15 June 21
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14 June 21
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The Deceit and Conflict Behind the Leak of the Pentagon Papers
Ben Bradlee, Jr., The New Yorker
Excerpt: "Fifty years on, Daniel Ellsberg praises the Times journalist who misled him."
ifty years ago this spring, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a seven-thousand-page top-secret history of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The study revealed systematic lying to the American people by four U.S. Presidents, from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson. The Nixon Administration tried to halt publication by the Times and the Washington Post, but was thwarted by the Supreme Court in a landmark victory for press freedom. A federal judge’s subsequent dismissal of criminal charges against Ellsberg, which carried a sentence of up to a hundred and fifteen years in prison, was seen as a validation of whistle-blowing.
All of this is well known. But the death, in January, of Neil Sheehan, the Times reporter to whom Ellsberg leaked the papers, brought new revelations, which have altered the heroic narrative surrounding the historic leak. The process was more contentious, combative, and duplicitous than was previously understood. In hours of interviews recently, Ellsberg revealed new details about his struggle to leak the papers, including that he provided portions of them to officials at a left-wing Washington think tank before the Times published. He vented about the extent to which Sheehan had deceived him about the newspaper’s intentions to publish the papers without ever telling him that the decision had already been made. And he provided new information about how Sheehan had surreptitiously made a copy of the papers, defying Ellsberg’s direct request that he not do so. When Ellsberg later gave Sheehan a copy of the papers, the journalist did not reveal that he already had one. “It turns out that Neil and I were both very much in the dark in 1971 as to what the other was thinking and doing, and why,” Ellsberg said recently.
A Harvard graduate who became a zealous marine and then a committed Pentagon Cold Warrior, Ellsberg turned his back on the culture of secrecy that he had long served in order to leak the papers. Convinced that President Richard Nixon, like his predecessors, would continue the war, Ellsberg hoped that the documents’ release would shorten American military involvement in Southeast Asia. Fifty years later, it is clear that the publication of the Pentagon Papers did just that—but in a way that Ellsberg never expected.
Ellsberg, who turned ninety on Wednesday, lives with his wife, Patricia, in the hills above Berkeley, California; their house is nestled in a grove of redwoods, with a sweeping view of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Still one of the country’s leading symbols of dissent, Ellsberg said that his story shows that more whistle-blowers are needed to keep Presidents, and all of Washington officialdom, on the constitutional straight and narrow. “I had been convinced that it was Nixon’s intention to continue the war in the air throughout his term,” he recalled. After Ellsberg leaked the documents, Nixon’s obsession with destroying him prompted the President to commit various crimes that culminated, ultimately, in his resignation from office. “In short, the criminal actions that the White House took against me were extraordinarily revealed in ways that led to this absolutely unforeseeable downfall of a President, which made the war endable.”
Ellsberg would become a through line to the Watergate scandal. “In the end,” he said, reflecting on the confusion and mistrust of that period of his life, “Things couldn’t have worked out better.”
Ellsberg grew up in Detroit, the son of Jewish parents who converted to Christian Science. He went to Harvard on a scholarship, and, in 1952, graduated third in his class. Wanting to prove his physical mettle and shun a life of Ivy League privilege, Ellsberg enlisted in the Marine Corps. In 1956, with the Suez crisis looming, he extended his tour by a year, hoping for a combat stint. He was discharged the following year as a first lieutenant.
After his service, Ellsberg would earn a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. His dissertation was on decision theory, the attempt to quantify the costs and risks of various strategies, which was then coming into vogue as an important part of military planning. In June, 1959, he joined the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, the Air Force-affiliated think tank that was then at the center of the application of decision theory to military issues.
In the summer of 1964, Ellsberg was assigned to the Pentagon to work under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who was mostly consumed by the war in Vietnam. Ellsberg spent most of his time reading top-secret cables and other dispatches from military officers based in Saigon. Wanting to see for himself what conditions in Vietnam were like, Ellsberg spent the period from 1965 to 1967 in the country, under the auspices of the State Department. Working with John Paul Vann, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who had been critical of U.S. strategy in Vietnam, Ellsberg assessed American and South Vietnamese efforts against Vietcong guerrillas. He approached his task with great ardor, visiting nearly every province, often going on patrols with U.S. soldiers and South Vietnamese troops—and occasionally engaging in firefights himself.
What Ellsberg saw on the ground prompted him to become increasingly disillusioned by the war. His disaffection only increased when, in 1967, he was assigned to work on a secret study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War that McNamara had commissioned, which became known as the Pentagon Papers. Participating in the study gave Ellsberg access to highly classified cables and field reports. When it was completed, the study consisted of forty-seven volumes, in thick binders, containing government documents and a narrative history written by Ellsberg and the other researchers. What struck Ellsberg most was the pattern of deception engaged in by military and political leaders. He concluded that the critical calculation for each President was domestic politics: no one wanted to be the first to “lose’’ Vietnam.
In August of 1969, Ellsberg crossed a personal and political Rubicon by attending an antiwar conference, near Philadelphia. While still working for RAND and the Pentagon, he passed out antiwar leaflets. A speech given by Randy Kehler, a draft resister at the gathering who was about to go to prison, convinced Ellsberg that he was not doing enough to end the war. Two months later, Ellsberg began secretly smuggling out seven thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers from his office at RAND and, in that era, laboriously copying them one at a time on a friend’s Xerox machine.
Ellsberg had initially planned to give copies of the papers to a U.S. senator, who he hoped would hold hearings and thereby shift the onus of the release from him. Ellsberg secretly met with William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in Washington. Fulbright seemed intrigued, Ellsberg recalled. He told Ellsberg that his staff would read the material and then set up a hearing. But Fulbright dithered for months and ultimately declined to proceed. Ellsberg tried a few other senators, including George McGovern, the South Dakota Democrat. McGovern was also initially supportive, but later told Ellsberg he feared that releasing the papers would hurt his plans to run against Nixon in the 1972 election.
