02 June 21
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Juan Cole | Was Mark Ruffalo Wrong to Accuse Israel of Genocide?
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "Is it bigoted to say that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians? No. Is it inaccurate? That is harder to say."
he great actor and great humanitarian Mark Ruffalo apologized on Twitter last week for asserting that Israel was committing “genocide” toward the Palestinians, saying that the accusation was inaccurate, inflammatory and disrespectful and he had thought better of it. He also implied that such language was related to anti-Semitic hate crimes.
So, is it bigoted to say that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians?
No.
Is it inaccurate? That is harder to say.
Is it inflammatory? I guess I would ask why that is an issue. Is it inflammatory to say that Myanmar has committed genocide against the Rohingya? The Burmese military junta’s feelings would certainly be hurt. But if they are committing genocide, then whether the charge is inflammatory or not is surely beside the point. Bringing up “inflammatory” is a form of special pleading, a logical fallacy.
Most of the countries in the world ratified the Genocide Convention in 1948, which put forward a set of definitions of genocide. These were incorporated unchanged into the 1998 Rome Statute that serves as a charter for the International Criminal Court (ICC), which came into being in 2002.
The definition is actually quite odd from a layperson’s point of view, since it does not actually require that large numbers of people be killed. Most of us think of genocide as mass murder, as with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who killed a fifth of the population.
The Rome Statute says,
“Article 6 – Genocide
For the purpose of this Statute, “genocide” means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- a. Killing members of the group;
- B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- d.Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Note that this definition only requires that one of the five actions be committed for genocide to have taken place.
International law specialists have puzzled over this language, wondering what its lower limits are. How about if you just killed one member of an ethnic group (but on the grounds of the person’s ethnicity)? That would presumably fit section a). And does this action have to be plotted out deliberately, i.e., is it like first degree murder with regard to an individual?
At the very least, I don’t think it can be contested that Israel is “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” of Palestinians. It has the Gaza Strip under blockade in ways that harm the non-combatant population and there is plenty of evidence that this harm is intentional. Likewise, the creeping annexation of the Palestinian West Bank, involving the criminal flooding onto Palestinian land of Jewish Israeli squatters who usurp it, results in bodily and mental harm.
So if committing Article 6, section b is genocide, Israel is without any doubt guilty of it.
But note that it isn’t just causing bodily and mental harm that makes for genocide. It is doing it for the purpose of destroying a people.
And then we have to ask what it means to destroy a people. I think it is a plausible assertion that for Israel systematically to deny the 5 million Palestinians under its military occupation any right of citizenship in a state is intended to destroy them as a people. My late friend Baruch Kimmerling called it “politicide.” Israelis have often denied that there are any Palestinians and expressed a hope that they can be made to melt into a general “Arab” population. But Arabic is a language, not an ethnicity, and there are nearly 300 million speakers of Modern Standard Arabic. The Palestinians in Lebanon who were expelled from their homes by Zionist militias in 1947-48 still know they are Palestinians, and the Lebanese don’t let them forget it. Just as many American ethnicities may speak English but they don’t melt away as a result.
But, look. I can look at the Rome Statute and form an opinion as a historian on whether it seems to fit what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. The International Criminal Court will eventually likely rule on this matter, and then we’d be on firmer ground.
So Mr.Ruffalo’s second position, that the charge of genocide is inaccurate, is simply incorrect. It may be accurate or it may not be. It would depend on who wins the definitional arguments.
These things are very difficult to adjudicate. The government of deposed dictator Omar Bashir killed 300,000 people in Darfur and put large numbers of people in camps. But it is controversial whether he committed genocide in the sense of the term as used by the ICC. Did he really intend to destroy the Fur people? How much command and control was there on the ground such that he directed attacks? How do you tell the difference between putting down a regional guerrilla movement seeking more autonomy and simple genocide?
One thing is clear, though. For someone to look at the Rome Statute and then at what Israel is doing to Palestinians and for that person to conclude that it is genocide is a perfectly ordinary act of humane politics and there is nothing bigoted or inflammatory about it.
As for anti-Semitism, it is a serious problem in the United States. But it is not a legitimate demand that we not talk about Israeli torts toward Palestinians. It is important that people who stand for Palestinian rights also stand for the rights of Jewish individuals.
The most deadly change in the US atmosphere on that issue has in any case come not because people stand for Palestinian rights but because the US far right, including Trumpists, bought into the replacement theory that Jews back immigration to get cheap labor and make whites redundant.
It is also not legitimate to try to rule out criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. That is mere propaganda. One can criticize the Mexican government without being anti-Latino, or the Zimbabwe government without being anti-Black. If anti-Semitism means anything it is the denunciation of bigotry toward a Jewish minority in a society. Criticizing what a state like Israel does with its F-16 fighter jets simply is not on the same plane.
All that said, it is also true that it is legitimate for someone to look at the Genocide Convention and to look at Israeli actions toward Palestinians and conclude, as Mr. Ruffalo did in the end, that those actions are not genocide.
The precise characterization is less important than an acknowledgment that it is wrong to keep Palestinians in a condition of statelessness and without basic human rights, and few have been as forthright in making that case publicly as Mr. Ruffalo.
Ambushed by the Cops: When Police Deliberately Trap Peaceful Protesters
Alice Speri, The Intercept
Excerpt: "A reconstruction of an incident in North Carolina last June shows police intentionally trapped and tear-gassed hundreds of peaceful protesters."
An Intercept and SITU reconstruction of an incident in North Carolina last June shows police intentionally trapped and tear-gassed hundreds of peaceful protesters.
everal hundred people were marching through downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, last year when a few dozen police officers in riot gear jumped off a city bus and lined up along the march route. It was the fifth consecutive day of protests in the city, where, like in scores of other places across the country, thousands had taken to the streets following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
That night, June 2, protesters peacefully approached the intersection of College and Fourth streets, when suddenly, those at the front of the march turned around and started running back: Officers positioned ahead of them had started firing tear gas and flash-bang devices directly at the advancing crowd. As people ran backward, they were met by the officers who had jumped off the bus, now closing in. Within a few chaotic moments, protesters found themselves caught between a line of cops on one end of the road, a cloud of tear gas on the other, and tall buildings on both sides. As the gas thickened, people began screaming and gasping for air.
“They closed the whole group in between a line of riot officers and a wall of tear gas,” Justin LaFrancois, a local journalist who was livestreaming the protest, told The Intercept. “Nobody ever gave a dispersal order or said where people were supposed to leave from. They blocked all the exits with tear gas, and nobody was going to just run through the tear gas, because if you did, you were getting shot with pepper bullets.”
People in the middle of the crowd began panicking and trampling other people. “There was no way out, it was the most helpless I have ever felt my entire life,” said Justin McErlain, a photographer who was also filming the protest. “I try to stay calm in most situations, I never get too excited. But in that moment, I wasn’t sure if we were getting out of there alive or not.”
A third group of officers positioned on the second floor of a parking garage along the protest route started shooting pepper balls at the crowd. “Not only we were getting hit from both sides, we were getting hit from the top as well,” said McErlain. “I felt sick to my stomach out of fear.” A few dozen people tried to escape by crouching to the ground and climbing under the closed gates of the parking garage — something police later described as trespassing. When that group eventually tried to leave, police rushed toward them and again fired pepper balls, said LaFrancois.
“It was terrifying,” he added. “They just trap you in, and you are basically at their disposal.”
