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15 June 21
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Elizabeth Bruenig | What Ilhan Omar Actually Said
Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic
Bruenig writes: "What did Omar say? Context is key."
No one should believe that Omar thinks the United States is identical to the Taliban.
y the time Republicans and centrist Democrats had united late last week to scold Representative Ilhan Omar for a tweet—one of the few pastimes that still draw the two parties together, and something those selfsame chiders would doubtlessly decry, under different circumstances, as cancel culture or censorship—it no longer mattered what, exactly, Omar had said. They had already managed to make a news cycle out of it: mission accomplished.
Now, following Democratic outrage and Republican calls for a floor vote to strip Omar of her committee assignments, let me record the following for posterity: Omar demonstrably did not say what she’s been accused of having said; what she did say was true; and every politico using this opportunity to take a swing at her likely knows those two things—they just think you don’t.
What did Omar say? Context is key. In 2020, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on International Criminal Court prosecutors who moved to investigate potential U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan as well as potential Israeli crimes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, arguing that because the U.S. and Israel aren’t members of the ICC, the court has no right to adjudicate such matters. (The ICC recognizes the State of Palestine as a party to its governing statute, a decision that the U.S. insists the ICC lacks the power to make.) Omar vocally opposed the sanctions—as did the European Union, the president of the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties, Senator Patrick Leahy, and, presumably, anyone skeptical of America’s willingness to look into its own savagery abroad.
During a June 7 budget hearing, Omar asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken a series of questions based on the ICC incident. First, Omar praised Blinken for lifting the Trump-era sanctions. Then she pointed out that he nevertheless still opposed an ICC investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan and Palestine—including, in the first case, offenses allegedly perpetrated by the U.S., the Afghan national government, and the Taliban; and, in the second, Israeli security forces and Hamas. Omar asked, “Where do we think victims are supposed to go for justice? And what justice mechanisms do you support?”
To which Blinken replied, more or less, that the U.S. and Israel are competent to adjudicate all of the above. This raised the obvious question Then why haven’t they?, but Omar’s time was up, and she politely yielded to the next representative.
Later that day, Omar’s official Twitter account shared a video and tweeted a paraphrase of the exchange. The tweet read, in its entirety: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. I asked @SecBlinken where people are supposed to go for justice.”
Omar’s critics then alleged that, by mentioning the U.S., Israel, Hamas, Afghanistan, and the Taliban in a list of parties worthy of investigation for wartime atrocities, she had implied a moral equivalence, or an intolerable similarity between the two good actors (you don’t need me to point them out) and the bad ones.
Distance yourself from king and country, blood and soil; remember that Twitter forces concision, and ask yourself: Has the U.S. committed atrocities in Afghanistan? During his presidency, Donald Trump used his clemency powers to pardon soldiers and mercenaries who had murdered Afghan civilians, which strongly suggests that American soldiers and mercenaries had in fact killed civilians in Afghanistan. An Intercept investigation last year found that CIA-funded death squads have organized lethal raids resulting in the murder of children. And about the torture that the ICC alleges U.S. forces carried out in the aftermath of 9/11—who was it, again, who outright admitted that in those days, “we tortured some folks”?
The U.S. had its reasons. Everybody always does. Omar wasn’t supplying a list of all the bad actors in the world, or ranking the worst of them. She was arguing that the parties listed have something in common: They’ve all committed acts of violence during conflicts that exceed or violate international standards of just war. The crimes of the U.S. aren’t of the same magnitude as those of the Taliban. But what does that matter to the victims of American forces—or the victims of Israeli forces, or those of Hamas, or of Afghan national forces, or of the Taliban? It was on behalf of those people—the victims of wartime atrocities—that Omar posed her questions, and the only equivalence stipulated was theirs: an equality of pain, a likeness of suffering.
Even Omar’s Republican critics should have the capacity to understand what Omar was saying, in part because Trump at times was willing to recognize that the U.S. isn’t blameless on the world stage. When, during a 2017 interview with Bill O’Reilly, he was confronted with his overt support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, for instance, Trump put up a disarmingly frank retort: Sure, he seemed to submit, Putin is a killer. But “there are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”
But Republicans’ crusade against Omar is no surprise. They spent all eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency panicked by a Black leader. Goaded by Trump himself, they claimed that Obama was a secret Muslim. Naturally, when presented with Omar, an actual Muslim, they wasted no time turning her into an object of fear and derision.