In the summer of 1970, some nine months after copying the report, Ellsberg, increasingly frustrated, decided to give some of the Pentagon Papers to the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing think tank in Washington. He knew the institute’s co-founder, Marcus Raskin, and later gave an interview to Raskin’s staffer Ralph Stavins, for a study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam that the organization planned to publish in book form. During the interview, Ellsberg told Stavins about the Pentagon Papers, and agreed to share some of its contents with the institute to help inform its examination of the war. In dribs and drabs over the next several months, Ellsberg gave the group more than a thousand pages of the papers. But since the institute was a far-left think tank, he feared that its liberal bent would taint the historic impact of what the study contained. He wanted a more mainstream launch.
Raskin and Stavins knew that Ellsberg had been trying, without success, to get the Senate to hold hearings on the papers. Frustrated with the pace of Ellsberg’s efforts, and wanting to limit their own legal liability in writing about the papers, Raskin and Stavins decided to give the stash that Ellsberg had given them to Sheehan, a star correspondent in Vietnam for both United Press International and the Times, who was then based in Washington for the newspaper.
At a dinner in Washington, on February 28, 1971, Raskin and Stavins suggested to Ellsberg that he give a full set of the papers to Sheehan. They did not tell Ellsberg that they had already given Sheehan a portion of those very documents. Thirty years later, according to Ellsberg, Raskin confessed that he had deceived him, saying he felt “abashed and guilty’’ about it. Raskin—whose son, the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, was the lead House manager in the second impeachment of Donald Trump—died in 2017. Stavins did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Ellsberg did reach out to Sheehan, whom he had met when they were both in Vietnam. He had also done business with Sheehan before: in March of 1968, making his first leak to a reporter, Ellsberg had given Sheehan classified reports and cables on U.S. estimates of North Vietnam’s troop strength, which led to three major stories in the Times that President Johnson considered damaging.
On March 2nd, Ellsberg met with Sheehan at his house in Washington, and they talked late into the night. Ellsberg told the reporter about the Pentagon Papers and said that he had the study in his possession—all of it. As the two men talked, Ellsberg recalled, Sheehan said that in the course of reporting a story about war crimes in Vietnam, he had recently consulted with I.P.S. and got the “impression that they had copies of documents’’ about America’s involvement in the war. Sheehan did not tell Ellsberg that the institute had already given him the papers. “[Sheehan] asked me not to go back to the institute to tell them he had been talking to me because he said they might get suspicious—they might go off on their own and give it to someone else,’’ Ellsberg told his lawyer, Charles Nesson, several months later, according to a transcript of their meeting.
As they concluded their conversation that night in Washington, Ellsberg said he told Sheehan that he would show him the Pentagon Papers study, and they arranged to meet in Cambridge, outside Boston, on March 12th. By this time, Ellsberg had resigned from RAND and taken a position at M.I.T.’s Center for International Studies. “Neil didn’t let on he already had some of the papers,’’ Ellsberg recalled. Sheehan would later assert that Ellsberg agreed at the March 2nd meeting that he would give him a full copy of the documents. Ellsberg strongly denies that.
On March 12th, the two men met in Cambridge, and Ellsberg took Sheehan to the apartment of his brother-in-law, Spencer Marx, where he was hiding the papers for safekeeping. Sheehan, who by then had turned strongly against the war himself, began reading them with great interest. Ellsberg agreed to give him copies of a few pages, which he could show his editors, and Ellsberg said that Sheehan could read as much of it as he wanted, and take notes. But Ellsberg refused to let him copy the entire study. He first wanted assurances that the Times would, in fact, publish the papers and treat them as a “big story”—a multipart series that would be given ample space, so as to reproduce some of the actual documents. Without these conditions, Ellsberg did not want to cede control of the papers by giving them to Sheehan, and he worried about extra copies being made at the newspaper, where security could be lax; the F.B.I. might get a whiff of what was afoot.
Sheehan had taken a hotel room in Cambridge, intending to stay a few days, and after a while, Ellsberg let him continue reading alone. He recalled telling the reporter that he was counting on him not to go against his wishes and take a bundle of the papers out to Harvard Square to make copies. After a time, Sheehan left for home to consult with his editors. When he returned soon after, Sheehan told Ellsberg that his editors were interested but they needed more information about the contents of the papers. Ellsberg was still not ready to allow the journalist to make copies without a commitment to publish, so Sheehan settled down for more reading and note-taking.
Around this time, Ellsberg told Sheehan that he and his wife would be going away for a few days. Sheehan asked if he could stay and continue reading and taking notes on the papers. Ellsberg agreed and gave him a key to the apartment, while again warning Sheehan not to make copies. “The issue here was, would the Times go ahead and publish the stuff?’’ Ellsberg recalled. “All I wanted was for them to take it seriously. Unknown to me, they already were.” After the Ellsbergs left for their trip, Sheehan quickly seized the opportunity to summon his wife from Washington to help him copy the entire set of papers at a local copy shop.
According to Ellsberg, Sheehan called him the following month, in April, to report that the Times had given him another assignment and the newspaper was no longer pursuing the Pentagon Papers story. But Sheehan said that he wanted to keep following the story on his own, so he again asked Ellsberg to give him a full copy of the papers, in case Sheehan could get his editors to change their minds. Feeling like he was out of options, Ellsberg this time agreed. In fact, it later emerged, the Times was going full speed ahead with plans to publish. It had rented a suite at the New York Hilton hotel, where a team of editors and reporters had been poring over the papers for at least a month, and planning a ten-part series.