In collaboration with the visual investigations team SITU, The Intercept reconstructed the events of that night by mapping footage captured by witnesses and police cameras against a 3D digital model of the urban environment in which the incident unfolded. The reconstruction, which offers multiple perspectives of the same event, shows that police deliberately exposed hundreds of peaceful protesters to tear gas and other “less-than-lethal” weapons within a confined space they had no clear way to escape. The model, combined with officers’ comments caught by their own body cameras, shows that their maneuvers had been intentional and carefully coordinated despite a claim from Charlotte’s then-police chief that his officers had not intended to cause harm.
The Charlotte incident is a particularly brutal example of a tactic police across the country have deployed for years against protesters — and at least a dozen times since last summer’s uprising alone. Known to protesters and civil rights advocates as “kettling,” the crowd control strategy consists of police surrounding a group of people, ostensibly in order to isolate them from a larger crowd for the purpose of making arrests. In practice, the maneuver — which police have described as “corralling,” “containment,” or “encirclement”— traps people in the streets with no immediate way out, indiscriminately subjecting all to the same, oftentimes violent treatment regardless of individual conduct.
Robert Tufano, a spokesperson for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, told The Intercept in an email that “the practice of ‘kettling’ is prohibited under the department’s standard operation procedures.” Tufano added that the practice was “not specifically banned” before June 2, 2020, but the guidelines on civil emergency standard operating procedures were since updated to include the ban. Still, the prohibition on kettling is not written into any of the department’s publicly available policies. When asked for clarification, Tufano shared internal guidelines stating that riot control agents, like tear gas, “will not be used to intentionally corral or contain crowds.”
“When a dispersal order is given, the dispersal order and egress routes will be audibly communicated repeatedly, loudly and clearly to the crowd and over the police radio,” Tufano added, citing the new policy. “Designated egress routes will not be intentionally blocked by RCAs or physical presence.”
Kettling is largely unregulated in police departments, and public officials, including mayors and police leaders, have offered wildly inconsistent explanations about when it may be appropriate, what it is, or whether it is even used at all. The police training on kettling that does exist includes little, if any, guidance on how to mitigate its harm, for example by allowing people a way out. Because kettling is essentially a temporary movement of bodies that leaves behind no trace, it can be hard to prove that it happened after the fact. As a result, kettling has not been as widely condemned or legally challenged as compared to other police tactics — even as the use of the practice has proliferated.
“Most of the attention has been placed on tear gas, impact munition, the use of military-style equipment and tactics,” Edward Maguire, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice who has written about the policing of protest, told The Intercept. “The tear gas is obvious, there’s the visual that gets captured; the impact munitions and the injuries that result from them make for compelling videos and compelling photographs, and it’s very visual and sort of easy to see and understand.”
There is, however, “no national conversation about kettling,” Maguire added. “Kettling is talked about on a one-off basis, based on a particularly egregious example of its use, but it doesn’t get talked about as a national practice.”
“How Do I Get Oxygen?”
A day after the protest, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney defended officers’ actions. “There is nothing to indicate whatsoever that there was intentional abuse on the part of our officers,” he said in a statement. Putney, who stepped down less than a month later, promised an independent investigation and the release of body camera footage to show police’s side of the story.
Police claimed they had responded to reports that the crowd had been “large and hostile” and that someone had hurled bottles toward officers that evening. But the alleged throwing of bottles preceded the kettling by nearly an hour and took place as the protest was moving through a different part of downtown. Those who were caught in the kettle say everyone was peaceful by the time police encircled them — and several videos that captured that moment show a crowd that was chanting and marching in an orderly fashion down the street.
Less than two weeks after the incident, the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation issued a five-page review of the events based largely on police records and interviews with officers. But several witnesses disputed the findings of the report.
Police, for instance, told investigators that the officers atop the garage had been shooting at the walls above the crowd, not directly at people, but LaFrancois, the journalist, recalled seeing people get hit in the face, neck, and shoulders. A police official told state investigators that officers had only fired “approximately 5-6” pepper bullets from the garage’s second floor. But LaFrancois, who returned to the scene a day after the protest, photographed the markings of at least 20 bullets on the walls. “Their investigation was inaccurate,” he told The Intercept.
The state investigation also found that two exit points had remained open for people to disperse — a conclusion officials cited as evidence that police movements that night didn’t amount to a kettle. But the streets were so filled with tear gas that the routes described by investigators were not visible to the crowd, according to people who were there. “All you see is blurriness,” said McErlain. “You’d have to have a lot of guts to try to run through that.”
In order to leave, protesters would have had to run through a thick cloud of gas. “I don’t define as a clear path one where a peaceful demonstrator has to go through chemical agents,” Luke Largess, an attorney who is representing many of those trapped in the kettle in a federal lawsuit, told The Intercept. “There was no clear path.”
Protesters caught in the kettle described having to make split-second decisions, in a panic, about their safest way out. “You should never be placed in a position where you have to make a decision, ‘How do I get oxygen?’” said Kristie Puckett-Williams, an organizer with the American Civil Liberties Union who was trapped in the kettle. “‘How do I get to a safe place where I’m not getting shot with pepper bullets? Do I go into this garage under this door that might crush me?’”
Puckett-Williams added that the officers were clearly “highly trained; they moved very efficiently and effectively. … They didn’t miss a beat.”
In late August, nearly three months after the protest, Charlotte officials released 57 videos captured by police cameras that night. The videos established that the officers’ actions had been premeditated and well-coordinated — a conclusion that is also supported by SITU and The Intercept’s reconstruction of the events. In the videos, officers can be heard describing their intended movements in detail. “We’re gonna push their ass straight up Fourth,” said one officer, who went on to describe the kettle as a “bottleneck.” “As soon as they get up on Fourth, we got ’em bottlenecked now, Rorie’s squad is gonna step out and hammer their ass. When they start running down, Dance’s squad is gonna step out and hammer their ass with gas. … We’re gonna fuckin’ pop it up.”
In another video, officers are heard laughing at having forced protesters “on the run.” In yet another, an officer reacts to police firing pepper balls at the crowd: “That was awesome!”
Even after the release of the videos, Charlotte officials denied that what police had staged was a “kettle.” City Council member Ed Driggs instead pointed the blame at the wind, which he said “created the sensation of being in a kettle.” (Driggs did not respond to a request to elaborate on his comment.)
Both McErlain and Puckett-Williams, who are involved with the litigation, said the trauma of the experience continued to hang over them nearly a year later. “As we’re talking, as I’m reliving it, I’m still feeling the same anger,” said McErlain.
Puckett-Williams said that people caught in the kettle were left “irreparably damaged. … We weren’t just afraid, we were terrified that police were going to suffocate us to death, and that we couldn’t do anything about it.”
Controlling the Crowd
Long before they were adopted by police, the mechanics of kettling were deployed by military forces as a way for a smaller force to even out the odds against a larger one. The modern-day iteration of the tactic can be traced back to a 1979 concert in Cincinnati, where 11 people were trampled to death and dozens more injured as they tried to enter the concert venue. That incident helped spur a new field of study to develop ways for officials to handle large crowds. In 1980, a report on the Cincinnati incident for the first time identified the term “crowd management,” and for years law enforcement deployed those principles primarily as a way to safely disperse fans after soccer games and other large events.
