18 May 21
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FOCUS: Bess Levin | Report: Matt Gaetz Should Be Weeping, Rocking Back and Forth in Fetal Position Right Now
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "If you're a glass-half-full type who always looks on the bright side of any situation, and Rep. Matt Gaetz came to you for some cheering up, something positive you could say to the Florida Republican would be 'Hey, at least you're not in prison!'"
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17 May 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
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Heather Ann Thompson | Saying Her Name
Heather Ann Thompson, The New Yorker
Thompson writes: "Remains that were found to be those of a Black teenager who was killed by Philadelphia police in 1985 were treated as an anthropological specimen. How was her identity known and then forgotten?"
he police bombing of 6221 Osage Avenue, in Philadelphia, caused a level of trauma that is difficult to exaggerate. On May 13, 1985, while many of the city’s residents were still basking in the glow of the previous afternoon’s Mother’s Day gatherings, hundreds of heavily armed police officers surrounded a row house in a Black neighborhood in West Philadelphia. After firing thousands of rounds of ammunition and cannisters of noxious tear gas into the home, they flew a helicopter over the roof and dropped a package of military-grade explosives. What followed was unimaginable.
This event—which Philadelphia’s mayor later said began with the intention of serving warrants to the residents, members of a largely Black group called MOVE—left around two city blocks of a formerly vibrant neighborhood in ashes, and more than sixty mostly working- and middle-class families homeless. That would have been bad enough. But what made this a trauma from which the city could not heal was that the bodies of the six Black men and women and five Black children lay under the smoldering embers of that row house—eleven human beings whom police had known were inside when they had dropped incendiary devices. Worse? No one was ever held meaningfully accountable for these many deaths.
So, in late April, when news outlets revealed that human remains from that event had been kept at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, at the University of Pennsylvania, and even used as a case study for an online class at Princeton University, the outpouring of disbelief and outrage from across the country was immediate and fierce. Indeed, the idea that the museum was holding the bones of a Black Philadelphian who was alive as recently as 1985 in the same way that it has held the skulls of enslaved people, procured by grave-robbers, was beyond comprehension.
This week, Philadelphia’s mayor, Jim Kenney, released the additionally distressing piece of news that the city had other remains from the MOVE bombing. At first, Kenney reported that the city’s health commissioner had the remains cremated and disposed of, without attempting to reach family members. He then explained that, after his first announcement, the remains had actually been found, in the basement of the medical examiner’s office.
But, at first, the story we were told, about the remains at the museum, was this: in 1985, the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office asked Alan Mann, an anthropologist then at the University of Pennsylvania, to identify the remains of the bodies found in the debris of the MOVE house. Mann attempted to do that, but was unable to positively identify one of the sets of bones. He kept those remains for continued study and stored them at the Penn Museum. And, at some point, Janet Monge, an anthropologist and curator at the museum, who as a graduate student had assisted Mann in his original investigation, used the remains to teach an online course at Princeton. That course, which was recently taken down, was previously open to the public, and anyone who registered could see the remains being handled.
The early coverage of this story seemed to understand why some would find it macabre, but many articles also noted that there may not have been anything inherently sinister or unethical about Mann and Monge keeping the MOVE remains. Mann had been asked to do a forensic examination of them, and he and Monge were still trying to do just that. This was the basic argument that representatives of Princeton and Penn were making as well. As a Penn spokesperson informed a critical public, the whole point of holding on to the remains was “to restore the individual’s personhood, help solve this painful case in the city’s history, and bring resolution to the community.”
But a full consideration of the city’s history with MOVE, and of all that actually happened during the original forensic investigation of the bodies that were left in the rubble of Osage Avenue, is exactly what was missing in the earliest reporting on this story. The remains that Mann claimed had never been satisfactorily identified had, in fact, been found to belong to a teen-age girl who, along with her sister, died that day. Until last month, their mother believed that both girls had been buried in 1985. To reckon with the actual history of the case raises troubling questions about why, after the original investigation, Mann had kept the remains at all. But there is, perhaps, something even more important to consider. The full history reveals the risk of too easily, and with too little skepticism, telling a story from the vantage point of those with power or prestige: one can easily end up quite literally erasing from history the people who had neither.
Since its formation, in the early seventies, MOVE had been under constant surveillance by law enforcement. A multiracial collective of people who took the surname of Africa and saw themselves as a family, MOVE members lived a back-to-nature life style and grew increasingly outspoken against what they called “the System”: its intense racism, police brutality, mistreatment of animals, pollution of nature, and much more. In the late seventies, Philadelphia’s mayor, Frank Rizzo, who had previously served as police commissioner and didn’t shy away from courting racist constituents, became determined to arrest MOVE members and evict them from their home—which, at that time, was in the West Philadelphia neighborhood of Powelton Village.
Between 1976 and 1978, clashes between the police and MOVE at that house reached a crisis point. That dramatic period saw the death of a MOVE baby (which some members of that group said occurred because police attacked the mother), a months-long police blockade of the MOVE house, and a shootout between police and MOVE at that house, which ended in the death of a police officer. (Police blamed MOVE, and MOVE blamed police.) On the day of the shooting, a MOVE member named Delbert Africa was beaten severely by police. Soon after, that house was levelled by cranes. These events culminated in nine MOVE members being sentenced to up to a hundred years in prison for, among other charges, the death of the police officer, and in the acquittal of three officers who were charged with the beating of Delbert Africa.
By 1983, a core group of MOVE members, including the group’s founder, John Africa, had relocated to the house on Osage Avenue, in the Cobbs Creek area of West Philadelphia. The longer they lived there, the more determined they became to force the city and its newly elected Black mayor, Wilson Goode, to revisit the sentences of the MOVE nine. By Christmas Eve of 1983, the residents of 6221 Osage Avenue were blasting their demands for justice, and their increasingly vitriolic and profanity-laced critiques of city officials and the system, from loudspeakers day and night. As dismay about the situation mounted among MOVE’s neighbors, they began pressuring the city to do something.
The city’s response, however, was to once again send in hundreds of heavily armed officers to forcibly remove men, women, and children from yet another MOVE house in yet another West Philadelphia neighborhood. Notably, some of the same officers who had participated in the siege in 1978, including one of the officers who had been charged in the beating of Delbert Africa, also participated in the armed response on Osage Avenue.
