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Ben Bradlee, Jr. | The Deceit and Conflict Behind the Leak of the Pentagon Papers
Ben Bradlee, Jr., The New Yorker
Bradlee writes: "Fifty years ago this spring, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a seven-thousand-page top-secret history of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War."
Fifty years on, Daniel Ellsberg praises the Times journalist who misled him.
ifty years ago this spring, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a seven-thousand-page top-secret history of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The study revealed systematic lying to the American people by four U.S. Presidents, from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson. The Nixon Administration tried to halt publication by the Times and the Washington Post, but was thwarted by the Supreme Court in a landmark victory for press freedom. A federal judge’s subsequent dismissal of criminal charges against Ellsberg, which carried a sentence of up to a hundred and fifteen years in prison, was seen as a validation of whistle-blowing.
All of this is well known. But the death, in January, of Neil Sheehan, the Times reporter to whom Ellsberg leaked the papers, brought new revelations, which have altered the heroic narrative surrounding the historic leak. The process was more contentious, combative, and duplicitous than was previously understood. In hours of interviews recently, Ellsberg revealed new details about his struggle to leak the papers, including that he provided portions of them to officials at a left-wing Washington think tank before the Times published. He vented about the extent to which Sheehan had deceived him about the newspaper’s intentions to publish the papers without ever telling him that the decision had already been made. And he provided new information about how Sheehan had surreptitiously made a copy of the papers, defying Ellsberg’s direct request that he not do so. When Ellsberg later gave Sheehan a copy of the papers, the journalist did not reveal that he already had one. “It turns out that Neil and I were both very much in the dark in 1971 as to what the other was thinking and doing, and why,” Ellsberg said recently.
A Harvard graduate who became a zealous marine and then a committed Pentagon Cold Warrior, Ellsberg turned his back on the culture of secrecy that he had long served in order to leak the papers. Convinced that President Richard Nixon, like his predecessors, would continue the war, Ellsberg hoped that the documents’ release would shorten American military involvement in Southeast Asia. Fifty years later, it is clear that the publication of the Pentagon Papers did just that—but in a way that Ellsberg never expected.
Ellsberg, who turned ninety on Wednesday, lives with his wife, Patricia, in the hills above Berkeley, California; their house is nestled in a grove of redwoods, with a sweeping view of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Still one of the country’s leading symbols of dissent, Ellsberg said that his story shows that more whistle-blowers are needed to keep Presidents, and all of Washington officialdom, on the constitutional straight and narrow. “I had been convinced that it was Nixon’s intention to continue the war in the air throughout his term,” he recalled. After Ellsberg leaked the documents, Nixon’s obsession with destroying him prompted the President to commit various crimes that culminated, ultimately, in his resignation from office. “In short, the criminal actions that the White House took against me were extraordinarily revealed in ways that led to this absolutely unforeseeable downfall of a President, which made the war endable.”
Ellsberg would become a through line to the Watergate scandal. “In the end,” he said, reflecting on the confusion and mistrust of that period of his life, “Things couldn’t have worked out better.”
Ellsberg grew up in Detroit, the son of Jewish parents who converted to Christian Science. He went to Harvard on a scholarship, and, in 1952, graduated third in his class. Wanting to prove his physical mettle and shun a life of Ivy League privilege, Ellsberg enlisted in the Marine Corps. In 1956, with the Suez crisis looming, he extended his tour by a year, hoping for a combat stint. He was discharged the following year as a first lieutenant.
After his service, Ellsberg would earn a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. His dissertation was on decision theory, the attempt to quantify the costs and risks of various strategies, which was then coming into vogue as an important part of military planning. In June, 1959, he joined the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, the Air Force-affiliated think tank that was then at the center of the application of decision theory to military issues.
In the summer of 1964, Ellsberg was assigned to the Pentagon to work under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who was mostly consumed by the war in Vietnam. Ellsberg spent most of his time reading top-secret cables and other dispatches from military officers based in Saigon. Wanting to see for himself what conditions in Vietnam were like, Ellsberg spent the period from 1965 to 1967 in the country, under the auspices of the State Department. Working with John Paul Vann, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who had been critical of U.S. strategy in Vietnam, Ellsberg assessed American and South Vietnamese efforts against Vietcong guerrillas. He approached his task with great ardor, visiting nearly every province, often going on patrols with U.S. soldiers and South Vietnamese troops—and occasionally engaging in firefights himself.
What Ellsberg saw on the ground prompted him to become increasingly disillusioned by the war. His disaffection only increased when, in 1967, he was assigned to work on a secret study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War that McNamara had commissioned, which became known as the Pentagon Papers. Participating in the study gave Ellsberg access to highly classified cables and field reports. When it was completed, the study consisted of forty-seven volumes, in thick binders, containing government documents and a narrative history written by Ellsberg and the other researchers. What struck Ellsberg most was the pattern of deception engaged in by military and political leaders. He concluded that the critical calculation for each President was domestic politics: no one wanted to be the first to “lose’’ Vietnam.
In August of 1969, Ellsberg crossed a personal and political Rubicon by attending an antiwar conference, near Philadelphia. While still working for RAND and the Pentagon, he passed out antiwar leaflets. A speech given by Randy Kehler, a draft resister at the gathering who was about to go to prison, convinced Ellsberg that he was not doing enough to end the war. Two months later, Ellsberg began secretly smuggling out seven thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers from his office at RAND and, in that era, laboriously copying them one at a time on a friend’s Xerox machine.
Ellsberg had initially planned to give copies of the papers to a U.S. senator, who he hoped would hold hearings and thereby shift the onus of the release from him. Ellsberg secretly met with William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in Washington. Fulbright seemed intrigued, Ellsberg recalled. He told Ellsberg that his staff would read the material and then set up a hearing. But Fulbright dithered for months and ultimately declined to proceed. Ellsberg tried a few other senators, including George McGovern, the South Dakota Democrat. McGovern was also initially supportive, but later told Ellsberg he feared that releasing the papers would hurt his plans to run against Nixon in the 1972 election.
In the summer of 1970, some nine months after copying the report, Ellsberg, increasingly frustrated, decided to give some of the Pentagon Papers to the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing think tank in Washington. He knew the institute’s co-founder, Marcus Raskin, and later gave an interview to Raskin’s staffer Ralph Stavins, for a study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam that the organization planned to publish in book form. During the interview, Ellsberg told Stavins about the Pentagon Papers, and agreed to share some of its contents with the institute to help inform its examination of the war. In dribs and drabs over the next several months, Ellsberg gave the group more than a thousand pages of the papers. But since the institute was a far-left think tank, he feared that its liberal bent would taint the historic impact of what the study contained. He wanted a more mainstream launch.
