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Bush denounced the rigged elections that produced the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin in Russia and added, “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean, of Ukraine . . . Iraq, too. I’m 75.”
I pointed out here at Informed Comment a couple of months ago that the “US would be on firmer Ground declaring Putin a War Criminal if George W. Bush had been Tried.”
I’d also like to say that the Bush administration was one of the most repressive in recent history when it came to dissent. Demonstrations in New York against the war during the Republican National Convention were illegally broken up and the demonstrators were physically attacked. Bush violated the fourth amendment extensively by spying on people through their smart phones and making the telcom companies give the government back doors. His administration punished Ambassador Joe Wilson for blowing the whistle on the phony story of Iraq buying uranium for bombs from Niger by outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as an undercover CIA operative and burning her anti-proliferation efforts.
At one point, someone in the White House even had the CIA very illeglly look into whether it was possible to destroy my reputation to blunt my critique of the Iraq War.
So Bush’s denunciations of Putin’s dictatorship as the reason he could single-handedly pursue a ruinous war ring a little hollow.
For a younger generation who didn’t live through it, I should explain that Bush was famous for his gaffes and malapropisms. The problem with the American economy, he once remarked, was that too many of our imports come from abroad. Or there was that time he stridently insisted on the abolition of all terriers. By which he meant, “tariff barriers.” It wasn’t very amusing.
I don’t know how to take Bush’s subvocalization after his gaffe of “Iraq, too.” Does it indicate that he finally moved away from his proud declaration that history would judge his Iraq War and his hope that it would ultimately be vindicated? Because let’s just say that as a professional historian of Iraq, I’m a little closer to that judgment than he is, and it is my estimation that the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq will always be seen by most historians as one of the largest foreign policy disasters in American history and as the worst disaster to befall Iraq since the Buddhist Mongols took Baghdad and executed the Abbasid caliph in 1258. Millions of Ukrainians have been made refugees. But the Bush invasion and occupation set in train events that displaced 4 million Iraqis. And Iraq at that time only had a population of 26 million, while Ukraine has 44 million. Most Americans, and many even in the State Department don’t know that we did that to the Iraqis.
I’m intrigued that Bush himself may have some remorse for his actions. If so, he should forthrightly come out and say so. Who knows, maybe it will take some of the wind out of the K-Street War Lobby, which learned no lessons from Bush’s Himalayan error.
I’m an eclectic thinker and wouldn’t subscribe to a Realist orthodoxy in political science. But I have to say that I am persuaded by the argument of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that a Great Power only weakens itself by launching wars of aggression against small ramshackle countries like Iraq. They think a Great Power like the US should be focused like a laser on peer powers (e.g. Russia and China) and working out ways to avoid war with them and yet at the same time to preserve American power. When all is said and done, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars will have cost the US trillions of dollars it literally did not have. Most of that money was borrowed, taking the national debt to dangerous levels for the stability of the dollar. And what economic or geopolitical benefit accrued to Americans from those wars?
If the US had been focused on diplomacy with Russia rather than distracted in the Middle East quagmire for two decades, maybe the current morass in Ukraine, where the Washington eagle is risking nuclear war with a potentially wounded Russian bear, could have been avoided or its most dangerous edges softened.
By the way, Vladimir Putin constantly invokes the Bush invasion of Iraq as proof of American hypocrisy and bad faith when Washington criticizes his own “special operation” in Ukraine.
Deputy Chief of Staff of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Sybiha. (photo: Yahoo! News)
ALSO SEE: Zelenskiy Proposes Compensation Deal From Russia
“There won’t be a Minsk-2 or Minsk-3; there will be absolutely no compromise over our territorial integrity and sovereignty; these are (our) fundamental positions,” said Sybiha.
On May 16, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba ruled out Ukrainian concessions in exchange for a ceasefire.
According to President Volodymyr Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron suggested Ukraine could compromise its sovereignty in order to allow Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to save face.
Zelensky said that trying to help Russia to find an “off-ramp” is pointless, until Moscow starts looking for one in the first place.
READ MORE
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., speaks during the House Democrats news conference in the Capitol on Feb. 8, 2022. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
A court-ordered redistricting process nearly pitted Squad member Jamaal Bowman against progressive Jones, but Jones instead is targeting a new open seat in New York City.
