14 July 22
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In the tradition of the Clintonometer, the Trump Apocalypse Watch, and the Impeach-O-Meter, the Is It a Crime-O-Meter is a wildly subjective and speculative estimate of whether the Jan. 6 select committee’s work will convince enough individuals of relevance (prosecutors, juries, voters) that Donald Trump committed insurrection-related crimes that he will be, in some fashion, held accountable for them.
“I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump,” the president said, naming groups who shared in common a predilection for being armed. “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
As I wrote at the time, implicit in those comments was the notion that if those armed supporters should ever feel his presidency was threatened, they would come to his rescue and bring their weapons. Trump famously nodded again to this sentiment during his lone televised debate with Joe Biden when he told the Proud Boys to “stand by” should he face defeat in the election.
Donald Trump did face defeat in the election—and the Proud Boys were central to the mob attack unleashed on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
That Trump knew his supporters would defend him with violence if necessary—as they did on Jan. 6—has been a running theme of the Jan. 6 committee’s summer hearings. Last month, Cassidy Hutchinson testified that she heard Trump demand that his armed supporters be let into the rally at the ellipse because “they’re not here to hurt me.” On Tuesday, the committee pressed this case that Trump knew—or certainly should have known—what his supporters might be capable of on Jan. 6. The committee is laying out the case that the violence unleashed on the Capitol that day was always part of the plan.
The biggest revelations of the day surrounded details of an “unhinged” Oval Office meeting between Trump, Gen. Michael Flynn, lawyer Sidney Powell, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick M. Byrne, in which Trump may or may not have appointed Powell special counsel and reportedly considered a pitch for declaring martial law. My colleague Ben Mathis-Lilley wrote about Powell’s testimony—she described what was obviously a slightly unprecedented meeting incredibly casually as she coolly polished off a Diet Dr. Pepper in between answers.
But the outlandish theatrics of Trumpworld aside, what’s more interesting to today’s crime-o-meter is what came after that meeting: Lots of evidence that the risk of bloodshed was obvious at that point to seemingly everyone in a position of power in Washington D.C. Immediately following that reportedly alcohol-fueled midnight meeting, close to 2 a.m. on Dec. 19, Trump tweeted his now infamous call for supporters to come to the Capitol on Jan. 6 for a protest that “will be wild.”
The committee then laid out how a Voltron of violent right-wing radicals almost immediately came together, first with testimony from an anonymous former Twitter employee who was tasked with tracking it all. The Twitter employee noted that the call and response of Trump was quickly met:
It felt as if a mob was being organized and they were gathering together their weaponry and their logic and their reasoning behind why they were prepared to fight prior to Dec. 19. … Very clear that individuals were ready willing and able to take up arms. After this Tweet on Dec. 19, again it became clear not only were these individuals ready and willing, but the leader of their cause was asking them to join him.
The former Twitter employee also said he had seen a similar spike in dangerous responses on the platform after Trump’s 2020 debate call for the Proud Boys to “stand by.”
Also following Trump’s tweet, a Jan. 6 rally organizer immediately launched a web site with the url wildprotest.com. Many of President Trump’s other supporters online responded in other ways—some calling for mass executions and for protesters to bring “body armor, knuckles, shields, bats, pepper spray,” all of which were eventually brought to the Capitol and used against police that day.
Donell Harvin, chief of homeland security and intelligence for D.C., testified that disparate groups immediately came together to create a single deadly force descending on D.C.
“We got derogatory information from [open source intelligence] suggesting that some very, very violent individuals were organizing to come to D.C. But not only were they organizing to come to D.C.—these non-aligned groups were aligning,” Harvin said. “When you have armed militia collaborating with white supremacy groups collaborating with conspiracy theory groups online all towards a common goal, you start seeing what we call in terrorism a blended ideology and that’s a very, very bad sign.”
Indeed, central to these efforts were people like Ali Alexander and Alex Jones, whose rhetoric regularly became violent, on top of the militia groups of the Oathkeepers and Proud Boys that started organizing right away and whose leaders have since been charged with seditious conspiracy for their role in the Capitol invasion. So troubled by the presence of these sorts of elements was former Trump spokesperson and Jan. 6 rally organizer, Katrina Pierson, that she attempted to warn White House chief of staff Mark Meadows via text about how bad she expected things to get. On Jan. 2, she requested a call with Meadows, saying that with regards to the Jan. 6 planning: “Things have gotten crazy and I desperately need some direction. Please.” During the following call, she outlined her concerns to Meadows that Jones and Alexander were involved with a previous invasion of a state capitol in Georgia. This was the same day that Hutchinson testified that Meadows warned her that things might get “real, real bad on Jan. 6.”