Soon, however, police began to take techniques intended to manage nonpolitical mass gatherings and applied them to protests. The first known instance of that dates back to 1986, when officers in Hamburg, Germany, surrounded more than 800 anti-nuclear protesters, trapping them in the streets for up to 13 hours. While German courts determined the subsequent arrests had been unlawful, police in Europe regularly resorted to the tactic through the following decades.
What had been intended as a tool to safely guide people through potentially dangerous overcrowding had become something else entirely: a way to trap them.
“There’s this delineation between managing the crowd and controlling the crowd,” said Brian Higgins, a former New Jersey police chief who now teaches crowd management to federal law enforcement and is an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Managing the crowd is being able to keep it from becoming uncontrollable. If it becomes uncontrollable, then we have crowd control, where the police come in and use other means.”
Kettling, Higgins added, is a way for police to intervene and control a crowd that is becoming unmanageable. “Kettling is identifying the area where the crowd is becoming excited, where it is going from a peaceful protest to a not-so-peaceful protest; it is identifying where the flashpoint is and kind of breaking it off from the big crowd,” he said. “It’s almost like cutting off a fire: If you cut it off, then it can’t spread.”
Over the last couple decades, there have been a number of high-profile kettling incidents. In 2002, police in Washington, D.C.’s Pershing Park kettled and then arrested hundreds of anti-war and anti-globalization protesters as well as several passersby, including tourists and at least one vulnerable, elderly man. “There have been several instances where people who got caught up in a kettle are people in wheelchairs, pregnant women, kids,” noted Maguire, the ASU professor. “It’s a really, really dangerous practice. And it can really entrap people who aren’t doing anything wrong.”
The next year, Chicago police kettled and arrested more than 800 protesters at an anti-war protest. During the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, police used mesh fencing to surround protesters on multiple occasions. And in Portland, Oregon, in 2017, and then again earlier this year, police trapped protesters in a kettle, only allowing them to leave after they agreed to be photographed and show their IDs.
Kettling has also been used in Europe, most notably during the 2009 G-20 protests in London, when police trapped nearly 10,000 people in the streets for up to seven hours. A newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, died after being struck by an officer as he tried to find a way out of that kettle, prompting an official inquiry that concluded kettling was an “inadequate” tactic belonging to a “different era.” The London case moved all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in favor of police.
Police who kettle protesters often say that they were reacting to violent acts by people in the crowd — usually the hurling of bottles, rocks, or other objects. But rather than singling out those individuals and separating them from the larger group, kettling traps everyone in the vicinity and indiscriminately subjects them all to the same consequences, whether prolonged detention, arrest, or exposure to tear gas or other weapons. Far from “cutting off” growing tensions within a crowd, the tactic tends to have the opposite effect: to create instant panic, claustrophobia, and chaos.
“Kettling has a political effect,” Chris Zebrowski, a political science professor and the director of the Centre for Security Studies at Loughborough University in the U.K., told The Intercept. “Police are always trying to undermine the idea that they are intervening politically in a protest, but they absolutely are.”
Zebrowski, the co-author of an academic paper on kettling, said that police guidelines on the tactic are rarely codified and that his review of the policies of several police departments for guidance on kettling yielded only scant mentions. Instead, knowledge about the practice seemed to be imparted on officers informally, Zebrowski found. For example, when he interviewed a senior U.K. police official and early proponent of the tactic, the officer described the use of kettling “as a matter of intuition, gut feelings,” Zebrowski said.
“One of our big questions was, what kind of training do police receive with regards to this sort of stuff? What does it say in the guidelines? When should a kettle be imposed? When should it be taken off?” he said. “The police are really, really reluctant to have regulations imposed on them. They like this idea that they have this experiential knowledge and they need to be the judge of these sorts of situations.”
A Planned Assault
The use of kettling was a flashpoint in protests across the country last summer, particularly in New York. On the same day as the Charlotte incident, New York police blocked off hundreds of people on the Manhattan Bridge, prompting elected officials to warn in real time of the dangers of such a maneuver. A day later, New York police kettled a group of peaceful protesters at a rally in Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza. And on June 4, they once again trapped hundreds of people who were marching through the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx. With at least 263 arrests and at least 61 injuries, the incident, which a Human Rights Watch investigation billed a “planned assault” on peaceful protesters, was one of the most violent instances of police repression in recent city memory.
Despite overwhelming evidence of police’s reliance on kettling, New York Police Department officials repeatedly denied that they use the tactic at all.
NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea testified before the New York State Attorney General’s Office that “he had never heard of the term kettling until after the protests began, but that in certain instances, kettling of protesters would be appropriate.” Senior NYPD officials told the Department of Investigation, an independent agency overseeing city government, that protesters “generally should be and were offered opportunities to leave when within a police formation,” a claim that was disproved by several videos and witness accounts.
In November, the NYPD’s chief of patrol, Juanita Holmes, denied that the department had ever engaged in any kettling at all. “I don’t even know what that is unless it’s related to cows,” Holmes said at a press conference a day after police kettled post-election protesters in lower Manhattan. “Kettling is not used by this department, it is not in any of our patrol guides nor is it part of our training.” And last month, Shea doubled down at a City Council hearing, claiming, falsely, that “kettling has never been something that has been taught or allowed within the New York City Police Department.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio, for his part, said last year that “kettling is not an acceptable practice,” even as he had repeatedly defended police accused of doing just that.
But the NYPD’s denial is only a semantic one: The department does use the tactic protesters refer to as kettling; it just calls it “encirclement.”
As a series of internal documents obtained by The Intercept reveal, the NYPD trains officers in a wide-ranging series of crowd-control tactical maneuvers, including formations for officers on foot, on bikes, and in cars. Those formations include multiple variations of kettling, which the documents suggest are used when “there is a need to take a group of people into custody.” The training documents, which include diagrams illustrating how kettling works, stress that the formation should be “tight,” with officers lined up “almost shoulder to shoulder.” They make no mention of leaving exit routes available to the people trapped within.
Sgt. Jessica McRorie, a NYPD spokesperson, confirmed to The Intercept that the department uses a tactic it calls “encirclement” though she denied it is the same as kettling.
“Kettling is not a term known to the NYPD. It has never been referenced in our training or procedures. It is not a crowd control tactic for us,” McRorie wrote. “However a tactic known as ‘encirclement’ is used in rare circumstances where a determination is made to make lawful arrests of a group of protesters who have received warnings and refused to comply with lawful orders. This tactic is meant to help ensure the safety of officers but also demonstrators during those arrests to limit the number of people within a given perimeter during an arrest situation.”
In a lawsuit against the NYPD for its violence during the Floyd protests, New York Attorney General Letitia James accused the police department of using kettling “to corral and detain individuals who were peacefully protesting in order to impede constitutionally-protected assemblies.”
That officials would “deny that they’re even doing what we can all see they are doing is an example of the NYPD being unwilling and unable to police themselves and take accountability for their actions,” said Molly Biklen, deputy legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has also sued the NYPD for using excessive force against protesters last year.
There were also reports of kettling at protests during and since last summer in Philadelphia; Houston; Dallas; Atlanta; Chicago; Los Angeles; Seattle; Des Moines, Iowa; and Portland, Oregon. But while police across the U.S. have kettled protesters frequently, there is little official acknowledgement of the tactic, let alone any nationally recognized standards about best practices for its use.