Raskin and Stavins knew that Ellsberg had been trying, without success, to get the Senate to hold hearings on the papers. Frustrated with the pace of Ellsberg’s efforts, and wanting to limit their own legal liability in writing about the papers, Raskin and Stavins decided to give the stash that Ellsberg had given them to Sheehan, a star correspondent in Vietnam for both United Press International and the Times, who was then based in Washington for the newspaper.
At a dinner in Washington, on February 28, 1971, Raskin and Stavins suggested to Ellsberg that he give a full set of the papers to Sheehan. They did not tell Ellsberg that they had already given Sheehan a portion of those very documents. Thirty years later, according to Ellsberg, Raskin confessed that he had deceived him, saying he felt “abashed and guilty’’ about it. Raskin—whose son, the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, was the lead House manager in the second impeachment of Donald Trump—died in 2017. Stavins did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Ellsberg did reach out to Sheehan, whom he had met when they were both in Vietnam. He had also done business with Sheehan before: in March of 1968, making his first leak to a reporter, Ellsberg had given Sheehan classified reports and cables on U.S. estimates of North Vietnam’s troop strength, which led to three major stories in the Times that President Johnson considered damaging.
On March 2nd, Ellsberg met with Sheehan at his house in Washington, and they talked late into the night. Ellsberg told the reporter about the Pentagon Papers and said that he had the study in his possession—all of it. As the two men talked, Ellsberg recalled, Sheehan said that in the course of reporting a story about war crimes in Vietnam, he had recently consulted with I.P.S. and got the “impression that they had copies of documents’’ about America’s involvement in the war. Sheehan did not tell Ellsberg that the institute had already given him the papers. “[Sheehan] asked me not to go back to the institute to tell them he had been talking to me because he said they might get suspicious—they might go off on their own and give it to someone else,’’ Ellsberg told his lawyer, Charles Nesson, several months later, according to a transcript of their meeting.
As they concluded their conversation that night in Washington, Ellsberg said he told Sheehan that he would show him the Pentagon Papers study, and they arranged to meet in Cambridge, outside Boston, on March 12th. By this time, Ellsberg had resigned from RAND and taken a position at M.I.T.’s Center for International Studies. “Neil didn’t let on he already had some of the papers,’’ Ellsberg recalled. Sheehan would later assert that Ellsberg agreed at the March 2nd meeting that he would give him a full copy of the documents. Ellsberg strongly denies that.
On March 12th, the two men met in Cambridge, and Ellsberg took Sheehan to the apartment of his brother-in-law, Spencer Marx, where he was hiding the papers for safekeeping. Sheehan, who by then had turned strongly against the war himself, began reading them with great interest. Ellsberg agreed to give him copies of a few pages, which he could show his editors, and Ellsberg said that Sheehan could read as much of it as he wanted, and take notes. But Ellsberg refused to let him copy the entire study. He first wanted assurances that the Times would, in fact, publish the papers and treat them as a “big story”—a multipart series that would be given ample space, so as to reproduce some of the actual documents. Without these conditions, Ellsberg did not want to cede control of the papers by giving them to Sheehan, and he worried about extra copies being made at the newspaper, where security could be lax; the F.B.I. might get a whiff of what was afoot.
Sheehan had taken a hotel room in Cambridge, intending to stay a few days, and after a while, Ellsberg let him continue reading alone. He recalled telling the reporter that he was counting on him not to go against his wishes and take a bundle of the papers out to Harvard Square to make copies. After a time, Sheehan left for home to consult with his editors. When he returned soon after, Sheehan told Ellsberg that his editors were interested but they needed more information about the contents of the papers. Ellsberg was still not ready to allow the journalist to make copies without a commitment to publish, so Sheehan settled down for more reading and note-taking.
Around this time, Ellsberg told Sheehan that he and his wife would be going away for a few days. Sheehan asked if he could stay and continue reading and taking notes on the papers. Ellsberg agreed and gave him a key to the apartment, while again warning Sheehan not to make copies. “The issue here was, would the Times go ahead and publish the stuff?’’ Ellsberg recalled. “All I wanted was for them to take it seriously. Unknown to me, they already were.” After the Ellsbergs left for their trip, Sheehan quickly seized the opportunity to summon his wife from Washington to help him copy the entire set of papers at a local copy shop.
According to Ellsberg, Sheehan called him the following month, in April, to report that the Times had given him another assignment and the newspaper was no longer pursuing the Pentagon Papers story. But Sheehan said that he wanted to keep following the story on his own, so he again asked Ellsberg to give him a full copy of the papers, in case Sheehan could get his editors to change their minds. Feeling like he was out of options, Ellsberg this time agreed. In fact, it later emerged, the Times was going full speed ahead with plans to publish. It had rented a suite at the New York Hilton hotel, where a team of editors and reporters had been poring over the papers for at least a month, and planning a ten-part series.
Sheehan, who died in January, at the age of eighty-four, would admit that he had been stringing Ellsberg along. In a 2015 interview with the former Times reporter Janny Scott, Sheehan also conceded that he had disregarded Ellsberg’s explicit instructions not to copy the papers, and gave him no warning before the Times published its first article, on June 13, 1971. In the interview, which Sheehan gave on the condition that his comments not be published until after his death, he tried to justify his deception. He told Scott that Ellsberg had been behaving recklessly, torn between his desire to get the papers published and his fear of going to prison. And since Ellsberg had already discussed the papers with senators, Sheehan said he also feared that someone on Capitol Hill could call the Justice Department and tip off officials there that the Times might be planning to break the story. Sheehan told Scott that he felt Ellsberg was “out of control.’’ He added, “It was just luck that he didn’t get the whistle blown on the whole damn thing.”
Ellsberg denied that he was ever out of control, but acknowledged that he felt “frantic and pressured’’ when Sheehan visited him in Cambridge because he feared that the F.B.I. might be closing in on him. He and his wife had also been staying up late at night making additional copies of the Pentagon Papers to store with friends in case he was arrested. He added that if Sheehan had simply told him that the Times was committed to the story, he would have given the reporter an entire set of the papers immediately.
Shortly after Sheehan’s death, in January, the Times published an obituary, as well as Scott’s story on the reporter’s fraught relationship with Ellsberg, including Sheehan’s 2015 statements questioning the whistle-blower’s behavior at the time. It did not include any comment from Ellsberg himself. The omission subjected the Times to criticism for not following the journalistic convention of allowing the subject of a story to respond to disparaging remarks. In an interview, Scott said that she had been assigned to write Sheehan’s obituary in advance. In 2013, Scott wrote Sheehan a letter and requested an interview. Two years later, Sheehan agreed to speak with her. “Then I sat down with Sheehan and he told me this extraordinary version of what happened,” Scott said.
