08 April 22
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But the scale of the killings and the depravity with which they were committed are only just becoming apparent as police, local officials and regular citizens start the grim task of clearing Bucha of the hundreds of corpses decomposing on streets and in parks, apartment buildings and other locations.
As a team from the district prosecutor’s office moved slowly through Bucha on Wednesday, investigators uncovered evidence of torture before death, beheading and dismemberment, and the intentional burning of corpses.
Some of the cruelest violence took place at a glass factory on the edge of town.
On the gravel near a loading dock lay the body of Dmytro Chaplyhin, 21, whose abdomen was bruised black and blue, his hands marked with what looked like cigarette burns. He ultimately was killed by a gunshot to the chest, concluded team leader Ruslan Kravchenko. His body then was turned into a weapon, tied to a tripwire connected to a mine.
“Every day we get about 10 to 20 calls for bodies like this,” Kravchenko said. The group worked quickly but gently, crouching over Chaplyhin’s body and noting minute details on clipboards. Some team members sifted through surveillance footage from the factory, as well as gathered testimony from eyewitnesses and local residents, to best understand what went on inside the complex.
On a dirt path behind it was an even more grotesque scene: two victims, their bodies bloating. One man’s head had been cleanly sliced off, burned and left by his splayed feet.
Investigators found no identification cards on either of the individuals, whose gloves were still in coat pockets despite the frigid cold.
The team called several men from the surrounding area to help with identification. A man who gave his name as Alexei said both were security guards at the factory. He recounted how Russians had come to his house three times while drunk and spoke about committing sadistic acts against Ukrainians.
“They didn’t act like men; they acted like savages,” he said.
Farther down the path, another corpse. Empty bottles of vodka lay in the grass beside it. It appeared that someone had tried but failed to behead this man, too.
The factory is just one fragment of the bloodied city. In Bucha’s cemetery, 58 body bags were lined up on Wednesday. All but one contained bodies of people who had been summarily executed or tortured to death, according to Vitaly Chayka, an employee who has been processing the dead. Because the cemetery can’t handle the number of burials needed, a large refrigerator truck is on call to transport bodies to morgues in Kyiv.
“There are 58 here and two more in that van,” he said. “They’re all men — the women and children mostly fled — but they are all civilians, too. None were wearing uniforms.”
Chayka moved between the bags, unzipping them so he could categorize their contents based on the extent of decomposition. Only eight of the bodies had been identified so far. His cellphone rang, and soon he was relaying directions to a new set of bodies someone had discovered.
“Sometimes people call us to say where the bodies are, or sometimes we drive around and ask,” he said. “But there are always more.”
Six weeks ago, this suburb outside of Kyiv featured tree-lined streets, modest homes, a few high-rises and a half-hour commute to the capital.
The war made Bucha a front line, with most structures being destroyed by artillery. When Russian soldiers were in control for a time, they made the city an arena for blood sport — though many of them died here.
On Vokzalna Street near the train station, the burned shells of dozens of Russian armored vehicles remain as a kind of testament to the horror.
“It was hell on Earth,” said Oleg Yevtushenko, 55, a resident of an apartment block that the soldiers took over as a base.
He and hundreds of others moved into the basement of a kindergarten, seeking safety in numbers. Russian soldiers had been singling out men whom they found outside, often detaining them, beating them and sometimes killing them, Yevtushenko said.
But over the course of a month, there are things one must do outside: Find water, walk the dog.
That’s how 47-year-old Vasil Nedashkivskiy died — walking his black Labrador in late March, just three days before the Russians withdrew. Anything could provoke the soldiers who occupied the neighborhood, Yevtushenko said. They had detained him, too, making him kneel in front of them for 40 minutes with a gun to his head while they accused him of being a Nazi.
“They shot Vasil,” Yevtushenko said. “Just like that.”
On Tuesday, locals laid Nedashkivskiy to rest in one of many sidewalk funerals that day. Yevtushenko has counted 20 neighbors who were killed, and he and others have been burying them in the gardens of their apartment blocks or in any open space they can find.
Next to a makeshift grave of three people — a woman in her 20s and two men in their 30s — the detritus of Russian ration packs still littered the ground. Chewing gum, pickles, cigarettes and vodka.
Destruction on a street in the town of Bucha near Kyiv. (photo: Roman Pilipey/EPA)
The images of the murdered civilians in Bucha shocked the world. DER SPIEGEL has learned that German intelligence intercepted radio traffic from suspected perpetrators. It appears that such atrocities were part of the strategy of Putin's army.