The Intercept surveyed the police departments of the 20 largest cities in the country, as well as several others with reported incidents of kettling, to ask about their policies relating to the tactic. The departments that responded offered a range of inconsistent guidelines: some denying they allow kettling, others outlining limitations to its use, and others still making no explicit reference to it at all. Most departments’ policies include guidelines on dispersal orders and reminders of protesters’ constitutional rights, but few get into detail about what officers are allowed to do in order to manage a crowd.
Of the police departments that responded to The Intercept, only the San Diego Police Department has an explicit policy on kettling in their publicly available guidelines. The policy states that under certain circumstances, “officers may contain the crowd or a portion of the crowd for purposes of making multiple, simultaneous arrests” but notes that this technique must not be used in response to nonviolent civil disobedience or simply to disperse a crowd.
A spokesperson for the Portland Police Bureau acknowledged that police kettled people at a recent protest. “It is still a tactic that can be used under certain circumstances at the direction of the Incident Commander,” the spokesperson wrote. On March 31, officers responding to individuals in a crowd who were breaking windows “created a perimeter around the group” police said. Those caught within that kettle, police added, were told “they were being detained for investigation of crimes, they were not free to leave, and they should comply with officers’ lawful orders. Failure to comply may result in arrest or force being used against them to include, but not limited to, crowd control agents, impact weapons, or tear gas.” Police added that legal observers, press, and anyone who was medically fragile or in need of immediate medical attention were invited to leave the kettle; those who were detained were identified and photographed as part of a criminal investigation.
Other departments — like Phoenix, Dallas, and Atlanta — denied they train officers on the use of kettling. A spokesperson for the Dallas Police Department pushed back against reports that officers there kettled people during the Floyd protests. “We did not participate in this type of crowd control tactic last year,” the spokesperson wrote, “even though those allegations were made.”
“We do not train on this,” a spokesperson for the Atlanta Police Department, which was also accused of kettling protesters last summer, wrote to The Intercept. “We train to allow protestors an avenue of egress.”
“Where Do The People Go?”
Because the most egregious incidents of police kettling have included additional use of force, like tear gas and beatings, many of the legal challenges to police actions have focused on those more clearly definable abuses rather than on the maneuver that enabled them.
A class-action lawsuit filed in the aftermath of the 2002 Pershing Park incident led to a $8 million settlement with kettled protesters, and in Chicago, a judge ruled that the arrests at the 2003 anti-war protest lacked probable cause, leading to a $6.2 million settlement. Lawsuits involving kettling incidents were also filed after the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York and after kettling incidents in Portland and St. Louis. But those lawsuits mostly focused on a host of abuses that followed the kettling.
“It’s kind of impossible to just study the kettle on its own, or to make a legal or even ethical judgment of it in the abstract, because it is always being used in conjunction with these other techniques,” said Zebrowski, citing tear gas and violent arrests as an example. He noted that while the tactic may be “less explicitly violent” than others used by police, it is regularly deployed in conjunction with them, erasing the distinction.
“As a technique itself, it imposes a kind of imprisonment, and anyone within it is very vulnerable to all these other techniques. So it’s almost enhancing all of these other techniques.”
Still, some attorneys question the legality of kettling on its own, which they say jeopardizes the rights of assembly and expression and indiscriminately subjects people to detention and arrest — a potential violation of constitutional protections against illegal searches, as well as of the right to due process. “There are circumstances where the kettling itself is going to become a constitutional violation,” said Biklen, the NYCLU attorney. “But this summer, what it really was, is that it led almost immediately to excessive force and unconstitutional arrests.”
Kettling, Biklen added, functioned as a trigger that regularly resulted in an escalation. “The kettling really lights the match for pretty extreme police violence,” she said.
Javad Khazaeli, a St. Louis-based attorney who has sued that city and dozens of individual officers over a 2017 incident in which police kettled, beat, and arrested dozens of peaceful protesters, argued that a kettle subjects a whole crowd to the same punishment with no individualized discernment, enough grounds for legal action even without the violence that often follows. “In U.S. law, before you arrest somebody, you have to have individualized knowledge that they broke the law, there’s no such a thing as guilt by association,” he said, comparing kettling to the use of large circular nets to catch tuna but trapping protected species in the process. “That’s the problem with kettling: You’re arresting a whole bunch of people without making any determination as to whether or not they broke the law.”
In the St. Louis case, there was not a single allegation that any of the 123 people kettled and arrested as they protested the acquittal of an officer who had killed a Black man were directly involved in any property damage or violence, Khazaeli said. Instead, police “arrested them for not leaving an area that they trapped them in and wouldn’t let them leave.” Those mass arrests were likely illegal, Khazaeli added, although his lawsuit focuses mostly on the police violence that followed. “It was a kettle and then a beatdown,” he said.
Some critics of kettling concede that there may be circumstances under which the tactic could be appropriate and even necessary, particularly when compared to the alternatives available to police.
“If you don’t allow the police to kettle, to cordon against violent assemblies, then what tactics do you use?” said Stuart Casey-Maslen, an international human rights law professor at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. “You don’t want them to be having to recur to rubber-coated metal bullets, let alone conventional ammunition, and tear gas is extremely problematic,” he added, noting that human rights practitioners are divided on a practice that a top United Nations official has condemned. “If you cancel out kettling, you have got to look at what options the police are going to return to, and none of them are particularly pretty in human rights terms or in terms of potential deaths and serious injuries.”
Maguire, who has trained law enforcement officers on protest response, argued that kettling should rarely be used, and only after police have given a lawful order to disperse, audible warning, and a meaningful opportunity to leave. If all such considerations are in place, police may legally, and as orderly as possible, arrest those remaining, he added, noting that the only purpose of a kettle should be a lawful arrest. Even then, violence against a kettled crowd is “never appropriate,” he stressed. “Kettling has a place in handling civil disturbances, but it’s a very specific, narrow place,” Maguire said. “The vast majority of its use is not under those conditions. It’s overused. And it’s typically used to pen in protesters when there has not been a lawful order to disperse.”
Others in law enforcement questioned the logic of a practice that often results in the opposite effect of its stated purpose.
Isaiah McKinnon, a former Detroit police chief who was an officer during the 1967 riots, noted that police regularly exacerbate situations they are supposed to diffuse. Kettling, he added, does just that. “If you have a group of officers in one direction, and you have a group of officers behind them, where do the people go?” he said, noting that the single most important thing police must do in a kettle is to ensure that people have a safe way out.
“The whole idea behind it is to clear the streets and to make everything safe,” McKinnon added. “If you force people into a scenario where they can’t retreat, then what’s expected of people? Are they supposed to lie down and not do anything?”
Changing the Culture
In Charlotte, none of the officers involved in the June 2 kettle were fired. Two supervisors who coordinated police response that night and who were named in the released body-camera videos were quietly transferred to different jobs within the department, according to internal documents reviewed by The Intercept. The officer whose crude comments were caught on camera received a two-week suspension.
But the events of that night have left a deep wound in a city where Floyd’s killing has resurfaced long-simmering tensions between mostly Black residents and police.
The viciousness of police’s attack on protesters that night prompted widespread, though not unanimous, condemnation from elected officials. Less than a week after the incident, Charlotte City Council passed a budget that eliminated funding for the purchase of chemical agents for crowd control purposes. A judge issued a temporary restraining order restricting the use of tear gas. And city officials have undertaken a broad review of public safety practices in the city. CMPD has committed to updated policies and procedures around dispersal orders, banned the use of tear gas for crowd dispersal, equipped all mobile field forces with body cameras, and required that the cameras be activated and turned on when officers are actively engaged with the public, wrote Tufano, the department spokesperson.
