18 June 21
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his is unqualified good news from the Guardian. A towering idiocy has been corrected. And, if we’re lucky, we’ll all be more well-informed about our recent past.
[Reality] Winner was sentenced to five years in 2018, after being convicted of leaking the report. Aged 26, she was the first person charged by the Trump administration under the Espionage Act over a document leak. She pleaded guilty as part of a deal. Prosecutors said Winner, who was working for a defense contractor, Pluribus International Corporation, printed a classified document that showed how Russian military intelligence hacked at least one voting software supplier and attempted to breach more than 100 local election systems before polling day in 2016.
But, from the New York Times, of course…
Once she is released from the halfway house, she will still not be able to talk about any of the documents she reviewed while working at the National Security Agency, but she will be able to speak broadly about issues that concern her.
God knows, we can’t know what she knows. It was the NSA’s election, not ours. We can’t frighten the children or scare the horses or prompt a mean email from the Crackerpot Palace down in Florida. Well, here’s one thing we can do: We can get Congress to kill the Espionage Act really, most sincerely dead. It is a meat-ax abomination to civil liberties born in one of the worst periods for civil liberties in our history: the days of A. Mitchell Palmer and that prince of fools, President Woodrow Wilson, who said while pushing for the bill’s passage:
There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.
And Mexico is not sending us their best people, either.
In October of 1917, Fightin’ Bob LaFollette, the great Progressive senator from Wisconsin whose birthday we celebrated on Monday, rose in front of a hostile Senate to inveigh in defense of free speech during wartime. It is one of the greatest defenses of free speech ever delivered by an American politician, and it was delivered by a man who had so stubbornly resisted the drive toward American involvement in World War I that people seriously called for him to be hung, shot, or at least expelled from the Senate. (It was a federal judge who called for him to be shot.) He also was the enemy of all the enabling legislation, including the Espionage Act, that makes Wilson such an indelible canker on the presidency. LaFollette, a man whose bag of fcks was pretty small to begin with, emptied them all in the faces of his war-drunk tormentors.
I have in my possession numerous affidavits establishing the fact that people are being unlawfully arrested, thrown into jail, held incommunicado for days, only to be eventually discharged without ever having been taken into court, because they have committed no crime. Private residences are being invaded, loyal citizens of undoubted integrity and probity arrested, cross-examined, and the most sacred constitutional rights guaranteed to every American citizen are being violated.
It appears to be the purpose of those conducting this campaign to throw the country into a state of terror, to coerce public opinion, to stifle criticism, and suppress discussion of the great issues involved in this war.
I think Bob LaFollette and Reality Winner might get along. I hope her life is everything she wants it to be. And I hope one day her truth will be revealed.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) speaks during a news conference Tuesday on Capitol Hill in Washington. McConnell said Republicans would block a Democratic elections bill when it comes up for an expected vote next week. (photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
enate Republicans vowed Thursday to block voting legislation from advancing later this month, rejecting a key Democratic senator’s compromise offer that adopted some GOP ideas in a bid to break partisan gridlock on the issue.
The pledge from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) all but guarantees that Republicans will filibuster a sweeping voting bill that Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) is sending to the floor Tuesday.
Parts of the bill are meant to overrule provisions contained in a host of GOP-passed state laws that have placed restrictions on early voting, mail-in voting, ballot drop boxes and other policies that make it easier to cast a ballot, in response to former president Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 presidential election.
“I’ve taken a look at all the new state laws — none of them are designed to suppress the vote,” McConnell said Thursday. “There is no rational basis for the federal government to take over all of American elections.”
The only remaining question is whether all 50 Democratic senators will unite in support of debating the bill, known as the For the People Act, and how they will react once Republicans block the legislation.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) has long withheld support for the sprawling bill, which contains dozens of provisions for disparate voting, campaign finance and elections, citing a lack of GOP support. But this week he circulated a three-page memo outlining potential changes that could win his support, including adopting some traditional Republican priorities such as mandating that voters provide identification and giving state and local elections officials a free hand to maintain their voter rolls.
After huddling with his fellow Democratic senators Thursday, Manchin suggested that he would join with them to at least start debating the bill next week. “I would think we all would want to do that,” he said. “You could air your differences that you might have or what your concerns are or what your thoughts may be.”
But McConnell said flatly Wednesday that his party would not be joining in.
“All Republicans, I think, will oppose that . . . if that were to be surfaced on the floor,” he said.
McConnell’s remarks came not long after the Manchin proposal won a notable endorsement from Democratic voting-rights activist Stacey Abrams, who said in a morning CNN appearance that she could “absolutely” support his proposal and called it a “first and important step to preserving our democracy.”
Other Democrats also spoke positively about Manchin’s proposal — and several senators said they could be willing to accept a voter ID mandate as part of a broader package.
“I don’t know anybody who believes that people shouldn’t have to prove that they are who they say they are,” said Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), a close ally of Abrams. “But what has happened over the years is people have played with common sense identification and put into place restrictive measures intended not to preserve the integrity of the outcome, but to select certain voters. That’s what I oppose.”
Abrams, a former Georgia state legislative leader and gubernatorial candidate, is an influential figure among Democrats, who credit her efforts with helping deliver Georgia for President Biden in 2020. But she is a reviled figure among the Republican voter base, and McConnell and other GOP leaders immediately used her words of support to cast the Manchin proposal as unacceptable.
“When Stacey Abrams immediately endorsed Sen. Manchin’s proposal, it became the Stacey Abrams substitute, not the Joe Manchin substitute,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the top Republican on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which oversees election issues.