By the next morning, the MOVE house was destroyed, and around two city blocks, parts of Osage Avenue and adjacent Pine Street, had burned to the ground. But rather than treat it like a crime scene, city officials dispatched a huge crane to the site, which began scooping at the debris, like so much trash, and dumping it into large piles. It was not until the afternoon, after someone saw a human leg dangling from the jaws of the crane’s bucket, that an assistant medical examiner reported to the scene. There were, in the beginning, at least three city agencies seemingly in charge of the remains of the dead, each using its own system to tag them. The bones were not properly photographed or stored, and, needless to say, much of the other evidence that might have been gathered from the ashes was never collected.
How the scene was handled mattered. Indeed, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. The police claimed that, when they dropped the bomb on 6221 Osage, they simply wanted to dislodge a bunker on the roof. They had never wanted to ignite the whole house, they insisted, and were, of course, devastated that people had been killed. The deaths that day had been an accident. But the more details surfaced, the less that the police officers’ claims satisfied the public.
By June, the mayor had appointed the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission on MOVE to get to the bottom of why the disaster had happened, who was responsible, and how so many people had died. During hearings, it was revealed that the police had known there were cans of gasoline on the roof where they dropped the explosives. Then came the disturbing testimony of the fire commissioner, William C. Richmond: once the fire had begun, Richmond said, the police commissioner, Gregore Sambor, instructed him to let it burn.
Most troublingly, there was a real possibility that these remains might show that MOVE members hadn’t died by fire at all. It could be that some people in the house had been shot to death trying to flee the inferno, by members of the Philadelphia Police Department, who were now saying that this had all been a terrible accident.
As 6221 Osage Avenue crackled and began collapsing and crashing down, terrifying the people who were huddled in the basement, a boy named Birdie Africa managed to escape. He told the commission that the police had indeed been shooting at his family as they tried to flee the burning row house.
Birdie had been cowering under water-soaked blankets with his dogs and the other children—Delisha, Tree, Phil, and Tomaso, he said. They were all crying. Screaming, he said. And the air was growing thick with smoke. It was getting so hot that, soon, three grownups, Conrad, Ramona, and Birdie’s mother, Rhonda, knew they had to get out. They started yelling “The kids’ coming out!” over and over again, and trying to walk the kids from the basement into the back alley. But each time, Birdie said, “there was gunfire around so we couldn’t get out,” and they were driven back into the basement.
Birdie, who was thirteen, was tiny for his age, and he had suffered terrible burns on his body. It was hard to fathom why he would be lying. And, besides, he wasn’t the only person who had managed to make it out alive. Ramona Africa had escaped, too. She was also covered in burns, but she had been handcuffed before being allowed to go to the hospital. She had not been permitted to speak to Birdie, yet she told investigators the same story that he had. “We were hollering out that we’re coming out, we’re bringing the children out,” she said. “The children were hollering, you know, that they were coming out, that we’re bringing them out. But that’s not what the cops wanted. Because we know they heard us. And the instant they saw us at the doorway, saw anybody coming out, they immediately opened fire.”
When the remains were first recovered, they were under the authority of the city’s medical examiner’s office, which recruited Alan Mann to conduct his analysis. But after the Special Investigation Commission on MOVE was appointed, the medical examiner’s office was told to turn them over to the forensic experts who would be working with that investigative body. Along with two others, the commission had hired Ali Z. Hameli, a pathologist who was famous at the time for having helped identify the remains of the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
Hameli’s team worked to identify all of the MOVE remains and concluded that there were six adults and five children, naming all of them, and later testified that evidence of gunshots had been found in three sets of remains. The remains that had been known as “G” were identified as those of the twelve-year-old Melissa (Delisha) Orr Africa, and the special commission’s forensic experts confirmed that, in her arm bone, they had clearly seen “one metal fragment consistent with double-ought (‘double 0’) buckshot or lead in a jacketed bullet.” A Philadelphia County grand jury later convened to determine whether any officers had indeed shot members of MOVE to death, and chose not to indict them.
The news that the victims had been shot at did not sit well with citizens sympathetic to the MOVE family, and Hameli’s identification of the remains did not sit well with Mann. In the examination he had conducted on those same remains a few months earlier, he had thought there was one more adult, and one fewer child. Specifically he had issues with Hameli’s team’s characterization of the remains marked as B-1 as an adolescent girl. Mann reëxamined the remains and issued a second report, on November 14, 1985, making clear that his opinion had not changed. When this second attempt was reported in the press, Hameli, too, reëxamined the remains, and invited new forensics experts to conduct their own examinations as well. To a one, those examinations corroborated Hameli’s team’s findings.
Despite the drama surrounding Mann’s report, by the time that the MOVE forensic inquiry had concluded, not only had myriad scientists laid eyes on the bones of B-1 but a consensus had been reached that they were those of a female adolescent. On January 23, 1986, Philadelphia’s assistant medical examiner, Robert Segal, wrote to the special commission’s staff director to confirm that he was in receipt of a recent report that “strongly supports Dr. Hameli’s conclusions” that the victim was “between 12 and 17 years,” and conceding that “it would be unreasonable for me reject these findings in light of the evidence that is available at this time.”
By the close of the official MOVE inquiry, official documents related to the investigation, including one of its final legal documents—the report of the Philadelphia County grand jury that had been convened to decide if anyone would be indicted as a result of the deaths at Osage Avenue—had identified B-1 not simply as a teen-ager, nor just as a girl, but specifically as belonging to Katricia Dotson, who, in life, had been called Tree Africa.
In reaching this conclusion, the commission did not rely on forensic reports alone. They also had the eyewitness account of Birdie Africa, who had told authorities, in no uncertain terms, that his friend Tree had been right there with him that terrible morning, when he and all of the other kids were trying so desperately to escape the smoke-filled basement, but the sound of gunfire had kept driving them back. The chairman of the commission asked Birdie, “When the police got you after you finally got out, did they ask you anything about whether or not there were any kids still in the house or were there any other grownups still in house?” Birdie nodded and said, “I said yes.” “Do you remember who it was that was still in the house?” they asked. “Tree,” Birdie answered emphatically, and then continued, “Tree, Netta, and Tomaso and Melissa and the big people.”
And so, even if not a single forensic scientist had examined the bones of B-1, logic seemed to dictate that B-1 was Tree Africa. All of the other victims had been accounted for.
Ultimately, it was agreed, and officially recorded, that B-1 was Katricia (Tree) Dotson. But what happened to the MOVE remains in the wake of the investigation of the bombing and the resolution of the legal proceedings is murky at best. It did appear, until recent revelations, that family members were given the remains of Tree and Netta, and had buried them at a funeral in December of 1985. In 1986, the state said that it buried the remains of Phil, Tomaso, and Delisha. But, now, not only has it been revealed that the remains which were identified as Tree’s have been in the Penn Museum but one former museum intern has reported that the institution may have some of Delisha’s remains as well. (The museum said that it is investigating the matter.) And now we are told that the medical examiner’s office has held the remains of other MOVE victims, without anyone’s knowledge or consent.