That decision sidesteps a primary against Rep. Jamaal Bowman, which Jones had been eyeing seriously and even polled last week. But it also sets up a contest for Jones in a district he’s never represented against former Mayor Bill de Blasio and a potential run from Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou, who told The Intercept she’s exploring the possibility.
Jones leaned into his status as the first queer Black member of Congress. “I have decided to run for another term in Congress in #NY10,” he said. “This is the birthplace of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Since long before the Stonewall Uprising, queer people of color have sought refuge within its borders.”
Underneath the district shuffling and refuge seeking is a dire warning for Democrats: Maloney is the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. His entire job is to make sure that Democrats hold their narrow House majority or else the Biden legislative agenda will be completely dead. When the new lines were released, Maloney’s district became one that Joe Biden had carried by 8 percentage points. Jumping into Jones’s district gave him just an extra 2-point advantage. The DCCC chair signaling nervousness about his own district is less than confidence inspiring.
Equally concerning, perhaps, was Jones’s reaction. The freshman member of Congress told allies that he wasn’t necessarily concerned about losing a primary to Maloney, as Jones is popular in the district with primary voters and would have had the full support of the party’s progressive wing. But his polling, he told multiple people late in the week, showed him narrowly trailing in the general election in what is shaping up to be a brutal election year. “That’s his concern, but we’re screwed if we lose Biden plus-10 seats,” said one Democratic member of Congress who spoke to Jones.
On Monday, after a New York judge threw out the congressional map drawn by the state legislature, a court-appointed special master released the preliminary outline of a new map. All hell broke loose.
Maloney was the first to storm out of those gates, announcing not long after the map was released that he’d be leaving his own district and running instead in the one represented by Jones.
Maloney’s move may be the most brazenly selfish district hop in American political history. That’s not said lightly, given that Maloney is operating in an industry — politics — that is populated almost exclusively by some of the most craven, attention-seeking people in our society.
Jones did not appreciate it. “Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement. And I think that tells you everything you need know about Sean Patrick Maloney,” he said.
Maloney’s district, which hugs the Hudson north of New York City, was slightly redrawn but still leans Democratic by at least 8 points and includes about three quarters of the 18th District he already represents. But Maloney’s own house was drawn into the 17th District.
There’s no law in New York that you have to live in the district you represent, and Maloney living nearby would be fine, especially since he’s well known there, having defeated a popular moderate Republican, Nan Hayworth, in 2012.
On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi threw her support behind Maloney, saying his move wouldn’t hurt Democratic prospects in the House. The only way that’s conceivable is if Pelosi and Maloney are confident he won’t actually have a primary.
Maloney didn’t want to primary Jones; he wanted Jones to step aside for him. When Jones’s staffer sent a Maloney staffer a pissed-off text message after Maloney’s announcement, the Maloney staffer shot back, “you guys live in 16 right?”
There’s an extraordinary amount of subtext in those texts. First, as the Jones aide notes, last year, Maloney was supporting a liquid natural gas project in Maloney’s district near a predominantly Black community; Jones had promised to oppose it during his campaign. Jones prepared a letter expressing opposition as one of his first acts in Congress, and Maloney exploded, a source familiar with the conflict said. That Jones’s staff hadn’t given Maloney a heads-up was considered a major breach of protocol on top of the substance of the opposition. Some Jones staffers feel that Maloney has held the grudge to this day.
And, yes, Jones technically lives in the new 16th, but he represents most of the 17th and has spent most of his life in the area. He was raised in the Village of Spring Valley by a single mother who cleaned houses in the district. He went through East Ramapo public schools, before going to Stanford and then Harvard Law School. When he was sworn in, he was the first openly gay Black member of Congress.
The reference to Jones living in the 16th is the DCCC chair’s hope that Jones would run there and challenge Squad member Jamaal Bowman, who is a Democrat in poor standing for having unseated an incumbent, former Foreign Affairs Chair Eliot Engel, a top ally of Israel in Congress.
According to sources familiar with Jones’s campaign strategy, he’s been preparing for a potential primary challenge with Bowman for the last year. He has regularly told donors that he needed to build up a war chest to be ready, though he didn’t say he wanted it to happen.
After the preliminary, court-drawn maps were proposed, voters in the 16th began seeing polls testing a race between Bowman and Jones. Bowman’s campaign was not running the poll, they told The Intercept. No similar poll in the 17th testing Jones against Maloney has been discovered. Multiple Democratic members of Congress who spoke with Jones before the survey results came back got the impression that he was leaning heavily toward challenging Bowman.