In an interview Thursday, Abrams said she did not agree with every piece of Manchin’s proposal but said it “signaled a willingness to engage and to have conversations” about voting legislation. “But this is a process,” she added, “which means others are going to also have a say.”
The most important message Manchin’s engagement has sent, Abrams said, is that the effort to pass federal voting rights legislation still has momentum. And she said the GOP efforts to weaponize her support for the new talks among Democrats did not change the political fundamentals of the partisan clash.
“If I disagreed with it, they were going to oppose it. If I agreed with it, they were going to oppose it,” she said. “There’s nothing in access to the right to vote that will appease Mitch McConnell.”
McConnell gathered about a dozen Republican senators to stand with him in front of reporters Thursday as he lambasted the Democratic voting rights efforts, a show of force that reflected his own long-standing distaste for legislation that puts federal fetters on campaigns and elections as well as the depth of support he has within his caucus for his hard-line approach.
That approach is backstopped by the Senate filibuster — the 60-vote supermajority rule that gives a united minority an effective veto — and the knowledge that Manchin and several other Democratic senators do not currently support changing that rule.
As he rolled out his compromise proposal Wednesday, Manchin simultaneously made clear that he remains unwilling to change Senate rules to pass major legislation with a simple majority. On Thursday, he said he was still hopeful that some Republicans could be convinced to support some type of elections bill.
“McConnell has the right to do whatever he thinks he can do,” Manchin told reporters. “I would hope that there’s enough good Republicans who understand the bedrock of our society is having an accessible, open, fair and secure election.”
However, there appears to be little space for compromise, with McConnell sketching out a broad position against any federal legislation — a view the vast majority of his colleagues have embraced.
Several of them Thursday took aim at provisions of the Democratic bill that Manchin has indicated should be dropped from the legislation, such as a public financing system for congressional campaigns. Others highlighted provisions that Manchin indicated support for, such as ending the partisan gerrymandering of House districts.
“Anything that involves the federal government in that process, I’d be opposed to,” Blunt said. “So it wouldn’t matter if it was a degree of federal involvement or total federal involvement, I’d still think that was not the right place for the federal government to be.”
Democrats, meanwhile, were heartened by Manchin’s newfound willingness to negotiate, even as they appear poised to hit another dead end with Tuesday’s vote due to the filibuster rule.
Leaving Thursday’s caucus meeting, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the Rules Committee chairwoman, said she was hopeful that Democrats would show a united front next week and that the path forward would remain open to negotiation.
“If we reach unity on a voting bill in the Democratic Party, with all of the debates that we have been having over the last few months, I don’t think anything is over yet,” she said.
Some lawmakers suggested that a party-line vote next week will force a more direct reckoning with the filibuster inside the Democratic ranks.
Should Republicans block the bill, Warnock said, “I think that we will have some decisions to make about how we make sure that we assure every American has a right to vote.”
Attorney General William Barr participates in a press conference at the Department of Justice along with DOJ officials on Feb. 10, 2020, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty)
Trump Spied on Journalists. So Did Obama. America Needs More Press Freedom Now
Trevor Timm, Guardian UK
Timm writes: "Before Trump, Obama's justice department did more to hurt press freedom than any administration since Nixon. Here's how we stop history repeating."
he US Department of Justice is under increasing fire for the still-unfolding scandals involving the secret surveillance of journalists and even members of Congress in the waning days of the Trump presidency. Some of these actions were even initially defended by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice.
In response to the growing scandal – and the scathing condemnations from the surveillance targets at the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN – the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has vowed the DoJ will no longer use legal process to spy on journalists “doing their jobs”. The Times, the Post and CNN are set to meet with the justice department this week to seek more information on what happened and extract further promises it won’t happen again.
But mark my words: if Congress does not pass tough and binding rules that permanently tie the DoJ’s hands, it will happen again – whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican in the White House.
Promises are no longer enough. In many circles, these scandals are being portrayed as the Trump White House run amok. While some in the Trump justice department may have been motivated by political vengeance, the problem is far bigger than Donald Trump, William Barr or even the party in charge of the White House.
As the reporter Charlie Savage detailed in an excellent piece in the New York Times over the weekend, administrations in both parties have spied on journalists with increasing abandon for almost two decades, in contravention of internal DoJ regulations and against the spirit of the first amendment. Many people already forget that before Trump was known as enemy number one of press freedom, Barack Obama’s justice department did more damage to reporters’ rights than any administration since Nixon.
So yes, Garland needs to immediately put his “no more spying on reporters” vow into the DoJ’s official “media guidelines”, which govern investigations involving journalists. If he doesn’t, he or his successor could change their mind in an instant. But, why should we just “trust” Garland’s pinky promise to not investigate journalists and politicians without an ironclad law?
Leaks of confidential and classified information to journalists are vital to our democratic system, yet the DoJ often diverts huge resources to root out their sources. If you want an example, look no further than ProPublica’s recent investigation into the American tax system and how the wealthiest billionaires in the country pay little to no taxes. The series of stories sparked outrage across the country as soon as it was published. Garland leapt into action, vowing an investigation … only, he promised to investigate the leaker – not the tax dodgers.
The rise of internet communications has opened the floodgates to authorities’ ability to spy on journalists and root out whistleblowers; they can figure out exactly who journalists are talking to, where, when, and how long; and they can silence media lawyers with expansive gag orders that can leave them almost helpless to appeal. And as the pandemic has rendered in-person meetings even harder than before, people everywhere are more reliant on the communications infrastructure that can betray them at any time.