Her editor had told her that he wanted the obituary to be fourteen hundred words. After she told him she could write that amount just on Sheehan’s dealings with Ellsberg, he agreed that she should do a separate article about that. When asked why she did not call Ellsberg for comment, Scott replied, “What I’m going to say here is an explanation and not an excuse.” She said, “When Sheehan died, I knew they obviously were going to run the obit immediately, but I didn’t know what the plans for the second piece were. I didn’t assume it would run instantly, but that should have been in the front of my mind. I stupidly did not say, ‘Please hold the second story until I can speak to Ellsberg.’ I should have.” She added, “I’ve had a few second thoughts.”
Scott’s story also did not mention the fact that Sheehan had obtained more than a thousand pages of the papers from the Institute for Policy Studies before getting the full set from Ellsberg. Scott said that Sheehan did tell her of his dealings with the I.P.S. but she chose not to write about that because she didn’t feel it was relevant to the reporter’s dealings with Ellsberg. She added that what was “fascinating’’ to her about the Sheehan-Ellsberg relationship was that “both of them were pursuing the same goal—to try and accelerate the end of the war, but neither of them trusted the other because each felt the other was going to blow it.”
Today, Ellsberg holds no grudge against Sheehan and called him “an outstanding journalist.” He chalked up their mutual grievances to a “misunderstanding.” “I was so right, and so lucky, to have given the Pentagon Papers to Neil,” Ellsberg said. “No one—no one—could have done better with them.’’
After the Times ran three stories on the papers, Nixon and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, accused the newspaper of violating the Espionage Act by releasing classified material, and they obtained a federal injunction forcing the Times to cease publication. Ellsberg, meanwhile, arranged to pass another copy of the papers to the Washington Post, which then began publishing its own stories on June 18th, but soon it, too, was enjoined from further publication.
By this time, Ellsberg had been widely reported to be the prime suspect in the leak. After hiding underground until the papers were published—next in the Boston Globe, and subsequently in more than a dozen other newspapers around the country—Ellsberg turned himself in to authorities in Boston on June 28th and was charged under the Espionage Act. Two days later, the Supreme Court ruled, by a vote of 6–3, in favor of the Times and the Post.
Publication of the papers infuriated Nixon. In an Oval Office meeting with Henry Kissinger and other top aides, he discussed how to retaliate against Ellsberg. Kissinger told Nixon that “Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in America,” and said, “He must be stopped at all costs. We’ve got to get him.’’ Nixon fervently agreed. “We’ve got to get him! Don’t worry about his trial. Just get everything out. Try him in the press,” the President said. “These fellows have all put themselves above the law, and, by God, we’re going to go after them.’’
Nixon ordered the formation of a Special Investigations Unit directed out of the White House, which became known as the Plumbers, an inside joke that referred to its stated mission to stop leaks, though the operatives actually carried out political dirty tricks. For its first operation, the group decided to break into the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, hoping to gather material that they could use to blackmail Ellsberg or smear him. This escapade, which proved unsuccessful, amounted to a Watergate trial run. The same ex-C.I.A. and F.B.I. operatives who oversaw it, Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, were the ones who plotted the bugging and burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building some nine months later in 1972.
The C.I.A., prohibited from engaging in any domestic operations, was nonetheless ordered to produce first one and then another psychological profile of Ellsberg, based on press reports as well as F.B.I. and State Department files. Meanwhile, Liddy and Hunt searched Ellsberg’s F.B.I. files for damaging material. When they learned that Ellsberg was due to be in Washington in September, to receive an award from a peace group, Liddy and Hunt concocted a bizarre plan to slip LSD into his soup before he made a speech, hoping that he would become disoriented during his remarks and embarrass himself. But they couldn’t procure the LSD in time.
Then, in May of 1972, when Ellsberg was scheduled to appear at a Vietnam War protest at the Capitol, a group of operatives was sent to assault Ellsberg and disrupt the rally by shouting that Ellsberg was a traitor. They tore down antiwar signs and started brawls with several of the demonstrators, but couldn’t get close to Ellsberg. Police broke up the fight, and the assailants slipped away.
Ellsberg’s 1973 trial, in Los Angeles, sparked a brazen effort by the Nixon White House to influence the trial judge by offering him a job as head of the F.B.I. while the case was in progress. During a break in the trial, Judge Matthew Byrne secretly travelled to San Clemente to meet with the Nixon counsel John Ehrlichman, who made Byrne the offer. When that and the Plumbers’ role in breaking into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist became public, along with their other activities, the compromised judge was forced to dismiss the case owing to government misconduct.
At the White House, Nixon seethed at the dismissal and said, of Ellsberg, “The sonofabitching thief is made a national hero . . . and the New York Times gets a Pulitzer Prize for stealing documents. . . . What in the name of God have we come to?’’
n the years after Ellsberg’s trial, he plunged into the anti-nuclear movement, a part of his life for which he is little known, compared to the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg has taught courses on the nuclear-arms race at Stanford and Harvard Medical School, and given hundreds of lectures on the subject. He has been arrested in nonviolent civil-disobedience actions close to ninety times. “I don’t expect to have a gravestone, but if there were to be one, I would want it to say that I was a member of the antiwar movement on Vietnam, and the anti-nuclear movement,’’ he said.
At ninety, Ellsberg appears to have aged well. He has avoided contracting COVID-19 thus far, and other than a longtime hearing problem and a balky sciatica condition, he’s in good health. He has a shock of white hair, a lined, craggy face, and hard blue eyes. His mind remains razor-sharp. Questions posed to him elicit no short answers; he’s never met a tangent he’s found unwelcome.
Looking back on the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg conceded that their publication had no effect on the conduct of the war. “Nixon went right on with his aims, and, a year after the Pentagon Papers, we had the heaviest bombing of the war,’’ he said. “People asked me, ‘What did the Pentagon Papers do?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ I never convinced anyone that Nixon was doing the same thing as his predecessors. Nobody wanted to believe that, and I did not convince them. The Times’ slant on the Pentagon Papers was, ‘This is history.’ The message I wanted to get out was: this is history being repeated.’’
Today, Ellsberg lends his name to progressive causes and nurtures other whistle-blowers in an effort to promote the exposure of government secrets as patriotic, not traitorous. Fifty years after he was put on trial, Ellsberg said that the government continues to misuse the Espionage Act to criminalize whistle-blowing and deter would-be leakers. He conceded, “My efforts to encourage that have been much less effective than the efforts of the government to deter and prevent it.’’
Ellsberg said that every government wants to conceal its mistakes, its lies, and its abuses of power from the public. “Here’s what I learned long before age ninety: that many virtues—like loyalty, obedience to authority, and courage—can be put toward dangerous and bad causes,’’ he said. “Officials are reluctant to recognize that loyalty to the President can, and regularly does, conflict with the higher loyalty they owe to the Constitution.”
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Union proponents in Bessemer, Alabama. (photo: Dustin Chambers/Reuters)
Union May Challenge Vote Outcome at Alabama Amazon Warehouse
Grace Kay, Business Insider
Kay writes: "Amazon pushed the US Postal Service to install a mailbox outside its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, according to emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by a union and first reported by The Washington Post."
mazon pushed the US Postal Service to install a mailbox outside its Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, according to emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by a union and first reported by The Washington Post.