Bowman didn’t mince words in his statement on Thursday confirming that he’s running for his seat in the 16th.
But let’s also be clear about this: two Black men who worked hard to represent their communities, who fight hard for their constituents in Congress and advocate for dire needs in our communities should not be pitted against each other all because Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney wants to have a slightly easier district for himself. The Democratic Party should not tolerate or condone those who try to dismantle and tear down Black power in Congress. I’m proud that many of my Democratic colleagues have stood up and made clear that this is wrong, and I encourage more to do the same.
The solution is simple. Congressman Maloney should run in his own district. I’ll be running in mine.
Maloney dialed up the racial tension by having allies spread the idea that Jones was “ideologically better suited for another district.” That’s incorrect on the face: Jones won comfortably in a very competitive primary in 2020. Then in the general election Biden carried the district by 20 points, but Jones carried it by 24 points. That makes him more in step with the district than Biden.
Rep. Ritchie Torres, who represents the 15th District, mostly in the Bronx, slammed Maloney. “The thinly veiled racism here is profoundly disappointing,” he said, a statement made even more notable by the fact that Torres has been in an open war with the left for several years and was a close ally of Engel. “A black man is ideologically ill suited to represent a Westchester County District that he represents presently and won decisively in 2020? Outrageous.”
Torres had his own motivation, though: He didn’t want Bowman jumping into his district.
With Jones’s own polling in the 17th District showing him slightly behind in a general election, a bruising and expensive primary against Maloney wouldn’t help those numbers. Jones also knew that Maloney would have endless resources. And if he beat Maloney, he’d then have to appeal for support in the general to the same organization Maloney now runs.
The alternative, running in the 16th against Bowman, was tantalizing. Jones had a much larger war chest than Bowman and could expect outside help, likely from the same pro-Israel groups that spent $2 million against Bowman in 2020. And the district is much safer, so winning the primary would lock in a seat in Congress.
Yet after the results of the Bowman-Jones survey came in, the offer started to look even worse, multiple Democrats who spoke with Jones said, and Jones’s interest in challenging Bowman began to wane. “He was jarred by whatever those Bowman numbers told him,” said one Democratic member of Congress who spoke to Jones.
The challenge to Bowman had little upside for Jones: In one scenario, the well-liked Bowman could plausibly fend Jones off, making Jones not just disloyal and opportunistic, but a loser. In the alternate scenario, Jones could beat Bowman, but it would be tarred by the fact that Jones had needlessly challenged a popular member of the Squad. His only route forward in politics would be further into the belly of the establishment. The party establishment, in the form of the DCCC chair, was offering permanent membership in the club, but Jones would have to prove his loyalty by handing over the district he fought for and heading off to execute his ally. For the rest of his career, he would know that what he had amassed was built on that decision, and his statewide or national aspirations might have a ceiling, as the progressive wing wouldn’t forget his betrayal.
Into this dilemma yawned the wide open New York 10th District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Colleagues who spoke with Jones said he only began entertaining the possibility Friday morning. The final maps had been expected Friday afternoon but were pushed to Friday evening and then well into the night. Democrats were holding out hope that the special master would fix the situation in those final maps, drawing Maloney’s house back into the 18th District and Jones’s back into the 17th. It didn’t happen and surveying the new maps after midnight, Jones decided Manhattan would have to do.
Photos shared with The Times, and taken from social media, show the eight men who were executed. Top row, from left: Anatoliy Prykhidko, Andriy Matviychuk, Andriy Verbovyi and Denys Rudenko. Bottom row, from left: Andriy Dvornikov, Svyatoslav Turovskyi, Valera Kotenko and Vitaliy Karpenko. (photo: NYT)
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Unarmed Civilians in Bucha Has Been Identified
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Who Ordered the Killing of Civilians in the Kyiv Region
Witness testimony and videos obtained by The New York Times show how Russian paratroopers executed at least eight Ukrainian men in a Kyiv suburb on March 4, a potential war crime.
The videos, filmed on March 4 by a security camera and a witness in a nearby house and obtained by The New York Times, are the clearest evidence yet that the men were in the custody of Russian troops minutes before being executed.