It was also around this time that rally organizers were texting each other about secret plans for Trump to instruct rallygoers to march to the Capitol after his speech. The committee unveiled an undated draft Trump tweet in which he was set to let his supporters know that there would be a “March to the Capitol after” the ellipse rally. The tweet was never sent, but leaders of the rally were clearly given advance notice of the instruction, with the committee producing multiple text and email exchanges from different rallygoers describing how the president was going to instruct them to “unexpectedly” march to the Capitol. Notably, Trump also called and spoke with advisor Steve Bannon—who is about to go on trial for contempt of Congress following his refusal to cooperate with the committee—on the morning of Jan. 5, right before Bannon went on the air to tell his podcast listeners that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” Bannon continued: “it’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different, and all I can say is strap in.” Oh, and also, on the eve of Jan. 6, Trump-supporting Rep. Debbie Lesko was recorded requesting a “safety plan for members” of Congress, because she knew “Trump supporters” were “going to go nuts” in the likely event that Congress did not “overturn the election.”
In sum: More than a year before Jan. 6 happened, Trump warned America that he could summon a mob of armed “tough people” at will to “go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” Then, in the midst of the 2020 campaign, he told a specific group of tough guys to “stand by” should he lose the election. Then, after all of his legal challenges collapsed and his White House counsel shut down the proposals of a bunch of loons that would involve Powell becoming special counsel and potentially martial law, Trump immediately called on those supporters to come to Washington for a “wild” protest. Then, militia groups that were body guards for two of Trump’s top former advisors—Michael Flynn and Roger Stone—began organizing for a descent on D.C. as internet chatter exploded with the potential for violence. At the same time, nearly everybody in Washington D.C. was fearful, or perhaps, expectant that this violence would erupt. Oh, and Trump was secretly planning at the time to send his supporters to the Capitol, and when they got to his rally, he wanted as many of them who were armed in attendance as possible because he knew he would not be the target of their violence.
I don’t know, seems pretty crime-y to me! The Diet Dr. Pepper can is pointing directly to a meter of FULL CRIME.
President Biden is on a Middle East trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia. (photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times)
With the war in Ukraine sending energy prices higher and China cementing more alliances in the Middle East, Mr. Biden is traveling thousands of miles to attempt to repair a relationship that has reached a nadir in its 80-year history — arguably even worse than after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Mr. Biden sought to justify his visit to Saudi Arabia this week in a Washington Post opinion essay, saying his aim was to “reorient,” not “rupture,” relations. Yet no justification for his visit to the kingdom this week can erase the truth: It is a defeat for Mr. Biden and a personal and political triumph for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or M.B.S., as he is popularly known. But it does not have to be a defeat for the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
A change in Mr. Biden’s attitude toward Prince Mohammed will undoubtedly generate some good will with the Saudi leadership. The question is: What will Mr. Biden choose to make of this renewed opportunity to reset the relationship?
The United States needs Saudi Arabia: The kingdom remains the oil market’s major swing producer and is the main buyer of U.S. arms globally. By virtue of geopolitics and economics, Saudi Arabia’s cooperation with the United States is consequential when it comes to Washington’s efforts to counter Iran, end the war in Yemen and normalize Israel’s relations with the Arab world, as well as limit Russia’s and China’s influence in the region. All of this was true before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended global oil markets and sent gasoline prices skyrocketing in the United States and Europe.
Mr. Biden’s posture — turning a tense relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia into a personal duel with Prince Mohammed — was always going to be short-lived, especially as world events intervened. This became evident over the past six months as the Biden administration suffered snub after snub, culminating in Prince Mohammed’s rebuffing U.S. demands to explicitly and actively side with the United States after Russia invaded Ukraine.
So the Biden administration had to come up with a solution to its Saudi problem, especially in a critical election year, as Mr. Biden’s job approval ratings have dropped and gas prices have soared.
The Biden administration has shied away from previewing desired results for this meeting. But returning home with only vague pledges on oil and Israel — and no concrete concessions from Saudi Arabia on human rights — would be a defeat not just for Mr. Biden but for the United States. Realpolitik policymakers like to wave away human rights as having any place in pragmatic policymaking, but there is an opportunity for Mr. Biden to make human rights part of a revamped strategy with Saudi Arabia that the kingdom could accept, even if not enthusiastically.
Saudi Arabia will not become a democracy soon. But the United States can still engage with the monarchy constructively to make some gains on human rights, defend against authoritarianism and promote regional integration.
The United States needs to demonstrate consistency in support of its values alongside its strategic goals. It is easy for Saudi leaders to dismiss Mr. Biden’s human rights rhetoric if the killing of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, which the State Department said was likely caused by gunfire from Israel Defense Forces positions, generates nothing like the official outrage over the killing of Mr. Khashoggi. The absence of a smoking gun didn’t stop the United States from investigating Saudi conduct and publicly announcing its findings to demonstrate a commitment to freedom of the press. Failing to raise the issue of Ms. Abu Akleh’s death during Mr. Biden’s visit to Israel would strengthen Saudi charges that U.S. commitment to its values is entirely conditional.