Following the withdrawal of the Russian military from the town over the weekend, a mass grave was discovered as well as the bodies of several dozen dead civilians left lying on the streets. The hands of some of the victims had been tied, while other bodies showed signs of torture. Numerous women and children are also reportedly among the victims.
The Russian government has vehemently denied that Russian forces are responsible for these war crimes. Several – completely unsubstantiated – claims have been made that the alleged war crimes have been staged by Ukraine. Those claims, however, are contradicted by the statements of numerous witnesses interviewed by reporters from DER SPIEGELand other news outlets in the town of Bucha.
The intercepted comments now appear to refute Russia’s denials. DER SPIEGEL has learned that the BND briefed parliamentarians on Wednesday about its findings. Some of the intercepted traffic apparently matches the locations of bodies found along the main road through town. In one of them, a soldier apparently told another that they had just shot a person on a bicycle. That corresponds to the photo of the dead body lying next to a bicycle that has been shared around the world. In another intercepted conversation, a man apparently said: First you interrogate soldiers, then you shoot them.
Part of the Plan?
The BND material also apparently provides evidence that members of the Russian mercenary unit called the Wagner Group played a leading role in the atrocities. The group is known to have perpetrated similar atrocities in Syria.
Eyewitnesses recently reported that the occupying force in Bucha was initially made up of "young soldiers." Once they were replaced by other units, the witnesses said, the attacks on civilians grew more frequent. Some eyewitnesses have said that Chechen units were in the town. The accounts raise the question as to whether this progression was part of the occupation plan.
The radio traffic intercepted by the BND makes it seem as though the atrocities perpetrated on civilians in Bucha were neither random acts nor the product of individual soldiers who got out of hand. Rather, say sources familiar with the audio, the material suggests that the troops spoke of the atrocities as though they were simply discussing their everyday lives.
That, say sources familiar with the audio, indicates that the murder of civilians has become a standard element of Russian military activity, potentially even part of a broader strategy. The intention is that of spreading fear among the civilian population and thus reducing the will to resist.
DER SPIEGEL has learned that more intercepted radio traffic is currently being analyzed, though it is apparently difficult to precisely localize some of the audio. Some of the recordings apparently indicate that incidents such as those in Bucha have also taken place elsewhere. There are reportedly indications of potential atrocities in the area surrounding Mariupol, the large city in southern Ukraine that has been besieged by the Russian military.
Close relatives of journalist Maks Levin at his funeral on April 4 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Levin went missing on March 13 and was found dead on April 1 near the village Huta Mezhyhirska, north of Kyiv. (photo: Alexey Furman/Getty)
A local official and a journalist’s father were abducted. Their families’ stories are part of a pattern of disappearances in Russia-occupied Ukraine.
Natali’s father never did.
She learned later, through relatives, that Russian soldiers took Maruniak from the home he shared with his wife. On the morning of March 23, Russian forces returned, with Maruniak in handcuffs.
The Russian soldiers searched the house, relatives told Natali, though what the soldiers were looking for remains unclear. They ripped the flowers out of their pots. They found the money, even the bills they’d hidden carefully, and they took that along with other valuables, and the candy and the nuts. They destroyed the furniture. The soldiers examined a hole in the yard dug by the dog, suspicious of the loose soil.
“Woman, calm down,” soldiers told Maruniak’s wife, according to Natali. “Maybe it’s the last time you see your husband.”
She saw her husband one more time, on March 24. He returned again with soldiers, though this time, they covered their faces. “Feed him, change his socks, and give him his medicine,” they ordered Maruniak’s wife. As she did, she noticed his legs were bruised blue. There was another bruise on his right temple, another on his arm. Maruniak said nothing, only that it was cold where he was being held.
That was the last Maruniak’s family saw or heard anything about him.
Maruniak is among dozens of local officials or community leaders who have been abducted or arbitrarily arrested by Russian forces as they seized territory in Ukraine, especially in the east and the south. These disappearances are both an attempt to coerce cooperation and a targeted effort to silence and intimidate Ukrainians who may oppose or organize against a Russian occupation.
The disappearances, said Tetiana Pechonchyk, the head of Human Rights Centre ZMINA, a Ukraine-based organization, are intended to “stop the resilience of local population and to incline the local mayors, active members of local communities, who have authority in this community, to press them to collaborate with the occupiers.”