Over the past seven weeks, employees have been voting whether to form the first Amazon union in the US. The emails could have an influence on the union vote at the warehouse after they were obtained by the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), The Post reported.
The group is working to represent nearly 6,000 Amazon employees at the Alabama site in a historic union battle that could set a precedent for other companies.
More than 3,000 workers cast ballots, according to the union, and hundreds have been challenged, mostly by Amazon. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) began its public count of the votes on Thursday. After the first day of counting, the "no" votes against were leading by almost 2-1 with about 1,000 voting against the union and 400 voting in favor of it.
The union has issued complaints about the mailbox in the past, as the mailbox was installed in February, not long before the start of the mail-in ballot process at the warehouse.
When the mailbox was set up, Amazon blasted workers with emails and texts telling them to "vote no" and put their ballots in the on-site mailbox, Vice's Motherboard reported.
At the time, the union said the mailbox could make it seem as if Amazon itself would directly see the ballots - a move that could deter employees from voting.
Before the installation of the mailbox, the NLRB rejected the company's request for employees to vote in person at the warehouse. Instead, the organization opted to allow workers to vote via mail only.
The Washington Post reported that if the union lost the vote, the emails - which showed Amazon told USPS to get the mailbox up as soon as possible - could be used to challenge the result of the vote, as it could be seen as a tactic to prevent workers from voting.
"We said from the beginning that we wanted all employees to vote and proposed many different options to try and make it easy," an Amazon spokesperson told Insider. "The RWDSU fought those at every turn and pushed for a mail-only election, which the NLRB's own data showed would reduce turnout. This mailbox - which only the USPS had access to - was a simple, secure, and completely optional way to make it easy for employees to vote, no more and no less."
"The box that was installed - a Centralized Box Unit (CBU) with a collection compartment - was suggested by the Postal Service as a solution to provide an efficient and secure delivery and collection point," a USPS spokesperson told Insider.
The mailbox will likely become increasingly controversial as votes continue to get tallied -- especially if they continue to swing in Amazon's favor.
"It's fairly common for there to be unfair labor practice charges at the end of a contentious election like this," John Logan, a labor and employment professor at San Francisco State University who specializes in tactics companies use to defeat union drives, previously told Insider. He added that it's "fairly difficult" to predict how the NLRB will ultimately rule on those charges.
RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum told The Washington Post that the emails showed Amazon felt it was "above the law."
"They did this because it provided a clear ability to intimidate workers," Appelbaum said.
Amazon has historically acted against unionization at its warehouses, employing tactics such as posting anti-union signs at its warehouses and holding meetings designed to convince workers to vote against the union.
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President Biden is expected to sign an order today establishing a commission to study potential Supreme Court reforms. (photo: AP)
Biden Creating Commission to Study Expanding the Supreme Court
Lauren Egan, NBC News
Egan writes: "President Joe Biden will sign an executive order Friday establishing a commission to study overhauling the Supreme Court, following through on a campaign promise, the White House announced."
The bipartisan commission will examine the length of service and turnover of justices on the court as well as its membership and size, the White House said.
resident Joe Biden will sign an executive order Friday establishing a commission to study overhauling the Supreme Court, following through on a campaign promise, the White House announced.
The topics that the commission will examine include the length of service and turnover of justices on the court, its membership and size, and its case selection, rules and practices, the White House said in a statement.
"The commission’s purpose is to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform," the White House said.
The commission will be comprised of bipartisan group of scholars with expertise in constitutional law, history and political science, as well as former federal judges and court reform advocates. The committee will hold public meetings to hear from outside voices and will be directed to complete a report within 180 days of its first public meeting.
White House aides told NBC News in January that they were working to set up the commission as part of their mission to shape the courts after Republicans overhauled them in the last four years.
Biden was reluctant during his campaign for president to embrace the idea of court expansion despite pressure from Democrats to do so after then-President Donald Trump's decision to quickly fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just weeks before the election.
In an interview with "60 Minutes" in October, Biden committed to establishing a "bipartisan commission of scholars" but said that their purpose would not be focused on "court packing," or adding seats to the court.
"There’s a number of other things that our constitutional scholars have debated, and I’ve looked to see what recommendations that commission might make," he said at the time.
The White House said Friday that Bob Bauer, a professor at New York University School of Law and a former White House counsel, and Cristina Rodriguez, a professor at Yale Law School and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, will co-chair the commission.
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Ivette Alé: 'Even when we lost, we still won.' (photo: Justice LA)
'We Didn't Stop': The Los Angeles Abolitionist Coalition That's Racking Up Victories
Lauren Lee White, Guardian UK
White writes: "There was a moment in late 2016 when Los Angeles county was set to invest $2.2 billion in rebuilding and revamping parts of its jail system, the largest in the world."
JusticeLA’s activists have devoted themselves to shutting down a jail construction plan – and they aren’t ‘playing to the middle’
here was a moment in late 2016 when Los Angeles county was set to invest $2.2bn in rebuilding and revamping parts of its jail system, the largest in the world. The old Men’s Central jail downtown would be replaced with a new “mental health jail” run by the sheriff’s department, and the women’s jail in south-east LA would be relocated to a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in the high desert, more than 80 miles outside the city.
Taxpayers would fund the project, which activist groups claimed would ultimately cost at least $3.5bn. The contract had been awarded and money promised. Justice reform organizers’ years-long efforts to halt construction and reallocate funds toward housing, education, and community-based services had failed.
But the battle wasn’t over.
That year, grassroots activists regrouped and rebranded, forming a broad coalition based on six organizations they called JusticeLA. They devoted themselves to shutting down the jail construction plan. Then they held their first direct action, an art installation in front of an administrative building where the Los Angeles county board of supervisors had greenlit the jail project. Activists set up 100 homemade jail bed replicas, creating a simulated jail dormitory for the public. More than 200 supporters showed up wearing orange shirts that read “I am not the property of L.A. County jail.” The action diverted traffic for more than six hours.
“Even when we lost, we still won,” Ivette Alé said. “We didn’t stop organizing, didn’t stop putting pressure on the county.” Alé, 35, is JusticeLA’s coordinator, which continues to work for decarceration and to increase resources for communities most affected by incarceration.
At the coalition’s core is a group of young abolitionists who grew up in Los Angeles in the “tough-on-crime” 90s, all of whom are the children of incarcerated people or were themselves incarcerated.
For two years following the jail bed action, JusticeLA employed protest, public education and policy recommendations to stop construction, and finally prevailed.
First, the county scrapped the new women’s jail project. Then in August 2019, they dropped the mental health jail plan, deciding instead to invest in community services. Former state senator Holly Mitchell (as of January, she is a member of the Los Angeles county board of supervisors), described JusticeLA’s success in shutting down the jail expansion plan as “miraculous”.