Delisha’s mother, Janet Africa, only recently came home after serving more than forty years in prison on charges stemming from the 1978 MOVE siege. Tree and Netta’s mother, Consuewella Africa, was also imprisoned when her daughters were killed. “Our children were murdered thrice over,” she said. “The first time when the bomb was dropped. Then when they were buried. And now with the bones.”
Three weeks into this sordid story, the question of how the bones recognized as Tree’s ended up in a museum remains unanswered. To be sure, because such outrage and grief has been expressed, we know more than we did originally. Alan Mann now says that Robert Segal, of the medical examiner’s office, asked him to continue investigating the identity of the bones, but no documentation of this request has emerged, and neither Segal nor the office has responded to requests for comment. Mann also says that he tried several times to reach members of MOVE, in the hopes of identifying and returning the remains, but Consuewella Africa said that no one ever called her: “Nobody called any of the mothers. All of this was done without our consent.”
Mann stored the remains at the Penn Museum, but the university says that it was never given custody of the bones, as a gift or on loan, and that it is currently investigating the matter. When I spoke to Christopher Woods, who became director of the museum last month, he told me that when he learned that the remains were there, it was immediately clear to him that they should be returned to Tree’s family. In his view, it was absolutely wrong not to do so decades ago. The week before the first press reports about the remains, Janet Monge, at the request of the museum, returned the remains to Mann; Woods then arranged for them to be stored at a Philadelphia funeral home. Consuewella Africa said that she has not spoken to the funeral home, but that she and other MOVE members will now discuss the situation and decide what to do.
There are many outstanding questions about the remains that were named as Tree Africa’s. But perhaps the most vital is why so many people accepted, without corroboration, the claim that they hadn’t been identified. Why, in this country, do we just accept what those with prestige and power tell us about an event for which they must account?
The long-term costs of elevating the statements of the prestigious and the powerful over testimonies of the traumatized are high, indeed. When white residents burned Tulsa’s Black Wall Street to the ground, in 1921, Black Oklahomans lost everything they had worked generations to build. But because white officials got to explain away what happened at the time, that massacre was largely unknown to the general public until the late nineties. In 1931, when two white women accused nine Black boys of raping them on a train passing through northern Alabama, their version of events left the Scottsboro boys fighting to avoid execution. In 1971, when state officials told the nation that prisoners at the Attica State Correctional Facility, who had led an uprising for more humane conditions, had killed hostages on the day that troopers retook the prison, it wasn’t just that this completely false story was printed on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times; this lie incited what a judge later called an “orgy of violence” on almost thirteen hundred stripped, severely wounded, terrified men, completely at the mercy of captors who were hell-bent on revenge.
This week marked the thirty-sixth anniversary of the day that the Philadelphia police bombed 6221 Osage Avenue, and the day that Tree Africa tried to escape. Let us, at least, try to tell the full story of how her remains ended up in a museum. Indeed, if we are ever to hope that any real justice might actually follow the horrific fate that befell her back in 1985, we must make sure that her story gets told as she, and those around her, actually experienced it. And we might start by saying her name.
A billboard showing the national debt and each American's share is displayed on Sept. 24, 2019, in downtown Cleveland. (photo: Duane Prokop/Getty Images for PGPF)
The Idea That Deficit Spending Is a Burden on Our Children Is the Dumbest Propaganda
Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Schwarz writes: "Every time the government sells a bond, it creates a liability for the government. But it also creates an asset for whoever bought it."
or decades, the Washington, D.C., political class has condemned deficit spending as an act of selfishness. We’re profligately throwing ourselves a party, they say, but paying for it with our credit cards, leaving our descendants to pick up the tab.
This is some of the most successful propaganda in U.S. history — which is especially impressive given that it’s also some of the silliest propaganda in U.S. history.
This rhetoric subsided during the Trump administration. But with a Democrat in the White House who’s proposing significant new spending, it’s returned with a vengeance. “We should use every tool we have to stop bankrupting our kids and grandkids,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently declared. Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee has decried the coming “debt burden on our children and grandchildren”:
In USA Today you can find Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson warning about “the debt burden we are placing on our children.” Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine — he caucuses with the Democrats — is anxious about “increasing the national debt we will leave to our children and grandchildren.”
And this goes far beyond politicians: It’s soaked into American culture. The AARP Bulletin once featured two newborns on its cover with a headline declaring them to be “$156,000 in debt.” An article in the Christian Post instructs us that “we used to take pride in paying our own way. Now we have no problem sponging off anyone, including our grandchildren.”
This sounds awful, until you think about it for five seconds. Instead of panicking about the blighted future we’re leaving to our progeny, ask whom our children are going to have to repay.
The answer is … our children.
Every time the federal government sells a bond, it creates a liability for the government. But it also creates an asset for those who bought the bond, in exactly the same amount. For American society overall, the entire process is, financially speaking, largely a wash. (For details on why it’s not completely a wash, see below.)
It is true that this could create problems with inequality. Government bonds, like financial assets in general, are disproportionately owned by the wealthy.
To understand what this means in concrete terms, consider Blackburn, and all of her anxious statements about the danger of government debt. Blackburn’s financial disclosure report states that she and her husband have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in various mutual funds. Most mutual funds invest to various degrees in U.S. government bonds.
Blackburn has a son and daughter. And if they inherit these mutual funds, part of that inheritance will almost certainly be indirect ownership of government bonds. In other words, while she frets in public about “a debt burden on our children and grandchildren,” her children will likely be benefiting from this debt burden. In the future, money will flow from the U.S.’s children in general to her kids specifically.
Of course, it doesn’t have the same ring to it to say, “I’m desperately worried that deficit spending today will force everyone else’s kids to pay my kids in the future.” This would raise the question of why, if future Americans see this as a problem, they won’t be able to just raise taxes on Blackburn’s children. The answer, of course, is that they will be able to do that if they want — thereby extinguishing most issues regarding deficit spending in the present.
There is somewhat more to it, though not a lot. Not all government bonds are purchased by Americans. Right now about one-third of U.S. government debt is held by foreigners. The Treasury Department updates who has how much every month; right now Japan and China both have a little over $1 trillion in U.S. treasury securities.
For complex and confusing reasons, however, this is almost certainly a good thing.