For real safeguards, Congress needs to act. Perhaps the fact that multiple members of Congress itself, including the representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, have now been ensnared in the DoJ’s leak dragnet will make them more likely to move than in the past.
The irony is Representative Schiff and Representative Swalwell have of course been some of Congress’s most ardent defenders of surveillance – even during the Trump administration. They fought against surveillance reform that would put in more safeguards at the DoJ on multiple occasions. In Representative Schiff’s case, despite literally being the co-chair of the “press freedom caucus”, he inserted a provision into an intelligence bill that would even make it easier for the government to prosecute reporters who published leaked classified information.
Being the victim of unjust surveillance sometimes tends to make even the most devoted surveillance hawks soften their stance. If Garland is promising to bar the surveillance of journalists for the purpose of finding their sources, Congress can simply pass a law holding them to it. Anything else at this point is just empty rhetoric.
But there is another issue looming large over this debate, one that many seem hesitant to talk about. Garland has said so far that the DoJ won’t spy on journalists unless they are engaged in a crime. Well, the DoJ is currently attempting to make newsgathering a crime, in the form of its case against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.
Assange is, to say the least, not popular in Washington DC and in mainstream journalism circles. However, the actions described in the indictment against him, most notably the 17 Espionage Act charges, are indistinguishable for what reporters do all the time: talk to sources, cultivate their trust, request more information, receive classified documents, and eventually publish them.
News outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post already know what a threat the case is to their reporters’ rights; they’ve said so in public. However, it’s vital that they say this to the attorney general’s face. Right now, there is little pressure on the DoJ to drop the Assange charges, despite the fact that virtually every civil liberties and human rights group in the US has protested against them.
If Garland bars surveillance of journalists “doing their jobs” but secures a conviction that makes journalists’ jobs a crime, his promises will ultimately be worse than meaningless.
'We've barely explored the darkest realm of the ocean. With rare-metal mining on the rise, we're already destroying it.' (photo: iStock)
he International Seabed Authority is headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica, in a building that looks a bit like a prison and a bit like a Holiday Inn. The I.S.A., which has been described as “chronically overlooked” and is so obscure that even many Jamaicans don’t know it exists, has jurisdiction over roughly half the globe.
Under international law, countries control the waters within two hundred miles of their shores. Beyond that, the oceans and all they contain are considered “the common heritage of mankind.” This realm, which encompasses nearly a hundred million square miles of seafloor, is referred to in I.S.A.-speak simply as the Area.
Scattered across the Area are great riches. Mostly, these take the shape of lumps that resemble blackened potatoes. The lumps, known formally as polymetallic nodules, consist of layers of ore that have built up around bits of marine debris, such as ancient shark teeth. The process by which the metals accumulate is not entirely understood; however, it’s thought to be exceedingly slow. A single spud-size nugget might take some three million years to form. It has been estimated that, collectively, the nodules on the bottom of the ocean contain six times as much cobalt, three times as much nickel, and four times as much of the rare-earth metal yttrium as there is on land. They contain six thousand times as much tellurium, a metal that’s even rarer than the rare earths.
The first attempts to harvest this submerged wealth were undertaken nearly fifty years ago. In the summer of 1974, a drillship purportedly belonging to Howard Hughes—the Hughes Glomar Explorer—anchored north of Midway Atoll, ostensibly to bring up nodules from the depths. In fact, the ship was operated by the C.I.A., which was trying to raise a sunken Soviet submarine. But then, in a curious twist, a real company called Ocean Minerals leased the Glomar to collect nodules from the seabed west of Baja California. The president of the company likened the exercise to “standing on the top of the Empire State Building, trying to pick up small stones on the sidewalk using a long straw, at night.”
After the Glomar expeditions, interest in seabed mining waned. It’s now waxing again. As one recent report put it, “The Pacific Ocean is the scene of a new wild west.” Thirty companies have received permits from the I.S.A. to explore the Area. Most are looking to slurp up the nodules; others are hoping to excavate stretches of the ocean floor that are rich in cobalt and copper. Permits to begin commercial mining could be issued within a few years.
Proponents of deep-sea mining argue that the sooner it starts the better. Manufacturing wind turbines, electric vehicles, solar panels, and batteries for energy storage requires resources, often scarce ones. (Tellurium is a key component in thin-film solar panels.) “The reality is that the clean-energy transition is not possible without taking billions of tons of metal from the planet,” Gerard Barron, the chairman of the Metals Company, one of the businesses that holds permits from the I.S.A., observed a few months ago. Seafloor nodules, he said, “offer a way to dramatically reduce” the environmental impact of extracting these tons.
But seabed mining poses environmental hazards of its own. The more scientists learn about the depths, the more extraordinary the discoveries. The ocean floor is populated by creatures that thrive under conditions that seem impossibly extreme. There is, for example, a ghostly pale deep-sea octopus that lays its eggs only on the stalks of nodule-dwelling sponges. Remove the nodules in order to melt them down and it will, presumably, take millions of years for new ones to form.
Edith Widder is a marine biologist, a MacArthur Fellow, and the author of “Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea” (Random House). Widder is an expert on bioluminescence, a topic that she became interested in after nearly going blind. In 1970, when she was a freshman in college, she had to have surgery for a broken back. The surgery went fine, but afterward she started hemorrhaging. Her heart stopped beating, and she was resuscitated. This happened again, and then a third time. Blood leaked into both of her eyes, blocking her retinas. “My visual world was swirling darkness with occasional glimpses of meaningless light,” she recalls. Eventually, she regained her vision, but she no longer took sight for granted.
“We believe we see the world as it is,” she writes. “We don’t. We see the world as we need to see it to make our existence possible.”