“I give them full credit with bringing pressure to bear on a board [the county board of supervisors] that I’m not sure would have done it on their own,” she said. The fact that the county was convinced to back out of a multimillion-dollar contract astonished her, Mitchell said.
Since then, they have been racking up victories by ignoring the conventional political wisdom of making compromises and “playing to the middle”. Instead, they pursue their abolitionist goals and so far every campaign they have waged has succeeded.
Ivette Alé has been one of JusticeLA’s key engineers since its inception, and an organizer since they were a student at UC Berkeley. As a young child, they and their family moved to southern California from Mexico City. Several years later, a close family member was incarcerated after battling substance use.
“If my [loved one] had received substance abuse treatment and mental health treatment instead of incarceration, my family would have been better off,” Alé said. “So often the rhetoric around justifying incarceration uses the stories of survivors and victims to justify punitive systems … A lot of us [at JusticeLA] have been survivors of interpersonal violence and state violence and understand that the punitive responses didn’t help us as survivors.”
Alé and their colleagues are working to build alternatives to those responses, and have built their coalition on the foundation of a few central principles. The first, Alé said, is that when they advocate for a policy, they leave no one behind. Traditional justice reform efforts tend to advocate for one community – cis and trans women, for example – but will stipulate that their efforts don’t apply to those who have committed violent crimes. JusticeLA does not make those distinctions.
“It’s making sure we don’t feed into a binary of who’s deserving and who’s undeserving,” Alé said.
Second, Alé said, they try never to help build something they will have to dismantle in the future. Proposition 25, a measure on the state ballot in the November 2020 election, would have eliminated cash bail but replaced it with risk assessment software that some activists and scholars say perpetuates racism and the criminalization of poverty, and which would have expanded judicial power. JusticeLA supports ending cash bail, but didn’t see the tradeoff as a real step toward reforming pretrial detention. (The state has since moved toward eliminating cash bail.)
JusticeLA’s large base of individuals and organizations is due in part to an expansive approach. In early 2017, when it looked as though the jail construction plan was unstoppable, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors and then leader of Californians United for a Responsible Budget Diana Zuñiga realized they needed a broader coalition than those who were explicitly abolitionist. Together they recruited some of their activist colleagues and created JusticeLA.
“We’ve got to … expand so that even organizations who don’t articulate themselves as abolitionist are down and feel compelled to fight for an abolitionist demand,” said Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson, a founding executive team member of JusticeLA, recalling the groups’ decision to rework their approach.
Clayton-Johnson, Alé and their colleagues convinced reformist – though not explicitly abolitionist – groups like the Service Employees International Union and ACLU of Southern California to join the coalition in the common pursuit of justice reform.
Decision-making power within the coalition, however, remains with the core group, which consists of members of established grassroots groups such as Dignity and Power Now and the Youth Justice Coalition, and rests only with formerly incarcerated and Black people and people of color.
“They’ve done a remarkable job of balancing the different elements of what social movement work requires to be successful,” said Toussaint Losier, professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “And they’ve done it in a way that has distinguished them from what we find in other parts of the country, where you have organizations or even local coalitions that are good at doing one aspect of this … to the exclusion of others.”
Indeed, JusticeLA has focused on a broad range of criminal justice policy issues. They fought successfully to get Measure J, which would allocate between $360m-$900m of county money to social services, on the ballot in the November 2020 election. Then they fought successfully to get the measure passed. They scored the surprise victory in November with the campaign to replace cash bail, which required voters to consider nuanced arguments against racist algorithms.
That was a case where JusticeLA wasn’t aligned with some of their usual political supporters, including then state senator Holly Mitchell, who co-authored the original bill eliminating cash bail that Prop 25 would have upheld.
“In the process of policymaking, there is sometimes impatience with the notion of incrementalism,” Mitchell said. “I think there’s sometimes fear that if you start down a particular road around a policy shift, and if it is not ideal, then it’s better to have not gone down that road at all.”
It was a point of contention that didn’t get resolved. “But we were able to have a conversation. I heard their perspective. They heard mine,” Mitchell said.
Still, JusticeLA is facing steep obstacles. The Gallup Center on Black Voices, created in response to last summer’s uprisings, found that although the overwhelming majority of Black Americans and Hispanic Americans say law enforcement needs “major changes”, only 22% of Black Americans and 20% of Hispanic Americans are in favor of abolition. In fact, a majority of Black and Hispanic Americans want to maintain current levels of law enforcement presence in their neighborhoods.
Burnout is also a constant peril in other organizing spaces he’s worked in, said Clayton-Johnson. To prevent that, JusticeLA’s leaders try to devote resources to mental health and creativity. Clayton-Johnson is an acupuncturist, Cullors is a multimedia artist, and Alé is a former fashion designer who moonlights as DJ IZLA.
Alé pointed out that engaging creatively with colleagues and allies relieves tension and strengthens relationships. It requires having your finger on the pulse of the community. “That’s what being an artist is,” they said. “Being able to reflect back your personal experiences and that of your community in ways that folks can identify with.”
Their artistic events tend to be the most intimate type of activism. In June 2020, JusticeLA held an event inspired by Tupac Shakur’s book of poetry The Rose That Grew from Concrete.
The group laid thousands of roses in front of the Hall of Justice as a tribute to those who have been killed at the hands of law enforcement in Los Angeles county. One of JusticeLA’s founding groups, Dignity and Power Now, holds card-making events in front of county jails on Mothers’ and Fathers’ Day so that visiting family members can present artworks to those they’re visiting.
“There’s a long tradition of joy as a radical force in our work, particularly in the Black organizing tradition,” Clayton-Johnson said. “Even in moments of conflict, or really tense political struggle, we still have a right to that.
“I mean, that’s the world we’re trying to build, right?”
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A mural honoring Breanna Taylor. (photo: Patrick Smith/Getty)
Kentucky Governor Partially Bans No-Knock Warrants After Breonna Taylor Death
Cameron Jenkins, The Hill
Jenkins writes: "Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) on Friday partially banned no-knock warrants in the state following a year of protests and demonstrations sparked by the shooting death of Breonna Taylor."
entucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) on Friday partially banned no-knock warrants in the state following a year of protests and demonstrations sparked by the shooting death of Breonna Taylor.
Taylor was shot eight times and was ultimately killed during a police raid in which law enforcement used a no-knock search warrant. The warrants enable police officers to identify themselves after they have already entered.
Beshear signed a bill into law that will only permit a no-knock search warrant to be used if there is "clear and convincing evidence” that the alleged crime being committed “would qualify a person, if convicted, as a violent offender,” according to The Associated Press.
Under the law, the warrants may only be executed between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m and an EMT must be on standby as the warrant is carried out, the AP noted. Judges will also be required to sign the warrants legibly when they approve them.