The U.S. has been running a trade deficit since the 1980s. That is, we’re buying more from other countries than we’re selling to them. In order to finance the difference, we have to give foreigners American assets. These assets can be anything: cash, or government bonds, or stock in American companies. At the same time, the U.S. has also been accumulating foreign assets.
Foreigners now own $46.25 trillion in such U.S. assets, while the U.S. owns $32.16 trillion in foreign assets. The gap between these two amounts, $14.09 trillion, is essentially the accumulated difference between what we’ve bought and what we’ve sold.
On its face, this would seem to be a significant problem for the U.S., inexorably leading to large outflows of money to other countries. Strangely, though, this is not happening. Investments in stock generally earn higher returns than investments in bonds, particularly government bonds. And the U.S. assets are disproportionately in foreign stock, while foreigners invest more in U.S. bonds.
Because of this, the U.S.’s smaller amount of foreign assets consistently earns a greater return than the larger amount of U.S. assets held by foreigners. Thus rather than money flowing out of the U.S., it’s still flowing into the country. More detail about this strange state of affairs can be found in a recent report from the Brookings Institution.
The upshot is that, if anything, we should want foreigners to be investing more in low-yielding U.S. government bonds, because this means that they’re not buying higher-yielding American stocks.
So Cruz, Blackburn, Johnson, King, and the rest of the huge anti-deficit spending army can stand down. Government debt simply is not a terrifying boogeyman for our descendants to fear, or even much of a problem at all. If our grandchildren end up hating us, it’s much more likely to be because we failed to give them excellent educations, or create a functioning health care system, or prevent global warming from destroying a livable biosphere. Those will be true burdens on them, ones that we can prevent by wisely spending lots of money today.
Gov. Greg Abbott. (image: Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Texas Passes Bill That Would Create Anti-Abortion Vigilantes
Emily Shugerman, The Daily Beast
Shugerman writes: "Texas lawmakers have sent Gov. Greg Abbott a bill that would allow anyone in the state to sue over an abortion performed past six weeks - essentially turning right-to-lifers into courthouse vigilantes."
The bill now goes to Gov. Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign it.
The law is a twist on the increasingly popular “heartbeat” laws that ban abortions past the date that a heartbeat can be detected—usually around six weeks gestation. (Experts say most embryos do not have a heart at this point, and that the technology is likely picking up an electric signal flutter.) Nine states have passed such six-week bans since 2013; all have been challenged in court and have yet to go into effect.
What differentiates Texas’ bill—and what some lawmakers hope will make it more effective—is the ability for private individuals to sue to enforce it. Under the law, any person who believes that an abortion occurred after a fetal heartbeat can be detected can sue—for minimum suggested damages of $10,000. And they can sue any number of people: the abortion provider, an abortion fund that helped pay for it, even a friend or family member who drove the woman to the clinic.
“It’s unprecedented, there's no question,” Amy Hagstrom-Miller, CEO of Texas-based abortion clinic Whole Woman’s Health, told The Daily Beast. “The idea that just anybody should be able to police a highly trained physician and their staff—that any Joe on the street can make that claim—is just totally shocking."
More than 200 physicians and almost 400 lawyers sent letters to the legislature this month pleading with them not to pass the bill, claiming it contradicts the state constitution and would have a “chilling effect” on a wide swath of medical professionals. Religious leaders held their own press conference at the state capitol to protest it.
But the bill sailed through the state House last week, with every Republican representative and one Democrat voting in its favor. (Almost every Republican in the Senate is either an author or sponsor of the bill.) And Gov. Greg Abbott has signaled he will sign it as soon as it reaches his desk.
In a press release last week, Texas Right to Life said the bill would “further bolster the ultimate goal of ending all elective abortion.”
“After the battle leaves the Texas Capitol, the next stop is the courthouse,” the group said.
Rebecca Parma, a legislative assistant for Texas Right to Life, told The Daily Beast the bill is meant largely as a deterrent, and that lawsuits would be filed only if someone is in violation of the law. But Hagstrom-Miller has no doubt that abortion opponents would jump at the opportunity to take matters into their own hands. In many ways, she said, they already have.
In 2011, after Hagstrom-Miller made an appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show, a prominent anti-abortion group started sending undercover agents to her clinics and filing complaints with every regulatory agency they could find. At one point, Hagstrom-Miller even had to consent to nurses searching through the clinic’s trash. During the pandemic, she said, anti-abortion protesters deluged the clinics with complaints about improper PPE use and social distancing.
The result, she said, is that abortion providers in Texas are “constantly on edge.”
“This is not abstract to me,” she said of the bill. “I’ve experienced this kind of use of the regulatory system and now they're going to get carte blanche to use the legal system.”
Though the bill does not permit lawsuits against the abortion recipient—focusing instead on those who “aid and abet” the procedure—advocates say it could still have a devastating effect on patients.
Dyana Limon-Mercado, executive director of Planned Parenthood Texas Votes, told The Daily Beast about an abortion she received years ago while she was in an abusive relationship. She discovered she was pregnant while trying to leave her partner, she says, and went to her parents for support. Her partner wanted her to continue the pregnancy—in order to secure further control over her, she claims—and he continued to harass both Limon-Mercado and her mother for months after she left.
“Had he had other options to inflict harm and harassment on us, he absolutely would have,” she told The Daily Beast. “These aren't theoretical situations.”
In fact, some men have already attempted to sue over abortions performed on their ex-partners. Last year, a man in Alabama attempted to sue the clinic where he believed his teenage girlfriend legally obtained abortion pills. A probate judge allowed the man, Ryan Magers, to sue on behalf of the aborted fetus’ estate, but a circuit court judge dismissed the case, noting that Magers did not assert any unlawful conduct on the part of his ex-girlfriend or the clinic. (The U.S. Supreme Court has already struck down laws requiring women to obtain permission from their partners for abortions.)
“He may deeply, emotionally, fervently wish that his girlfriend had accepted his pleas to not have an abortion, but she didn’t,” Lucinda Finley, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, told The Daily Beast at the time. “And U.S. constitutional law says it’s her decision, not his.”
Experts say Texas’ law could be more difficult to challenge in court than others. Usually, opponents of abortion restrictions sue the state to block and eventually overturn them. (The U.S. Supreme Court overturned an earlier Texas abortion restriction in 2016 after advocates sued the state health commissioner.) But in this case, it is private citizens, not the state, tasked with enforcing the law, which could make it more difficult to challenge.
Mary Ziegler, an abortion rights historian and professor at Florida State University College of Law, said the bill is the continuation of a 1990s-era strategy to “sue abortion providers out of existence.” In the last decade, she said, abortion foes pivoted away from that strategy and towards passing extreme abortion laws that could pose a constitutional challenge to Roe v Wade. But so far, none of these laws have succeeded in overturning the historic 1973 decision making abortion legal across the country—and that legal fight has gotten costly.