“Hostages are lying there, against the fence,” the person filming one of the videos says. He counts: “One, two, three, for sure, four, five, six …” In total, nine people are being held.
The men are forced to the ground, including one wearing a distinctive bright blue hooded sweatshirt.
The video ends. But eight witnesses recounted to The Times what happened next. Soldiers took the men behind a nearby office building that the Russians had taken over and turned into a makeshift base. There were gunshots. The captives didn’t return.
A drone video filmed a day later on March 5, also obtained by The Times, is the first visual evidence that confirms the eyewitness accounts. It showed the dead bodies lying on the ground by the side of the office building at 144 Yablunska Street as two Russian soldiers stood guard beside them. Among the bodies, a flash of bright blue was visible — the captive in the blue sweatshirt.
A photograph of the executed men’s bodies lying in a courtyard, some with their hands bound, was among a range of images that received global attention in early April after Russian forces withdrew from Bucha. Russian leaders at the highest levels have repeatedly denied wrongdoing in Bucha and described the images as a “provocation and fake.”
But a weekslong investigation by The Times provides new evidence — including the three videos — that Russian paratroopers rounded up and intentionally executed the men photographed in the courtyard, directly implicating these forces in a likely war crime. Russia’s foreign affairs and defense ministries did not respond to requests for comment on The Times’s findings.
To uncover what happened to these men, The Times spent weeks in Bucha interviewing a survivor, witnesses, coroners, and police and military officials. Reporters collected previously unpublished videos from the day of the execution — some of the only evidence thus far to trace the victims’ final movements. The Times scoured social media for missing persons reports, spoke to the victims’ family members and, for the first time, identified all of the executed men and why most of them were targeted.
They were husbands and fathers, grocery store and factory workers who lived ordinary civilian lives before the war. But with restrictions on men leaving the country, coupled with a resolve to protect their communities, most of the men joined various defense forces in the days before they were killed. Nearly all of them lived within walking distance of the courtyard in which their bodies would later lie.
Return to Bucha
Russian soldiers first entered Bucha in late February, days after the war began, as they advanced toward Kyiv. Ukrainian forces were ready for them. They devastated Russian paratroopers at the front of the column in an ambush. Death notices and interviews with Russian prisoners posted by a Ukrainian YouTuber indicate that at least two paratrooper units — the 104th and 234th Airborne Assault Regiments — suffered losses.
The Russians withdrew and regrouped before returning on March 3, making their way to Yablunska Street, a long thoroughfare running through the city. Security camera footage obtained by The Times shows that the soldiers, like those who were ambushed in late February, were paratroopers. The video shows them driving vehicles — such as the BMD-2, BMD-3 and BMD-4 designs — that are used almost exclusively by the Russian Airborne Forces, according to experts from the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Royal United Services Institute.
The paratroopers patrolled the area, conducting house-to-house searches and operating in and out of 144 Yablunska Street, a four-story office building that the Russians turned into a base and field hospital.
About 300 yards from that base, at 31 Yablunska Street, Ivan Skyba, a 43-year-old builder, and five other fighters had been manning a makeshift checkpoint when the Russians returned. They had a grenade, bulletproof vests and a rifle between them, Mr. Skyba told The Times.
Warned via radio that Russians were back in Bucha and moving in their direction, they hid in the house beside the checkpoint, along with the homeowner, Valera Kotenko, 53, who had been bringing the fighters tea and coffee, Mr. Skyba said.
They were joined later by two more fighters, Andriy Dvornikov and Denys Rudenko, the man wearing the blue sweatshirt in the video. As the nine men hid, they texted and called loved ones. Mr. Rudenko messaged his best friend saying they were trapped. “Don’t call. I will dial later,” he wrote.
The men sheltered there overnight. By the morning of March 4, they realized that an escape was impossible. “We are surrounded,” Mr. Rudenko wrote to his friend. “For now we are hiding. They are shooting from armored vehicles and heavy caliber.”
Mr. Dvornikov, a delivery driver, called his wife, Yulia Truba, at 10:20 a.m., she told The Times. “We can’t get out. I will call when I call,” he said, before telling her to delete all of their messages and to prepare to evacuate. “I love you,” he said.
Around an hour later, Russian soldiers conducting searches found the men and forced all nine of them, including the homeowner, out of the house at gunpoint, Mr. Skyba said. The soldiers searched the men for tattoos that could indicate military affiliation and made some of them remove their winter jackets and shoes. Then they walked them to the Russian base at 144 Yablunska Street.