Law enforcement officials in Taylor's case said that they knocked and announced their presence prior to entering the residence, though Taylor's neighbors and her boyfriend have said that they did not hear a knock or announcement.
Louisville passed "Breonna's Law" last year, banning no-knock warrants and requiring all officers who are serving warrants to wear body cameras.
One of the officers involved in Taylor's case in September was indicted by a grand jury for allegedly shooting into the apartment of Taylor's neighbor. No charges were brought against the officers who shot into Taylor's apartment.
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Demonstration in solidarity with Abdulhadi Al Khawaja who was on a hunger strike for 12 days on September 05, 2014. (photo: Ahmed Al Fardan/Getty)
Ten Years a Prisoner in Bahrain: My Father Was Arrested and Tortured During the Arab Spring. My Son Has Never Known Him Outside Prison
Zaynab Al Khawaja, Newlines Magazine
Al Khawaja writes: "My six-year-old is usually shy when his grandfather calls. My father was arrested and imprisoned years before my son was born."
y six-year-old is usually shy when his grandfather calls. My father was arrested and imprisoned years before my son was born. They first met when all three of us were behind bars. Now we wait for calls from Jau Prison to hear my father’s voice, and on one of those days when we were expecting a call, my little boy told me he wanted to ask a question. He had his little whiteboard in his hand.
“How do you spell breathe, mama?”
When the call started, my son handed me the whiteboard.
“Hi Baba Hadi, do they let you breathe?”
My father always tells us he doesn’t want his grandchildren to connect his name to anything sad or painful. He makes a point in his calls of joking and laughing with them. As I heard him try to reassure his grandson, the prison authorities — who always listen in — ended the call. My boy looked up at me.
“But does he have a window?”
Two thoughts crossed my mind as I struggled to respond. The first was that I am happy he doesn’t remember being in prison himself, where he accompanied me as an infant when, in 2016, I was handed a three-year sentence for tearing a picture of Bahrain’s king. Had he remembered, he would have known that there were no windows, he was ill for most of the time, and that I did, indeed, have trouble breathing.
The second thought was a flashback from the day of my father’s arrest, as I watched him from the top of the stairs being beaten bloody for leading peaceful protests in Pearl Square in Bahrain. I was frozen, unable to move, until I heard his faint voice.
“I can’t breathe.”
A few days before his arrest, we had celebrated his 50th birthday the only way we could, as the country was under martial law. Taking a risk to leave the house, trying to avoid the riot police and armored vehicles, I went to a grocery store and bought a frozen cake and a few funny gifts. I remember a couple of wigs. We did not know how much time we had, but we knew they were coming any day. We sat in my apartment, sang happy birthday to him, ate cake, and enjoyed each other’s company. We put on the wigs and laughed, all while the helicopters whirred above. We wore our street clothes, just in case.
That was 10 years ago. My father has been in chains ever since.
My father, Abdulhadi Al Khawaja, is a human rights activist from the Kingdom of Bahrain. He had been very vocal during the 2011 Arab Spring protests, standing on the stage at Pearl Square and calling for a democratic country where people would be equal, have rights, and enjoy free speech. Importantly, he spoke against impunity.
“If someone is responsible for killing peaceful protesters, they must be put on a fair trial,” he said.
A fair trial was not what he got. After his arrest, he was disappeared for weeks and tortured so badly that when a family member happened to see him in a military hospital, she could only recognize him by his name tag. They tortured him in the hospital, too. His jaw was so crushed, he could not eat. After two months of torture, they gave him clean clothes for the first time and allowed him to shower, then took him to see a representative of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. He was ordered to record a video apologizing to the king, or else he would be sexually assaulted. When he refused, they attacked. The only thing that saved him was that when he fell to the ground, he purposefully slammed his already broken jaw into the ground over and over so hard that even his torturers got scared.
It was months before he was finally brought before a military court and charged with “attempting to overthrow the monarchy” and “inciting hatred against the regime.” He was brought to court with a sack on his head. When it was removed, he looked nothing like himself. His head was shaven, his jaw broken. When he spoke up and told the judge that he had been tortured, he was dragged out of the courtroom and tortured more.
The court sentenced him to life in prison.
How does one heal from hearing these details, let alone from living them? For my father, there was no space or time to heal because the Bahraini regime is not done punishing him for daring to speak out in the name of the people of Bahrain. In these past 10 years, they have come up with new ways to torment him. Prisoners have nothing, so the prison administration grants them certain requests only to then take them away. The regime wants prisoners to suffer beyond the prison term and the torture.
For a while, my father had books. I would ask how he was, and his response was always, “I have my books. Every day I am somewhere new.” Then they took them all away. He was given paper and pens for a while. He wrote two books, one about his childhood dedicated to his grandchildren. Both were confiscated along with his writing material. For a while they allowed him to tend some plants he and the other prisoners had coaxed into life. During one visit, he walked into the visitation room with a bouquet for my mum, made from five leaves from the different plants they had grown. On the day of Eid, prison guards used machetes to cut them down.
Ten years on, he has three new grandchildren who have never seen him except in a prison uniform and under surveillance. Ten years in which he has been on several hunger strikes. Ten years in which he intermittently lost his eyesight. Ten years of not being able to see the sky or open a window. Ten years of being shackled by his feet and hands with heavy chains every time he fell ill or needed medical attention. Ten years in which he lost his older brother and couldn’t even say goodbye.
We did not imagine things could get worse, but with the pandemic, they did. Facing an outbreak in prison, instead of releasing political prisoners to save their lives, the regime canceled all visits. They did nothing to curb the spread of the virus among the prisoners. In a string of leaked recordings, political prisoners have been asking the world to heed their cries. A number of the prisoners’ mothers have even taken to the streets, holding signs that read “save our children.” People around the world are trying to protect themselves and their loved ones from this deadly pandemic, but our loved ones are in overcrowded, filthy prison cells with no access to proper medical care. They can’t breathe.
It’s been 10 years of appeals and open letters, but in my country, injustice remains entrenched and unyielding. And while the cause of justice is making shy progress in the United States, American and British loyalty to Bahrain’s dictator remains unshaken. Even as I write these words, news has broken that the imprisoned torture survivor Abbas Malallah had a heart attack in his cell and died in hospital Tuesday morning after having been denied medical attention. He, like my father, had been in prison for a decade.
My father dedicated his life to fighting for justice, democracy, free speech, and accountability — things the West claims to cherish. Yet the U.S. and Britain have served as enablers of the Bahraini regime, even as it continues to imprison and torture my father and others for demanding those same values. This is more than passive acquiescence since both countries spare no opportunity to show their support for Bahrain’s authoritarian rulers. By allying with the regime against the people, the West implicates itself in all its crimes. It is time to end the impunity and speak up for those whose voices are being stifled in Bahrain’s prisons. Let my father breathe.