Sheehan, who died in January, at the age of eighty-four, would admit that he had been stringing Ellsberg along. In a 2015 interview with the former Times reporter Janny Scott, Sheehan also conceded that he had disregarded Ellsberg’s explicit instructions not to copy the papers, and gave him no warning before the Times published its first article, on June 13, 1971. In the interview, which Sheehan gave on the condition that his comments not be published until after his death, he tried to justify his deception. He told Scott that Ellsberg had been behaving recklessly, torn between his desire to get the papers published and his fear of going to prison. And since Ellsberg had already discussed the papers with senators, Sheehan said he also feared that someone on Capitol Hill could call the Justice Department and tip off officials there that the Times might be planning to break the story. Sheehan told Scott that he felt Ellsberg was “out of control.’’ He added, “It was just luck that he didn’t get the whistle blown on the whole damn thing.”
Ellsberg denied that he was ever out of control, but acknowledged that he felt “frantic and pressured’’ when Sheehan visited him in Cambridge because he feared that the F.B.I. might be closing in on him. He and his wife had also been staying up late at night making additional copies of the Pentagon Papers to store with friends in case he was arrested. He added that if Sheehan had simply told him that the Times was committed to the story, he would have given the reporter an entire set of the papers immediately.
Shortly after Sheehan’s death, in January, the Times published an obituary, as well as Scott’s story on the reporter’s fraught relationship with Ellsberg, including Sheehan’s 2015 statements questioning the whistle-blower’s behavior at the time. It did not include any comment from Ellsberg himself. The omission subjected the Times to criticism for not following the journalistic convention of allowing the subject of a story to respond to disparaging remarks. In an interview, Scott said that she had been assigned to write Sheehan’s obituary in advance. In 2013, Scott wrote Sheehan a letter and requested an interview. Two years later, Sheehan agreed to speak with her. “Then I sat down with Sheehan and he told me this extraordinary version of what happened,” Scott said.
Her editor had told her that he wanted the obituary to be fourteen hundred words. After she told him she could write that amount just on Sheehan’s dealings with Ellsberg, he agreed that she should do a separate article about that. When asked why she did not call Ellsberg for comment, Scott replied, “What I’m going to say here is an explanation and not an excuse.” She said, “When Sheehan died, I knew they obviously were going to run the obit immediately, but I didn’t know what the plans for the second piece were. I didn’t assume it would run instantly, but that should have been in the front of my mind. I stupidly did not say, ‘Please hold the second story until I can speak to Ellsberg.’ I should have.” She added, “I’ve had a few second thoughts.”
Scott’s story also did not mention the fact that Sheehan had obtained more than a thousand pages of the papers from the Institute for Policy Studies before getting the full set from Ellsberg. Scott said that Sheehan did tell her of his dealings with the I.P.S. but she chose not to write about that because she didn’t feel it was relevant to the reporter’s dealings with Ellsberg. She added that what was “fascinating’’ to her about the Sheehan-Ellsberg relationship was that “both of them were pursuing the same goal—to try and accelerate the end of the war, but neither of them trusted the other because each felt the other was going to blow it.”
Today, Ellsberg holds no grudge against Sheehan and called him “an outstanding journalist.” He chalked up their mutual grievances to a “misunderstanding.” “I was so right, and so lucky, to have given the Pentagon Papers to Neil,” Ellsberg said. “No one—no one—could have done better with them.’’
After the Times ran three stories on the papers, Nixon and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, accused the newspaper of violating the Espionage Act by releasing classified material, and they obtained a federal injunction forcing the Times to cease publication. Ellsberg, meanwhile, arranged to pass another copy of the papers to the Washington Post, which then began publishing its own stories on June 18th, but soon it, too, was enjoined from further publication.
By this time, Ellsberg had been widely reported to be the prime suspect in the leak. After hiding underground until the papers were published—next in the Boston Globe, and subsequently in more than a dozen other newspapers around the country—Ellsberg turned himself in to authorities in Boston on June 28th and was charged under the Espionage Act. Two days later, the Supreme Court ruled, by a vote of 6–3, in favor of the Times and the Post.
Publication of the papers infuriated Nixon. In an Oval Office meeting with Henry Kissinger and other top aides, he discussed how to retaliate against Ellsberg. Kissinger told Nixon that “Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America,” and said, “He must be stopped at all costs. We’ve got to get him.’’ Nixon fervently agreed. “We’ve got to get him! Don’t worry about his trial. Just get everything out. Try him in the press,” the President said. “These fellows have all put themselves above the law, and, by God, we’re going to go after them.’’
Nixon ordered the formation of a Special Investigations Unit directed out of the White House, which became known as the Plumbers, an inside joke that referred to its stated mission to stop leaks, though the operatives actually carried out political dirty tricks. For its first operation, the group decided to break into the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, hoping to gather material that they could use to blackmail Ellsberg or smear him. This escapade, which proved unsuccessful, amounted to a Watergate trial run. The same ex-C.I.A. and F.B.I. operatives who oversaw it, Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, were the ones who plotted the bugging and burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building some nine months later in 1972.
The C.I.A., prohibited from engaging in any domestic operations, was nonetheless ordered to produce first one and then another psychological profile of Ellsberg, based on press reports as well as F.B.I. and State Department files. Meanwhile, Liddy and Hunt searched Ellsberg’s F.B.I. files for damaging material. When they learned that Ellsberg was due to be in Washington in September, to receive an award from a peace group, Liddy and Hunt concocted a bizarre plan to slip LSD into his soup before he made a speech, hoping that he would become disoriented during his remarks and embarrass himself. But they couldn’t procure the LSD in time.
Then, in May of 1972, when Ellsberg was scheduled to appear at a Vietnam War protest at the Capitol, a group of operatives was sent to assault Ellsberg and disrupt the rally by shouting that Ellsberg was a traitor. They tore down antiwar signs and started brawls with several of the demonstrators, but couldn’t get close to Ellsberg. Police broke up the fight, and the assailants slipped away.
Ellsberg’s 1973 trial, in Los Angeles, sparked a brazen effort by the Nixon White House to influence the trial judge by offering him a job as head of the F.B.I. while the case was in progress. During a break in the trial, Judge Matthew Byrne secretly travelled to San Clemente to meet with the Nixon counsel John Ehrlichman, who made Byrne the offer. When that and the Plumbers’ role in breaking into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist became public, along with their other activities, the compromised judge was forced to dismiss the case owing to government misconduct.