What happened next was described to Times reporters by Mr. Skyba and seven civilian witnesses whom Russian forces also rounded up from neighboring houses and held in a separate group yards from the captive fighters.
The witnesses said they saw the group of captives in the parking lot in front of the Russian base with shirts pulled over their heads. Yura Razhik, 57, who lives in front of the office building, said some had their hands tied. The Russian soldiers made them kneel down and then shot one of the men, Vitaliy Karpenko, 28, almost immediately, Mr. Skyba said. Mr. Razhik said he also witnessed the shooting.
Mr. Skyba and another captive, Andriy Verbovyi, were then taken inside the building, he said, where they were questioned and beaten before Mr. Verbovyi was shot and killed. The soldiers took Mr. Skyba back to the parking lot, where the other checkpoint guards were still being held.
At one point, one of the checkpoint guards confessed to the Russians that they were fighters, Mr. Skyba said, and that man was eventually let go. He is now under investigation by Ukrainian authorities, according to a local military commander and investigators; a government document seen by The Times specifies it is for “high treason.”
The soldiers debated what to do with the remaining men. “Get rid of them, but not here, so their bodies aren’t laid around,” one said, according to Mr. Skyba.
A courtyard execution
Two Russian soldiers took Mr. Skyba and the remaining captives to a courtyard on the side of the building, where the body of another dead man was already lying, Mr. Skyba said. The Times has identified that man as Andriy Matviychuk, 37, another fighter who went missing a day earlier. He was shot in the head, according to his death certificate.
Mr. Razhik and other witnesses being held outside the office building saw the soldiers lead the captives out of sight, they said. Then gunshots rang out.
“I was shot and I fell down. The bullet went into my side,” Mr. Skyba said. Photos he shared of his injuries show an entry and exit wound in the left side of his abdomen. A doctor in Bucha who treated his injury and a medical report reviewed by The Times confirmed the injury.
“I fell down and I pretended to be dead,” he said. “I didn’t move and didn’t breathe. It was cold outside and you could see people’s breath.”
Mr. Skyba lay there as the soldiers fired another volley at injured men who were still moving. He waited for about 15 minutes until he could no longer hear the soldiers’ voices. Then he ran.
Tetyana Chmut, whose garden borders the courtyard at 144 Yablunska Street, was among the residents held and later released by the Russians, along with her family. As Ms. Chmut dashed from her house to shelter in a neighbor’s basement later on March 4, she saw the bodies lying in the courtyard. A neighbor of Ms. Chmut’s, Marina Chorna, saw the bodies two days later when she emerged from her basement after the Russian troops occupying her house left.
The bodies of the men killed in the parking lot and inside the building were brought to the courtyard and, together with the six other victims, would lie there for nearly a month.
Evidence of a war crime
Four weeks later, after Russian forces had withdrawn from Bucha, Times reporters visited the scene of the executions. The wall and steps of the building were pockmarked by bullet holes. On the other side of the courtyard, scattered a few feet from where the bodies lay, were spent 7.62x54R cartridge casings, used in the Soviet-designed PK-series machine guns and Dragunov sniper rifles commonly used by Russian troops. The Times also found an unfired 7.62x54R round inside the building.
Other evidence left behind by the Russians points to two specific paratrooper units that may have occupied the building. Packing slips for crates of weapons and ammunition listed Units 32515 and 74268, corresponding respectively to the 104th and 234th Airborne Assault Regiments. Both units suffered heavy losses during the first Russian attempt to enter Bucha in February.
Investigators with the Security Service of Ukraine, or S.B.U., also provided The Times with an image of a patch recovered from inside the building bearing the emblem of the 104th Regiment and a roster of Russian soldiers recovered from the building. By searching Russian social media websites and other databases for each soldier’s name, The Times found that at least five of the named soldiers had apparent links to the 104th Regiment. Others posted images of themselves holding paratrooper flags or wearing paratrooper uniforms. Some listed their location as Pskov, the city that is the headquarters for both the 104th and 234th regiments.
The execution of the captured fighters and the homeowner in Bucha “is the kind of incident that could become a strong case for war crimes prosecution,” said Stephen Rapp, former United States ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. The captives, having been disarmed and taken into custody by the Russians, were “outside of combat,” under the laws of war, Mr. Rapp said. According to the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, such laws mean that prisoners must be treated humanely and protected from mistreatment in all circumstances.