“Because they never acknowledged that this was kettling, they haven’t come out and said that there won’t be kettling in the future,” said Irena Como, a senior attorney at the ACLU of North Carolina, which is also involved in litigation against the city over police actions on June 2, 2020.
Police critics welcomed the reckoning ushered in by the Floyd protests but warned against piecemeal fixes to policies that do not substantially overhaul police’s role in the city as a whole. “If you take away kettling, you still have the things they do with the bikes, smacking people in the shins with pedals and wheels and things like that,” said Braxton Winston, a Charlotte protester now in his second term on City Council. “The bigger picture is reassessing and resetting government’s role in ensuring community safety.”
Focusing on narrow calls to reform or regulate specific tactics — from chokeholds to kettling — risks getting “into a level of semantics and specificity that allows changes to occur without the culture, or the overall flavor of the tactic changing,” Winston added. “You need a comprehensive reset about how you look at how government provides services around community safety. Changing any one policy at any given time is not going to produce the results that are necessary.”
It also won’t erase the experience of those trapped in that kettle last year. “What they did to us, I believe, is use illegal war tactics on their own citizens,” said McErlain, the photographer.
“There are not enough money or injunctions that could ever change what happened to us that night; we were changed forever,” echoed Puckett-Williams, of the ACLU. “How does a community ever trust people who laid a trap for them, to hurt them?”
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the centennial anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre at the Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa, Okla., June 1, 2021. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
Biden's Provocative Pressure on Manchin and Sinema
Aaron Blake, The Washington Post
Blake writes: "For months, it has been clear that President Biden, once a staid defender of the at-times-arduous and long legislative process, has grown impatient with it."
or months, it has been clear that President Biden, once a staid defender of the at-times-arduous and long legislative process, has grown impatient with it. As a Democratic president with a pair of effective Democratic majorities in Congress, he sees this moment as the time to get big things done. But that same staid process he has often — including very recently — defended now poses his biggest hurdle, particularly given how slim Democrats’ majorities are.
On Tuesday, he offered perhaps his most forceful — yet still subtle — suggestion that Washington should change how it does business.
At an event in Tulsa commemorating the 100th anniversary of the massacre there, Biden spotlighted the hurdles to his agenda. In doing so, he turned attention to members of his own party.
“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’ Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” he said. “But we’re not giving up.”
It wasn’t at all difficult to parse which two Democratic senators Biden had in mind: Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). Perhaps Biden was indeed just being defensive about why he may not be able to get more done, but you could certainly be forgiven for thinking he chose to highlight those two senators in an effort to apply pressure on them.
But pressure for what?
Plenty of fact-checkers quickly noted a supposed problem with the argument. In fact, Manchin and Sinema have voted with Biden 100 percent of the time on big bills, according to FiveThirtyEight vote rankings.
But Biden’s argument wasn’t necessarily about that. And if you look at voting records over the past four years, he’s right to spotlight Manchin and Sinema. Among Democratic senators between early 2017 and early 2021, they voted with President Donald Trump more than any of their sitting Senate colleagues. Sinema’s record in particular, when you factor in the political lean of her constituency, skewed more toward Trump than any of her Democratic colleagues.
Manchin and Sinema haven’t been forced into a position in which they had to vote against the Democratic president on big bills. But their presence in a 50-50 Senate, no question, makes it more difficult to pass Biden’s agenda. Even the prospect of their “no” votes can mean legislation never actually comes to a vote.
As The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan and Mike DeBonis wrote Tuesday, Manchin in particular is facing lots of party pressure to support Democrats’ voting rights bill. There are fears that if the senator from the second-Trumpiest state in the 2020 election strays from the party on voting rights, he could also torpedo future legislation on things such as climate change, gun control and immigration.
But it is Manchin’s and Sinema’s shared stance against reforming the Senate’s filibuster rules that poses the biggest roadblock to Biden’s agenda.
The effective 60-vote threshold the filibuster creates for most legislation means there’s a premium on Democratic unity to, at the very least, pressure Republicans to negotiate. It’s very doubtful that Republicans will suddenly warm to bipartisanship, given the example of the past decade-plus, but you can’t really press that issue if you can’t even win the votes of your own senators.
What’s perhaps most interesting to me about all this, though, is what it says about Biden and his approach.
There’s another guy who has supported maintaining the filibuster in the relatively recent past: Biden. The president defended the filibuster as recently as the 2020 campaign, but he has since gradually moved toward supporting a potential change, suggesting support for restoring the “talking filibuster” and possibly going even further than that.
But to make any changes, he needs all 50 Democratic senators to go along, including Manchin and Sinema.
Again, it’s possible that Biden’s comments on Tuesday were simply defensive when it comes to what lies ahead and the possibility that his agenda will go no further. But he’s also extremely studied in the ways of Washington, in which everyone knows calling out allies is dicey. He had to know that not terribly subtly spotlighting Manchin and Sinema would be viewed as provocative.
The potential downside is that you alienate those you depend upon. Manchin, in particular, has plenty of incentive not to align with Democrats’ agenda. (Indeed, you could certainly argue that Democrats should be happy to have a senator from deep-red West Virginia voting with them on much of anything.) Sinema has also proved rather strong-willed in the face of lots of pressure for her to fall in line and criticism from liberals on things such as voting against an amendment to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour. (Her objection wasn’t to the increasw, but rather it being included in a coronavirus relief package.)
Manchin’s and Sinema’s offices declined to comment on Biden’s remarks.
If we’re reading into Biden’s comments on Tuesday, it’s that he recognizes that his agenda goes nowhere without keeping the troops in line — and that the possibility it completely stalls is very real. It also seems to be the latest iteration in his gradual warming to changing filibuster rules which, after all, is mostly what Manchin and Sinema are standing in the way of.
Keep an eye on whether he keeps it up; that will be the surest sign that he’s moving toward going nuclear.
Teachers and students had a very difficult school year. (photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP)
Belle Chesler | My COVID-19 Teaching Year
Belle Chesler, Tom Dispatch
Chesler writes: "It would be no exaggeration to say that I did not love my job this year, but I did it with diligence and fortitude because it was the way that I could still contribute."
I’ve thought about my situation more than once (who hasn’t?) in these pandemic months. As it happens, I was in the equivalent of a work lockdown for years before Covid-19 hit our shores. I deserted an office setting early in this century and I’ve been running TomDispatch, while editing books from the small office in my apartment in New York City, ever since.
Nonetheless, that was a voluntary act. My choice. As soon as the pandemic hit big-time and President Trump began to blow it even bigger time, I felt imprisoned in a way I never had before. It was eerie, really. And the moment only got worse in the many months it took until I got vaccinated. The masks went on, the bottle of hand sanitizer slipped into my pocket, and my friends fell away. Their apartments became half-remembered zones in a forbidden universe. (Two of them, even older than me, got desperately sick from Covid-19.) The restaurants we used to visit — not that we would have eaten in them in those pandemic months — largely became empty holes in a neighborhood filled with closed shops and vacant storefronts. Zoom and FaceTime were new and, for me at least, uncomfortable realities. The phone became my lifeline to the world. It couldn’t have been eerier, all in all, even if my wife and I didn’t face the full-scale suffering of so many Americans, from essential workers to those in danger of losing homes, livelihoods, everything that mattered, even their lives, in the pandemic moment.