The same goes for fish. Only the top layers of the oceans are illuminated. The “sunlight zone” extends down about seven hundred feet, the “twilight zone” down another twenty-six hundred feet. Below that—in the “midnight zone,” the “abyssal zone,” and the “hadal zone”—there’s only blackness, and the light created by life itself. In this vast darkness, so many species have mastered the art of bioluminescence that Widder estimates they constitute a “majority of the creatures on the planet.” The first time she descended into the deep in an armored diving suit called a Wasp, she was overwhelmed by the display. “This was a light extravaganza unlike anything I could have imagined,” she writes. “Afterwards, when asked to describe what I had seen, I blurted, ‘It’s like the Fourth of July down there!’ ”
Bioluminescent creatures produce light via chemical reaction. They synthesize luciferins, compounds that, in the presence of certain enzymes, known as luciferases, oxidize and give off photons. The trick is useful enough that bioluminescence has evolved independently some fifty times. Eyes, too, have evolved independently about fifty times, in creatures as diverse as flies, flatworms, and frogs. But, Widder points out, “there is one remarkable distinction.” All animals’ eyes employ the same basic strategy to convert light to sensation, using proteins called opsins. In the case of bioluminescence, different groups of organisms produce very different luciferins, meaning that each has invented its own way to shine.
The most obvious reason to flash a light in the dark is to find food. Some animals, like the stoplight loosejaw, a fish with photon-emitting organs under each eye, use bioluminescence to seek out prey. Others, like the humpback blackdevil, hope to attract victims with their displays; the blackdevil sports a shiny lure that dangles off its forehead like a crystal from a chandelier.
Bioluminescence also serves less straightforward functions. It can be used to entice mates and to startle enemies. The giant red mysid, a hamster-size crustacean, spews streams of blue sparkles from nozzles near its mouth; these, it’s believed, distract would-be attackers. Some animals smear their pursuers with bioluminescent slime—the marks make them targets for other predators—and some use bioluminescence as camouflage. This last strategy is known as counterillumination, and it’s used in the twilight zone, where many creatures have upward-looking eyes that scan for the silhouettes of prey. The prey can adjust their glow to blend in with the light filtering down from above.
Since it’s so hard for humans to get to the deep sea—and, once there, to record what they’re seeing—Widder has spent much of her career trying to figure out ways to study bioluminescence remotely. She’s developed special deep-sea cameras that rely on red light, which marine creatures mostly can’t detect. Much of “Below the Edge of Darkness” is occupied with the travails of getting these cameras placed, a project that involves journeys so nauseating that Widder describes cycling through the five stages of seasickness. In the fourth, she explains, “you’re afraid you’re going to die,” and in the last “you’re afraid you’re not.”
The experience that she really wants to convey, though, is not queasiness but wonder. The creatures of the deep have been putting on the world’s greatest light show for tens of millions of years. Widder thinks that if people could witness this spectacle—or even just be made aware of it—they’d pay a lot more attention to life at the bottom of the seas and the many hazards that threaten it. These include but are not limited to global warming, ocean acidification, overfishing, agricultural runoff, oil spills, invasive species, bottom trawling, plastic waste, and seabed mining.
“We seem to be in a Catch-22 scenario where we haven’t explored the deep ocean because we don’t appreciate what a remarkable, mysterious, and wondrous place it is, and we don’t know what an astonishing place it is because we haven’t explored it,” she argues. Meanwhile, she writes, “we are managing to destroy the ocean before we even know what’s in it.”
All marine photosynthesis takes place in the sunlight zone. Beneath that, food is in such short supply that the occasional dead whale that falls to the ocean floor represents a major source of nutrients. Nevertheless, even in the farthest recesses of the oceans, life finds a way.
The Mariana snailfish, as its name suggests, occupies the Mariana Trench—the ocean’s deepest depression—in the western Pacific. It’s a few inches long and looks like a large, pale-pink tadpole. The Mariana snailfish has been found more than twenty-six thousand feet below sea level, where the pressure is eight hundred times greater than at the surface. To survive under such conditions, the snailfish has come up with various ingenious adaptations: its skull is not completely closed, its bones are unusually rubbery, and it produces special chemicals to prevent its proteins from denaturing under stress. The creature can barely see and instead relies on fluid-filled chambers along its jaws, which detect the movements of small crustaceans known as amphipods. Amphipods, for their part, have been collected from the very bottom of the Mariana Trench, almost thirty-six thousand feet down, where the pressure is so great that the animals’ shells, in theory at least, should dissolve. A team of Japanese scientists recently reported that one deep-dwelling amphipod, Hirondellea gigas, protects its shell by coating it in an aluminum-based gel, produced from metal that it extracts from seafloor mud.
Some of the seas’ most extraordinary animals live around hydrothermal vents—the oceanic equivalents of hot springs. Through cracks in the seafloor, water comes in contact with the earth’s magma; the process leaves it superheated and loaded with dissolved minerals. (At some vents, the water reaches a temperature of more than seven hundred degrees.) As the water rises and cools, the minerals precipitate out to form crenellated, castlelike structures. Hydrothermal vents had been theorized about for many years but remained unseen until 1977, when a team of geologists and geochemists travelling on a research vessel called the Knorr located one about two hundred and fifty miles northeast of the Galápagos. A pair of scientists went down to take a look at it in a submersible named Alvin.
“Isn’t the deep ocean supposed to be like a desert?” one of them asked over Alvin’s phone link.
“Yes,” came the answer from the Knorr.
“Well, there’s all these animals down here.”