At the White House, Nixon seethed at the dismissal and said, of Ellsberg, “The sonofabitching thief is made a national hero . . . and the New York Times gets a Pulitzer Prize for stealing documents. . . . What in the name of God have we come to?’’
In the years after Ellsberg’s trial, he plunged into the anti-nuclear movement, a part of his life for which he is little known, compared to the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg has taught courses on the nuclear-arms race at Stanford and Harvard Medical School, and given hundreds of lectures on the subject. He has been arrested in nonviolent civil-disobedience actions close to ninety times. “I don’t expect to have a gravestone, but if there were to be one, I would want it to say that I was a member of the antiwar movement on Vietnam, and the anti-nuclear movement,’’ he said.
At ninety, Ellsberg appears to have aged well. He has avoided contracting COVID-19 thus far, and other than a longtime hearing problem and a balky sciatica condition, he’s in good health. He has a shock of white hair, a lined, craggy face, and hard blue eyes. His mind remains razor-sharp. Questions posed to him elicit no short answers; he’s never met a tangent he’s found unwelcome.
Looking back on the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg conceded that their publication had no effect on the conduct of the war. “Nixon went right on with his aims, and, a year after the Pentagon Papers, we had the heaviest bombing of the war,’’ he said. “People asked me, ‘What did the Pentagon Papers do?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ I never convinced anyone that Nixon was doing the same thing as his predecessors. Nobody wanted to believe that, and I did not convince them. The Times’ slant on the Pentagon Papers was, ‘This is history.’ The message I wanted to get out was: this is history being repeated.’’
Today, Ellsberg lends his name to progressive causes and nurtures other whistle-blowers in an effort to promote the exposure of government secrets as patriotic, not traitorous. Fifty years after he was put on trial, Ellsberg said that the government continues to misuse the Espionage Act to criminalize whistle-blowing and deter would-be leakers. He conceded, “My efforts to encourage that have been much less effective than the efforts of the government to deter and prevent it.’’
Ellsberg said that every government wants to conceal its mistakes, its lies, and its abuses of power from the public. “Here’s what I learned long before age ninety: that many virtues—like loyalty, obedience to authority, and courage—can be put toward dangerous and bad causes,’’ he said. “Officials are reluctant to recognize that loyalty to the President can, and regularly does, conflict with the higher loyalty they owe to the Constitution.”
Undocumented immigrants from El Salvador wait to be deported on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight bound for San Salvador. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Immigration Judges Feel Overburdened and Pressured to Deport
Sarah Al-Arshani, Business Insider
Al-Arshani writes: "The country's 500 immigration judges feel overburdened and under pressure to deport as more than 1.3 million cases have been backlogged at the end of the last administration and crossings into the country keep rising."
he country's 500 immigration judges feel overburdened and under pressure to deport as more than 1.3 million cases have been backlogged at the end of the last administration and crossings into the country keep rising, NBC News reported.
While federal trial judges are appointed for life, making it easier to make independent decisions, immigration judges are appointed and answer to the attorney general.
The ability for the judges to rule independently on asylum cases has also been compromised by a move from former Attorney General Bill Barr to decertify the National Association of Immigration Judges.
"We are in the legal fight for our life to ensure that our decisional independence is valued and maintained," Judge Amiena Khan told NBC.
Sixty Democrats in the House and some on the Senate Judiciary Committee have also called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to recertified the union and allow judges to speak freely about immigration cases, The Hill reported.
As the union fights to be recertified, judges have said they are fighting to be able to make rulings independently.
"We should not be used as a tool of law enforcement," Judge Dana Leigh Marks told NBC. "That is not how Congress envisioned the immigration courts should play a role in the immigration system."
In a press release, the American Immigration Lawyers Association said the wait time for the backlogged cases was more than four years, including "cases that require urgent attention, such as those seeking asylum and humanitarian relief."
Additionally, cases keep rising. In May alone, Customs and Border Protection reported more than 180,000 migrants at the Southern border, the largest number in a month in more than 20 years.
Marks told NBC quotes were imposed to get cases through faster but the measure threatens to ensure every case has due process and doesn't allow migrants time to find a lawyer. Migrants aren't given court-appointed lawyers and without a lawyer, they will most likely lose their case.
'Police have yet to determine a motive for the driver's actions.' (photo: NBC)
Driver Hits Minneapolis Protesters, Killing 31-Year-Old Woman and Injuring Others
Paul Walsh and John Reinan, The Star Tribune
Excerpt: "A man drove into a group of protesters, killing one woman and injuring others at an Uptown Minneapolis intersection late Sunday."
Brother identifies the woman who was killed.
The incident occurred about 11:40 p.m. at W. Lake Street and S. Girard Avenue, near where Winston Boogie Smith Jr. was fatally shot by law enforcement on June 3 during an attempt by a U.S. Marshals Service task force to arrest him in a parking ramp.
The woman died after being taken by ambulance to HCMC. A second protester also was struck by the vehicle and taken by ambulance to HCMC. Two more people from the incident later sought medical attention at nearby hospitals, said police spokesman John Elder.
The driver was hospitalized for treatment of injuries after some of the protesters "began to strike" him, Elder said. Conditions of the injured protesters and the driver were not immediately known.
Police have yet to determine a motive for the driver's actions, however, "the use of drugs or alcohol ... may be a contributing factor in this crash," Elder said.
The identity of the driver is being withheld by police. The names of the injured also have yet to be released.
Garrett Knajdek said his sister, Deona M. Knajdek, of Minneapolis, was the protester who was killed. She was to have celebrated her 32nd birthday on Wednesday.
"She was using her car as a street blockade, and another vehicle struck her vehicle and her vehicle struck her," the 29-year-old brother said, who learned the details from police and his mother.