The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has documented about 109 cases of suspected detention or enforced disappearances among civilians since February 24, including 48 local officials. The UN and other human rights groups have confirmed disappearances among other members of civil society: volunteers, activists, journalists, religious leaders, protesters, and former military veterans. (Vox reached out to the Russian Embassy for comment, but did not receive a response.)
Anastasiia Moskvychova, who has been tracking disappearances for ZMINA, says they have confirmed more than 100 arbitrary detentions since February 24; about 50 people are still missing.
But Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Kyiv-based activist and head of the Center for Civil Liberties, said these numbers are only the “top of the iceberg.” Her group is tracking dozens more suspected cases of enforced disappearances, but they are still trying to corroborate evidence, a task that’s all the more difficult in Russian-occupied areas. Other times, family and friends of the suspected victims fear making that information public.
Fear is why disappearances happen. It is a particularly insidious human rights violation and a technique utilized by US-backed dictators in Latin America in the 20th century, Nazi Germany, and other regimes around the world. Individuals are arbitrarily arrested or detained by a government — or affiliated groups like security services, local militias, and criminal gangs — and because disappearances happen outside the bounds of the law, there’s often little recourse. “State denial is an essential part of a disappearance,” said Freek van der Vet, a researcher at the University of Helsinki’s institute of international law and human rights. “Somebody would disappear, and now authorities, or occupying forces, would deny they are responsible for the disappearance.”
These tactics did not begin with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24; they are a continuation of a strategy used before, including during Russia’s military campaigns in Chechnya and in Ukraine. After Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and invaded the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine in support of a separatist movement, activists and journalists and officials were abducted and detained in these regions.
“It’s the repetition of the Russian playbook,” said Mattia Nelles, a political analyst specializing in Russia and Ukraine. “It’s definitely a concerted effort of intimidation that we see in the now-occupied areas in the south and east, but also in the north.”
All of this foreshadows how Russia might try to consolidate control in Ukrainian areas it captures by force. The Russian occupation is still being met with defiance; people are protesting, those who have been kidnapped and released are speaking out. But human rights advocates and experts worry that, as the war continues, Russian forces may ratchet up this repression, and carry out more enforced disappearances, along with other possible war crimes. The United States raised this possibility to the United Nations ahead of Russia’s invasion.
“What we see now,” Nelles said, “foreshadows how the Russians will govern.”
What’s happening in Ukraine has happened before
In late March, Svetlana Zalizetskaya, a journalist who ran a news outlet in Melitopol, a city in southeastern Ukraine currently under Russian control, got a call from the men who detained her father. She asked what they wanted. “We want you to be here,” came the reply.
Zalizetskaya, who had already left Melitopol, told them she would not return. Instead, referencing a viral clip of Ukrainians on Snake Island talking to a Russian warship, she told the men they could go where that warship went — that is, to “go fuck yourself.”
On March 25, she got another call from a man who she referred to as Sergei. She demanded he let her father go. “When you stop writing bad stuff,” he told her. In another call, Sergei accused Zalizetskaya of causing the deaths of Russian soldiers with her writing. “Why me? You came to our land and you’re killing us,” Zalizetskaya shot back. “I’m not guilty in the death of your soldiers.”
Zalizetskaya, though, understood this back-and-forth would not go anywhere. Her 75-year-old father had recently had a stroke, and he needed his blood pressure medication. So she made a deal: on her Facebook page, she would post that she no longer owned the Melitopol news outlet, in exchange for her father’s “evacuation” — the words his captors used, she emphasized.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told CNN in March that he was not aware of any disappearances among journalists or civil society activists, despite well-documented reports from human rights groups. And these organizations have seen what happened to Zalizetskaya’s family happen before in Russian-occupied territories.
“We can clearly state that it is a deliberate policy,” Matviichuk said. “This is like a method of conducting warfare.”
Extrajudicial arrests happen within Russia, but they are documented more frequently in Russia’s other territories, including Dagestan and Chechnya, where enforced disappearances became what Human Rights Watch described as an “enduring feature” of the conflict.
In Crimea, ethnic Tatars, who tended to oppose Russia’s annexation in 2014, were targeted, including one local activist and leader who was allegedly kidnapped by men in Russian traffic police uniforms in 2016. In the Donbas, militias kidnapped, tortured, and killed a local city council member who tried to take down a flag of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. “They hunted after the activists, after the persons who supported the Ukrainian army, Ukrainian volunteers,” said Oleksandr Pavlichenko, executive director of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union.
“Now we see the same scheme,” Pavlichenko added, “and it’s only the beginning of this scheme.”