As Helen Scales, a British marine biologist, explains in her new book, “The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It” (Grove Atlantic), “these animals” turned out to be fundamentally different from other creatures. At the bottom of the vents’ food chains are microbes that have come up with their own novel survival strategy. Instead of using photosynthesis, which harnesses the energy of photons, they rely on chemosynthesis, which uses the energy stored in chemical bonds. Since the late nineteen-seventies, Scales reports, researchers have catalogued hundreds of strange species living around vents; they include creatures so puzzling that it’s hard to find a limb for them on the tree of life.
Yeti crabs, first observed in 2005 on a vent system along the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge, south of Easter Island, look like hairy white lobsters. Their “hairs” are actually extensions of their shells, and along them live colonies of chemosynthetic bacteria, which the crabs scrape up and consume. Yeti crabs were found to be so evolutionarily distinctive that taxonomists had to create not just a new genus but a whole new family for them.
Xenoturbella profunda is a creature that looks like a discarded tube sock. First collected from a vent system in the Gulf of California in 2015, it has no intestines or central nervous system, and scientists aren’t even sure what phylum it belongs to. Chrysomallon squamiferum, commonly referred to as the scaly-foot snail, is a mollusk that’s been found at vents in the Indian Ocean, at a depth of ten thousand feet. It’s the only animal known to build its shell with iron, and around its foot it sports a fringe of iron plates that looks a bit like a flamenco skirt. The snail carries around chemosynthesizing microbes in a special pouch in its throat. In 2019, Chrysomallon squamiferum became the first vent-dwelling creature to be included on the Red List of Threatened Species, maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The rationale for the listing is that the species has been found at only three sites, and two of these are being explored for mining. Its living space, the I.U.C.N. has observed, is thus apt to be “severely reduced or destroyed.”
Scales, like Widder, worries that the bottom of the ocean will be wrecked before many of the most marvellous creatures living there are even identified. “The frontier story has always been one of destruction and loss,” she writes. “It is naïve to assume that the process would play out any differently in the deep.” Indeed, she argues, the depths are particularly ill-suited to disturbance because, owing to a scarcity of food, creatures tend to grow and reproduce extremely slowly. “Vital habitat is created by corals and sponges that live for millennia,” she writes.
If deep-sea mining proceeds, it’s likely that one of the first countries to pursue it will be Nauru, a tiny nation that, as it happens, was itself almost destroyed by mining.
About the size of Block Island, Nauru sits in the South Pacific, about sixteen hundred miles northeast of Papua New Guinea. For thousands of years, the island’s largest visitors were birds, which used it, in the words of one journalist, as a “glorified rest stop.” Polynesians and Micronesians arrived on the island sometime around 1000 B.C. They seem to have lived harmoniously—even idyllically—until gun-toting Europeans showed up, in the early nineteenth century. At the start of the twentieth century, a New Zealander named Albert Ellis realized that the ancient bird droppings that coated the island were a rich source of phosphate, an important fertilizer. During the next six decades, more than thirty-five million tons of phosphate were dug out of Nauru and shipped off to farms in Europe and Australia. The process stripped much of the island bare, leaving nothing but jagged pillars of limestone sticking out of the ground. A National Geographic photographer who visited Nauru mid-destruction wrote, “A worked-out phosphate field is a dismal, ghastly tract.”
In 1968, Nauru became its own country. The phosphate business was still booming, and, on paper, the island’s ten thousand residents became some of the richest people in the world. The new nation used its sovereign wealth to invest in, among other things, cruise ships, airplanes, overseas office buildings, and a London musical based on the life of Leonardo da Vinci. The musical flopped, as did most of the other ventures. Nauruans “have a long history of being taken to the cleaners by crooks” is how Helen Hughes, an Australian economist, put it. In 2001, in return for various fees and payments, Nauru’s government allowed Australia to set up a detention center for refugees on the island. The center soon became infamous for its grim conditions.
Today, with the phosphate mostly mined out and the refugees mostly resettled, Nauru is betting on nodules. To engage in deep-sea exploration and mining, a company must be sponsored by a country that’s party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. (The U.S. is one of the few nations that has not ratified the Law of the Sea treaty, because of conservative opposition in the Senate.) Nauru has teamed up with the Metals Company, which is based in Canada, to explore a region of the Pacific known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, west of Mexico. “We are proud that Pacific nations have been leaders in the deep-sea minerals industry,” a statement co-authored by Nauru’s representative to the International Seabed Authority recently declared. The deal, it’s estimated, could eventually bring the country more than a hundred million dollars a year. Alternatively, the arrangement could prove even more disastrous than the da Vinci musical. At one point, Nauru officials expressed concern to the I.S.A. that, if a sponsoring nation were held liable for damages arising from a mining operation, it could “face losing more than it actually has.”
The I.S.A., for its part, has been assigned the task not just of issuing the permits for seabed mining but also of drafting the regulations to govern the practice. These regulations have yet to be finalized, so it’s unclear how stringent they will be. (The final rules are supposed to be in place before commercial mining commences, though the Metals Company has threatened to try to start without them.) Many marine scientists argue that because deep-sea ecosystems are so fragile—and operations that are miles below the surface so difficult to monitor—the only safe way to proceed is not to. Scales makes this point, but acknowledges that the I.S.A. is unlikely to be swayed. She quotes Daniel Jones, a researcher at the British National Oceanography Centre, who says, “Even if we found unicorns living on the seafloor, I don’t think that would necessarily stop mining.” Meanwhile, assuming that mining does go forward, it’s been suggested that faux nodules could be manufactured and dropped by ship into the deep ocean, to replace those being refashioned into batteries. The perfect vessel for this task would have been the Glomar; unfortunately, a few years ago it was sold for scrap.