The United States should push for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia only if it can guarantee that the Saudi government won’t suppress Saudi voices opposed to normalization. And the United States must voice its support for Palestinians’ rights as much as it supports the Israelis’. If and when normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel happens, it shouldn’t be used to erase the human rights violations of both governments.
Saudi Arabia is substantially investing in the transformation of its digital infrastructure, which has become essential to the success of Vision 2030, Prince Mohammed’s plan to overhaul the economy — and his legacy. At the same time, the country has become a case study in digital authoritarianism. The government benefits from its citizens’ exceptionally high connectivity to promote disinformation and propaganda, collect data on and deploy spyware against dissidents, and hack and trace its enemies.
The United States is already blacklisting firms that provide digital repression tools to Saudi Arabia, such as the Israeli NSO Group. But it should also find ways to collaborate with Saudi Arabia on the institutional and legal frameworks that regulate the technological environment in the kingdom. For instance, the United States can capitalize on Saudi Arabia’s craving for U.S. technology by linking U.S. digital support and investments to the adoption of safeguards that protect digital human rights and privacy.
The Biden administration also needs to continue targeting Saudi enablers of authoritarian behavior through coercive diplomacy. The Khashoggi ban, a visa restriction policy instituted by the State Department in response to the murder of Mr. Khashoggi, is a good start that should continue. Individuals acting on behalf of the Saudi government who are involved in the repression of Saudi nationals at home and abroad must pay a price.
Similarly, the regulation of relevant Saudi intelligence and paramilitary training must continue. In 2019, The Washington Post revealed that the State Department had refused a proposal to train the Saudi intelligence service because of insufficient safeguards by the Saudis to prevent lawless operations against political dissidents. To go further, the United States could apply more scrutiny to training that former military and law enforcement officials offer the kingdom privately.
By making space for values in the bilateral relationship, Saudi leaders would be helping themselves. Without an improved values record, Saudi Arabia will continue to face obstacles from Congress and the U.S. government that prevent it from obtaining the technology and military systems it wants and needs.
The same goes for business. Even if Mr. Khashoggi’s killing hadn’t driven American investors away, the Saudi government isn’t reaching the foreign direct investment levels that it needs to meet Vision 2030’s objectives. Despite progress, the weakness of the rule of law and lack of participatory decision making in the kingdom require investors to think twice and have complicated existing relationships.
For the United States, Saudi business is crucial if it wants to outcompete China in the Middle East. It also gives the United States leverage in the success of Vision 2030.
None of these paths are easy to take. They require both Saudi and American leaders to plan strategically and not according to election dates and oil prices. They also require Mr. Biden to deliver a clear message: For a long time, Saudi leaders counted on U.S. values always coming second to U.S. interests. But they should also realize that having a minimum of shared values builds more consequential relationships than oil and arms.
Russian, Ukrainian and Turkish military delegations meet with U.N. officials in Istanbul, Turkey, July 13, 2022. (photo: Turkish Defense Ministry)
UN hails ‘critical step forward’ after meetings in Istanbul as Turkey says deal will be signed next week
Turkey’s defence minister, Hulusi Akar, said on Wednesday that the deal would be signed when the parties meet again next week and would include joint controls for checking grains in ports and Turkey ensuring the safety of Black Sea export routes for Ukrainian grain.
Turkey would also set up a coordination centre with Ukraine, Russia and the UN for grain exports, Akar said. Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, wrote on Twitter: “Its task will be to carry out general monitoring and coordination of safe navigation in the Black Sea.”
In his daily address, Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president, said: “We are indeed making significant efforts to restore the supply of food to the world market. And I am grateful to the United Nations and Turkey for their respective efforts.”
Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia in February, had said earlier that a deal appeared “two steps away” as Turkey hosted the four-way talks in Istanbul.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said a “critical step forward” had been made toward reviving Ukrainian grain exports but cautioned that “more technical work will now be needed to materialise today’s progress”.
“Today is an important and substantive step, a step on the way to a comprehensive agreement.” Ukraine and Russia had shown they could talk, but “for peace we still have a long way to go,” he told reporters in New York.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine or Russia, both among the world’s largest grain exporters.
Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Pyotr Ilyichev, head of the international organisations department at Russia’s foreign ministry, earlier on Wednesday as saying Russia wanted to control and inspect vessels itself to rule out arms smuggling.
Several Ukrainian cities meanwhile reported heavy Russian shelling and, while not linking a grain deal to progress in talks to end the war, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, was downbeat on prospects for peace.