Disappearances are one element of the scheme; the other is what happens after that. Advocates say they have credible evidence — including from those who have been released since 2014 — that those being held are interrogated, and sometimes tortured, physically and mentally, and sometimes killed. Zalizetskaya said that her father was never beaten, but interrogated nightly: “They just repeated the same question: ‘Why are you arrested?’ And he was answering, ‘because of my last name.’”
Natali noted that what little information her relatives had about her father’s disappearance, they knew he was cold. “They hold people in conditions which can be torture itself,” Matviichuk said. The longer people stay disappeared, the more likely they are to be killed, though confirmation of that is often difficult to obtain.
Human rights watchers and experts say it is often difficult to say who is carrying out disappearances, or subsequent mistreatment — including in Ukraine right now. “The state actors are not interested in accountability for those kinds of abuses, so it creates this environment of impunity,” said Saskia Brechenmacher, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has researched Russian civil society.
That can make it hard to know exactly how organized these actions are, or whether they are directed top-down from Moscow, the work of local units or security services, or militias affiliated with Moscow.
Eugenia Andreyuk, a human rights adviser at the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), said that some of those detained in Ukraine are arrested just days after Russia takes a city, and Russian forces often come directly to activists’ houses. That speed has led researchers to suspect Russia knew who they were targeting. Russian authorities, Andreyuk said, were “equipped for this.” Her colleague, Maryia Kvitsinskaya, regional consultant for the OMCT, said they are seeing military veterans being targeted in the smallest of villages. “For me, it’s a question of how they got the list of these people,” she said.
Ahead of the invasion, the United States told the United Nations it had credible information that Moscow was compiling lists of Ukrainians to be “killed or sent to camps.” Advocates do not have confirmation of such lists, or who may have compiled them if they do exist, but emphasized that this campaign of disappearances is not random.
“It’s not happening as some chaotic or spontaneous thing,” Andreyuk said. “This is very targeted detentions — and it’s a very targeted policy to get more control over society.”
A foreshadowing of how Russia will occupy these zones
Natali said there still is no information about her father. Her family has heard some rumors, including that a woman was taken to a pretrial detention center in Kherson, and might have seen Maruniak. If it was her father, he was skin and bones. Natali and her relatives still do not know what the Russian soldiers were looking at his home. She heard they might have been looking for weapons or guns, but her dad was not connected to military servicemen.
Again, this not knowing is the point. “[People] never know if somebody has died, or is still alive, or if they would ever return, and I think that creates the fear in society in general. Could this happen to me?” Van der Vet, of the University of Helsinki, said.
Disappearances terrorize the local population, but Russia’s ultimate goal is to consolidate power, either through direct control or pro-Russian proxies. This is why civil society activists — those who can organize a peaceful resistance to occupation — are often the first targeted.
The detention of local authorities is also an effort to win legitimacy. “If you can get mayors, or elected officials, to say that ‘okay, they support the new order,’ I think that’s very important,” said Oxana Shevel, associate professor of political science at Tufts University.
If they cannot win that cooperation, the abduction of a local leader gives the Russian military the opportunity to install a more pliant figure, as Russian personnel attempted to do in Melitopol. (In that case, surveillance video showed the capture of the elected mayor, Ivan Fedorov, with a bag over his head; he has since been freed, and has continued to speak about his capture.)
Added together, these disappearances help create a “Stalin-like” police state, a rule through terror and mistrust, and where nobody knows what — or who — might make them a target of disappearance. “If you just keep silent, it is also suspicious,” Pavlichenko said.
Those who have tracked disappearances in Ukraine since 2014 point out that, as brutal as that campaign was, this latest chapter is different. The Ukrainian population in places like Kherson and Melitopol have continued to protest and resist the invasion — even after evidence of kidnappings. “We’re really afraid that we will have more and more cases [of enforced disappearances],” Kvitsinskaya said. “Because what we see — it’s really the way how Russia’s military responds when civilians don’t want to cooperate with them.”
After her father’s kidnapping, Natali says that few people will come to her father’s house anymore. “Everyone is afraid to talk in the village,” she said. Her father’s wife is afraid too, but of leaving the house. “What if they will bring her husband home when she wouldn’t be there?” she said. “So she’s just waiting for him.”
Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-CT), center, becomes emotional during a news conference with the Congressional Black Caucus after the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 7, 2020. (photo: Sarah Beth Maney/NYT)
Congressional Black Caucus hails ‘historic pick’ of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman in the court’s history
When the day arrived, it inspired an outbreak of euphoria for many Black Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“I’m glad I’m alive,” said a joyful Yvette Clarke, a New York congresswoman.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) filed on to Capitol Hill, through corridors lined with portraits, busts and statues of the white men who have dominated Congress since its inception.