“Even earlier this year, states that were passing six-weeks bans [were] being asked questions about ‘Ok, who’s going to pay for this?” Ziegler said.
The bill in front of the Texas legislature, she suggested, is a way for Republican lawmakers to “have their cake and eat it too.”
“It’s designed to basically be a heartbeat bill without exposing the state to the kind of legal fees and expenses that we’ve seen other states have to pay when they lose lawsuits about this,” Ziegler said. “Texas is trying to find a way to basically outsource its six-week ban.”
Despite the challenges, Limon-Mercado said Planned Parenthood and the ACLU are working together on legal strategies should the bill be signed into law.
“Planned Parenthood has been providing care in Texas for over 80 years,” she said. “We have a base of a million supporters and growing across the state.”
“All of these attacks are unfortunate, they put abortion access further out of reach, they have a real impact on peoples’ lives,” she added. “But at the end of the day, every time the opposition attacks the right to access, our movement grows stronger.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci. (photo: Getty Images)
Fauci: Vaccinated People Become 'Dead Ends' for the Coronavirus
Joseph Choi, The Hill
Choi writes: "Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Biden, said during a discussion on Sunday about the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's decision to drop mask recommendations for fully vaccinated individuals that vaccinated people become 'dead ends' for COVID-19."
Appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," Fauci explained to host John Dickerson that fully vaccinated people can go without masks even if they have an asymptomatic case of COVID-19 because the level of virus is much lower in their nasopharynx, the top part of their throat that lies behind the nose, than it is in someone who is unvaccinated.
"So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they're going to transmit it," Fauci said.
Fauci added that vaccinated people essentially become "dead ends" for the virus to spread within their communities.
"When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community," Fauci said. "In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere. And that's when you get a point that you have a markedly diminished rate of infection in the community."
Fauci said he hopes that the CDC's relaxation of mask guidelines encourages those who have yet to be vaccinated to go and get a shot.
The website of the social media platform Parler is displayed in Berlin earlier this year. (photo: Christophe Gateau/AP)
Social App Parler Is Cracking Down on Hate Speech - but Only on iPhones
Kevin Randall, The Washington Post
Randall writes: "When social media network Parler came back to life on Apple's App Store Monday, it was designed to be a less offensive version than what users are able to see elsewhere."
Shut down after the Jan. 6 riot, Parler is using a new artificial intelligence moderation system with more stringent standards for the App Store than other platforms.
Posts that are labeled “hate” by Parler’s new artificial intelligence moderation system won’t be visible on iPhones or iPads. There’s a different standard for people who look at Parler on other smartphones or on the Web: They will be able to see posts marked as “hate,” which includes racial slurs, by clicking through to see them.
Parler has resisted placing limits on what appears on its social network, and its leaders have equated blocking hate speech to totalitarian censorship, according to Amy Peikoff, chief policy officer. But Peikoff, who leads Parler’s content moderation, says she recognizes the importance of the Apple relationship to Parler’s future and seeks to find common ground between them.
“At Parler we embrace the entire First Amendment meaning freedom of expression and conscience are protected,” Peikoff said. “We permit a maximum amount of legally protected speech.”
Apple declined to comment.
Apple, like other major tech companies, took Parler down in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The app had been used to glorify and encourage the attack. Google also booted Parler from its app store. Shortly after, Amazon Web Services cut off Parler’s cloud computing power, essentially shutting it down. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Last month, Apple confirmed it would let Parler back on its store with the proposed changes to the app’s moderation policies.
Parler’s maneuvering to get back on the App Store — where it was the number one app when it was taken down on Jan. 9 — shows the sway Apple and other major tech companies have over businesses that exist on their platforms. As the sole gatekeeper of what apps can appear on iPhones, Apple is as important an arbiter of online speech as Facebook or Twitter — though it is more often overlooked.
Parler is still pressing Apple to allow a function where users can see a warning label for hate speech, then click through to see it on iPhones. But the banning of hate speech was a condition for reinstatement on the App Store.
“Where Parler is different [from Apple], is where content is legal, we prefer to put the tools in the hands of users to decide what ends up in their feeds,” Peikoff said.
She added that the version on iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system, could be called “Parler Lite or Parler PG.”
Apps can only be downloaded on iPhones through the App Store, and Apple requires that social networking apps meet a certain standard for vetting content. While tech giants such as Facebook and Google’s YouTube can afford to employ thousands of human moderators, in addition to artificial intelligence, smaller companies often lean more heavily on a limited human staff or tech solution. Unlike Parler, the major social media platforms apply their policies universally, regardless of where users see a post.
Parler burst onto the scene in 2018 touting itself as a place for unfettered free speech. It gained rapid steam last year as Facebook and Twitter started penalizing former president Donald Trump for spreading misinformation. Politicians such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) joined. And the number of users surged, particularly among groups of people who supported Trump and leaned to the right.
As Parler grew, a major problem emerged: its hands-off approach to content on its site. It used a system of voluntary, unpaid, Parler-trained community jurors that depended on users to report violating content, which was then reviewed by the group. Jurors then referred potential violations to a five-person quorum that would render a verdict. Users were able to appeal.
Peikoff says the juror system was especially difficult to scale when the platform was experiencing wild growth during the 2020 presidential election, particularly around Nov. 3 and Jan. 6. After the election, the site was filled with misinformation on the election. And on Jan. 6, some users egged on violence at the Capitol, while others used the platform for planning.
In a letter to lawmakers, Apple said it had communicated to Parler before and after the Jan. 6 riot about repeated instances of incitement and hate speech on its platform and the need to fix its moderation. It took the app down after it deemed Parler’s response insufficient to its urgent demand for a “moderation improvement plan.”
Parler had shunned the use of more stringent moderation practices that mainstream social media sites Facebook and Twitter used, before adopting some similar methods.
One of Parler’s first moves to try to get back online was to approach Amazon, according to former CEO John Matze, who was fired in February. He offered to explore using the Amazon’s Rekognition AI tool, which reads faces, objects and scenes in images and videos and is used for content moderation by some of its customers. Amazon‘s own Trust & Safety team, which has fewer than 100 workers, acts only on complaints received and did receive complaints about Parler. But according to Matze, Amazon said implementing that tool wouldn’t be enough to fix Parler’s problem.
Amazon Web Services spokesperson Kristin Brown confirmed that while Rekognition can effectively moderate for image and video content, it does not yet have the same capability for text, which is a critical need for Parler.