He said his sister, a mother to daughters ages 11 and 13, was active about many issues surrounding justice.
"She constantly sacrificing herself for everyone around her," he said, "no matter the cost, obviously."
Deona Knajdek's Facebook page as recently as Sunday showed videos of a peaceful scene at the intersection, where people sat and chatted. An additional post read: "If we don't get it, shut it down!!!"
Jill MacPhee, who lives in the Walkway apartment across the street, said, "I heard this big thump and a crash," she said. When she came outside, she saw the injured woman lying on the sidewalk on the southeast corner of the intersection.
Well after daybreak Monday, the scene was largely quiet. A streetlight pole, torn from its base, laid alongside the sidewalk, dangling wires still connected to the shattered base. Nearby, jagged pieces of a car's front end, including an entire headlight, we're piled along a fence.
Video posted on social media from the scene overnight showed a man being hustled down the sidewalk by one man as another yelled, "You're going to jail! You're going to jail!"
The man was walked over to police by one protester as others raised their arms and chanted, "Hands up!"
"I didn't mean to," the man can be heard saying on one of the postings. Another showed the distraught crowd directing police to the scene as others tended to the gravely injured Knajdek.
Another protester posted on social media that the woman was sitting down when she was run over.
Several of the witnesses turned their distress toward police officers as they had their pepper spray at the ready while securing the scene ahead of an ambulance arriving.
Barely 12 hours after the mayhem, Mayor Jacob Frey said late Monday morning that police are being reinforced with "some substantial resources that are coming in from a number of different jurisdictional partners," including the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office and federal agencies.
City officials announced last month that they were seeking help as they try to temper a wave of violence that included a mass shooting downtown and the shootings of three young children, two of whom died, in the span of just a couple weeks. "It's too early to tell how many of those assisting officers will be focused on Uptown vs. other areas of the city," Frey said.
The mayor also pointed out that "the right to peacefully assemble is a cornerstone of our democracy and, simultaneously, these businesses that have suffered a number of difficulties in this last year have the right to reopen and have access to their customers. So, that difficult scenario is what we are continuing to navigate right now."
The mayor said city officials "have received word" that there will likely be a vigil or protest at the crash site Monday night. "We'll make sure to have both the right outreach staff from our Office of Violence Prevention on hand as well as law enforcement," Frey said.
Councilmember Lisa Bender, whose ward includes Uptown, said in e-mail to the community Monday morning, "I woke up to the very troubling news that a person was killed in Uptown last night, when a driver crashed into people gathered in protest. Any death in our city is a tragedy, and as we wait for more information, I hope we can all come together to support the victim's family and friends who have suffered this sudden loss of life."
Bender said that based on what police have so far disclosed, "it does not seem possible at this time to say if the crash was accidental or intentional. MPD is investigating. ... This stretch of road, like many in our community, is one of the highest crash corridors."
The deadly crash comes a little over a year after Bogdan Vechirko drove a semitrailer truck onto the Interstate 35W bridge during a massive protest following the killing of George Floyd. Hundreds of protesters scrambled for cover, and no one was injured in the May 31 incident. Vechirko, 35, of Otsego was charged five months later with threats of violence, a felony, and criminal vehicular operation, a gross misdemeanor. His case is pending.
Smith, a 32-year-old father of three, was killed after task force members surrounded him on the top floor of the parking garage at Seven Points, the shopping mall formerly known as Calhoun Square. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said he fired a gun from his vehicle as the task force tried to arrest him on a warrant from Ramsey County for being a felon in possession of a gun.
An unidentified woman who was with Smith at the time said she never saw him with a weapon, her attorneys said last week. Authorities have said that no body or dash camera or surveillance footage is available in the case.
Jordan C.K., who lives two blocks from the scene, said Monday morning that he's angry at the lack of information about Smith's death.
"Let's get the questions dialed in," he said. "Who killed Winston Smith? Let's have a name. Why does the North Star Task Force get a green light to come into our city, kill a man and give no information?"
A vaccine. (photo: Artyom Geodakyan/Tass)
The GOP's Anti-vax Messaging Is Working, Red States Are Vaccinating More Slowly
Peter Wade, Rolling Stone
Wade writes: "Republicans have made vaccines a partisan issue, to the detriment of their constituents."
lthough President Biden has said he wants 70 percent of Americans to have at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose by July 4th, as things currently stand the country is on track to miss that goal. And while most states that voted for Biden will likely meet or exceed the 70 percent mark, many states that Trump won are behind.
Seventeen of the 18 states with the lowest adult vaccination rates voted for Trump, according to an NPR analysis of CDC data. The top 22 states, including D.C., with the highest adult vaccination rates voted for Biden. And, CNN reported, the partisan gap has grown substantially in recent months. As of April 1, there was only a weak correlation between the 2020 election results and vaccination rates, but now the relationship is much stronger.
With how vehemently Republicans have been making vaccines a partisan issue, it’s not a huge surprise that vote red-voting states would be lagging. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson was recently suspended from YouTube for one week after his account added a video of the senator spreading disinformation about the virus, including touting two drugs, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, as Covid-19 treatments. YouTube explicitly lists recommending those medications as “treatment misinformation” in their Covid-19 medical misinformation policy.
Johnson has also publicly claimed he does not intend to get vaccinated, as has fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul. In mid-May, CNN reported that while 100% of Democrats in Congress said they were vaccinated, a much smaller number of Republicans — at least 44.8 percent in the House and 92 percent in the Senate — said they were. All members of Congress have had access to the vaccine for months. And although Trump did receive the vaccine in January while he was still president, he did not announce or publicize it to his supporters, so the public did not know until the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman broke the news in March.
Groups also differ in vaccination rates across demographics. Younger people are less likely to be vaccinated. And black Americans are also trailing behind, although it appears that is because some may not yet have access to the vaccine. Three out of four black adults asked in a May poll by NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist said they had either received a vaccine dose or would get one when one became available.