More than 20m tonnes of Ukrainian grain are stuck in silos at the Black Sea port of Odesa and dozens of ships have been stranded due to Russia’s blockade, part of what Moscow calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine but which Kyiv and the west say is an unjustified war of aggression.
The talks, in Istanbul between Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish and UN officials, took place behind closed doors at an undisclosed location.
Igor Konashenkov, a spokesperson for Russia’s defence ministry, said Moscow had put forward proposals to resolve the grain issue as soon as possible.
Turkey published a photograph of the meeting showing the Russian and Ukrainian delegations sitting opposite each other looking stony-faced.
Apart from being major global wheat suppliers, Russia is also a large fertiliser exporter and Ukraine a significant producer of corn and sunflower oil. Clinching a deal to unblock exports is seen as vital for food security, notably among developing nations, and for stabilising markets.
Ukrainian officials said there had been sustained Russian shelling across Donetsk province, which Moscow aims to capture to complete its seizure of the industrialised Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Russian state news agency Tass on Wednesday quoted a separatist official, Vitaly Kiselyov, as saying Russian and proxy forces had entered the town of Siversk in Donetsk province and could take it in a couple of days. It was not clear what that assertion was based on.
In their evening briefing note, Ukraine’s armed forces said Russia had not conducted any new assaults on the frontline that includes Siversk, but that the town had been fired on by artillery.
Russia also struck 28 settlements in the Mykolaiv region bordering the Black Sea, killing at least five civilians, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office.
Russia, which says it does not target civilians, said on Wednesday it had shot down four Ukrainian military jets, an assertion the Ukrainian air force dismissed as propaganda.
Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield accounts.
As the Istanbul talks got under way, Kuleba reaffirmed Ukraine’s overall stance in the war, telling a briefing there were still no peace talks with Moscow and no territory would be ceded to Russia under any future deal.
Ukraine and the West have accused Russia of exacerbating a global food crisis and fuelling inflation by complicating attempts to supply poorer nations with grain.
Moscow has blamed Ukraine, accusing it of refusing to remove mines that it scattered around its coastline to protect itself from Russia’s attack and that represent a threat to shipping.
Russia has also lashed out at the West for imposing sanctions on a range of sectors that make it harder for Russia to fund and insure its own maritime freight services.
Diplomats say details of the plan under discussion at Wednesday’s talks included an idea for Ukrainian vessels to guide grain ships in and out through mined port waters; Russia agreeing to a truce while shipments move; and Turkey – supported by the UN – inspecting ships to allay Russian fears of weapons smuggling.
Ilyichev said Russia was ready to facilitate the navigation of foreign commercial vessels to export Ukrainian grain.
Russian news agency RIA quoted an unnamed diplomatic source as saying Russia’s demands included the removal of “obstacles to exports” created by western sanctions, citing the areas “of shipping insurance, logistics, transportation services and banking operations”.
Da Silva’s plea this week reflects growing concerns among politicians, authorities and voters about Brazil’s presidential campaign and October election. The leftist leads all polls to return to the office he held between 2003-2010, but far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro has suggested he may not accept the results, while urging his allies to arm themselves.
Last week, Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin, the chairman of the country’s electoral court, warned in a Washington, D.C., presentation that incidents worse than the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol could happen in Brazil this year. Last July, CIA Director William Burns told two Bolsonaro ministers that the president should stop attacking the electoral system.
Electoral tensions rose again on Saturday night, when Marcelo Arruda, a da Silva backer and Workers’ Party official, was shot dead by a man who, witnesses told the police, had shouted support for Bolsonaro before pulling the trigger. The investigation is ongoing, but the killing reignited fears of political violence on the campaign trail, which officially begins in August.
“We don’t need to fight. Our weapon is our calmness, the love we have inside of us, our thirst of making people’s lives better,” da Silva said at the rally. “We don’t have to react to (Bolsonaro’s supporters’) provocations. If anyone teases you, tell them to go bite themselves. Go home and take care of your families. That’s the lesson we need to teach.”
Members of da Silva’s campaign and Bolsonaro’s presidency told The Associated Press they will not discuss security details with the media.
Bolsonaro, who was severely injured when he was stabbed in the abdomen at a campaign event in 2018, has presidential security at all times, including military personnel and local police.
Da Silva can only count on private security until his bid is validated by a party convention, which can take place until Aug. 5. After that, Brazil’s federal police will protect him.
The federal police said in a statement that 300 officers will be among those protecting candidates.
The Workers’ Party has taken several measures to avoid conflicts between supporters, and to ensure the former president’s security. Before the rally in Brasilia, party leadership published guidelines asking supporters to move in groups, bring an extra shirt of neutral color and avoid conflict with adversaries.
“Don’t argue or attack any provocateur. Heroic actions might cause unnecessary risks to you and to your fellow supporters,” the party said.