Parler managed to get its site back up through hosting provider SkySilk in February.
Matze hired Hive, an AI-based content moderation company that does work for Reddit and Chatroulette, on Jan. 18. Hive, based in San Francisco, employs more than 2.5 million contractors who are paid per task, often in bitcoin, and annotate images, video, text and audio content collected from the Web. That feeds into Hive’s machine learning and algorithms, allowing it to better police content.
Amazon suspends Parler, taking pro-Trump site offline indefinitely
Every post on Parler runs through Hive’s AI for analysis. The algorithms are the first filter for content. More than 99.5 percent of posts on Parler are deemed safe based on algorithmic review, according to Hive and Parler; the remaining 0.5 percent are flagged for Hive’s human moderators to evaluate.
For Parler alone, Hive has contracted with more than 1,000 moderators, said Hive’s CEO, Kevin Guo.
Social media content moderation still has a long way to go, said Sarah Myers West, a post doctorate researcher with NYU’s AI Now Institute. Even Facebook and Twitter’s efforts still fall short on occasion or make the wrong call, but they have put a lot more money into the problem than Parler.
AI moderation is “decently good at identifying the most obviously harmful material. It’s not so great at capturing nuance, and that’s where human moderation becomes necessary,” she said. “It’s really critical for highly skilled labor to be able to make these kinds of decisions.”
Parler sets the guidelines on what Hive looks for. For example, all content that the algorithms flag as “incitement,” or illegal content threatening physical violence, is removed for all users, Peikoff and Guo said. That includes threats of violence against immigrants wanting to cross the border or politicians.
But Parler had to compromise on hate speech, Peikoff said. Those using iPhones won’t see anything deemed to be in that category. The default setting on Android devices and the website shows labels warning “trolling content detected,” with the option to “show content anyway.” Users have the option to change the setting and, like iOS users, never be exposed to posts flagged as hate.
Peikoff said the “hate” flag from the AI review will cue two different experiences for users, depending on the platform they use. Parler’s tech team is continuing to run tests on the dual paths to make sure each runs consistently as intended.
The chief policy officer acknowledges that many in her world view content moderation as anti-free speech and pro-censorship. Some Parler users decry the blocking of hate speech as a sellout to Big Tech.
But Peikoff said she believes revamped moderation allows Parler to better enforce its guidelines and uphold the Constitution by effectively removing inciteful content, which is illegal and threatens free speech.
She praised Apple for its user privacy protections, something she said aligns with Parler’s goals to do the same. She said Parler also argued to Apple that it had been unfairly singled out for contributing to the Jan. 6 violence and in fact had notified the FBI of threats of violence being planned at the Capitol.
Parler was rejected by Apple in February in a bid to reenter the App Store because there was still too much hate speech on the platform, according to a report by Business Insider. In March, Parler tried again, but it hadn’t filtered out user names that were offensive and caught by Apple.
Peikoff said that Apple has now observed Parler’s improved moderation and safer user experience from testing and browsing the app and buys into the new moderation approach.
But content moderation, whether performed by AI, humans, or with both in concert, is famously imperfect. Peikoff said Hive recently flagged for nudity her favorite art piece, the “To Mennesker” naked figures sculpture by Danish artist Stephan Sinding, when she posted it. The image was immediately covered with a splash screen indicating it was unsafe.
“Even the best AI moderation has some error rate,” Guo said. He said the company’s models show that one to two posts out of every 10,000 viewed by the AI should have been caught on Parler but aren’t.
In mid April, Apple’s App Review Board told Parler that it would be allowed back onto its App Store.
In an April 19 letter to Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), who had asked Apple to explain why Parler was removed from the store, Apple stated that Parler’s “proposed updates to its app and the app’s content moderation practices” were now sufficient to comply with its rules.
Peikoff said she looks forward to the platform getting a new life through the App Store and perhaps a fresh look from people who are not part of the right-wing political base. She also hopes Apple will come around to Parler’s proposal giving its users the choice to opt out of receiving hate speech content, just like Apple’s users can now opt out of being tracked.
Meanwhile, Parler is in no rush to return to the Google Play store.
Google spokesperson Dan Jackson says the Play Store will consider reinstatement once Parler submits an updated app for Google Play. But there has been little communication between Parler and Google over the past few months, both companies said.
Peikoff said Parler is not currently pursuing getting back on the Play Store since the updated app can be side-loaded through Parler’s site on Android phones.
A U.N. peacekeeper approaches a U.N. vehicle destroyed by an ADF attack during operations near Beni, Democratic Republic of Congo, on March 13, 2014. (photo: Sylvain Liechti/United Nations/Flickr/CC)
The Islamic State Is in Congo. What Now?
Haroro J. Ingram and Lorenzo Vidino, Lawfare
Excerpt: "The Islamic State first began formally claiming attacks in Congo in April 2019 and since then has claimed dozens of actions by its Congolese 'soldiers of the caliphate.'"
n March 10, the U.S. State Department designated the Islamic State’s affiliate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (ISIS-DRC) a foreign terrorist organization and the group’s leader, Musa Baluku, a specially designated global terrorist. It is the latest and most prominent acknowledgment that the Baluku-led faction of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) is part of the Islamic State’s global enterprise. Yet the ADF’s links to the Islamic State are highly contentious among Congo watchers. For example, a U.N. Group of Experts report released in December 2020 denied ties between the Islamic State and the ADF. The U.N. assessment was perplexing given that only three months earlier, in September 2020, Baluku had declared, “There is no ADF anymore. ... [W]e are a province, the Central Africa Province which is one province among the numerous provinces that make up the Islamic State.”
The Islamic State first began formally claiming attacks in Congo in April 2019 and since then has claimed dozens of actions by its Congolese “soldiers of the caliphate.” Three factors explain the dogged commitment by some to denying links between the Islamic State and its Congo affiliate: persistent misunderstandings about the Islamic State’s global strategy, lack of access to primary sources, and justifiable fears about the policy implications of such an assessment. Our report, “The Islamic State in Congo,” drew on a variety of primary sources, including speeches, doctrine, and communiques produced by the Islamic State and the ADF, as well as interviews with dozens of current and former ADF members, and reveals inextricable links between the Islamic State and the ADF.
The Islamic State in Congo
Those who deny the relationship between the Islamic State and its Congo affiliate highlight as evidence things like the ADF’s crude bomb-making skills, which are unlike those of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and the lack of documentation validating Islamic State-ADF relations. But these assessments ignore dozens of public messages by the Islamic State and the ADF confirming their relationship, and reflect deeply flawed assumptions about the strategic and operational implications of being an Islamic State affiliate.