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A beached fishing aggregation device. (photo: Island Conservation Society)
European Tuna Boats Dump Fishing Debris in Seychelles Waters 'With Impunity'
Malavika Vyawahare, Mongabay
Vyawahare writes: "Vessels from Spain and France have for decades exploited Seychelles' abundant tuna stock and left waste behind in its waters."
n 2019, when Jeremy Raguain turned up for a cleanup campaign on Aldabra Atoll, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, he bagged a marine monstrosity like no other: a beached fish aggregating device, or FAD.
It was a massive tangle of buoys, netting and fishing ropes weighing hundreds of kilograms. The fishing aid, like most FADs, was made of a floating raft and an underwater trail. More than 80% of the plastic garbage washed up on the Indian Ocean atoll, home to Seychelles’ iconic giant tortoises, is fishing-related, Raguain, a Seychellois marine conservationist, and his team estimated.
Vessels from Spain and France have for decades exploited Seychelles’ abundant tuna stock and left waste behind in its waters. “It’s not to say that they’re the sole culprits. But they are by far the largest,” said Raguain, who co-led the cleanup effort on Aldabra.
Purse seine tuna-fishing vessels release thousands of FADs into the seas every year, abandoning many of them there. When forsaken FADs drift ashore, it falls on volunteers and environmentalists like Raguain to clean up after industrial fishing fleets. He and five team members spent an entire day under the scorching Seychellois sun dismantling that one monster FAD.
“Aldabra is covered in trash because there’s a massive tuna fishing industry in the region, many of which are big EU companies that are exporting all this tuna to EU and all around the world,” said April Burt, a marine scientist at the University of Oxford who co-led the garbage collection with Raguain. “They’ve been dumping this fishing waste with impunity.”
European-owned purse seiners haul in tuna; a Thai cannery in Seychelles processes most of it and then exports it to Europe.
Questions about FADs are part of a larger debate about the sustainability of industrial tuna fisheries. Indian Ocean fisheries are a major supplier of the $8.5 billion annual global canned tuna market. At least one stock, the yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), is only a few years away from collapse, and FADs are partly to blame.
‘Addicted to FAD fishing’
FADs have revolutionized tuna fisheries; instead of chasing after tuna, fishers can now lure them with FADs. Everywhere there is industrial tuna fishing, there are FADs. In the Indian Ocean, about 80% of tuna is caught using FADs today.
They work because tuna and its ilk dig floating debris. Driven by some undeciphered instinct, the fish gather around FADs in the thousands. This makes them easy targets for fishers who would otherwise have to scour unmarked oceanic expanses to spot free-swimming schools. FADs freed them from the drudgery and vagary of this modus operandi.
Until a few decades ago, fisherfolk were content to employ natural driftwood to attract fish. But in time, industrial fishing vessels began to deploy FADs more regularly and the fishing aids became more and more sophisticated. Now, many FADs are equipped with GPS transmitters and echo sound sensors, which relay their locations and the number of fish in their orbits in real time. The vessels can then home in on the most promising FADs.
“It is comfortable fisheries; you can look at your potential catch, follow it and never miss your set,” said Alain Fonteneau, a tuna fisheries expert who worked for decades at France’s National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD).
The convenience has come at a cost. FADs have invaded oceans across the planet, contributing to the rising tide of plastic pollution.
Purse seine vessels that depend on FADs are some of the world’s largest industrial fishing boats. Seine nets, up to 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) long if laid out flat, encircle the fish school and close at the bottom like a drawstring purse. A single large purse seine vessel can deploy hundreds of FADs. There is not enough data about how many FADs are released into the sea globally, but researchers put the number at around 100,000 a year.
It could be higher, experts say.
The EU delegation for Mauritius and Seychelles said in an e-mailed statement to Mongabay that it could not share data about the number of FADs its Indian Ocean fleet uses because of “business confidentiality.”
An Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) report analyzed the origins of 115 FADs recovered in Seychelles’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in 2015 and traced more than three-quarters of them to Spanish-owned vessels. The rest came from French-owned ships.
Spain and France have operated purse seine fleets in Seychellois waters since the mid-1980s. There are currently 15 Spain-flagged and 12 France-flagged purse seiners in the Indian Ocean. But the EU’s dominance of tuna fisheries in the region is also explained by European control of vessels flagged to other states.
Of the 13 purse seine vessels that sail under the Seychelles flag, 11 have beneficial owners in Spain and the remaining two in France. A 2019 study found that Seychelles-flagged purse seiners fish almost exclusively on FADs.
“The Spanish are heavily addicted to FAD fishing because FAD fishing is so efficient. They save fuel, money and time,” Nirmal Shah, chief executive of the nonprofit Nature Seychelles and former head of the Seychelles Fishing Authority, told Mongabay.
Claiming unintended victims
It’s more than a numbers problem.
Immense tuna schools have swiveled for millennia between their feeding and spawning grounds. In doing so, they redistribute nutrients over entire oceans. Some scientists say the FADs mushrooming in their habitat can alter everything from their migration patterns to spawning behavior, skewing instincts shaped by millions of years of evolution.
They could also be leading other fish astray.
FADs don’t attract only tuna; they draw other fish species too. Purse seine vessels fishing near FADs are estimated to capture five times more fish from non-target species, or bycatch, than when they’re fishing free-schooling tuna.
Even more worryingly, they draw in juveniles that haven’t reached sexual maturity. The capture of too many juveniles that will never reproduce leaves populations in danger of collapse. It is one of the reasons the Indian Ocean yellowfin tuna stock could be only a few years from crashing.
The IOTC, the regional intergovernmental agency that regulates tuna fisheries, has set catch limits for yellowfin tuna since 2016. Both the EU and Seychelles fleets have breached these limits in recent years.
“A large percentage of the Spanish catch is juveniles, they catch millions of them. It is a scandal,” Shah said. “In our own small-scale fisheries we have been telling local fishermen for years that there are size limits. Yet, we are allowing massive vessels to vacuum juveniles from the Indian Ocean.”
Seychelles lies smack in the middle of the western Indian Ocean tuna migration route. The country is comprised of more than 100 islands that stitch together an EEZ of 1.37 million square kilometers (529,000 square miles). It’s a marine area more than three times the size of California, and provides the largest tuna catch in the Indian Ocean.
Drifting FADs, the kind that purse seiners mostly use, are not deterred by state borders, nor are they repelled by the boundaries of marine reserves like Aldabra. Vessels have little incentive to chase after them if they go missing or fail to attract fish. When the fishing aids wander into marine protected areas, ships cannot follow.
That means FADs and their entrails can remain at sea for months or years.
They are built to last, the floating structure fashioned from bamboo, plastic netting, cork, or PVC pipes. The underwater appendage consists of reams of nylon netting. This durability, a boon for fishers, is a disaster for the marine environment.