Two members of the da Silva campaign, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss the matter publicly, confirmed to the AP that the leftist leader has been wearing bulletproof vests in public events since the beginning of July.
Da Silva supporters were thoroughly searched at the entrance of the pavilion where the event took place. But the long lines were a small concern for people like artisan Alessandra Melo, 50. She believes the former president’s life is at risk, and that supporters like her could also be targeted.
“I fear a lot for Lula’s security. He likes to be close to the people. I worry for him, being out there amid all this violence,” Melo said.
Smaller incidents against da Silva supporters have been reported in recent weeks. On June 15, drones dropped liquid with a pungent smell on leftists attending an event in Uberlandia, in the state of Minas Gerais. Last week, a man threw a rudimentary explosive made with small-scale fireworks at a da Silva rally in Rio de Janeiro.
No injuries resulted from either incident, and police have made arrests in both cases.
Da Silva was arrested in the sprawling Car Wash corruption probe as he led polls to win the 2018 presidential elections. His conviction also barred him from running. But the cases against him were quashed after the country’s Supreme Court ruled that judge Sergio Moro was biased against the leftist, and he was freed from jail.
Political violence is no stranger to Brazilian politics. In 2018, Rio councilwoman Marielle Franco and her driver were shot to death in their car while driving downtown.
Bolsonaro, under pressure to condemn Arruda’s killing last weekend and any political violence, said on Tuesday there is no justification for the murder. He has also called members of Arruda’s family. In his recorded phone call, he suggested they tell the media he shouldn’t be blamed for the murder.
“Since almost all of the press is on the left, they are basically putting this guy’s actions on my back,” the president told two of Arruda’s brothers. “The left has made this a political issue.”
Arruda’s killing occurred in the southern state of Parana, a Bolsonaro stronghold. Since then, many authorities have expressed worries about the risks of violence involving supporters of both candidates.
Melina Risso, a program director at the Rio-based security think tank Igarape Institute, said candidates will only stop worrying about their own safety if Bolsonaro openly condemns those committing violent actions.
“Bolsonaro sometimes takes some steps back when these incidents appear, but that is only until the news cycle is over,” Risso said. “The risks are very real, and there is no sign that will change until the election is over.”
Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court's marriage equality case, at home in 2015. Obergefell told BuzzFeed News he fears the court might now unwind marriage equality:
“It's exhausting to even think about trying to do this again in the environment that we're in now,” one LGBTQ campaigner said.
A county clerk refuses to issue a marriage license to two women, citing an old amendment to a state constitution against doing so. Or maybe it’s a far-right state legislator who passes a bill that categorizes marriages between same-sex couples differently from opposite-sex ones. It could even be an order from a state executive allowing anyone in government with a religious objection the right to refuse to work on a same-sex marriage.
Let’s say we’re in Texas, for no other reason than the governor there has already been targeting the LGBTQ community and the state attorney general has expressed an interest in defending a law against sodomy — not to mention the state Republican Party, whose members control every level of government, officially adopting a platform last month that calls homosexuality an "abnormal lifestyle choice.”
The plaintiffs from the LGBTQ community will win the first federal case — that part is assured. But there will be appeals, and Texas sits in the 5th Circuit, the most conservative appellate court in the country, which only shifted further right thanks to the six lifetime appointments made by Donald Trump. One of those men — they’re all men — has spent much of his career working against LGBTQ rights and has called Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing marriage for same-sex couples, an “abject failure” that “imperils civic peace.” It’s possible he could sit on that court for the next 40 years.
All it takes is one novel case — the right case with the right questions — to intrigue enough justices in the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority with an appetite to overturn their institution's own precedent.
Then, as supporters of abortion rights will tell you, all bets are off.
“There's a range of ways that it could happen, and what we know about how this far-right political movement operates is that they will kind of go after every method until they find one that they feel like can advance to the courts in the circuits they want to be in,” said Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality. “They have allies at every level of government who are more than willing to pursue that.”
“We are entering a new chapter,” she added.
The ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision last month in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization to overturn almost a half century of reproductive rights guaranteed under Roe v. Wade also landed like a bombshell for LGBTQ campaigners across the country. Interviews with 10 activists and legal strategists, including attorneys who argued the case for marriage equality before the Supreme Court, revealed genuine fears that the court’s demonstrated willingness to revisit and overrule established precedent would soon come for LGBTQ rights.
“I would characterize it as a pretty seismic effect,” Beach-Ferrara said. “It's like living in an area that's prone to earthquakes. You know it could come, but this is a big one.”
“I don't know who across our community is not alarmed,” said Jennifer Pizer, acting chief legal officer at Lambda Legal. “One would need an ocean of optimism to not be alarmed.”