The Democrats going after Omar, on the other hand, are a more puzzling and, in some sense, more despicable species, because they belong to the party that takes umbrage when people of color seem to come in for unusually harsh attack. (And compare the treatment of Omar with that of Representative Betty McCollum, who in discussing her bill to restrict how Israel spends U.S. taxpayer dollars has drawn equivalences between “Jewish extremists and Palestinian extremists.”) Democrats should also know all about the art of making comparisons without claiming exact moral equivalence, because during the Trump years, they became fond of analogizing the U.S. president to extreme malefactors: According to Senator Tim Kaine, Obama referred to Trump as a “fascist”; President Joe Biden compared the man to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; Representative Jerry Nadler called him a dictator; Representative Hank Johnson delivered a protracted Hitler riff in an NAACP speech.
So of course no one should believe that Omar thinks the United States is identical to the Taliban; she didn’t say that, and politicians draw comparisons between different states and political figures all the time, at any rate. To which the wise Hill operative will reply: The pileup was nonetheless good politics. Omar has been a passionate ally of Palestinians embattled by Israeli assaults on Gaza, a position that has won her as few friends in the donor class as her steadfast advocacy for the poor, if not fewer. For the Democrats, who seem to believe that their midterm fortunes rest as far from the left as they can possibly tack, knocking out Omar is just a convenient electoral move, and this ridiculous controversy merely a pretext. Maybe all they wanted was to bully her a little, remind the viewing public who’s behind the party’s wheel, in case anyone had worried that it would ever, in any universe, be somebody like Ilhan Omar.
Wisdom of the Hill aside, this strategy points up a major difference between the parties. While Republicans leave their most radical, extremist members—Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, for instance—to cultivate their constituencies and influence the party, Democrats pick off their only honest lefties and coddle their pet right-wingers, such as Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, in hopes of stopping the somewhat further right.
If the floor vote succeeds and Omar is removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, it will be a victory for Trump’s legacy and the Republicans who have always hated her, and for the centrist Democrats who so clearly wish that their party had no left flank to risk votes by sympathizing with the poor, the battered, the anonymous dead abroad, the disenfranchised, the weak—despite their oft-bellowed respect for just such underprivileged persons. It’ll be a win for the right and a demoralizing humiliation for the left, another tally in a populated category. Never has a political party traded so much principle for so little power.
Former president Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
Trump Pressed the Justice Department to Reverse the Election Results, Documents Show
Barbara Sprunt, NPR
Sprunt writes: "A batch of emails released by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee appears to paint a clearer picture of how former President Donald Trump and his allies attempted to pressure the U.S. Justice Department to investigate unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election."
The 232 pages of documents detail the unprecedented pressure campaign that Trump, along with his chief of staff and other allies, conducted to get senior officials at the Justice Department to challenge the results of the election in the face of Trump's loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
In one example, Trump directed sham claims of voter fraud to then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen less than an hour before the president tweeted that Attorney General William Barr — who publicly stated that there was not evidence of widespread election fraud — would be stepping down and replaced by Rosen.
The newly released emails also highlight multiple conspiracy theories surrounding election fraud pushed by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. On Dec. 30, 2020, Meadows emailed Rosen a translation of a document that alleged there was a plot in which U.S. election data was altered in Italian facilities and loaded onto "military satellites" and that Trump was "clearly the winner."
After he sent Rosen a YouTube link on Jan. 1 detailing the conspiracy theory, Rosen forwarded the email to then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, who replied: "Pure insanity."
The cache of documents reveal that Meadows emailed Rosen multiple times to share unverified allegations of election fraud or to ask him to take steps to change the election results.
The documents also highlight how Trump used official White House channels, along with a private attorney, to hound the Justice Department to file a lawsuit in the Supreme Court with the aim of having the court declare that the Electoral College vote counts in six states that Trump lost cannot be counted. The draft complaint circulated by Trump's White House assistant to Rosen, Richard Donoghue, and Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall requested that the court order a "special election" for president in those six states.
The release of the documents to the public comes after the committee request in late May to the Justice Department for documents related to the Trump administration's efforts to overturn the election.
"These documents show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation's chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost," Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said in a statement Tuesday. "Those who aided or witnessed President Trump's unlawful actions must answer the Committee's questions about this attempted subversion of democracy."
The Oversight Committee will hold its second hearing on the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection on Tuesday afternoon and has requested that several former Trump administration officials appear for a "transcribed interview" on the efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Those people are: Meadows; Donoghue, who served as acting deputy attorney general at the time; former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark; former Associate Deputy Attorney General Patrick Hovakimian; and former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia Byung Jin Pak.
Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-VT, questions Shalanda Young, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, at a Senate Budget Committee hearing June 8. (photo: Shawn Thew/Getty)
Democrats Harden Position on Infrastructure Package as Doubts About Bipartisan Deal Grow
Julie Tsirkin, Frank Thorp V, Leigh Ann Caldwell and Dartunorro Clark, NBC News
Excerpt: "Progressive Democrats working on a bipartisan infrastructure deal hardened their position on the legislation after tense talks Monday."
Sen. Bernie Sanders came out against the bipartisan agreement Monday night, saying, "I wouldn't vote for it."
rogressive Democrats working on a bipartisan infrastructure deal hardened their position on the legislation after tense talks Monday.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a member of the Senate Democrats' leadership team, came out against a bipartisan agreement Monday night after meeting with a bipartisan group of 10 senators.
"I wouldn't vote for it," Sanders told reporters. "The bottom line is there are a lot of needs facing this country. Now is the time to address those needs, and it has to be paid for in a progressive way, given the fact that we have massive income and wealth inequality in America."
Last week, the so-called G10 group of five Democrats and five Republicans said it had reached a tentative infrastructure deal, but skepticism from Republicans and impatience from Democrats left its prospects uncertain as lawmakers departed for the weekend.
Democratic Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon have insisted that any deal must include action on climate change. They plan to hold a news conference Tuesday to call on lawmakers to include substantive climate action in the proposal, such as investments to reduce emissions.
Some Democrats have tried to pressure their leadership to abandon bipartisan talks and push through a partisan bill, instead, but there's no guarantee that there are 50 Democratic votes for that tactic, either. And for every Democratic vote appearing to be in jeopardy, another Republican would need to vote in favor.
That means the bipartisan group will need to secure more than 10 Republicans to get its proposal across the finish line. Many in the Republican conference are still bitter over the breakdown of negotiations between President Joe Biden and their chief negotiator, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., this month.
The group of lawmakers huddled Monday night to flesh out details of their plan. But as they left the half-hour meeting, senators sent mixed signals.
"There are still conversations on the pay-fors," said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont. "There is no agreement."
The lawmakers didn't seem to be on the same page about whether a gas tax would help pay for the proposal. Republicans said it was part of the plan; Democrats said it wasn't. The White House opposes the idea, saying it would increase taxes on the middle class.
However, several senators said they plan to release their proposal with details this week — an ambitious goal for a group that seems to disagree on key issues. Both sides plan to present the plan during their respective lunches Tuesday afternoon, said Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah.
David Reinert holds up a large 'Q' sign while waiting in line to see President Donald J. Trump at his rally on August 2, 2018, at the Mohegan Sun Arena at Casey Plaza in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. (photo: Rick Loomis/Getty)
The FBI's New QAnon Report Is Scary as Hell
David Gilbert, VICE
Gilbert writes: "The FBI is warning lawmakers QAnon followers may move from being 'digital soldiers' to 'real world violence.'"
The warning is contained in an unclassified threat assessment sent to lawmakers last week and obtained by VICE News.
The FBI believes that while the inauguration of President Joe Biden and the disappearance of the leader of QAnon will see some adherents leave the movement, others will decide to take things into their own hands.
“We assess that some [domestic violent extremist] adherents of QAnon likely will begin to believe they can no longer ‘trust the plan’ referenced in QAnon posts and that they have an obligation to change from serving as ‘digital soldiers’ towards engaging in real world violence—including harming perceived members of the “cabal” such as Democrats and other political opposition—instead of continually awaiting Q’s promised actions which have not occurred,” the assessment says.
QAnon is a conspiracy theory that broadly believes that former president Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a group of Democratic and Hollywood elite who are running a child sex trafficking ring. It has always claimed it is a non-violent movement, but as the FBI report points out, there have been several incidents of QAnon believers committing acts of violence.
QAnon played a central role in the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and the FBI said this “underscores how the current environment likely will continue to act as a catalyst for some to begin accepting the legitimacy of violent action.”
The agency says it has arrested more than 20 self-identified QAnon adherents who participated in the Jan. 6 attack.
The FBI had worked with Congress to produce the unclassified report in recent months, after a leaked memo had shown the FBI viewed QAnon as a potential terrorist threat last year.
Protests call for student debt relief. (photo: David McNew)
Biden Promised Student Debt Relief. Where the Hell Is It?
Greg Walters, VICE
Walters writes: "Can't he just issue an executive order telling the Department of Education to start shredding that debt?"