Clarke’s district was once represented by the first Black woman ever elected to the Congress, the late Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, who was first elected in 1969.
“I’m glad I’m around to witness this,” Clarke told the Guardian. “I wasn’t around for Thurgood Marshall,” she said, referring to the lawyer and civil rights activist who became the first African American on the supreme court in 1967, and who served until 1991.
Clarke entered Congress in 2007. “This is so historic on so many different levels,” she said.
After the 53-47 Senate vote that included the support of three Republicans, Jackson will take her place as an associate justice on the nine-member court. She will be the 121st justice to join America’s highest judicial body, established in 1790.
In October 1967, Marshall became a supreme court justice. In September 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman to serve on the court. In August 2009, Sonia Sotomayor became the court’s first Hispanic member.
And in April 2022, Jackson became the first Black woman confirmed to the bench in its 232-year existence.
“I’m very proud that my very first vote to confirm a supreme court nominee will be to confirm this historic pick,” Raphael Warnock, who won his own milestone race in January last year to become Georgia’s first Black US senator, told the Guardian as he headed to the Senate chamber to vote for Jackson.
“I had the opportunity to meet her, and she brings talent and integrity and as we saw during those scorched-earth hearings, a great deal of grace and civility,” he added, nodding to Jackson’s confirmation sessions before the Senate judiciary committee last month where she endured vicious attacks from several Republicans.
The chair of the CBC, Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, swept on to Capitol Hill on Thursday and witnessed Jackson’s triumph.
“It means the world to us, because when you think about voting rights, when you think about our children, when you think about all of our fundamental issues – it starts at the supreme court,” Beatty said.
“For the first time, a Black woman sitting there. It gives us balance. Not only because she’s Black, but because of her judicial temperance, and because of her reverence for the rule of law. But also when you look at her background and culture: she attended public [publicly funded] schools,” Beatty continued.
Members of the caucus gathering in an ornate room in the Capitol near the House floor for a group photo after Jackson was confirmed included those holding black T-shirts saying “Black Women are Supreme”.
Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia said: “Despite all of the dog-whistling and appealing to racist instincts among the Republican base, there are three Republican senators who have been able to work their way through all of the QAnon-conspiracy nonsense being spewed by Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, and folks trying to outdo themselves with outrageousness directed toward [Jackson].”
Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah broke with their fellows who went along with Republican leadership, and those who attacked Jackson outright, and voted for Joe Biden’s nominee.
“I’m glad we had three Republican senators who saw through that, and recognized how eminently qualified Ketanji Brown Jackson is, and the fact that she will bring more experience to the bench than just about every one of the justices on the supreme court – including the chief justice [John Roberts],” Johnson added.
Jackson has a connection to Congresswoman Frederica Wilson of Florida, who represents parts of Miami, and has known the judge’s parents for decades.
“Her father was the first Black school board attorney when I was serving on the school board. Her mother was a principal when I was a principal … so [for] the Black people in Miami, you can imagine what’s happening now as we watch this,” she told the Guardian.
“Young kids know her name, and they’re talking about her in schools. They’re talking about her in barbershops,” she said. “This was a young lady who grew up with people telling her you can be anything you want to be.”
On Thursday afternoon, a beaming Kamala Harris also became emotional as, in her other role as president of the Senate, she announced that Jackson was officially confirmed.
The first female and first Black US vice-president marked another historic moment that, as Harris said after she won the 2020 election with Biden, may be the first but “won’t be the last”.
Anti-government militant Ammon Bundy is among a slate of far-right candidates running for office in Idaho in 2022. (photo: Kirk Siegler/NPR)
"When you see him rising in the national consciousness as some kind of a cowboy rancher, that gets a little touchy," Ellis said one windy afternoon on her ranch near Blackfoot, Idaho.
To Ellis, Bundy gave ranchers — actual, working, public lands ranchers who follow the law and pay their fees — a bad name. Self-described moderate Republicans like her viewed the scofflaw rebellion as a precursor to today's right-wing politics of conspiracies and trolling becoming mainstreamed. Ellis is also alarmed by the meanness and threats directed at anyone with opposing viewpoints.
"It's dividing communities," she says. "They love the politics of fear."
Ruby red Idaho is one of the most intense battlegrounds between moderates and extremists in the Republican Party. Its primary is next month. Political analysts see it as a national test for how far to the right the GOP can be pulled.