The Islamic State’s transnational enterprise is a relatively recent evolution in the group’s history that began with its formal expansion into Syria, which it acknowledged in 2013. After declaring its caliphate in June 2014 and claiming that Muslims worldwide were obligated to join its ranks, the Islamic State established criteria that jihadi groups had to satisfy to be accepted as formal affiliates. However, these standards were applied inconsistently. By 2018, the pressures of decline saw the Islamic State restructure its global network by consolidating groups from different countries under regional banners, including groups that, for a variety of possible reasons, had not previously been accepted as affiliates. The Islamic State’s primary exports to its affiliates are its aqeeda (creed), manhaj (method) for establishing an Islamic state, and association with its brand for propaganda purposes. In short, its affiliates are expected to adopt and apply the Islamic State’s ideology and politico-military strategy in their corner of the world.
These historical and strategic dynamics have resulted in a patchwork of groups with varying degrees of operational capabilities and centralized oversight by the Islamic State. To base the genuineness of an affiliate on whether it looks like another affiliate or the Islamic State in Mosul or Raqqa circa 2014 ignores the complex mix of top-down and bottom-up drivers of the Islamic State’s global enterprise. The ultimate criterion is whether the Islamic State has officially declared the local group a “province.” But this says little about the nature of each relationship, which must be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
Under Baluku’s leadership, the ADF has adopted the Islamic State’s aqeeda and manhaj, most notably to justify and frame its operational activities. This is most evident in its propaganda. Since 2017, the historically secretive group has demonstrated a newfound enthusiasm for producing propaganda and using social media to disseminate multilingual content. By 2019, most ADF videos bore the production label “Ashabul Kahf Media” (Media of the Cave Dwellers), and its content and rhetorical framing had begun to echo Islamic State talking points. The Islamic State has also acknowledged ADF operations and counted them among their successes. For example, hours after the Kangbayi prison break on Oct. 20, 2020—which saw the ADF free more than 1,300 prisoners, including 236 of its own fighters—the Islamic State claimed the attack, linking the operation to its global “breaking the walls” campaign that Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the organization’s new leader, had announced two days earlier. Since April 2019, the Islamic State’s central media units have claimed more than 110 operations in the DRC.
The Islamic State relationship with the ADF emerged as early as 2017, two years prior to its public acknowledgment. In February 2018, soldiers with the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) discovered literature by the Islamic State’s Office of Research and Studies in the possession of a dead ADF combatant. While centralized command-and-control oversight seems limited, sources suggest the Islamic State has provided financial support. Waleed Zein, a Kenyan Islamic State financier, transferred thousands of dollars to the group before being sanctioned by the United States for financing “ISIS fighters in Syria, Libya, and Central Africa.” According to witnesses in the camps, Baluku stated on multiple occasions in 2018 that he had received funding from the Islamic State.
Eastern DRC has been plagued by endemic levels of violence, which have worsened in recent years in part due to the ADF. According to the Kivu Security Tracker, from 2018, the same year that then-Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi first mentioned a Central Africa Province (ISCAP), to 2021, the ADF has mounted an escalating campaign of violence against civilians. Between January 2019 and June 2020, the ADF killed approximately 793 civilians, although local civil society groups suggest the actual number of casualties is much higher. It would be wrong to conclusively draw a causal link between the ADF’s increasing toll and its association with the Islamic State—especially given that in late 2019 the FARDC launched a military offensive against the ADF that triggered a wave of retributive violence against civilians. However, a year after the FARDC’s campaign ended, ADF attacks and casualties remain high, with approximately 200 civilians killed so far in 2021. With the recent declaration of martial law in North Kivu and Ituri provinces, the prospect of worsening bloodshed is concerning. While the ADF’s motivations for targeting civilians vary from case to case (for example, retribution, theft, diversion), the violence is increasingly being justified through the Islamic State’s frames. Moreover, the link to the Islamic State’s “brand” and indications of funding support will likely increase the Congo affiliate’s appeal to foreign fighters and other Islamic State affiliates in Africa, which in turn may lead to more attacks on civilians.
Despite the Islamic State’s ties to the ADF being a persistent issue of debate, the connection between the Islamic State and the Baluku-led faction of the ADF is well established, and evidence of the relationship has been publicly available since at least 2019. Other issues that are far more consequential for both research and practice need to be addressed. For example, little is known about the extent to which the Islamic State exerts centralized control over its Congo affiliate. Also, given the ADF’s decades-long history of operating in eastern Congo, it is difficult to ascertain to what degree the link to the Islamic State has substantively changed the ADF’s strategy and governance, or whether the affiliation has provided a way of framing activities that are largely consistent with historical trends. More work needs to focus on how, if at all, the affiliation is understood by rank-and-file members and how it might influence their actions. Addressing these issues would provide the field with important details that help better clarify not only the Islamic State’s involvement in Congo but also the range of potential relationships that define the spectrum of Islamic State affiliates.
The Right Questions to Avoid the Wrong Road
There are understandable concerns that assessing the ADF as an Islamic State affiliate has policy implications that could lead to militarized counterterrorism policy responses that risk exacerbating the crises in eastern DRC. However, denying the clear evidence of Islamic State-ADF links is, at best, filibustering scholarly debate and stunting policy progress and, at worst, ignoring crucial evidence that could help prevent civilian massacres. The debate is no longer about whether the Islamic State has an affiliate in the DRC but, rather, what the nature and implications of that relationship are. In our report, we assess that the Islamic State provided the ADF with a benefactor and amplifier that justified and empowered its politico-military approach. In the ADF, the Islamic State found an enthusiastic local group desperate to revitalize its fortunes, operating in a forgotten corner of the world devastated by decades of war.
With Islamic State affiliates dotted across Africa, the potential for transnational collaboration between groups and increased numbers of foreign fighters will threaten regional stability. Whether it is misguided denialism or flawed counterterrorism policies, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Effective strategies to counter the ADF must draw on the best available evidence to combat them and address the local population’s needs. In the case of Congo, there are currently more questions than answers about the nature of the ADF’s relationship with the Islamic State, which demands that scholars and policymakers put aside preconceived notions (whether personal, ideological, or disciplinary) and collaborate to better understand dynamics on the ground. The violence in eastern Congo is bigger and more complex than the ADF. But confronting this threat will be crucial for protecting the people of the region and thwarting the Islamic State’s effort to remain and expand in Africa.
Cargo ship. (photo: Stewart Sutton/Getty Images)
Cargo Ships Are Cleaning Up Smog - by Dumping Pollution Into the Seas
Maria Gallucci, Grist
Gallucci writes: "A solution meant to reduce smog, experts say, is leaving a potentially toxic trail in its wake."
