halt the use of force, including stun grenades and teargas, against Palestinian reporters.
"Palestinian journalists, who were already struggling to work in the conditions imposed by the Israeli authorities, are once again on the front line when tension erupts," she said.
"We urge the Israeli authorities to desist from this disproportionate use of force against Palestinian reporters, who should on no account be treated as if they were parties to the conflict."
Israel ranks 86 out of 180 countries in RSF's 2021 World Press Freedom index.
A US Border Patrol agent speaks to a group of migrants from Central America at the US-Mexico border in Roma, Texas. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
The Last Thing We Need Is a More Militarized Border
Hallam Tuck, Jacobin
Tuck writes: "The hysterical talk about a 'crisis at the border' isn’t being used to make the lives of those fleeing violence and poverty any easier."
It’s being used to justify shoveling even more money to an enforcement apparatus whose budget has tripled in less than two decades.
f you’ve been watching the news over the past few weeks, you might have heard that there is a crisis at the US-Mexico border. Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Alejandro Mayorkas has already made three visits to the border since taking office in February. In Congress, House minority leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy has proclaimed a “Humanitarian crisis, public health crisis [and] national security crisis” unfolding at the US-Mexico border.
Political concern has, in turn, spurred a wave of media coverage. The Washington Post declared recently that the Biden administration faced the biggest “border surge” in twenty years, predicting that there may be as many as “two million migrants at the southern border.” This story was seemingly so urgent that ABC News chose to run the entirety of a recent edition of “This Week,” the network’s Sunday news talk show, from the El Paso section of the border wall.
The alarming statistics presented in this media coverage are often juxtaposed against images and videos of people in desperate situations, living in informal settlements, or sitting stranded in the shadow of the border. Rhetorically, the people in these images are reduced to floods, waves, or surges threatening to overwhelm the laws, institutions, and government officials that claim to keep us safe.
Despite this rhetoric, it is hard to know what exactly this “crisis” amounts to. The Post’s article cites US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data which shows that there has been a rise in “Southwest Land Border Encounters,” up to 172,331 in March, surpassing the most recent peak of 144,116 in May 2019. Yet the concept of the “Southwest Land Border Encounter” is a novel and deeply unspecific metric. In fact, it tells us more about the rhetorical functions of crisis — and their uses for agencies like the CBP — than it does about unauthorized migration.
Strange Encounters
Here, it is worth noting how much these symptoms of “crisis” in fact owe to US government policy. Illustrative was the decision taken last March, when the Trump administration invoked Title 42, an arcane public health statute from 1944. Previously, people attempting to enter the United States without authorization were placed into legal proceedings in immigration court. Under the authority of Title 42, however, people caught by CBP are quickly removed to Mexico, their home country, or a third country without meaningful due process.
In practice, Title 42 has created an unprecedented situation in which nearly every person who is apprehended after entering the United States without authorization, including those seeking humanitarian protection, is immediately removed from the United States. As a result, thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers have become stranded on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border.
Following the Trump administration’s decision to invoke Title 42, CBP changed the way that it reported data on unauthorized border crossings, shifting from measuring “apprehensions” to “Southwest Land Border Encounters.” Unlike data on apprehensions, the encounters metric measures the number of times CBP encountered someone who was crossing the border without authorization or was determined to be inadmissible after coming to a port of entry without proper documentation.
The “encounters” metric doesn’t track who was apprehended, how many people were actually allowed to enter the United States, or how many times any given person attempted to enter the United States during a specific time period. While US Customs and Border Protection hasn’t offered a detailed explanation for this change in terminology, the term “apprehension” has a specific definition under US immigration law. Expulsions carried out under Title 42 don’t meet this legal standard. CBP has seemingly developed “Southwest Land Border Encounters” as a catchall term to describe an unprecedented practice of extralegal removal.