Nerina Joseph is seen as balloons are distributed during a memorial vigil for her son Jean Jimenez-Joseph, who died by suicide while in ICE custody at the Stewart Detention Center, in Kansas City, Mo., on May 15, 2020. (photo: Melissa Golden/Redux)
.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement monitored immigrant advocacy organizations engaged in First Amendment-protected activity around a highly contentious immigration detention center in Georgia, according to documents obtained by the advocacy groups and shared with The Intercept. The public records show that ICE kept track of the groups’ nonviolent protests and social media posts, at one point suggesting that the agency might retaliate by barring visitations by one organization.
Internal ICE records and emails, as well as a deposition by an ICE officer in a court case, show the agency referring to an advocacy group as a “known adversary” and closely surveilling the immigration and civil rights activists’ activities, both online and in person.
“ICE’s pattern of surveilling and targeting immigrant rights organizers demonstrates how afraid the agency is of being held accountable for its actions,” Alina Das, a law professor at New York University and co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic, who has closely studied ICE surveillance and retaliation against activists, told The Intercept. “Government agencies should be protecting these voices, not silencing them.”
The groups that were surveilled by ICE include Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, El Refugio, and others, as well as individual activists. The immigrant advocates have all worked to bring national and international attention to alleged abuse at ICE’s Stewart Detention Center and the Irwin County Detention Center, both in Georgia. Stewart is one of the largest ICE facilities in the nation, and it is also the facility that has seen the most deaths of detained migrants over the past five years.
The emails show that in one instance, ICE considered retaliating against the advocacy group El Refugio, an immigrant rights organization and ministry that focuses on visiting and supporting people detained in Stewart. ICE was monitoring a vigil planned for one of the men at Stewart who had died in custody. When informed that the main organizer of the vigil was not El Refugio, an ICE official wrote, “If it was El Refugio I was going to have to put some effort into getting them out of their visitation program.”
“We are concerned to know that ICE is surveilling community members, activists, and organizations like ours because we are concerned about the well-being of people in their custody,” El Refugio Executive Director Amilcar Valencia said. “As an organization that walks alongside those affected by immigration detention, we are obligated to report issues of poor treatment, medical neglect, and other abuses suffered at Stewart Detention Center.”
In a statement, an ICE spokesperson did not respond to questions about the discussion of retaliation. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fully respects the rights of all people to voice their opinion without interference,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Like all other law enforcement agencies, ICE follows planned protests to ensure the safety and security of its infrastructure, personnel, officers and all those involved.”
While ICE has a history of monitoring and intimidating its critics — a practice that falls within a long pattern of the U.S. government surveilling activist groups — the agency’s surveillance of the groups first took place in Georgia following the 2017 death by suicide of Jean Jimenez-Joseph in Stewart. Advocates alleged that CoreCivic, the private prison company that runs Stewart, and ICE didn’t properly monitor or care for Jimenez-Joseph, noting that he was placed in solitary confinement for 18 days prior to his death, despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a history of mental illness, and a recent suicide attempt. (An internal ICE review obtained by CBS News confirmed that staff engaged in improper mental health care and failure to conduct routine health and safety checks in the days leading up to his death.)
Project South, a human rights group that has been at the forefront of investigating and exposing allegations of medical abuse in immigrant detention centers over the past year, shared the documents exclusively with The Intercept. The documents revealing the surveillance practices came from a larger trove of records accessed by Jimenez-Joseph’s family through the Freedom of Information Act as they prepared a wrongful death lawsuit against ICE. (In the statement, an ICE spokesperson told The Intercept, “ICE continues to place a greater focus on suicide prevention, working to improve its suicide risk assessment tools and providing more robust suicide prevention training for detention center staff.”)
When Georgia Detention Watch and other groups organized the vigil to honor Jimenez-Joseph, ICE monitored the vigil closely, exchanging multiple emails and counting attendees as they RSVP’d online. The documents indicate that ICE monitored the real-time presence of advocates at the vigils, resorting to militant language in their descriptions of them. ICE officials referred to Georgia Detention Watch as “a known adversary” and ordered the preparation of a “SIR,” or Significant Incident Report, for a candlelight vigil involving 19 people.
An ICE spokesperson, in an internal email the day after Jimenez-Joseph’s death, claimed that activist groups were trying to “exploit” Jimenez-Joseph’s death “by making a lot of false claims.” It is unclear what claims the spokesperson was referring to.
Andrew Free, the attorney representing the Jimenez-Joseph family, contrasted the efforts toward surveillance with a litany of what he considered failures by ICE leading up to and after the death.
“ICE didn’t bother to conduct the forensic autopsy their standards required, correct the false record of Jean’s criminal history, or reveal to Congress and the American people that he held valid DACA status up until the moment he died. But they found time to digitally surveil his memorial in Kansas City and a protest in Nashville against the CEO of a private prison company,” Free told The Intercept. “Even in death, ICE officials found ways to wantonly torment Jean and his community. We hope the evidence Jean’s family has gathered will end this toxic agency’s stranglehold on the truth.”
During proceedings for Jimenez-Joseph’s wrongful death lawsuit, Free asked Stewart Detention Center’s ICE Officer in Charge John Bretz about the agency’s surveillance practices.
“Once we get a — once we hear, or get a report that there is going to be a demonstration, past practice was that we had to do a Significant Incident Report,” Bretz said in the deposition. “But that’s no longer the case, we discontinued that several years ago. That’s no longer a requirement.”