READ MORE
People protesting during the national strike in Colombia, 2021. (photo: Jimmy Celemin)
Colombia: National Strike to Adopt New Protest Strategies
teleSUR
Excerpt: "On Tuesday, the National Strike Committee announced new strategies to prevent state terrorism from affecting those Colombians who have been protesting against President Ivan Duque since April 28."
READ MORE
A Citgo oil refinery stands in Corpus Christi, Texas, Jan. 7, 2016. (photo: Eddie Seal/Bloomberg)
13 Refineries Emit Dangerous Benzene Emissions That Exceed the EPA's 'Action Level,' a Study Finds
Aman Azhar, Inside Climate News
Azhar writes: "In Houston and Corpus Christi, the impacted communities are predominantly Black and Latino. Scientists say the dangers of benzene, a carcinogen, are not well understood."
he day is etched in Lemont Taylor’s memory unlike any other. He met his doctor on Dec. 14, 2014 to go over lab results from an earlier visit. A few minutes and a couple dozen words later, Taylor’s life had changed.
“I was told I had stage four bladder cancer and 30 percent chances of survival,” he recalled. “I was in shock.”
A longtime resident of the Hillcrest neighborhood of Corpus Christi, Texas, Taylor, who is African American, believes growing up around refineries and chemical plants led to his ordeal.
“I blame the refineries, the emissions from these refineries,” said Taylor, 68, “From the tender age of 6 to the age where I am now. And they were unregulated back then. Texas Commission for Environmental Quality (TCEQ) didn’t come in until the mid-80s. Well, guess what TCEQ…we’d already been there since the ‘60s.”
A predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhood, Hillcrest is dwarfed by a 15-mile industrial expanse known as Refinery Row on one side and oil tanks on another. From his window, Taylor could see CITGO, Flint Hills Resources and Valero refineries with their flame-tipped towers and futuristic mash-up of tanks and pipe.
In February 2014, 10 months before Taylor was diagnosed with cancer, CITGO was fined over $2 million for violating the Clean Air Act at its Corpus Christi East refinery. The company was convicted by a jury in 2007 of operating two open-top tanks as oil water separators ,without the required emission control equipment. The tanks emitted toxic gases, including benzene, a known carcinogen, over a period of more than eight years.
CITGO’s Corpus Christi East Refinery is among 13 refineries that exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s “action level” for average annual benzene emissions in 2020, an April study by the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project said. Its findings were based on benzene emissions measurements recorded along the refineries’ “fencelines” and reported to the EPA.
Responding to the study, CITGO said in a statement that only one of the fenceline monitors captured emissions over the limit in 2020. “Upon further investigation, it was determined that the monitor readings were affected by emissions resulting from an incident at a nearby plant not owned by CITGO,” the statement said. “If this third party incident had not occurred, the East Plant Refinery would have been below the action limit for the relevant time period.”
CITGO said that it continues working to improve performance at the refinery, and has recently implemented several projects that have further reduced emissions below action limits.
Two other Texas refineries, Marathon Galveston Bay in Texas City and Total Refinery in Port Arthur, were also among the 13. A total of five Texas refineries—Citgo East and Flint Hills Resources East in Corpus Christi; Marathon Galveston Bay; Total Refinery, and Chevron Pasadena Refining in Pasadena—were among 11 that exceeded the benzene action level in 2019.
A Clean Air Act rule that went into effect in 2015 requires refineries to install air pollution monitors at their boundaries to monitor benzene emissions escaping into neighboring areas. The refineries are required to investigate and clean up the emission sources if the benzene levels averaged above 9 micrograms per cubic meter over a year. The regulation is designed to protect neighborhoods next to refineries, many of which are lower-income communities of color.
Benzene is known for causing leukemia and respiratory ailments, and in high concentrations it indicates the presence of other air pollutants considered dangerous to human health.
Citing U.S. Census Bureau and EPA data, the study found that more than 530,000 people live within three miles of the 13 refineries flagged for excessive benzene emissions, 57 percent of whom were people of color and 43 percent of whom lived below the poverty line. The 2020 monitoring also revealed more communities at risk than in 2019, when 11 refineries exceeded EPA’s action level.
Taylor expressed pain and frustration in an interview that the City of Corpus Christ has allowed such cancer-causing emissions from the refineries to continue. He recalled seeing elderly Hillcrest residents falling ill back in the 1980s, adding that the city knew about the releases for decades.