In this context, data showing an increase in CBP “encounters” cannot reliably tell us whether our present so-called crisis reflects an increase in the absolute number of people attempting to enter the United States, or an uptick in the number of attempted crossings made by increasingly desperate people stranded in a precarious humanitarian limbo.
To paraphrase Stuart Hall, the ideological function of data on “Southwest Land Border Encounters” is to ground free floating and controversial impressions in the hard, incontrovertible soil of numbers. It is a kind of rhetorical masterstroke, simultaneously raising alarm about a “surge” of migrants while masking the fact that the border is more closed off to those seeking humanitarian protection than perhaps ever before.
Crisis Management?
Yet, making sense of this data is beside the point of “crisis.” Crisis has become a narrative rather than a descriptive device, foreclosing any possibility of analysis. Reflecting on Anglophone media coverage of migration in Europe since 2015, Nick Dines, Nicola Montagna, and Elena Vaccheli suggest that “crisis does not simply describe a set of conjunctures … [but] when invoked, produces a set of meanings that structure knowledge of social phenomena and crucially, shape policy decisions and governance structures.” Crisis has become, as Janet Roitman suggests, a kind of “diagnostic of the present,” a way to understand and make sense of experience rather than a signifier of a critical or decisive moment.
In the United States, the central ideological function of the rhetoric of border crisis is to frame certain patterns of mobility as threats to national stability, thereby invoking a predetermined response that requires punitive policies of deterrence and control. Rep. McCarthy’s claim that there is an ongoing “Biden border crisis” invokes what the anthropologist Leo R. Chavez calls the “Latino threat,” a dominant narrative frame in which Latino immigrants are understood as a threat to the demographic and social stability of white-dominated American society.
Within the crisis narrative, state violence is the only legitimate response to the threat posed by migration. As Texas congressman Michael McCaul put it in an interview with ABC News held in the shadow of a section of the border wall near El Paso, “deterrence is the key here.”
By looking at periods of border crisis critically, we can see that what is changing is less patterns of migration than the ways in which migration is controlled and policed. In the United States, the total number of yearly apprehensions of unauthorized migrants peaked in 2000, and net unauthorized migration has been zero or negative since 2009. Yet, the scope, scale, and cost of migration control has ballooned nonetheless.
Since 2003, the combined annual budgets of Federal immigration enforcement agencies have nearly tripled, and the number of people employed by both CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has nearly doubled. From 2003 to 2019, the number of people forcibly removed from the US by ICE every year more than doubled to 133,525. What is truly being transformed during periods of crisis is the power of the Federal government to surveil, control, and expel migrants.
Looking back over the past forty years, we can see how this unending condition of crisis has dominated US immigration policy. In an effort to combat perceptions of disorder in the period after the Mariel Boatlift in 1981, the Reagan administration oversaw the creation of the first modern immigration detention facilities and began the buildup of enforcement infrastructure that has come to dominate how we understand the US-Mexico border. After signing the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, Reagan declared that the “challenge to US sovereignty [posed] by the problem of illegal immigration” had been solved.
Yet, the so-called crisis was far from over. The perception that unauthorized immigration threatened to overwhelm public institutions continued to dominate public opinion. In 1994, the state of California passed Proposition 187 outlawing unauthorized immigrants from accessing social services including health care and public education. Later that year, a front-page story in the New York Times declared that the “Porous Deportation System Gives Criminals Little to Fear,” recounting the story of Jorge Luis Garza, a Mexican immigrant and supposed “thief, burglar, and heroin addict.”
So-called “criminal aliens” such as Garza served as powerful specters that haunted the public imagination, producing visions of chaos and crisis at the border. Sensing this public pressure, the Clinton administration passed two hugely punitive immigration reform laws in 1996, and pursued the unprecedented militarization of the US-Mexico border through the strategy of “prevention through deterrence.”