In addition to their distress at the rolling back of abortion access, these campaigners have been particularly shaken by the concurring opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas, who went further than the other five conservatives by openly calling for the court to “correct the error” in legal reasoning that formed the basis in other 14th Amendment cases that guaranteed the rights to contraception, same-sex relations, and marriage equality. Many said they believed Thomas was signaling sympathetic officials across the country to start working to get a case before the court. Two campaigners described it in the same terms: an invitation to mischief.
“He sort of laid out a target and said go for this,” said David Stacy, government affairs director for the Human Rights Campaign, who predicted state legislators would heed Thomas’s call. “We definitely think that could be the starting gun for a more aggressive effort to challenge these things.”
“It was clearly a threat to the rights we fought for,” said Evan Wolfson, founder of Freedom to Marry. “The threat is real.”
In the wake of the Dobbs decision, these activists described conversations with colleagues and lawmakers that have taken on a new urgency as they imagine the fallout from a worst-case scenario. Campaigners who had turned their attention to pushing for marriage equality in other countries are now imagining what a return to the US might look like. Some groups have prepared information packets for LGBTQ people to reassure them their marriages are secure for now, but to warn them that fresh legal attacks are likely. Others have been working with Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee for a public hearing on Thursday billed as “The Threat to Individual Freedoms in a Post-Roe World.”
“I think people in the community had assumed that marriage was off the table — that we have turned the corner on that as a country,” National Center for Lesbian Rights Legal Director Shannon Minter said.
“Believe me: all the LGBTQ legal and advocacy groups are on alert," Minter added.
Some campaigners, like Kendra Johnson with Equality North Carolina, are fielding calls from nervous people in their community, asking what steps they might take to best secure their marriage, shared assets, or parental rights — through a second parent adoption or an updated will or power of attorney, for example — just in case the legal sky falls in.
“We've seen early reports of massive calls to estate planning attorneys, people who are specialized in LGBTQ law, seeing an uptick in consultations,” Johnson said. “I've seen different seminars already being hosted on how to protect your families in light of Roe. So there is great fear and trepidation in the community.”
The threat is so real that two of the people interviewed for this story expressly declined to imagine what kind of case might travel up to the Supreme Court, lest they unintentionally help their opponents achieve their goal.
“The last thing I'm gonna do is speculate about what those cases might look like,” said Mary Bonauto, the civil rights project director at GLBTQ Legal Advocates … Defenders (GLAD) who led oral arguments in Obergefell. “The last thing I want to do is provide anybody with any ideas they don’t already have.”
James Esseks, the director of the ACLU LGBTQ … HIV Project who was also among the attorneys who argued Obergefell, said he believed the conservative justices were emboldened and unfettered. He described the Dobbs decision as a “game changer” for abortion rights and for “the realm of the possible for this court.”
“It's entirely possible that this court rolls back a whole series of rights that the country has taken for granted for a long time,” Esseks said.
For Esseks, even discussing marriage equality once again with a reporter felt somewhat surreal.
“It is hard to go back here,” he said. “It's otherworldly. It’s through the looking glass.”
All the campaigners interviewed for this story wanted to make at least two things clear. First, there is no immediate threat to marriage equality or bans on sodomy laws (which have previously prohibited anal and oral sex between any two consenting adults but which began being used against LGBTQ people in the 1960s).
Second, the legal attacks on marriage equality are not new. From Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis to attempts to carve out religious objections on things like baking wedding cakes or designing wedding websites for same-sex couples, opponents have continued to challenge Obergefell in the courts since it was handed down.
“It's not as if we won marriage and the fight was over, and now the fight is renewed,” Pizer with Lambda Legal said. “They didn't let up for a minute.”
In October 2020, when the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Davis, Justice Thomas took the somewhat rare step of issuing a statement, which Justice Samuel Alito signed on to, saying the Kentucky clerk who refused to give marriage licenses to same-sex couples "may have been one of the first victims" of the court's "cavalier treatment of religion." Thomas decried Obergefell as prioritizing a “novel constitutional right” that they needed to remedy.
“The court has created a problem that only it can fix,” Thomas wrote.
Since then, the court has only become more conservative, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett taking the seat that once belonged to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, creating a 6–3 split in favor of the right that has been left unchanged by the recent appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
In the Dobbs decision, the majority of justices relied on an originalist and historical interpretation of the Constitution in order to decide that, because it does not explicitly mention abortion, the issue should be returned to the states. Alito, who authored the majority opinion, said the decision should only be seen as impacting abortion, as other rights did not concern “potential life.”
But that did not assuage the liberal justices, who warned in their dissent, “No one should be confident that this majority is done with its work.”
LGBTQ advocates agree. They don’t trust conservative justices who described Roe as an important precedent during Senate confirmation hearings only to rule against it when the balance on the court changed — evidence, they believe, that the court is acting with ideological and political imperatives rather than legal or judicial ones.