It’s strange when you think about it. For all of us, this has been our year-plus personal nightmare, so who doesn’t have a story? How could we not? TomDispatch regular and public school teacher Belle Chesler (the daughter, I might add, of my first friend on Planet Earth) was one of those Americans locked into an all-too-essential occupation and yet locked away herself. What a tale of what a year she has to tell! Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
My Covid-19 Teaching Year
A World Unraveling Amid Smoke and Death and How One Teacher and Her Students Dealt With It
t seems appropriate that the 2020-2021 school year in Portland, Oregon, began amid toxic smoke from the catastrophic wildfires that blanketed many parts of the state for almost two weeks. The night before the first day of school, the smoke alarm in my bedroom went off. Looking back, I see it as a clarion call, a shrieking, beeping warning of all the threats, real and existential, we’d face in the year to come.
On that first day of what would be that fall’s online version of school, I was still reeling from the loss of one of my dear friends. As wildfires approached her remote Sonoma County, California, home, she chose to end her life. She’d spent the initial months of the pandemic isolated from friends and loved ones, her serene mountain retreat no longer offering solace. She left no note, only a tidied kitchen and, according to those who’d attended a virtual yoga class with her on the last day of her life, a peaceful smile. She was my friend and I loved her.
Marooned inside our house, all the windows and doors tightly sealed, I stared into the grid of black boxes on Zoom that now represented the students in my high-school visual arts classes. I wondered how I’d find the strength to carry us all through the year.
As I greeted them, the air inside my home was stale, smoky, and distinctly claustrophobic. It was becoming harder to breathe. I struggled to find words of uplift. What do you say when the world is burning up all around you?
Ad-Hoc Childcare
Unable to find solutions to the larger and more menacing threats outside my door, I shifted my focus to managing the chaos inside. My first and most pressing concern was what to do with my nine-year-old daughter during the school day. My husband, who works outside our home as a studio artist, was under contract for a job that would last much of the year, ensuring us needed income at a time when so many had none. However, it also left us in a new type of childcare bind.
Last spring, a few friends, also teachers, realized that it was going to be next to impossible to juggle parenting and homeschooling, while simultaneously running our own classrooms. In the spirit of self-preservation and of maintaining a shred of sanity, we decided that three days a week we’d set the kids up, masked — and with blankets and heaters once it got cold — on our porches or in open garages. We decided that, at the very least, left largely to themselves they’d develop skills of resiliency and independence, and learn to navigate their fourth-grade year together.
We put our trust in our kids and gave up control. In truth, we had little choice. We all felt lucky and incredibly privileged even to have such an option. No matter how imperfect, at least it was a plan. Our kids were old enough to make our ad-hoc solution work and they seemed desperate enough to socialize in the midst of a pandemic that they were willing to tough out Portland’s cold and rainy fall and winter outdoors together.
And so, until they resumed in-person learning in April 2021, our kids spent a majority of the school week together outside. When it was our day to host such a gathering, my husband set up the heaters, made sure the kids could log on, and left for work. For the rest of the school day, I would rush out to check on them between my classes, delivering food, warm tea, and more blankets if needed. I couldn’t, of course, monitor their classroom attendance or help them with their work, but at least I knew that they were together, and could rely on one another. I’d then retreat back to the little room that I’d converted from an art studio to an office/classroom in order to teach my own students.
Going It Alone
The energy, problem solving, and logistics involved in creating a “solution” to our individual childcare problems in the midst of a pandemic will undoubtedly be familiar to many parents. The disastrous spread of Covid-19 forced families to repeatedly engineer solutions to seemingly impossible, ever-evolving problems. It stretched families, especially women, to our breaking points.
It’s no wonder, then, that the push to restore the only support most of us rely on for free, consistent, and dependable childcare and resources — the public school — remains one of the most urgent and divisive issues of this period. However, the toxic dialogue that developed around in-person versus online learning created a false dichotomy and unnecessary rancor between parents and teachers. The idea that somehow there was a conflict between what teachers (like me, often parents, too) and non-teaching parents desired functionally obfuscated the true situation we all faced. Parents didn’t want their children to suffer and they needed the resources and childcare support schools provide. Teachers wanted a safe school environment for our students and us — and not one more person to die, ourselves included.
If nothing else, the pandemic served as a stark reminder of at least two things: that the nuclear family is not enough and that schools can’t be its sole safety net. The ethos of toxic individualism that permeates this society can’t sustain families in such crises (or even, often enough, out of them). It’s a shoddy stand-in for a more communal and federally subsidized version of such support.
Since March 2020, we’ve suffered as our children suffered because we’ve had to do so much without significant help. And yet teachers like me endured our jobs through those terrible months at enormous personal cost, even as we were repeatedly punished on the national stage for doing so. We were called selfish, accused of being lazy, and told to toughen up and shut up, even as the most unfortunate among us lost their lives. What’s been missing in this conversation is the obvious but often overlooked reality that many teachers are also parents. Almost half of all teachers have school-aged children at home and, let me just add, 76% of all public school teachers are women.
What Students Actually Learned This Year
By the time my aunt, who contracted Covid-19 in the spring of 2020, died of sudden and inexplicable heart failure in October, I was no longer able to pretend that my personal life was separate from my professional persona. Isolated from my larger family, I found myself grieving the loss of a beloved relative without the normal rituals or sort of support I would have had under other circumstances. On the morning of her death, I logged on as usual and taught each of my classes, digging deep to make it through the day. I then cooked, cleaned the house, answered emails, and negotiated my own sadness. There just wasn’t the space or time to stop and grieve.
Despite waking with a heavy heart morning after morning, I would still log on and try to connect with my students. I had to ask myself: if I was feeling this exhausted, worn-down, grief-stricken, and anxious, how were they feeling? I had the benefit of financial security, experience, and years of therapy, and I was still really struggling. My students were coping with the loss of their autonomy, routines, and social worlds. Some had lost family members to the virus, a few had even contracted it themselves. Others were taking care of younger siblings or working jobs as well to support desperate families. Some were simply depressed. It was a wonder that any of them showed up at all.
I decided I would have to shift my thinking about what learning should look like in that strange pandemic season. If my students owed me nothing and their time was a gift, then I would have to approach teaching with a kindness, openness, and willingness to listen unmatched in my 20 years in the profession. I showed up because I knew that, even if students were silent and didn’t turn their cameras on, most of them were actually there and were, in fact, taking in far more than they were being given credit for.
Extraordinary learning has taken place in this school year. It’s just not the learning we expected. All the hand-wringing and fears of students’ “falling behind,” not taking in specific material in the timelines we’ve adopted for them, reflect the setting of goalposts that are completely arbitrary. That way of thinking is rooted in viewing certain kinds of students as eternally deficient and their struggles as individual failings rather than indications of historically inequitable systemic design and deprivation, or extraordinary circumstances like those we faced together this year.
The skills and the knowledge we promote as most valuable are tied to workforce demands — not to what should count as actual life learning or growth. When you narrow achievement to what’s quantifiable, you miss so much. You fail to see just how infinitely resourceful and resilient kids can actually be. You ignore skills and learning that haven’t historically been considered valuable, because it can’t be quantified. We’ve become accustomed to looking for skills that can be neatly measured and distributed like any other commodity. We’ve adopted standardized benchmarks, standardized modes of assessment, standardized testing, and standardized curriculum, but the truth of the matter is that knowledge is rarely neat and tidy, or immediately measurable.