How a fix for air pollution leads to tons of contaminated water.
ruise and cargo ships around the world are cleaning up their dirty smokestacks, installing systems that prevent harmful pollutants in their exhaust from escaping into the air. Yet much of that pollution is winding up in the sea instead. And so a solution meant to reduce smog, experts say, is leaving a potentially toxic trail in its wake.
Thousands of ships use exhaust cleaning systems, or “scrubbers,” compared with hundreds of ships just a few years ago, as companies face rising pressure to tamp down on their pollution. International regulators now require vessels to burn low-sulfur fuels at sea, while local authorities are cracking down on emissions close to shore. Scrubbers offer a middle ground, allowing ship operators to keep burning sludgy, sulfur-laden “bunker fuel” and still comply with air quality rules.
The problem is that those ships are expected to dump at least 10 billion metric tons of what’s known as wash water — the contaminated byproduct — into seas around the world every year, according to a first-of-its-kind study from the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit research group.
About 80 percent of that wash water ends up close to shore, including near major cruise destinations in the Bahamas, Canada, and Italy as well as in ecologically sensitive areas such as the Great Barrier Reef, the ICCT’s study said. The wash water can be a nasty cocktail of carcinogens from the fuel oil, heavy metals that harm marine life, and nitrates, which can worsen water quality in shallow waters. Instead of flowing into the open ocean, where pollutants might disperse, much of the wash water often pours into places that function more like bathtubs.
“It means that every year, quite high concentrations will accumulate in these areas and will be growing and growing,” said Liudmila Osipova, the study’s lead author and an ICCT researcher in Berlin.
Separate scientific research has shown that scrubber wash water can be acidic and poisonous to some marine life, though the overall effect on coastal environments and communities isn’t fully understood. “We don’t know what kind of consequences that will have,” Osipova said.
Only a fraction of the global shipping fleet — roughly 8 percent — uses scrubbers. Other vessels have switched to cleaner-burning but more expensive petroleum products like “marine gas oil.” But scrubber adoption continues to grow, particularly among giant cargo vessels and cruise ships with huge appetites for fuel. The bigger the vessel, the bigger its scrubber, and the more wash water the system will ultimately discharge.
Most scrubber systems are “open-loop,” meaning they mix seawater with exhaust gas, filter it, then discharge the resulting effluent. “Closed-loop” systems treat and recirculate their wash water and dispel a smaller amount, but fewer shipping companies use them because they cost more to install and operate. Until ICCT researchers studied some 3,600 scrubber-equipped ships, there wasn’t a solid sense of how much polluted water these systems produce around the world or where it winds up. Some 700 more ships now use scrubbers since the research data was collected, so the volume of wash water is likely much higher than estimated, Osipova said.
For environmental groups, the study compounds their broader frustration with the industry’s seemingly tepid efforts to address climate change. Cargo shipping is responsible for nearly 3 percent of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. Yet rather than pursue technologies to replace bunker fuel, some shipowners are spending millions of dollars to install equipment that addresses one problem — air pollution — but does nothing to advance the industry’s decarbonization efforts, said Dan Hubbell, manager of the Ocean Conservancy’s shipping emissions campaign in Washington, D.C.
“We’re facing a truly global crisis, and it’s the kind of thing that requires bold solutions,” Hubbell said. “A piece we’ve struggled with is the industry’s preference for short-term fixes.”
Proponents of scrubber systems pushed back against the ICCT study and other criticisms. The Clean Shipping Alliance, an industry group that includes the cruise giant Carnival, said the report’s estimates of 10 billion tons of wash water are “greatly exaggerated.” The alliance pointed to industry-funded research that suggests that wash water has the “same overall water quality” as the seawater it returns to. In a statement, Capt. Mike Kaczmarek, the alliance’s chairman, said that scrubbers have become “a successful bridging solution to carbon neutrality.”
Independent research had already raised flags about the effects of scrubber wash water on the marine environment. Last year, a study on ships in Belgium found their scrubber discharges to be acidic, with elevated concentrations of metals like nickel, copper, and chromium — all of which can hurt fish and other marine life. In April, the Swedish Environmental Research Institute found that wash water from North Sea ships has “severe toxic effects” on the zooplankton that serve as food for cod, herring, and other important fish species. Researchers suggested that ships’ scrubber systems might serve as a “witch’s cauldron,” meaning that chemical compounds brew in a hot, acidic environment and become more toxic together than they would if taken individually.
Kerstin Magnusson, an ecotoxicologist and co-author of the Swedish study, noted that scrubber wash water doesn’t affect all species the same, and it may be less toxic in certain environments than others. But research on the topic is still relatively limited, in large part because scientists have trouble getting their hands on wash water samples. “Ship owners don’t want us to collect it,” she said. “They think we are seeking to find adverse effects, but this is not the case.”
Given such uncertainty, governments worldwide are taking steps to protect the waters they control. Thirty countries and ports have banned or put limits on scrubber wash water in their jurisdictions, including major shipp6ing countries like China, Singapore, and Norway, as well as authorities in charge of the Panama and Suez canals. In the United States, California and Connecticut have scrubber-related restrictions. And in Washington state, officials are considering a proposal to prohibit wash water in the Puget Sound, a busy cruise hub that’s home to threatened orca whales and Chinook salmon.
The Port of Seattle last year banned cruise ships from dumping wash water “out of an abundance of caution” to protect fish and wildlife habitats near the Seattle waterfront, said Alex Adams, the port’s senior manager of environmental programs. “Until we can learn more about the impacts of wash water discharges, we’re going to continue this prohibition,” Adams said. In response to the policy, most cruise ships now plug into the port’s shoreside electricity to avoid running their scrubbers.
Groups like Ocean Conservancy and Stand.earth are calling for a blanket ban on scrubber use within U.S. and Canadian waters. The ICCT recommends that the International Maritime Organization — the United Nations body that regulates the shipping industry — prohibit ships from using scrubbers to meet environmental protocols and phase out scrubbers on existing ships. That might encourage companies to get more of their vessels to run on low-sulfur fuels like marine gas oil until fossil fuel alternatives such as green methanol, hydrogen, and ammonia become viable.
Without tighter restrictions on wash water pollution, or stronger requirements to reduce ships’ greenhouse gas emissions, cruise and cargo ships are expected to continue installing scrubbers. That could lead to even more wash water getting dumped overboard. The way things are going, Osipova said, “We’ll just see more and more emissions of water pollution in the future.”
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