Besides ICE closely monitoring, accusing, and vilifying the human rights organizations, the documents reveal the close coordination between ICE and CoreCivic, the for-profit corporation running the detention center.
Members of El Refugio had asked to visit Jimenez-Joseph shortly before his death but were denied.
Records show that in addressing why Jimenez-Joseph was denied a visit shortly before his death, an ICE spokesperson wrote, “I’ll simply explain denying the visit was a CoreCivic decision… My sole intent here is to protect ERO” — ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations — “and I’ll be as sensitive as possible to not criticize CoreCivic in doing so.”
In another email, ICE’s then-Assistant Field Office Director Sean Ervin implies that he and CoreCivic are “on the same page” and that “we are trying to allow CoreCivic the opportunity to explain why they refused visitation to Jimenez.” When ICE realized that CoreCivic wouldn’t be making a public statement, Ervin proposed ICE spokespeople simply tell reporters, “ICE cannot comment on operational decisions made by Core Civic employees and defers questions to CoreCivic for response.”
“Our organization provides social visits at SDC” — Stewart Detention Center — “as a way of accompanying people who are detained,” Valencia, of El Refugio, told The Intercept. “This role does not prevent us from speaking up when we are made aware of neglect and abuse.”
As other vigils for Jimenez-Joseph were planned, according to a deposition from the wrongful death suit, Bretz, the ICE official, wrote in an email that ICE continued to monitor groups by doing “a little research on facebook,” noting the number of participants who were signing up to attend. Another email noted that the importance of the vigil, for which 19 people were planning to attend, was “high” — the same vigil for which the assistant field office director ordered someone from ICE to prepare the Significant Incident Report.
Earlier this year, ICE settled with the Jimenez-Joseph family, paying the family $925,000.
“Our family struggles everyday to cope with the fact that the only way ICE could resolve Jean’s death is with a settlement. We want change beyond that,” said Jean Jimenez-Joseph’s family in a statement addressed to ICE. “Jean is gone because of ICE. Gone because of carelessness. Gone because when he cried out for help you threw him into isolation. Gone because Stewart Detention Center was not staffed correctly. You are all complicit and to blame for Jean’s death. “
The monitoring of immigrant advocates, and interventions by ICE officials, continued into spring of last year.
On March 26, 2020, the advocacy groups Project South, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, Mijente, Georgia Detention Watch, and Siembra NC organized a virtual press conference to bring attention to hunger strikes taking place at Stewart due to the lack of Covid-19 safety protocols.
When Project South’s Legal and Advocacy Director Azadeh Shahshahani tweeted about the hunger strike, ICE spokesperson Lindsay Williams sent an email to Shahshahani claiming that there were no hunger strikes happening and demanding that she “edit/delete your posts.” (Twitter does not give users the option to edit posts.) Williams chastised Shahshahani: “Persons who spread misinformation are engaged in irresponsible behavior by needlessly spreading fear, and they do a disservice to the communities they claim to represent.”
Shahshahani did not delete the posts, and Project South pushed back against ICE’s request. She noted that Project South goes through a corroboration process to verify its information from multiple sources and that there was indeed a hunger strike taking place at Stewart.
Shahshahani told The Intercept that the incident was an example of “ICE not only monitoring your speech, but telling you what to do.” She added, “It’s very much in line with what you’ll find in totalitarian regimes.”
Twice in two weeks during April 2020, correctional staff at Stewart pepper-sprayed immigrants who were demanding improved conditions and protections from Covid-19. Advocates and family members of people detained have continued to speak out about alleged abuse at the facility.
Shahshahani told The Intercept, “The response of ICE is to dismiss abuses, not to do anything to address abuses.”
ICE monitoring of and use of scare tactics and retaliation against advocates is not new. As previously reported by The Intercept, New York University Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic documented more than 1,000 incidents of alleged retaliation against immigrant rights groups, individual activists, and journalists. Most of the incidents occurred from 2016 to 2020, but some go back as far as 2012, while others have been documented in recent months.
Rachel Maremont, an NYU law student and member of the Immigrant Rights Clinic, told The Intercept, “ICE is going after movement-based groups, knowing that these are the people who have the most contact with the folks in detention who are the most marginalized and vulnerable.”
Chiraayu Gosrani, also an NYU Law student who helped document the incidents of retaliation, noted a pattern in ICE’s monitoring of and actions against advocates. “ICE surveillance leads to more egregious forms of retaliation,” Gosrani said. He pointed to the arrest and attempted deportation of Ravi Ragbir, one of the leaders of the New Sanctuary Coalition, and the targeting of Maru Mora Villapondo, of La Resistencia in Washington state. Both high-profile activists were surveilled and eventually targeted by ICE. Gosrani asked, “What business does ICE have in monitoring people investigating human rights abuses?”
From the Obama administration through the Trump administration, and continuing today, the NYU Law group has witnessed ICE seeking to silence dissent within detention centers and deporting government informants, witnesses of mass shootings, and witnesses of medical abuse.
“Instead of addressing the grave issues advocates are raising,” Shahshahani and Priyanka Bhatt, both attorneys from Project South, said in a statement to The Intercept, “ICE is using intimidation in an attempt to silence us.”
Explosions light-up the night sky in the early hours of Wednesday above buildings in Gaza City. Israel renewed its aerial bombardment late on Thursday. (photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP)
Israel targets a civil administration building, sites belonging to armed Palestinian groups and an agricultural field, sources say.
sraeli fighter jets have launched a series of air raids on the Gaza Strip for the second time since a shaky ceasefire ended last month’s 11-day war.