Ammon Bundy recently switched his affiliation from Republican to independent. But the state's lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, who has cozied up to white nationalists and anti-government militias, is vying for the GOP nomination. There are also militia-backed candidates running for the state legislature, including two men also involved with the recent armed standoffs with federal agents in the West.
Attacking conservatives as RINOs
In eastern Idaho, Jennifer Ellis regrets not speaking out sooner. She's a past president of the Idaho Cattle Association and proudly says she's a fourth generation Idahoan.
"People like me kind of got tired of listening to the conspiracy stuff," she says. "We just went home and went back to work, and so then the extremists were able to take control."
So last fall, Ellis joined with a group of former Republican elected leaders here — including a retired state House speaker and state Supreme Court justice — to form the political action committee Take Back Idaho. The group has raised close to $100,000, and it's initially trying to unseat 16 far-right legislators.
That will be a tough job in Idaho, where the far right often even attacks fellow conservatives as being RINOs, Republicans in name only.
"There's nothing that Republican officeholders hate worse than being called a RINO, or not Christian enough, and now we've got both of those operations going in this state," Ellis says.
The state has long been associated with political extremism, but only lately has it been aligned to elements within a political party.
Around her family's ranch on the windy high prairie, new subdivisions have sprung up lately with homes bought by newcomers, some calling themselves "refugees" from nearby blue states. Trump 2024 flags started popping up here right around President Biden's nomination. Letters to the editor champion the former president as a "blue collar billionaire."
In most states, Idaho's Republican Gov. Brad Little, who's running for reelection, would be considered a hard-line conservative. He just signed a Texas-style abortion bill. But around here, some dyed in the wool party activists consider Little too liberal.
"We are a very conservative state with nothing but blue policies," says Doyle Beck, a former Bonneville County GOP chairman.
Beck runs a construction company in Idaho Falls and is also a state GOP delegate. He says conservatives have worked hard in recent years to steer the party toward an agenda based on liberty: eliminating most government, he says, as well as taxes on business. Beck sees the upcoming primary, and the national midterms, as a tipping point.
"The status quo is special interest groups and cronies governing the state of Idaho," Beck says. "Take Back Idaho's feeling like they're losing."
Where are the current Republicans?
At the University of Montana, political scientist Rob Saldin is tracking moderate groups like Take Back Idaho, which so far are rare.
"Where are the current high-profile Republicans who are endorsing and supporting this effort?" Saldin asks. "I don't see many. And the ones you do, it's like, Liz Cheney, who's in big trouble."
Saldin says the populist rhetoric stoked by the former president and his followers continues to appeal to the party base, and particularly people who have never voted or been politically active before. He figures that may be why some current GOP lawmakers are reluctant to speak out.
The former governor of Saldin's state, Marc Racicot, has been writing editorials in mainstream outlets like The Washington Post lately similar in tone to Take Back Idaho. Racicot, who also chaired the Republican National Committee during the George W. Bush administration, says the party's far-right leaders are a threat to democracy.
"There is a huge, great middle of America that is concerned about us as a republic falling apart," Racicot told NPR.
Racicot was a popular two-term governor in the 1990s. Now some of the party's base attacks him, too, as a RINO. He calls that angry, cheap rhetoric.
"Anytime you get fat and happy about what it is you're doing that's not focused upon the best interest of your country first — not your party, your country first — you end up placing your form of government at risk," Racicot says.
He added that Republicans today in his view are using hate and division as a tool to distract rather than dealing head on with tough issues facing the country.
Where are "the grown-ups"?
This was rancher Jennifer Ellis' take as the Idaho legislature recently wrapped up its session. Lawmakers made national headlines for going after librarians for exposing kids to "harmful" books. One sponsor of a self-described election integrity bill even pushed a false notion that Canadians were crossing over the border to vote in elections here.
"I just have to wonder where the grown-ups in the room are on some of these things," Ellis says. "We have got infrastructure that is really in peril. We have got schools that have not been funded like they should."
On a recent afternoon, Ellis was trying to raise money for the PAC and fight extremism in the middle of calving season, one of the busiest times of the year on a ranch.
"Actually I'm surprised that they haven't done a little bit of bellarin'," she said, laughing, as she steered her pickup into a pasture where some newborn calves, still wet, lay with their mothers.
This time of year, when the wind kicks up dirt and mud on them, she's often in the fields checking on things around the clock. She says true Idaho conservatives are out here on the land working.