This year our children figured out how to navigate complex technologies and online platforms, and many did so, despite considerable disadvantages. They had to learn how to self-regulate, how to deal with complex time management, often under genuinely difficult circumstances at home. Older students sometimes had to sort out not just how to manage their own schooling, but that of younger siblings. Some of my students demonstrated extraordinary emotional growth. Sometimes, they would even talk with me about how the pandemic had shifted their understanding of themselves and their relationships. They learned the beauty of slowing down and the preciousness of family and friends. They have a far clearer sense now of what’s most worth valuing in life as they step back into a world radically altered by Covid-19.
As it happens, much of their learning has taken place outside school walls, so they’ve developed a deeper understanding of the forces that shape and control their world. Students in Oregon watched climate crises unfold in the form of catastrophic wildfires in the fall and terrible ice storms in the winter. Together, we all had a real-time civics lesson in the fragility of our democracy. They watched — and a number participated in — a civil-rights uprising. They experienced their families and their communities being torn apart by political divisions, conspiracy theorizing, and a deadly virus. They suffered as the holes in what passed for America’s social safety net were exposed.
And yet most of them continued to show up for school day after day, still trying. And it’s a goddamn miracle that they did!
One More Layer
When it was announced that we would be returning to our school buildings in late April, I realized I had finally hit my own personal wall. My daughter, who attends school in a different district from the one where I teach, was to be in-person at school for only 2 hours and online for the remainder of the day. I, on the other hand, would be required to be in my building full-time, four days a week (with Wednesdays still remote). I had no options for outside childcare and no extended family or friends who could help me cobble together a plan.
Logistically, my husband and I were at an impasse. Personally, I was a mess. I’d lost four more loved ones and our cat had been eaten by a coyote. My husband, struggling to remain sober without the support of his recovery community, relapsed. My daughter had become increasingly anxious and fearful. When I tried to problem-solve an answer to our childcare predicament, my mind simply shut down.
For the decade since my daughter was born, I’d been trying to manage a difficult balance of working, commuting, taking care of myself, and raising her. I considered myself fortunate to have healthcare covered and an option at work for maternity leave. After all, my own mother, a kindergarten teacher, had been forced to return to her classroom a mere six weeks after giving birth to me (and she already had two kids at home to care for). Many women in America are ineligible even for unpaid Family Medical Leave. Upon returning to work after her birth and a three-month maternity leave, I had no sick days banked and had exhausted our savings. When I experienced a period of severe postpartum depression I pushed through it and never missed a day of work. I didn’t feel then as if I could rest or be vulnerable or simply put the needs of my baby, or even myself, first. It took me years to recover from the physical, emotional, and financial toll of having a baby. And then the pandemic struck.
As the discourse about schools, teachers, and teachers’ unions became more vitriolic and antagonism toward educators grew louder, I realized that I was experiencing yet another layer of trauma. It was as if the work I’d sacrificed so much for had not only been invisible, but I was actually being punished for it.
This time, I decided, I needed a different answer. I applied for a leave of absence and left school for the last two months of the semester in order to take care of my child and myself. I did so knowing how lucky, how privileged I was even to be able to make such a decision.
As We Emerge
It would be no exaggeration to say that I did not love my job this year, but I did it with diligence and fortitude because it was the way that I could still contribute. I developed an entirely new online curriculum and learned to teach by Zoom. I also showed up each and every day for my students, no matter what was happening to me personally. I did that because I witnessed the ways in which my daughter’s teacher showed up every morning for her and how much that simple interaction with another adult buoyed her, how much it kept her spirits high despite the mounting mental-health challenges she faced.
My situation is neither unique nor extraordinary. If anything, I’m lucky. Nevertheless, I feel irrevocably changed by the past year. Some days, I’m flattened by grief, wrung out and hopeless. Other days I find myself daydreaming of the transformative potential of this hardship, imagining a future that better serves all our children — one that acknowledges their shared humanity, the fragility of our existence, and the tenderness required of all of us to build something better together.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Sen. Graham (left) with Netanyahu. (photo: Kobi Gideon/Getty)
Israel to Ask US for $1 Billion in Emergency Military Aid
Barak Ravid, Axios
Ravid writes: "Israel will ask the U.S. for $1 billion in additional emergency military aid this week, Sen. Lindsey Graham told 'Fox and Friends' on Tuesday and Israeli officials confirmed."
Why it matters: Israeli officials say the aid is needed to replenish the Iron Dome aerial defense system and to purchase munitions for the Israeli air force — mainly precision-guided bombs. But several congressional Democrats have argued against providing additional weapons to Israel after at least 256 Palestinians were killed during last month's fighting in the Gaza Strip, mainly by Israeli airstrikes.
- The Iron Dome system was used to intercept thousands of rockets from Hamas during the 11 days of fighting, and Biden has already said the U.S. would replenish it.
Driving the news: Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz will arrive in Washington on Thursday for talks with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Gantz’s office said. The aid request will be the focus of Gantz's visit, Israeli officials say.
- While in Washington, Gantz will also discuss the Iran nuclear deal, the Gaza ceasefire and reconstruction efforts, and the situation in Lebanon.
- Worth noting: The Biden administration has promised $110 million to go toward reconstruction efforts in Gaza.
What he's saying: “There is going to be a request made by the Israelis to the Pentagon on Thursday for $1 billion in aid to replenish Iron Dome batteries. It will be a good investment for the American people. I will make sure in the Senate that they get the money," Graham told Fox a day after meeting Netanyahu and Gantz in Israel.
Flashback: In 2016, Israel and the U.S. signed an agreement for $3.8 billion in military aid to Israel over 10 years, with Israel able to ask for additional funding in case of an emergency.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) was one of several prominent Trump backers who spoke to a crowd gathered for the 'For God & Country Patriot Roundup' on Saturday. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty)
Molly Jong-Fast | Louie Gohmert Says He Isn't a QAnon Supporter, Just a Moron
Molly Jong-Fast, The Daily Beast
Jong-Fast writes:
Some people spent Memorial Day at parades or BBQing with friends, but not Loonie Louie Gomhert, who was in Dallas speaking at The For God & Country Patriot Roundup hosted by “Q power couple” Amy and John “QAnon John” Sabal.
It was like CPAC meets a flat earther convention, but with more talk of coups and overthrowing the government, including former Trump National Security Adviser Mike “Madman” Flynn calling for a Myanmar-style military coup in America (he later denied saying that, but he said it on camera) and Sidney “Kraken” Powell musing that former President Donald Trump should be “reinstated” and then installed as president with a “new inauguration date.” Powell, of course, is defending herself from a defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems, which she said rigged the 2020 election on behalf of Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, by arguing that “no reasonable person” would take seriously the things she says.
So Rep. Gohmert maybe wasn’t the craziest guest at this cavalcade of crazy, but he was the only elected member of Congress there, giving a speech under a banner with a QAnon slogan on it. Gohmert didn’t embrace Q on stage, which I guess is better than the alternative, but he did play down the Jan. 6 attacks and say, “I would submit that weaponizing the FBI and the Department of Justice against one administration was an attack on democracy.” After his speech, he hung out with such Q’minaries as Capitol rioter Zak Paine, better known online as redpill78.