In the period after September 11, 2001, the Bush administration poured money into immigration enforcement measures, framing border militarization as a key facet of the War on Terror. This transformed the entire machinery of immigration enforcement, reconstituting the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a component of the Department of Homeland Security and creating Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) out of thin air in the process. Ten years later, DHS was the third largest Federal Agency, managing 225,000 employees, a $60 billion budget, and unprecedented power to enforce immigration laws.
A Humanitarian Disaster
Even as patterns of forced displacement in Central America have changed who is arriving at the US-Mexico border, the narrative of border crisis has prevented us from understanding migration as anything other than a social threat. From 2011 to 2019, the number of children placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) by CBP increased more than sevenfold. Ninety-three percent of children placed in ORR custody in 2019 were from El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras. Rather than a genuine system of humanitarian protection and due process, the Obama administration pursued what it described as “[a]n aggressive deterrence strategy focused on the removal and repatriation of recent border crossers.”
This included $3.73 billion in supplemental funding for border enforcement and the creation of two new ICE facilities to incarcerate women and children. While President Obama famously remarked that he wanted to focus immigration enforcement on “felons not families,” in practice his administration ended up locking up a lot of families, too.
A 2018 investigation by the DHS Office of Inspector General found that the Obama administration violated federal procurement laws in the rush to set up twenty-four hundred new family detention beds at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. To solve this crisis, as then Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told Congress in 2014, “people in Central America need to see illegal migrants coming back.” In practice, what Johnson was describing was the mass deportation of women and children seeking asylum.
As long as we remain stuck in the protracted condition of border crisis, we will only get newer and more spectacular polices of deterrence. As ABC News correspondent Matt Gutman, reporting on the increase in the number of minors in CBP custody noted unironically “the border wall has failed to contain this humanitarian disaster.” While Federal agencies scramble to find basic humanitarian shelter for thousands of families and children seeking asylum, the number of people held in immigration detention has dropped to its lowest point in twenty years. The laws, institutions, and infrastructures bequeathed to us by our former solutions to crisis are entirely unfit to solve our actual problems.
What our current so-called border crisis tells us is that we are desperately in need of a new way of making sense of the social facts of migration. Rather than coding migration as a racialized threat or symptom of social disequilibrium, we need new modes of discourse and governance that understand mobility as a basic, foundational aspect of social life. To move forward we must reject the rhetoric of crisis.
Dr. Valentina Tancredi (right) works with a colleague as Covid-19 cases surged in Argentina this spring. (photo: Magali Druscovich/ITT)
We're Living With the Consequences of Rich Nations' Vaccine Hoarding
Jacob Sugarman, In These Times
Sugarman writes: "Dr. Valentina Tancredi recalls the precise moment she realized the most recent wave of the coronavirus in Argentina had become a tsunami, engulfing Buenos Aires Province."
The installations of the Limetree Bay petroleum refinery are seen in St Croix, US Virgin Islands, in 2017 before they reopened in February this year. (photo: Alvin Baez/Reuters)
EPA Shuts Polluting Caribbean Refinery Trump Had Reopened
Paola Rosa-Aquino, Guardian UK
Rosa-Aquino writes: "The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered an oil refinery in the US Virgin Islands to pause all operations, citing 'at least four incidents' in which the facility significantly affected St Croix residents."
Nearby residents in the US Virgin Islands, have endured water contamination and noxious fumes that closed three schools
he Environmental Protection Agency has ordered an oil refinery in the US Virgin Islands to pause all operations, citing “at least four incidents” in which the facility significantly affected St Croix residents. The Limetree Bay refinery, which caused a massive oil spill in the 1980s, first reopened in February under an order from the Trump administration, after eight years idle.
“These repeated incidents at the refinery have been and remain totally unacceptable,” said the EPA head, Michael Reagan, noting that residents in St Croix are “already overburdened” by pollution and other environmental harms.
When the refinery reopened, it promised to be well maintained, according to Jennifer Valiulis of the St Croix Environmental Association.