Palestinian sources on the ground said Israeli missiles on Thursday hit several sites belonging to armed groups northwest of Gaza City and north of Beit Lahia in the besieged territory.
A civil administration building east of Jabaliya in the north was also targeted, in addition to an agricultural field east of the southern town of Khan Younis. No casualties were reported.
Translation: The moment the civil administration building site was targeted east of Jabaliya in north Gaza
Following the air attacks, Fawzi Barhoum, spokesman for Hamas, the group running the Strip, said in a statement that “the occupation’s bombing of the resistance sites is a demonstrative show by the new Israeli government”, referring to the administration that was approved on Sunday by Israel’s parliament, with right-wing nationalist Naftali Bennett sworn in as prime minister.
“The resistance will be on the lookout in defence of our people, our people and our holy sites,” the statement added.
The Hamas-owned Al Aqsa TV reported that an Israeli drone was downed west of Gaza City.
There have also been reports of Hamas opening fire with heavy machines guns towards Israel, prompting air raid sirens to rang out.
Incendiary balloons
Israeli media reported that the army attacked Hamas targets inside the Gaza Strip in response to the continued launching of incendiary balloons by activists within the territory.
Palestinians fighters have been launching the balloons for a third day running on Thursday, according to Israel. The balloons are basic devices intended to set fire to farmland and bush near the border with Gaza.
In a statement, the army said it will “continue to destroy Hamas’ military capabilities and structures and hold it responsible for what is happening in the Gaza Strip”.
On Thursday, US Secretary Antony Blinken spoke with Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid to discuss security issues and “ongoing challenges for Israel and the region.”
“The Secretary discussed the US commitment to Israel’s security, the importance of the US- Israel bilateral relationship, and the need to improve Israeli-Palestinian relations in practical ways,” US State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.
“Secretary Blinken and Minister Lapid underscored the strong partnership between the United States and Israel, and America’s unwavering support for Israel’s security,” the statement added.
On Wednesday, Israel also carried out air raids, targeting what it is said were Hamas facilities.
At least 257 Palestinians, including 66 children, were killed during the 11-day bombardment on the Gaza Strip last month.
On the Israeli side, 13 people, including two children, were killed by rockets fired from Gaza.
Environmental groups have asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to immediately restore Endangered Species Act. (photo: Jacob W. Frank/National Park Service)
Today’s letter supports the emergency petition filed on May 26 by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society Legislative Fund and Sierra Club. That petition explains that the changes in wolf killing laws in Idaho and Montana trigger the need to restore federal protections for wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains on an emergency basis.
“The unsustainable management of gray wolves by the states clearly demonstrates that the states cannot be trusted to protect this iconic species,” said Tara Thornton of the Endangered Species Coalition. “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must step in to ensure gray wolves aren’t once again exterminated in the Northern Rockies.”
On June 13, Idaho Fish and Game closed a nine-day public comment period on its proposal to implement the state’s new wolf laws, which take effect July 1. The proposed rules implement Senate Bill 1211, allowing the state to hire private contractors to kill up to 90% of Idaho’s wolf population. The Idaho rules would allow hunters and trappers to kill an unlimited number of wolves, run down wolves with packs of hounds, chase them and run them over with ATVs and snowmobiles, and trap year-round on private land across the state.
The Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission will decide at a June 24 meeting in Helena whether to move forward with new wolf rules after taking testimony from the public.
Montana’s Senate Bill 314 pushes the commission to authorize hunters and trappers to kill an unlimited number of wolves through baiting, trapping and night hunts using night-vision scopes and spotlighting. The commission will also address new laws allowing snaring and expanding the wolf-trapping seasons by four weeks.
“When states embrace such extreme and aggressive policies that threaten the viability of a species, few other options remain than to look to the federal government to reinstate necessary protections until a long-term solution is in place,” said Garrick Dutcher, research and program director at Idaho-based Living with Wolves. “Sacrificing gray wolf recovery in Rocky Mountain ecosystems because wolves are perceived as inconvenient to agricultural interests is shortsighted and misguided. States cannot be allowed to cleanse the landscape of wolves and other ecologically vital top-level carnivores in the interest of agribusiness.”
“The bills recently signed into law in Idaho and Montana are not wolf management bills — they are wolf extermination bills,” said Lindsay Larris, wildlife program director at WildEarth Guardians. “These laws harken to the 1800s, when the value of wildlife and ecosystems was non-existent. For the protection of the wolves and landscapes of the western U.S., the Endangered Species Act requires the Fish and Wildlife Service to relist wolves in the Northern Rockies immediately."
"In Montana, we are facing a War on Wildlife, being driven by Gov. Gianforte,” said Stephen Capra, executive director of Footloose Montana. “We must have the federal government act to relist wolves, or approximately 85% of them will be killed."
“The impending and abhorrent changes to wolf hunting regulations will allow for inhumane methods to kill these animals and threatens the very survival of wolf populations in the region,” said Nicholas Arrivo, managing attorney for wildlife at the Humane Society of the United States. “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must meet its obligation under the Endangered Species Act by restoring protections to wolves in the northern Rockies.”
“Wildlife managers in Idaho and Montana are rushing out regulations that’ll allow widespread slaughter of wolves to start this summer,” said Andrea Zaccardi, an Idaho-based senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Decades of progress recovering wolves in the Northern Rockies will be erased unless the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acts now to restore their Endangered Species Act protections.”
The Endangered Species Act requires the Fish and Wildlife Service to respond to the relisting petition by Aug. 24.
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