In addition to the soldiers who shot the men, their commanders could be charged if they knew about the killings and failed to act to prevent or punish the conduct, Mr. Rapp said.
A desperate search
On March 4, after the men stopped answering calls and replying to text messages, their brothers, wives, mothers and friends began an agonizing search for them. Russian forces patrolled the streets of Bucha, so the relatives went online, pleading for information on social media.
“My nephew Denys (wearing a cap and glasses) stopped responding three days ago,” Valentina Butenko, Mr. Rudenko’s aunt, wrote on Facebook. “Does anyone know anything about him?”
“Help find this man,” Elena Shyhan wrote with a photo of her husband, Vitaliy. “His family is very worried, but we are not losing hope.”
Meanwhile, the men’s bodies remained in the courtyard. Once the Russians fled nearly a month later, the graphic image of the scene caught the world’s attention — and that of the families scrambling to find clues.
Liudmyla Nakonechnaya, the mother of Mr. Dvornikov, saw the photo on Facebook. Her comment read: “Oh my god! Oh my god! My dear son!”
Ms. Shyhan also saw the image. She edited her post from weeks earlier with a single line: “Stop searching. We have found him.”
Summer Lee speaks during an event in Philadelphia, Pa., on July 13, 2019. (photo: Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
The 34-year-old proponent of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal just won her primary in a deep-blue Pennsylvania district, all but guaranteeing she’ll be in Congress next year
34-year-old Lee first won her statehouse seat in 2018 as part of a wave of progressive, diverse, younger candidates who unseated longtime incumbents, winning in the same fashion as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) did at the federal level. Lee supports the typical slate of left-wing priorities, such as the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and packing the Supreme Court. Her coalition draws upon the working class voters of Pittsburgh, who have left the city’s traditional manufacturing jobs for its growing hospital and care sector, says Lara Putnam, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies grassroots politics.
Lee defeated two other candidates, including attorney Steve Irwin, who received endorsements from much of the Democratic establishment, as well as retiring Rep. Matt Doyle (D-Penn.), the current seat holder. Lee edged out Irwin by roughly 750 votes.
Lee’s victory is the second major win for the left as it seeks to broaden its congressional footprint this cycle. Austin City Council member Greg Casar, another Justice Democrats-backed candidate, won his March primary for Texas’ 35th congressional district, a narrow strip that runs from Austin to San Antonio. Both candidates succeeded in primaries for open seats in deeply Democratic districts, political conditions most fertile for left-wing gains.Progressive challengers to Democratic incumbents, meanwhile, have struggled to topple their opponents. Nina Turner, a former Bernie Sanders campaign chair, lost her rematch to Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) in Ohio’s primaries earlier this month.
The only potential exception of the cycle, so far, may come from Oregon’s 5th congressional district, where progressive challenger Jamie McLeod-Skinner holds a small lead on Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.). Schrader, a business-friendly Democrat, drew renewed ire from the left in his efforts to kill affordable prescription drug legislation during the party’s negotiations over Build Back Better, President Joe Biden’s now-defunct social spending agenda. A remaining test arrives next week when immigration attorney Jessica Cisneros faces her runoff against Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), one of the last anti-abortion Democrats in the House. Cisneros failed to win a majority of votes against Cuellar during Texas’ March primary.
The president’s party often loses seats during an administration’s first midterm election, and Democrats are bracing for potentially losing control of one or both chambers of Congress. Regardless of whether they do, a higher count of progressive lawmakers would give Congress’s left flank greater power over the party’s legislative agenda. The possibility has drawn ample attention from the left’s centrist and corporate detractors, which have poured millions of dollars into defeating progressive candidates. Tuesday’s House primaries in five states have drawn more super PAC spending than all of the 2020 House Democratic primaries combined, according to an analysis from OpenSecrets, a campaign finance watchdog organization.
The pro-Israel wing of the party has been a particularly big spender this cycle, intent on punishing progressive candidates who support Palestine and insufficiently supportive of Israel. Lee, like many of her progressive allies, has criticized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and advocates placing conditions of U.S. aid to Israel. In the primary’s final stretch, she faced a $2 million attack campaign from the United Democracy Project, a PAC tied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, as well as $400,000 in negative spending from the Democratic Majority for Israel.