“That’s the most disturbing thing, they knew that it was happening, and they did nothing about it,” he said. “They wanted profit over people. They wanted business over people and didn’t care about the residents.”
Rules Favor Refineries. Communities of Color Take the Hit.
More than a quarter of a million people, predominantly Black and Hispanic, live in communities adjacent to the five Texas refineries that exceeded benzene levels in 2019.
Valero Corpus Christi East, located next to Hillcrest, emitted the highest two-week average of 386 micrograms of benzene in May 2020, although it was not among the 13 refineries exceeding average annual benzene limits. Nearly 40,000 people are estimated to be residing next to the facility, almost 90 percent of whom are people of color with almost 60 percent living below the poverty line. The refinery said that the emissions came from offsite sources, the study found.
CITGO Corpus Christi East refinery’s highest two-week average benzene emission was calculated at 47 micrograms. Nearly 41,000 people live next to that facility, with 87 percent of that population people of color and almost 60 percent living below the poverty line.
Flint Hills Resources East, which shares the same industrial stretch as CITGO and Valero refineries, emitted 51.8 micrograms of benzene during its highest two-week spike of 2020. Some 7,000 residents live in its immediate surroundings, with 64 percent Black and Hispanic families and 40 percent living below the poverty line.
The 2015 EPA rule recognizes that significant concentrations of benzene may also signal the presence of a large cloud of other harmful toxins such as formaldehyde, naphthalene, ethyl benzene, toluene or xylene. Each of these toxins either present their own cancer risks, attack respiratory systems or contribute to smog formation.
But the rule does not require any response by emitters or regulators to such highly concentrated short-term emission bursts. Instead, the enforcement action is triggered only when average benzene emissions exceed 9 micrograms per cubic meter and can be traced to on-site facilities subject to the rule.
Events under 9 micrograms are disregarded as “background” emissions and refineries typically adjust their emission figures to a lower limit, often claiming that sources of emissions lay elsewhere, the report found.
The Environmental Integrity Project, based in Washington and founded by two former EPA attorneys, maintains that the 2015 EPA rule ignores the risks from such short-term benzene spikes, which may threaten the low-income communities that also often suffer from underlying conditions and compromised immunity.
These are the same communities hit hard by Covid-19, where residents who lack affordable health care already suffer from the kind of ailments that make them especially vulnerable to toxic air pollutants like benzene, the report said.
EPA estimates that inhaling benzene at a concentration as low as 1.3 micrograms per cubic meter over a lifetime could result in up to one additional cancer death per 100,000 people exposed to that level. As benzene levels rise, those risks increase proportionately.
“This data adds to the mounting evidence that communities of color and low-income communities suffer disproportionately from industrial pollution,” said Ilan Levin, Texas the Environmental Integrity Project’s Texas director. “It’s heavily communities of color, a lot of non-English speakers, especially here in Texas, in the Gulf. It confirmed what many of these communities have been complaining about for a long time.”
A successful lawsuit filed against the EPA in 2012 by the EIP led to the 2015 benzene monitoring rule. The actual monitoring requirements began in 2017, so the data has only been available since then.
Levin said the report shows refineries tend to downplay their emissions. “When we look at the data, we saw that they were actually recording very serious little spikes of benzene at their fenceline. But they use some of the loopholes in the rule to subtract some of the benzene from those numbers that went into their annual average. So, this rule is far from perfect,” he said.
The organization is asking EPA to take more enforcement action and to investigate the refineries and determine why the emissions are going up. Other recommendations include expanding monitoring at similar chemical and petrochemical facilities where benzene or other toxic substances are being emitted into nearby communities.
Taylor, who is also a member of community action group Citizens Alliance for Fairness and Progress, said the City of Corpus Christi has failed to serve and protect its citizens. “How could they let the refineries right next to people” continue operations, he said, “…knowing that it was toxic in the beginning. But it was a minority neighborhood. So, therefore they did not care.”
A spokesperson for Corpus Christi Mayor Paulette M. Guajardo said she was unavailable for comment.
‘We Need a Better Science’
Juan Flores, 42, a resident of Galena Park in suburban Houston, often finds himself wondering if living close to refineries and chemical plants emitting toxins led to his daughter’s cancer. Flores’ only daughter, now 5, was born with a tumor and went through chemotherapy and a round of surgeries.
“I’m not saying that pollution is what made my daughter have cancer. I can’t say that, I can’t prove that,” he said with a hint of frustration. “But it makes me wonder, you know, it could have been, or maybe it was, but I will not know that because you got to have proof.”
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