Despite the lagging vaccination rates, the U.S. will still get somewhat close to Biden’s 70 percent goal by July 4th, likely falling short by a few percentage points. But not having a large portion of the population vaccinated can be dangerous and can promote the spread of Covid-19. And unvaccinated people are the most at risk, especially as variants are coming from across the globe. According to preliminary data from the Cleveland Clinic, 99 percent of patients admitted to the hospital with coronavirus from January to mid-April 2021 were not fully vaccinated.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (photo: Getty Images)
Corporate Welfare Props Up the Billionaire Class
Grace Blakeley, Jacobin
Blakeley writes: "The last year has seen the largest increase in billionaire wealth in history, but it has little to do with innovation."
ast year, during the peak of the global pandemic, the world created more than seven hundred new billionaires. In the year since, another five hundred have been created — but the total wealth on the Forbes list has increased from $5 trillion to $13 trillion, the largest increase ever recorded in any one-year period. China topped the list for the highest number of new billionaires, with the United States coming in second.
Meanwhile, global GDP shrank by 3.3 percent in 2020 and unemployment rates are around 1.5 percentage points higher than they were before the pandemic in most economies. This doesn’t simply raise moral questions about the distribution of wealth during a pandemic — it requires us to ask exactly how those at the top are doing so well while demand in the global economy is so subdued.
The main reason for the explosion in billionaire wealth over the course of the pandemic has been the asset-purchasing programs undertaken by central banks. In the wake of the financial crisis, and following in the footsteps of the Bank of Japan after its crisis a decade earlier, central banks set about creating new money to purchase long-dated government bonds and some other assets in order to reduce yields (previously, they had primarily dealt in short-dated bonds as a way to influence interest rates).
The idea behind what is now commonly known as quantitative easing (QE) was that pushing down yields on long-dated government bonds would encourage investors to purchase other assets, like equities. Some argue that this was simply a measure designed to increase lending and investment; others argue that central banks were actively attempting to increase asset prices, enriching the wealthy based on the assumption that that wealth would “trickle down” to everyone else.
Whatever the original intentions, central bank asset purchases have unquestionably led to significant asset price inflation and increased wealth inequality. If that trend was not obvious in the run-up to the COVID-19 pandemic — US equities had undergone their longest bull run in history and many observers were pointing to a bubble in high-yield corporate debt — then it is certainly obvious today.
Saying that central bank asset purchases have increased wealth inequality is another way of saying that the state has intervened directly in order to increase the wealth of those at the very top. In this context, the idea that billionaire wealth simply represents a reward for effort and innovation — the size of which is determined by the “market” — is clearly absurd. These billionaires didn’t earn the massive increases in their wealth seen over the last year — they were effectively handed this wealth by the state.
And QE is not the only form of upward redistribution promoted by capitalist states today. Even before the pandemic, the United States had a massive problem with so-called corporate welfare. Special interest groups — from oil to agriculture to aviation — received huge direct handouts from the US state in the form of tax breaks and subsidies.
The response to the global financial crisis could itself be considered a form of corporate welfare. Some of the largest banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions received massive direct or indirect bailouts for undertaking activities that many of their senior executives were aware were incredibly risky.
These bankers no doubt knew that their organizations were “too big to fail”: they knew that their collapse could bring down the world economy. The trump card held by these large organizations is a form of structural power inherent to the functioning of capitalism: as long as a small number of people control most of the world’s resources, they’ll be able to blackmail even the most progressive governments.
The pandemic has seen a massive revival of corporate welfare — only this time, rather than bailing out their financial sectors, governments are bailing out the entire capitalist class. On top of the $9 trillion worth of QE that’s been undertaken since the pandemic began, governments all around the world have spent trillions on loans and subsidies to big businesses, financiers, and landlords. Most have also provided some support for workers; yet without breaks on debt, rent, and bills, much of this has ended up in the pockets of the wealthy too.
These are only the indirect channels through which capitalist states support the global billionaire class. Oxfam identified in 2015 that a third of billionaire wealth comes directly from crony connections to the state or monopolies. Whether through outsourcing, subsidies, or privatization, state policy has created many billionaires over the years — as should be clear from the fact that state-capitalist China created the most new billionaires this year.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the dramatic increase in the wealth of those at the very top of society would have been impossible without the direct intervention of capitalist states all over the world. Those who attempt to justify the extraordinary levels of inequality on the basis that they are the natural result of the operation of the free market would do well to remember this.
But so would those on the Left who see state intervention as the answer to all of capitalism’s problems. More often than not, capitalist states undertake policy in the interests of capital. This is not because states are mere instruments of the ruling class; it is because the balance of power between capital and labor has shifted decisively in favor of the former in recent years, which has influenced the class struggle taking place within state institutions.
It may be possible to imagine a world in which public power is used to support the interests of labor over capital, but there is no way this can be achieved without class struggle within and — crucially — outside of the capitalist state.
Palestinian protesters with flags confront Israeli soldiers during a demonstration against Jewish settlements in the town of Asira ash-Shamaliya in the illegally occupied West Bank near Nablus in October 2020 (photo: Abbas Momani/AFP)
New Israeli Government Is Just as Bad as the Last, Says Palestinian PM
Oliver Holmes, Guardian UK
Holmes writes: "Benjamin Netanyahu's ousting closes one of the 'worst periods' of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but the new government headed by a settler advocate, Naftali Bennett, is just as bad as the last, the Palestinian prime minister has said."
Mohammad Shtayyeh condemns Naftali Bennett’s announcements in support of Israeli settlements
enjamin Netanyahu’s ousting closes one of the “worst periods” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but the new government headed by a settler advocate, Naftali Bennett, is just as bad as the last, the Palestinian prime minister has said.
“We do not see this new government as any less bad than the previous one, and we condemn the announcements of the new prime minister Naftali Bennett in support of Israeli settlements,” Mohammad Shtayyeh said, referring to hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis who have taken land in the occupied West Bank.