"We're not conspiracy theorists in Idaho; that's never been how we've ran this state," Ellis says. "It's a meat and potatoes state. We do important things; we don't do juvenile things."
For Ellis and other moderates trying to pull the pendulum back toward the middle, the May 17 primary could be a big first test of that.
A victim of the June 2015 airstrike looks at the destruction in Hawija, Iraq, in February 2022. (photo: Ayman al-Amiri/PAX)
Military documents reveal a flawed “collateral damage estimate” before an airstrike that killed scores of Iraqis in 2015.
In the wake of the carnage, the chief of targets for U.S. Central Command insisted in an email, included in a detailed follow-up assessment of the attack by military investigators, that the strike had been conducted by the book, including the pre-attack “collateral damage estimate,” or CDE. “My targeteers actually spent hours working and reworking this target just to make the CDE ‘executable,’” he wrote in the email. “This was a perfectly accurate CDE call,” he insisted, emphasizing in another email that “CDE Methodology does not account for secondary explosions.”
The emails and other investigation documents are included in 73 pages of post-strike assessments of the Hawija attack that are part of a 5,400-page archive of the Pentagon’s confidential reviews of civilian casualty allegations resulting from U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. The archive was published in December by the New York Times, which obtained the documents through the Freedom of Information Act. The documents, part of the Times’s award-winning “Civilian Casualty Files” series, offer an unvarnished glimpse of the faulty intelligence and inaccurate targeting that led to thousands of noncombatant deaths. They also offer a look into little-known policies and procedures — such as the failure to factor secondary explosions into estimates of potential collateral damage from an attack on a bomb factory.
“It is stunning that secondary explosions aren’t factored into collateral damage estimation — especially in this case, where the target was an explosives factory,” said Annie Shiel, the senior adviser for U.S. policy and advocacy at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “It’s also illustrative of the broader ways the U.S. and its partners have failed to address not just direct civilian deaths and injuries, but also the wide range of reverberating harms that devastate communities for years to come, as civilians in Hawija have experienced firsthand — things like loss of livelihoods and essential services, displacement, public health crises, food insecurity, and long-term psychological trauma.”
The U.S.-vetted attack on the vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, or VBIED, factory in Hawija was outsourced to two Dutch F-16s that struck the site on the night of June 2-3, 2015. The attack and secondary explosions killed at least 85 civilians, may have injured 500 or more people, and reportedly damaged 1,200 businesses and 6,000 homes, according to a new report by researchers from Al-Ghad, PAX (a Dutch civilian protection organization), and Utrecht University.
“Overnight, I lost my soul, my body, my family, everything,” Abdullah Rashid Saleh, whose five children and two wives were killed in the strike, recalled in a 2021 interview with the research team that’s included in the report. “I want to meet the person who killed my family and ask him why did he do that?”
Targeting of the VBIED factory was approved by Lt. Gen. James Terry, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force — Operation Inherent Resolve, according to an August 2015 Army investigation, which was also released in the Times’s “Civilian Casualty Files.”
Collateral damage estimates use complex modeling to predict the anticipated civilian harm from a strike, but the Hawija documents demonstrate that CDEs can be deeply flawed. While estimates take potential chemical, biological, or radiological plumes into account, bombing an “active ISIL VBIED and IED factory and weapons cache” did not raise any red flags beyond concern for a shed that the U.S. military deemed “the only collateral structure … estimated to be affected by any of the weapons.”
“I do not think that anyone could have predicted the magnitude of the explosion and effects in the surrounding neighborhood,” wrote the chief of targets, whose name is redacted from the documents. “Secondary effects are impossible to estimate with any level of accuracy.”
But in 2020, the U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group Airwars reported that a Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs email from June 2015 noted an estimate of “probably more than 18,060 kilos of explosives stored, making this the largest ISIS IED factory ever.” Last year, when the U.S. Navy detonated roughly the same amount of explosives — 40,000 pounds — near its new aircraft carrier to test the ship’s combat survivability, it registered magnitude 3.9, the equivalent of a small earthquake.
“It may not be possible to determine the effects of a secondary explosion,” explained Sarah Holewinski Yager, a former senior adviser on human rights to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now the Washington director at Human Rights Watch, “but it’s clearly possible to understand that explosives are present and even the general magnitude of what an explosion might look like.”
Almost seven years after the attack, Hawija has never recovered, according to the new report. “The airstrike killed breadwinners and destroyed many workplaces and so cost many people their livelihood; because people’s homes had become uninhabitable, they became displaced; damage to the electricity network reduced civilians’ access to clean (and thus safe) drinking water,” it states. “This demonstrates how one single airstrike can cause reverberating civilian harm effects that last years, even generations.”