“If I were someone in the Democratic party establishment, I’d be at Summer’s feet trying to dissect her strategy,” says Maurice Mitchell, the president of the progressive Working Families Party, which endorsed Lee. “Instead many have tried to purge her from the party.”
Rally for trans kids. (photo: Getty Images)
Two women shower amid destruction after Typhoon Haiyan on Nov. 14, 2013 in Leyte, Philippines. (photo: Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
While not binding, the findings of the report by the country’s Commission on Human Rights has broad implications for other cases, experts say.
“My brother remembered exactly how many bodies he picked up with his own hands,” Saño said. “Seventy-three dead bodies exactly.”
Haiyan ultimately killed more than 6,000 people in the Philippines and damaged more than 1 million homes, uprooting lives with devastation from which the country still hasn’t recovered. While the storm may have been an act of nature, Saño and others were convinced that humans, ultimately, were responsible.
In 2015, working with Greenpeace Southeast Asia, Saño sought to hold those people accountable, petitioning the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights to declare the world’s largest fossil fuel companies “accountable for either impairing, infringing, abusing or violating human rights” because of their contribution to climate change.
Earlier this month, the commission issued its conclusions. Saño felt vindicated. In a damning and lucidly-written report, the commission found that the world’s largest fossil fuel companies had “engaged in willful obfuscation and obstruction to prevent meaningful climate action.” The companies continue to deny climate science and try to slow a transition away from fossil fuels, the report said, driven “not by ignorance, but by greed.”
As the first national human rights body to weigh in on fossil fuel companies’ role in driving climate change, the commission determined that corporations have obligations under human rights law and can be held liable if they neglect them. While the commission has no power to compel companies or governments to act on its findings, legal experts said its report carries broad implications for other cases.
“This is a milestone for the narrative that climate impacts result in the infringement of human rights,” said Saño, now the executive director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia. “So this report means a lot to Filipinos who confront the adverse effects of the climate crisis. This means a lot for the pursuit of climate justice.”
Some of the companies named in the petition, which included Chevron, ExxonMobil and other major producers, sought to have it dismissed, the report said, arguing that the commission had no jurisdiction beyond its borders and that the topic reached outside its traditional realm of political and civil rights. But the commission rejected these appeals, determining that it had a mandate “to test boundaries and create new paths; to be bold and creative, instead of timid and docile.”
Some experts said the report’s impacts extend beyond the Philippines, increasing the legal risks that fossil fuel companies are facing from a raft of lawsuits around the world. Despite the commission’s lack of enforcement powers, legal experts said its findings provide new strength and evidence for cases that have already been filed and will help people file new challenges in courts and human rights commissions elsewhere.
“I think corporations, their boards, their leaders should really start taking this potential liability seriously,” said John Knox, an expert in international and human rights law at Wake Forest Law who testified to the Philippines commission. “This is the harbinger of much more to come.”
The commission’s multi-year inquiry and its final report are part of a growing effort globally to reframe climate change as a threat to human rights. Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Council created a new special rapporteur on human rights in the context of climate change. Aside from better recognizing the impacts of warming on people’s health and well-being—now evident around the world in the form of more extreme weather—advocates of this framing say it provides a solid base for holding governments and corporations accountable if they fail to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Saño said he has been in touch with colleagues in other parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe about the report’s findings.
“Many of them were just waiting for this to be completed,” he said, “and now that we have seen the culmination of the Philippines case it provides a lot of energy into those other possibilities.”
A Roadmap to Document Harm
The Philippines is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, an archipelago south of Taiwan that is hit by an average of 20 cyclones each year, according to the commission’s report. The country has also contributed only a tiny portion of the greenhouse gases that humans have pumped into the atmosphere over the last century-and-a-half. The pairing of the Philippines’ vulnerability with its relative lack of culpability makes it a powerful venue for an inquiry into climate change and human rights.
In 12 public hearings and many hours of testimony, the commission gathered an exhaustive catalog of evidence about the science of climate change and its impacts, and fossil fuel companies’ efforts to sow doubt about that science as they lobbied against government attempts in the United States and other countries to reduce dependence on coal, oil and gas.
The petition by Greenpeace drew on the research of Richard Heede, who leads the Climate Accountability Institute and has published studies linking specific levels of greenhouse gas emissions to specific companies, the so-called “carbon majors.” According to Heede’s research, Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company of Saudi Arabia, is responsible for more emissions than any other company, with Chevron and Exxon close behind.
Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, which filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners, said the new report was perhaps the most comprehensive compendium of all the research that has been published on fossil fuel companies’ role in driving emissions.
But what stood out, Muffett said, is that the report tied those greenhouse gas emissions to immediate threats to specific human rights of Filipinos, including their rights to life, health, food security and sanitation.
“Through every one of those rights, the commission pulls out witness testimony that says this was the lived experience of this,” Muffett said. “It is very much a roadmap to show how you document human rights impacts of climate change not only on entire nations, but on individuals and the communities who are being harmed, and that is, I think, extremely important.”
One chieftain from the southern Philippines testified that her people have been unable to practice traditional rituals based on seasonal rhythms because erratic weather has disrupted the once-predictable patterns. A rice farmer reported decreased harvests as a result of extreme heat.
One storm survivor told of losing three children, a son-in-law and four grandchildren to Typhoon Sendong in 2011. Veronica Cabe, one of the petitioners, spoke about the destabilizing effects of having her home destroyed by a storm.
“We felt displaced, we didn’t have our own space,” she told the commission. “We were forced to live with friends who were willing to share their homes with us. We were separated from each other.”
The commission held several hearings in New York and London, and traveled to the Netherlands, too, in a mostly-failed attempt to have some of the 47 fossil fuel companies named in the petition testify or meet with the commissioners.
The report focuses in particular on arguments made by the American Petroleum Institute, the American coal industry and others, beginning in the 1990s, against efforts to limit emissions from fossil fuels, despite those organizations’ knowledge of the dangers of failing to do so.
In the report, the commission cites international human rights laws and standards to say that corporations, in addition to states, have obligations to protect human rights. It points to the continued financing of politicians who oppose climate action as evidence that fossil fuel companies are still working to deflect needed action. And it adds that financial institutions that fund fossil fuel production share in the responsibility and, potentially, liability for continuing to drive emissions higher.
Scott Lauermann, a petroleum institute spokesman, said, “At a time of rising energy costs and geopolitical volatility around the world, it’s more apparent than ever that we must both reduce emissions and ensure access to affordable, reliable energy for U.S. consumers, and that’s exactly what our industry has been focused on for decades” He added, “Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
Creighton Welch, a spokesman for Chevron, said, “Chevron intends to be a leader in efficient and lower-carbon production of traditional energy—in high demand today and for years to come—while growing the lower-carbon businesses that will be a bigger part of the future.”
Todd Spitler, an Exxon spokesman, said the company was “developing comprehensive roadmaps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our operated assets around the world and in support of society’s net-zero ambitions,” including investments in low-carbon technologies such as carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and biofuels. He added, “Our commitment to emissions reduction isn’t new; we have supported the Paris Agreement from its inception and made consistent progress on short- and medium-term emissions-reduction plans.”
A spokesperson for Saudi Aramco declined to comment.
The report was the first to be issued by a national human rights commission, and experts said it was only the second official finding to tie fossil fuel companies’ actions and responsibilities directly to the human rights impacts of climate change. Last year, a Dutch court ordered Shell to reduce its emissions in a ruling that drew in part on human rights laws.
Muffett and others said the report will add to a growing list of rulings and evidence laying the groundwork for holding specific companies liable for their role in fueling warming.
“What the commission is saying is there are adequate bases here for seeking to hold these companies liable,” Muffett said. “And I think that’s really significant because this report provides a pretty clear roadmap to human rights bodies and courts around the world, to then take up cases to do precisely that.”
In the report, the commission acknowledged that it had no enforcement powers, and instead was providing recommendations to companies and governments for how they could meet their obligations to protect human rights with respect to climate change. For companies, chief among those was halting the exploration of new oil and gas fields and contributing to a climate fund for mitigation and adaptation. The report said states must enact policies to make sure companies take these steps, and to penalize those that don’t.
Saño said he hopes the report would have immediate impacts in the Philippines, where the son of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was just elected president on Monday. He said successive governments have failed to address injustices in the country, including the concentration of power in a small elite, that exacerbate the impacts of climate change. The new government has an obligation to better protect its citizens from the storms that hit its coastlines every year, Saño said, and “this really paves the way for a lot of change, we hope.”
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