You’d think that a sitting United States congressmen would stay away from a cult that FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress “can lead to violence.” But Louie is no fool or, rather, he’s a fool who can read the writing on the wall, which is that QAnon is very popular with the Republican base, which counts on roughly 100 percent of the votes from the “15 percent of Americans (who) say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.” Maybe he’s not crazy but is just trying to meet the base where they are, which is nowhere good.
When the local CBS affiliate asked Gohmert’s office what he was doing there, a member of his staff insisted that he wasn’t there even though he was on camera.
Later, the station’s David Lippman got a long email from Gohmert that said his staff got its days mixed up and wasn’t lying about him being at the event (which organizers had tried to distance from QAnon amid lots of coverage about how it was a QAnon event) and also claiming that he does not even “know who or what QAnon is.”
But I was too stupid to know what the event I spoke at was about isn’t the defense Louie seems to think it is.
It’s been quite the year of being on the wrong side of history for Rep. Gohmert. First there was COVID, which he came down with after months of refusing to wear a mask, and reportedly berating staffers who did.
Then there was the lawsuit he filed to try and overturn the election results after Trump lost to overturn the Constitution and grant VP Pence “exclusive authority and sole discretion” to decide which electors to count in each state. After the suit was dismissed, Louie was big mad, going on Newsmax to declare that the “bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not going to touch this. You have no remedy’—basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM.” During that same interview, he said that if the 2020 election isn’t overturned, “it will mean the end of our republic, the end of the experiment in self-government.”
That’s terrifying talk from a member of Congress, though at least he said it on Newsmax, a “news” channel no one actually watches.
But back to this weekend’s fuckery. Gohmert went on about how “it wasn’t just right-wing extremists” rioting in the Capitol (although it was). He’s talked previously about how, in the words of Trump, there were lots of “very fine people” there at the insurrection.
People may be right that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Rothschild space lasers lunatic, is the worst member of Congress, but she has at least been stripped of her committee assignments by Democrats and scolded, for what little that’s worth, by her own party’s leaders after comparing mask mandates to what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany. Louie Gohmert remains a party member in good standing in his R+25 district.
Texas can do better than this guy. It would be hard to do worse.
Smoke rises from a fire onboard the MV X-Press Pearl vessel as it sinks while being towed into deep sea off the Colombo Harbour, in Sri Lanka, on Wednesday. (photo: Reuters)
Cargo Ship Sinks Off Sri Lanka After Weeks on Fire, Sparking Fears of Environmental Disaster
Yuliya Talmazan, NBC News
Talmazan writes: "A cargo ship laden with chemicals sank on Wednesday after nearly two weeks ablaze off the west coast of Sri Lanka, worsening fears of a major environmental disaster."
The Singapore-flagged X-Press Pearl has already left the country’s coastline covered in tons of plastic pellets and now threatened to spill oil into its rich fishing waters.
cargo ship laden with chemicals sank on Wednesday after nearly two weeks ablaze off the west coast of Sri Lanka, worsening fears of a major environmental disaster.
The vessel has already left the country’s coastline covered in tons of plastic pellets and now threatened to spill oil into its rich fishing waters.
The government has banned fishing, a crucial economic industry, along about 50 miles of coast in the wake of the incident. Authorities have also deployed hundreds of soldiers to clean affected beaches and warned residents not to touch the debris because it could be contaminated with harmful chemicals.
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Pamunugama beach, north of the capital Colombo, sits nearly directly opposite where the Singapore-flagged X-Press Pearl has been anchored since a fire erupted onboard on May 20.
Since then millions of bead-like bits of plastic washed up from the fire-ravaged ship and turned the once vibrant, tropical shore into a scene from one of Sri Lanka's worst-ever marine disasters.
Marine biologist Dr. Asha de Vos, 41, said that when she stepped onto the beach on Wednesday, it hit her like a brick wall.
Where there was once gold sand and coconut trees, she told NBC News, there was now a sea of plastic waste.
“I have dedicated my life to protecting and taking care of the ocean around Sri Lanka,” said de Vos, who is an executive director of Oceanswell, a marine conservation research and education organization, in Colombo.
“We work so hard to look after and protect this. It was heartbreaking to see it this way.”
De Vos said one of the soldiers clearing out the pellets at Pamunugama beach told her they have been taking away as much as 3,000 bags day.
“But I was watching the waves coming in, and just bringing in more,” she added.
Sri Lanka is famous for its beautiful coast lines and has emerged as a budding tourism destination in recent years after its civil war ended in 2009. But its tourism sector took a heavy hit from the Covid-19 pandemic and 2019 Easter terrorist attacks.
Sri Lanka's fisheries minister, Kanchana Wijesekera, said in a tweet Wednesday that emergency prevention measures were being taken to protect the lagoon and surrounding areas in order to contain the damage from any debris or in case of an oil leak.
A Sri Lankan Navy spokesman, Captain Indika Silva, told NBC News on the phone Wednesday that an effort to tow the ship into deeper waters was not successful and had to be abandoned halfway through, as the rear part of the ship had sunk and was resting on the sea floor while the bow remained afloat.
Silva said there was water inside the ship and their main concern was the possibility of an oil spill, although they had not yet observed any oil slicks.
“We stand ready with all necessary equipment to respond,” Silva said.
X-Press Feeders, which owns and operates the ship, also confirmed in a statement that efforts to move the ship to deeper waters and away from the coastline had failed.
Wijesekera tweeted later on Wednesday that booms and skimmers will be used around the vessel in case of an oil spill. There are also contingency plans for full beach clean-ups, he said.
The fire-ravaged ship was transporting 1,486 containers, including 25 tons of nitric acid, along with other chemicals and cosmetics.
As the fire was being extinguished, flaming containers laden with chemicals had fallen from the ship's deck or broken open on the deck, spilling their cargo into the sea.
“It’s the worst environmental disaster for Sri Lanka,” Charitha Pattiaratchi, professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Western Australia, told NBC News on the phone from Perth, Australia.
Pattiaratchi said he was most concerned about the possibility of an oil spill should the ship sink completely, and its fuel leaking into the ocean “sooner or later.” The ship was carrying nearly 300 tons of heavy fuel oil at the time of the incident, the ship's owner said.
There was also uncertainty about the exact nature of the chemicals in the more than 1,400 containers aboard, he added.
The Marine Environment Protection Authority said on its Facebook page Tuesday that six clean-ups were being conducted at 14 locations. X-Press Feeders said Wednesday it was working with local authorities to help clean up the shoreline.
Pattiaratchi said plastic pallets have been a scourge for oceans around the world, with an estimated 230,000 tons entering oceans every year, and the estimated 3 billion spilled off the Sri Lankan coast are likely to migrate into other parts of the ocean.
Pattiaratchi said he expects them to make it as far as Indonesia and the Maldives in the next 40 to 50 days.
Notoriously difficult to clean up, he said they will likely stay in the environment “for generations” to come.
Although they are not known to be toxic to humans, Pattiaratchi said, they can endanger marine wildlife by getting caught in the gills of fish or ingested by sea turtles.
Local television channels in Sri Lanka have been showing dead fish, turtles and other marine life that has washed ashore in recent days.
While dealing with the plastic pellets has been challenging enough, de Vos said an oil spill would add another layer of complexity.
“Imagine this black oil washing up on these beaches, where we now have this plastic snow basically,” she said.
“We are hoping we don’t have to face that.”
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