After Dutch media exposed the Netherlands’s responsibility for the Hawija strike, lawmakers set up a fund to help reconstruct the city. But the 4.4 million euros allocated is not spent in consultation with local authorities, according to the report, and is insufficient to meet ongoing needs. Neither the Dutch nor the U.S. government has ever offered an apology to survivors or individual compensation, which is hardly unique. “There are thousands of civilians harmed by U.S. military operations who never even received acknowledgement of the harm they suffered,” Yager told The Intercept. “Those involved in Hawija absolutely deserve amends.”
Central Command and the Combined Joint Task Force — Operation Inherent Resolve told The Intercept they were unable to answer questions prior to publication. Earlier this week, at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the 2023 Pentagon budget, Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., asked whether the Defense Department was planning to revisit civilian harm cases, including those in the Times’s “Civilian Casualty Files.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin replied, “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases.”
Cut timbers in Washington State in the U.S. Mint Images. (photo: Getty)
A first-of-its-kind study published in the Lancet Planetary Health April 1 found that wealthy countries led by the U.S. and Europe have contributed far more to unsustainable resource use over the last 50 years than poorer nations.
“[H]igh-income nations are the primary drivers of global ecological breakdown and they need to urgently reduce their resource use to fair and sustainable levels,” the study authors concluded. “Achieving sufficient reductions will likely require high-income nations to adopt transformative post-growth and degrowth approaches.”
The researchers calculated the “fair share” of resources that every country could sustainably use based on their population size, The Guardian explained. They then subtracted that number from the amount of resources that countries actually used between 1970 and 2017. The difference was how much each country had overshot sustainable resource use, determining its culpability for the global environmental crisis.
The researchers found that wealthy nations were responsible for 74 percent of excess resource use during the study period. The U.S. was the single biggest resource thief, responsible for 27 percent of the global overshoot. The EU and the UK together followed with 25 percent, while other wealthy countries including Australia, Canada, Japan and Saudi Arabia were responsible for 22 percent.
“We were all shocked by the sheer scale of the high-income nations’ contribution to excess resource use,” study lead author professor Jason Hickel of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) in Barcelona told The Guardian. “We didn’t expect it to be so high. If they are now to achieve sustainable levels, they need to reduce their resource use by about 70% on average from existing levels.”
On the other side of the spectrum, China was responsible for 15 percent of excess resource use, but the rest of the poorer nations in the Global South were responsible for only eight percent. A total of 58 countries did not exceed their fair use at all, the study authors wrote. Among them were India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bangladesh. The research team has set up an interactive website that allows you to check resource use by individual country.
Previous studies have tried to assign relative responsibility for the climate crisis, but this is not the only crisis the Earth faces. Human activities are also overshooting planetary boundaries in the realm of land-use change, biodiversity loss, and the addition of novel entities like plastic pollution.
“These problems are being driven in large part by global resource use, through processes of material extraction, production, consumption, and waste,” the study authors wrote.
The authors said that wealthy nations owe an “ecological debt” to the rest of the world and should therefore rapidly reduce their resource use by adapting degrowth or post-growth strategies. Hickel noted on Twitter that the wealthy world probably owed even more than the report indicated, since the study did not consider overshoots prior to 1970 and did not give countries credit for years of undershooting their fair use of resources. While not everyone in wealthy nations is equally responsible for the high resource use, the current economic model funnels more resources towards these countries overall.
“A new era in global accountability is opening up, thanks to powerful analyses like this one,” Kate Raworth, a senior associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute who was not involved in the study, told The Guardian. “New metrics such as these bring powerful new ethical clarity to longstanding injustices between the global north and global south. The undeniable responsibility of the world’s richest nations for destroying the life-support systems of our planetary home must now be turned into meaningful reparations for those worst affected.”
Degrowth is the idea that a society should prioritize the health and wellbeing of the planet and human beings over corporate profits and overconsumption, according to Degrowth.info. While degrowth would reduce production and consumption in wealthier countries, the idea is that it would ultimately make everyone’s lives better because the economy would be structured around human needs and wellbeing instead of profits for a few.
A related idea is Raworth’s “doughnut economics,” which seeks to find the sweet spot between the minimum every human needs to thrive with the planetary boundaries humanity cannot sustainably overshoot.
“Between social and planetary boundaries lies an environmentally safe and socially just space in which humanity can thrive,” the website explains.
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