“That obviously [was] not happening,” Valiulis said. In the first week of May, island residents endured the latest round of noxious fumes emanating from the plant, prompting several establishments, including three schools to shut down. The national guard then found elevated levels of sulfur dioxide – a harmful, toxic gas – near the refinery. Reuters reports Limetree Bay’s own testing found zero concentrations of the pollutant.
Earlier this week, on Wednesday, the refinery’s owners announced they were temporarily halting operations after a rapid series of accidents exposed neighboring communities to pollution.
But on Friday, the EPA, which said the company’s failure to properly operate pollution controls violated the Clean Air Act, told Limetree Bay to stay shut for 60 days “due to multiple improperly conducted operations that present an imminent risk to public health”.
Limetree Bay did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment at the time of publication.
“This is a really serious environmental justice problem, and the EPA has to do a lot better,” said Judith Enck, before Friday’s emergency order. Enck oversaw the refinery as a regional administrator in the Obama-era EPA and is founder of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics.
As is common with industrial facilities in the US, the majority of people living near the Limetree Bay refinery are Black or Latino, and many are poor.
“To have so many incidences within the early operations of the refining is unnerving,” said Frandelle Gerard, a St Croix business leader and the head of the Crucian Heritage and Nature Tourism Foundation.
From early only, the oil refinery in St Croix had problems. The facility was built by the Hess Oil Virgin Islands Corp in 1966, and by the 1970s, had expanded to become the largest in the world, churning out up to 650,000 barrels of oil a day.
The EPA learned the refinery was leaking oil into St Croix’s sole aquifer in 1982 – but it wasn’t until decades later that residents were given a full accounting of the damage. In 2011, the agency released a report stating that it had recovered more than 43m gallons of spilled oil from the island’s groundwater over that 30-year period.
The facility also has a history of polluting the air. The former owner, Hovensa, reached a settlement with the EPA in 2011 over alleged Clean Air Act violations. As part of the settlement, the company agreed to pay a $5.4m fine, and spend hundreds of millions on pollution controls. But the plant filed for bankruptcy and shut down in 2012 before making those upgrades.
The oil refinery’s closure deeply affected St Croix’s economy, according to Valiulis. “There were a lot of people who lost their jobs and a lot of people who left the island. We haven’t really had a chance to recover from that.” The devastation wrought by Hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017 only compounded the problem.
The Trump administration played a large role in getting the plant back on its feet under new ownership. Near the end of Trump’s presidency, his administration helped fast-track approval to reopen the facility under new ownership – Limetree Bay Ventures. (Limetree Bay Ventures’ principal investor is ArcLight Capital Partners, which has ties to former president Donald Trump.)
The plant reopened earlier this year, on 4 February 2021 – and three days later, a malfunctioning valve sent a cloud of oil into the sky over the island, drifting as far as three miles away. According to Enck, although the refinery’s new owners invested a significant amount of money into reopening the facility, the refinery hadn’t been physically updated. “This is basically a 50-year-old refinery that is having really serious operational problems,” Enck said.
“The executive management of Limetree Bay sincerely apologizes for the impact to the public,” the company said in a press release, adding that the company would continue to monitor impact to the nearby community.
The EPA’s emergency order is the latest in a series of developments that have cast doubt on the refinery’s future – a welcome move for locals that don’t want the island to become a pollution haven for a dying industry.
This week, after the plant had temporarily halted operations, environmental groups and island residents held a virtual town hall – to which Limetree was invited – to discuss the impacts of the plant’s operation and address its lack of transparency.
“People are being harmed. Our children are suffering,” St Croix native ChenziRa Davis-Kahina said during the town hall, reports the Washington Post. “Why are they being allowed to operate without monitors? Why are our officials meeting, instead of shutting them down?”
“For the majority of the island’s long-term residents and natives, the time has come and gone for a refinery like this,” Gerard said. Really, she added, they want clean air, clean water, a healthy ecosystem and to build towards a more sustainable future. “The two just don’t go together.”
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