Abandoned FADs can end up anywhere: washed up on beaches, stuck on coral reefs, or festooned to mangroves. A study estimated that one in 10 FADs used by the French fleet in the Indian Ocean between 2007 and 2011 eventually beached.
Aldabra is formed by ancient coral reefs that now linger above sea level and enclose a lagoon three times the size of Manhattan. Its remoteness — it takes a chartered flight and a chartered boat from the main Seychellois island of Mahé to get there — makes cleaning operations difficult. FADs stuck on coral reefs offshore are even trickier to dislodge.
Those that remain at sea are also a menace. Their plastic components can break down into tinier particles and enter the marine food chain.
But the longer the devices persist intact, the higher the chances of ensnaring unintended victims. Endangered female green turtles (Chelonia mydas) undertake treacherous migrations every year, often spanning thousands of kilometers, to arrive at Seychelles’ shores to nest. For some, the journey ends trapped in the netting of an FAD.
Seychellois waters are also home to 60 species of shark, including silky sharks (Carcharhinus falciformis). Entangled in FADs and unable to move, juvenile silky sharks are likely to suffocate to death. Like many shark species, female silky sharks reach sexual maturity late, undergo long gestation periods, and give birth to few young ones, so the loss of juvenile sharks to FADs hits populations hard.
Drifting FADs are responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million silky sharks every year in the Indian Ocean, a 2013 paper estimated.
FADs flourish, regulations lag
Regulation of FADs hasn’t kept up with their burgeoning use or the growing recognition of the problems they pose for marine life.
A series of agreements starting in 1987 between Seychelles and the EU (at that time still the European Economic Community, or EEC) govern EU-flagged ships that operate in Seychelles’ EEZ. A new six-year fishing pact came into force in 2020. It and other sustainable fisheries partnership agreements (SFPAs) the EU has signed with several developing nations in the Indian Ocean region have been criticized as exploitative, leading to overfishing and food insecurity, and stifling domestic fishing fleets’ development.
Even so, these deals have evolved from earlier “pay, fish and go” deals. After more than three decades, environmental considerations were included for the first time in the EU-Seychelles SFPA signed last year.
The new SFPA says EU vessels “shall use” natural or biodegradable material and non-entangling designs in FAD construction and retrieve FADs when they become useless. However, the use of so-called BioFADs is not actually binding and they appear to be stuck in the development phase.
In an emailed response, an EU spokesperson said their use is expected to be mandatory “by 2022,” adding “the E.U. conducted and is still conducting and funding several projects and studies to make biodegradable FADs a reality.”
Julio Morón Ayala, managing director of OPAGAC, an organization that represents the Spanish tuna purse seine fishing companies, described the 2022 target as “an impossible date.”
“We are trying to find the BioFAD design that could be fit for our fishing, and it is taking longer than expected, because after several years of experiences with scientists in an EU funded project in the Indian Ocean, it has been proved to be more difficult as expected,” Ayala wrote in an email to Mongabay.
The provisions regarding BioFADs in the SFPA do not extend to the 13 European-owned purse seine vessels that sail under the Seychelles flag.
‘What is biodegradable?’
Moreover, there is no consensus on what an eco-friendly FAD actually is. The EU launched a project in 2017 to test natural biodegradable materials for the construction of BioFADs. It involved key research institutes on the continent, including France’s IRD and the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO), as well as the Seychelles Fishing Authority, and the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation.
“We are still defining basic questions: what is biodegradable?” said Jóse Carlos Báez, a marine fisheries expert at IEO. “While the transition to biodegradable FADs has started, it may take a while until all FAD components can be made biodegradable.”
Not everyone is convinced that biodegradable FADs are the way to go. “We can put quotas, we can talk about biodegradable FADs, but a lot of conservationists who want sustainable fisheries do not see FADs becoming sustainable or part of sustainable fisheries,” said Raguain, the Seychellois marine conservationist.
Shah at Nature Seychelles called BioFADs “a red herring.” He says he wants FADs phased out altogether.
The IOTC, the regional fisheries management organization, has limited the number of FADs in use to 300 per vessel. While the IOTC’s intervention has made some difference, monitoring compliance is a challenge.
Fonteneau of IRD said part of the trouble is that there is no consensus among European vessel owners on what to do about FADs. Behind the scenes, the French and the Spanish are jostling about the rules, he said. The use of environmentally friendly FADs would add to the cost for all ship owners and operators.
An unequal relationship
For Raguain, the “unequal relationship” with the EU makes regulation difficult, especially for Seychelles, a small country with a very, very large marine territory and multiple fleets operating in its waters.
The onus for implementing the provisions of the SFPA, including those regarding FADs, will fall on Seychelles, the regional EU delegation said in a written response to Mongabay’s questions. The statement added that EU-flagged vessels “shall cooperate with them.”
“We can put the laws, but if the companies involved are not being monitored, they will abuse that; history shows that,” Raguain said.
Seychelles’ fisheries observer program involves personnel who accompany fishing vessels to monitor catches and ensure compliance with the rules. The program, which is partly funded by the industry, was launched only in 2013. An IOTC report that documented implementation of the program on the 13 purse seiners of the Seychellois fleet found that poorly trained observers and lack of human resources hampered their work.
The Seychelles Fishing Authority did not respond to multiple attempts to seek comment.
For small island nations worldwide, fishing license fees contribute significantly to government coffers, casting doubt on their ability to adequately regulate ships from larger, more powerful countries. For Seychelles, the fees and payments amount to about 3% of total government revenues.
According to the latest agreement, the EU will pay 5.3 million euros ($6.3 million) annually as fishing access fees, and EU ship owners will pay 80 to 85 euros ($97 to $102) per ton of tuna caught. They will also set aside an additional 175,000 euros ($208,000) a year to help Seychelles safeguard its bountiful marine riches.
Raguain pointed out that the terms of the EU’s deal don’t even cover the cost of getting rid of the garbage.
“For Aldabra, it costs us $10,000 per ton to remove marine plastic pollution. The 85 euros per ton of tuna does not reflect the actual externalities of these activities,” he said. “The consumers, most of whom are in Europe, need to realize that when they buy that can of tuna, it doesn’t show the full costs of this impact.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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omething that’s been made abundantly clear over the last few years is that there is no minimum IQ requirement to serve in Congress (or, obviously, the White House). There are numerous examples of this to choose from, including but not limited to: Rep. Louie Gohmert, who suggested he caught COVID-19 from wearing a mask; Senator Ted Cruz, who thought no one would notice him on a commercial flight to Cancún amidst a Texas state of emergency; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who claimed the California wildfires were started by Jewish laser beams; and Senator Tommy Tuberville, who doesn’t know the three branches of government. On Thursday, though, a strong case was made for crowning Rep. Matt Gaetz the king of congressional morons, thanks to his decision to be as blatant as possible about allegedly paying women for sex.