“The new government has no future if it does not take into consideration the future of the Palestinian people and their legitimate rights,” Shtayyeh added.
A far-right former settler leader, Bennett addressed his newly sworn-in cabinet late on Sunday night, saying the country was “at the outset of new days”. The new prime minister has ruled out a Palestinian state and wants Israel to maintain ultimate control over all the lands it occupies. He has previously called for Israel to be more forceful in its attacks on Gaza.
Bennett was once Netanyahu’s chief of staff and a member of his Likud party, but they have become fierce rivals. On Monday, Bennett and Netanyahu held a 30-minute meeting to formally transfer power. However, they skipped the photo op and public well-wishes of previous handovers.
Several world leaders publicly congratulated Bennett. And despite the fact that the new leader’s government has explicitly pledged not to make efforts to end the Israeli occupation, some figures abroad highlighted the need to pursue peace in their messages of congratulation.
The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said Ottawa “remains steadfast in its commitment to a two-state solution, with Israelis and Palestinians living in peace, security, and dignity – without fear and with their human rights respected”.
The White House said in a statement that Joe Biden had, in a phone call with Bennett, “conveyed that his administration intends to work closely with the Israeli government on efforts to advance peace, security, and prosperity for Israelis and Palestinians”.
An earlier statement said the US president looked forward to working with Bennett, adding: “Israel has no better friend than the United States.”
The European Council president, Charles Michel, said he was looking forward to strengthening the EU-Israel partnership “for common prosperity and towards lasting regional peace and stability”. The UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said: “I look forward to continued cooperation on security, trade and climate change, and working together to secure peace in the region.”
Bennett, 49, was sworn in on Sunday evening after the opposition leader, Yair Lapid, a centrist former TV news anchor, won a confidence vote in the Knesset by a razor-thin advantage of 60-59 seats. Under a power-sharing agreement, Bennett will hand the reins to Lapid after two years.
The new administration breaks a political deadlock that has resulted in four snap elections since 2019. During that time, Netanyahu, who is famed for his political skills, managed to keep his rivals bickering and divided while he clung to power, even after he was indicted in three criminal corruption cases on charges he denies.
Bennett leads a self-described “government of change” that is a mix of ideologically opposed politicians from hardline Jewish religious nationalists and a small Arab Islamist party, whose leader, Mansour Abbas, is seen as a pragmatist.
Published coalition agreements showed the new government would focus mostly on economic and social issues, such as passing a state budget and building new hospitals, rather than risk an internal fight by trying to address the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. However, Bennett will have executive powers as prime minister to further solidify the occupation.
In joining the coalition, Bennett has been branded a traitor by some politicians on the religious right, who accused him of abandoning his ideology in order to join Jewish “leftists” and Arab politicians.
Bennett told the parliament before the Sunday vote that Israel had been thrown “into a maelstrom of hatred and infighting”.
“The time has come for different leaders, from all parts of the population, to stop, to stop this madness”, he said, to angry shouts of “liar” and “criminal” from rightwing opponents.
On Sunday night, after Netanyahu was removed from high office, thousands of Israelis waving the country’s blue and white flag packed a square near the Knesset in Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s opponents waved “Bye bye Bibi” placards as they celebrated in central Tel Aviv.
Netanyahu has been in power for so long that – after Sunday’s confidence vote dethroned him – he automatically returned to sit in a seat reserved for the prime minister. After being discreetly prompted by a lawmaker in his party, he moved to a seat designated for the opposition.
The new government’s first major test will be on Tuesday when a parade attended by far-right Jewish nationalists is set to march through Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem.
Israeli police had changed the route to avoid the Muslim quarter of the Old City after a similar march last month played a key role in building the tensions that led to the latest Gaza conflict. However, the planned march will still pass through Arab areas and is seen as deeply provocative.
African elephants. (photo: Ronan Donovan/NatGeo)
Life After Wildlife Trafficking: What Happens to Rescued Animals?
Danielle Beurteaux, The Revelator
Beurteaux writes: "International pressure to tackle the illegal wildlife trade has increased in recent years. But a resulting increase in successful seizures of live wildlife also means authorities are often overwhelmed with animals."
A serious lack of data about the fate of wildlife saved from illegal trade leads to calls for better accountability
n 2013 authorities at Bangkok's main airport busted a smuggler carrying 54 ploughshare tortoises from Madagascar crammed in a suitcase. The seizure of what amounted to about 10% of the critically endangered species' wild population made news around the world.
What happened to those animals later did not generate as many headlines, says Jan Schmidt-Burbach, head of wildlife research and animal welfare at World Animal Protection.
Half of the tortoises died soon after their rescue — a surprise, he says, because the animals are tough and should have been able to survive. The rest went to a government rescue center in Thailand, only to end up among a group of animals that later disappeared and were suspected stolen. That second suspected crime was possible, in part, because there was resistance from center managers, he says, to marking the tortoises' shells to make them traceable.
Cases like this illustrate two of the biggest problems with the fight against the illegal wildlife trade: the scarcity of regulations for the treatment of animals after they've been rescued, and the lack of data regarding what happens to them.
"That lack of transparency with confiscated wild animals opens doors to laundering and just inappropriate handling," says Schmidt-Burbach.
International pressure to tackle the illegal wildlife trade has increased in recent years. But a resulting increase in successful seizures of live wildlife also means authorities are often overwhelmed with animals, including species that require specialized care or are dangerous.
A recent paper published in the journal Animals examines what happens to these creatures, and why. Focusing on Southeast Asia, a wildlife trading hot spot, the researchers found that illegally traded wildlife are often not handled in a way most beneficial to the animals due to a combination of corruption, exploitation, and lack of policy, funding, expertise and capacity.
"Yes, they were essentially rescued," says conservation scientist Shannon Noelle Rivera, the paper's lead author. "But seizure does not mean rescue by any means, and a lot of times they end up right back in the trade."