“To have [Dobbs] arrive as part of a suite of opinions that lack a coherent, constitutional approach, where the results-oriented approach was so transparent, makes the impact that much greater, and it drives more to a conclusion that this is not a court that has any fidelity to giving us constitutional analysis that the country can actually follow,” Pizer said. “It looks more transparently like an exercise of raw power and the consequences be damned.”
In recent months, the political climate has also changed against LGBTQ Americans with shocking and ferocious intensity. Outdated anti-gay language about people preying on children or grooming them has become accepted among prominent ring-wing figures as they launch legislative and political assaults, especially against the transgender community.
Should Obergefell fall and the patchwork of state bans on marriage for same-sex couples suddenly be resurrected, as was the case with so-called abortion trigger laws after Dobbs, the prospect of trying to return to a protracted and expensive campaign to try to flip states one by one in such a toxic political environment is horrifying, said Fran Hutchins, executive director of the Equality Foundation.
“It's exhausting to even think about trying to do this again in the environment that we're in now, in this like post-Trump authoritarian renewal of the culture war moment,” Hutchins said. “I just don't want to. I don't want to do it. I don't think we should have to do it.”
One project activists have once again turned their minds to is the official legislative repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a federal ban on recognizing marriages for same-sex couples that was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2013. Prior to Dobbs, the repeal of DOMA “was on the nice-to-do list, but not the urgent priority list,” Stacy with the HRC said. Of course, that’s since changed.
One way to achieve that end, Stacy said, would be to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, which was first introduced in Congress in January 2015. That bill would amend DOMA and make clear that the federal government would recognize any married couple’s legal rights, benefits, or protections, even if they lived in a state that outlawed same-sex marriage.
For others, the Dobbs decision and its potential ramifications were the final pushes they needed to advocate for reform of the Supreme Court itself. Lambda Legal, GLAD, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the Transgender Law Center all now support adding seats to the Supreme Court and introducing an ethics code for justices in order “to regain a measure of balance and restore confidence in the Court and the rule of law.”
All 10 campaigners interviewed for this story also stressed the importance of people turning out to vote in every election in order to support candidates who believe in LGBTQ equality. That also involves people urging their loved ones and allies to do the same.
“On a personal level, I'm doing what I imagine others are doing, which is — I haven't talked to my family or straight friends about these issues in a long time, and I am back to doing it,” Minter with the National Center for Lesbian Rights said. “All my family members know, ‘Hey, we're concerned that these protections may be under attack and I've asked you to do this before in the past and I'm asking you again now. Vote.’”
History shows civil rights movements sparking backlash from opponents who might enjoy varying degrees of success, and LGBTQ advocates are clear-eyed that their movement is no different. “We know from history that you're never done working. You're never done persuading. You're never done building on what you've done,” Wolfson with Freedom to Marry said.
Still, it makes the prospect of such a major loss no less terrifying, according to Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the 2015 marriage case. Just hours after the Dobbs decision landed, he told BuzzFeed News he’d be crestfallen if his case might one day too suffer the same fate as Roe.
“But not because it's my name on it and not because I was involved in it. I'd be devastated if it had someone else's name on it and I had nothing to do with it,” Obergefell said. “I'd be devastated because that's the wrong thing for our nation.”
Rachel Corrie stands in front of an Israeli bulldozer to protest the destruction of Palestinian homes along the Rafah-Egypt border on March 16, 2003. Corrie was killed later the same day. (photo: Corrie Family)
Both killings left little real doubt about the dynamics at play. Abu Akleh was standing with a group of colleagues, wearing a vest clearly marked “PRESS,” nowhere near the fighting that had taken place earlier that morning. Corrie was nonviolently protesting the demolition of a Palestinian family’s home in Gaza. She was wearing a fluorescent orange jacket with reflective stripes and had been on the scene for several hours, at times speaking into a megaphone.
In the moments before her death, Corrie was standing in the path of the bulldozer as other activists had been doing throughout the day. As the driver pushed the machine forward, she climbed onto a mound of dirt so she would be clearly visible, according to witness testimony reviewed by The Intercept. The driver kept advancing. When she fell to the ground, the dirt engulfed her, but the driver moved several feet forward before backing off, effectively crushing her twice. The possibility that he did not see her, as he later claimed, defies all credibility. Still, the Israeli government never took responsibility for her death, and while the U.S. government rejected the results of the Israeli investigation, it did nothing to ensure that such a killing would not happen again. So it did.
Corrie was killed on March 16, 2003, when she was 23. Twelve years later, on the anniversary of her death, her parents and sister met with Antony Blinken for the last time. The deputy secretary of state spoke to them in the sincere way they had come to know well. “Come back anytime,” he told them as the meeting came to a close.