Handled correctly, some of these animals could be successfully returned to their home habitats and help replenish populations of threatened species. Instead, they are often kept in captivity, in centers that lack the expertise, funding or the will to care for them properly.
Others disappear back into the wildlife trade. Sometimes it's because corrupt officials sell them back into the illegal wildlife market. Other times it's because directives to care for seized animals often lack the resources to do so. Many are released en masse, whether the environment is suitable or not, because that's the easiest thing to do.
As Rivera's research found, large amounts of lizards, snakes and birds are being released haphazardly and not in their native habitats: "The wrong species are getting dumped all over the place," according to a source quoted in the paper. This puts the animals at risk of dying, becoming invasive, overwhelming the ecosystem, or carrying new diseases to other fauna and humans.
The Vagaries of "Disposal"
Other researchers say the paper, although limited to Southeast Asia, reflects a global problem.
"The key themes they've identified definitely ring true," says Neil D'Cruze, global head of wildlife research at World Animal Protection and an academic visitor at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford. The best outcome, he says, is not just about following laws but ensuring the animals' wellbeing.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, an international agreement to regulate wildlife commerce, has guidelines for what it terms the "disposal" of rescued animals. The three options include returning them to wild, captivity or euthanasia, with the latter, as the CITES resolution states, "the simplest and most humane option available."
But tracking which option countries choose has been difficult. D'Cruze co-authored a study in 2016 that found 70% of CITES signatory countries didn't provide any data on animal disposals on their mandatory animal trade reports because they weren't required to do so at the time. CITES finally added a field for this information in 2018, but it's still not compulsory. Indeed, more recent research found that only 32% of CITES signatory countries had even submitted the mandatory reports.
Once an animal is trafficked, it's often considered lost to conservation, says Rivera, who also points out that the term "disposal" comes with the connotations of discarding.
"Just ethically looking at the exploitation and corruption that can continue after the confiscation is really important," she says. "We're trying to stop [wildlife trafficking] through a lot of enforcement measures," but what happens to the animals next "just kind of slips under the radar."
Many animals end up in various forms of captivity of extremely varying quality of care. Some sites that position themselves as true sanctuaries are actually little more than thinly veiled tourist attractions, or are reliant on tourism dollars for funding, which can create a cycle of keeping animals in perpetuity. There is also a lack of transparency about the source of these animals — some facilities have been linked to the illegal wildlife trade.
"Trying to understand where these facilities are getting their animals is extremely difficult," says Rivera.
Stronger legislation, political support, a reduction in demand, global participation, and wildlife seizure management are among Rivera's recommendations. A registry of rescue centers, with licensing, oversight and inspections would be a good start, she says.
D'Cruze agrees that any care centers must have strict guidelines to follow that mean they are genuine sanctuaries and lifetime care facilities.
"That means no selfies and cuddling with the cubs, no performances or tricks or unnatural behaviors, no walking with them on a leash," he says.
The Complexity of Releases
Of course, if at all possible, an animal rescued from the wildlife trade should be returned to its native habitat.
But releasing a trafficked animal is much more complicated than finding an open field or a forest. These animals are often wounded, malnourished or dehydrated, or they've potentially been exposed to pathogens when they were held in close contact with other animals and species. They often require quarantine or specialized veterinary care, expensive prospects that require expertise and commitment from governments.
"Even if there is expertise and funding, the next biggest hurdle tends to be doing it properly and mitigating the risks of harming wild populations," says D'Cruze. That includes minimizing other animals' exposure to diseases and releasing animals in areas with enough territory to sustain populations. Also, some captive animals have imprinted on humans to the extent that they can't take care of themselves in the wild, can be come nuisance animals, or are particularly vulnerable to hunters.
One success story is the Wildlife Alliance's work with the Cambodia government to create a protocol for animals from seizure through to release or lifetime care. Thomas Gray, former director of science at the nongovernmental organization, calls the repopulation of native animals around the UNESCO World Heritage site Angkor Wat "a fantastic success story." But, he cautions, "only a tiny proportion of the animals from the wildlife trade have been able to be released there."
Over the years, says Gray, thousands of snakes, turtles and other reptile species have been released into the wild in Cambodia by the Wildlife Alliance and the government. Yet there is no post-release information on whether they survived and what, if any, effects they had on their environments.
"We're assuming that they are surviving," he says. "We're assuming that we're returning them into the right places ecologically. And we're assuming that they're not having an impact on the ecology of the places where they are released. And I think those are all safe assumptions, but there's no hard data that supports that."
Can This Problem Be Solved?
Much of the burden to manage the results of the illegal wildlife trade is on the countries where these animals were seized or sourced, says Rivera. But the market demand for these exotics comes overwhelmingly from elsewhere. According to recent research, wealthy nations are driving this trade — the so-called WEIRD countries: western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. The biggest market by far is the U.S., with France and Italy trailing.
That's why one of Rivera's recommendations is for global participation in managing seizures, particularly when the source or intervening countries don't have the resources. "We can't just leave this up to countries that are doing the most seizures, or countries that have the most wildlife trade demand."
D'Cruze agrees. If countries allow the legal importation and trade of exotic animals, he says they should help manage the consequences, especially as the legal and illegal trade are linked with, for example, poached animals being passed off as legal, captive-bred animals.
And law enforcement and seizures alone aren't enough — what happens afterwards is equally, if not more, important, according to the experts.
"All interventions need to be designed in such a way that the care of any live animals are explicitly built into your interventions," says Gray. And it's particularly important for any entity funding this work to encourage governments to create protocols for these animals, he says.
The process of developing those protocols starts with better information. The current lack of data means we're missing the opportunity to develop and refine approaches for post-seizure release into the wild, and for finding ways to repopulate endangered species' populations.
"I think if we were able to show how to do it successfully, or even how to do it unsuccessfully, then we can start rehabbing these animals a lot better and have that be a more viable option," says Rivera.
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