The Corries didn’t want to come back. They had been meeting with Blinken for years, and they were tired. When he asked, earnestly, “What can I do for you?” they felt frustrated. “I appreciate your kindness,” Craig Corrie told Blinken. “I’m glad you are personally engaged. But unless you engage your institution, it doesn’t do me any good.”
“He’s asking, what can I do for you,” Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother, told The Intercept. “But there’s a point at which it’s like, what are you guys going to do?”
“I can’t tell you what tools you have to use,” echoed Sarah, Rachel’s sister. “You need to be telling us.”
Rachel’s killing had brought the Corries to hundreds of offices like Blinken’s over the years but nowhere closer to the accountability they were seeking. Blinken, today the secretary of state, was one of several senior U.S. officials who worked closely with the family during their yearslong crusade for justice and one of a number who now occupy top positions in the Biden administration. The Corries liked him, and they appreciated his efforts and warmth. In emails, he signed himself “Tony.” He always responded to their letters and regularly met with them for longer than scheduled.
Ultimately, however, Blinken failed them.
As they prepared to leave his office for the last time, Sarah told him: “There was a promise made to the president of the United States from Prime Minister [Ariel] Sharon of a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation. Your government said that that never happened; that promise was never fulfilled,” she recalled. “You’ve still got a problem here.”
Blinken nodded. “I know.”
Walking away, Sarah knew she was done. Blinken had asked her to follow up with an email; she wondered why she should be the one do that, why one of the staffers in the room couldn’t take notes. “I felt like we could go on like this for the rest of our lives,” she said. “I think in some way I needed them to say no. If they weren’t going to do anything, that’s what I needed to hear out of that meeting.”
Sarah was 29 when her sister was killed, and since then she had devoted herself completely to lobbying the U.S. government for action. “You think about what your life is in your 30s, developing your career, raising your family,” she said in an interview last month. “Mine was this process.”
She had been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease before Rachel was killed, but the stress of the last 12 years had taken a toll on Sarah’s health. The day of that meeting with Blinken, she felt too sick to get out of bed but powered through it. She had two more meetings at the Senate that day. In the hallway outside Blinken’s office, she remembered the words of another senior official, Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department at the time of Rachel’s death: “You’re doing the right thing,” Wilkerson had warned the family. “But you may never see results, so don’t lose your health.”
Those words haunted Sarah now. “I’m not going to lose my health over banging my head against the wall,” she finally decided. “I knew at that point I couldn’t keep doing this. I had reached my limit.”
That was in 2015. Since then, Cindy and Craig Corrie have continued to honor Rachel’s memory through the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. They launched a sister city partnership between Olympia, Washington, where she grew up, and Rafah, the city on the Egypt-Gaza border where she was killed. They speak in support of Palestinians at events around the world. In meetings with activists, Cindy sometimes found herself defending Blinken to critics of U.S. foreign policy. “I told them I did feel this was a good person, who cared and did try to help,” she said. “And I believe Tony Blinken wants the best for Palestinian people too.”
Blinken did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, but a State Department spokesperson wrote that the administration stood by the statements of previous administrations. “Rachel Corrie’s death was tragic and this administration reiterates our condolences to her family,” the spokesperson wrote. “The U.S. consistently called for a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation into Rachel Corrie’s killing.”
Sarah was not much of an activist herself, but she had seen it as her civic duty to ensure that her government worked as it was supposed to. The endeavor of lobbying U.S. officials to do something about Rachel’s killing had become all-consuming, barely leaving time to grieve. After the last meeting with Blinken, she stored the piles of documents she had accumulated over the years and tried to focus on her life. She took up dance classes and flight lessons.
When the Corries gave up, the U.S. government’s effort to get accountability for Rachel also came to an end. “When we stopped, they stopped,” said Craig. “That wagon was in a bunch of mud. If you weren’t pushing on it, you didn’t go anywhere.”
Then in May, Abu Akleh was killed. Several independent investigations, including one by the United Nations, concluded that she was shot by Israeli forces, describing the shooting as “targeted” and the bullet that killed her as “well-aimed.” Her death was referred to the International Criminal Court. But following a tested playbook in such situations, the Israeli government refused to take responsibility.
Another American Killed
For weeks after Abu Akleh’s death, her family and a growing number of people, including members of Congress, called on the U.S. government to conduct its own independent investigation.
U.S. officials eventually responded to those demands by reviewing and “summarizing” the investigations conducted by Israeli and Palestinian officials. In a statement issued on the Fourth of July holiday, the State Department said that investigators “could not reach a definitive conclusion regarding the origin of the bullet” that killed Abu Akleh. While they noted that “gunfire from [Israel Defense Forces] positions was likely responsible” for her death, they found “no reason to believe that this was intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances.”
It was a deeply disappointing conclusion for those who had hoped that the probe would yield stronger condemnation or a path toward accountability.
The Abu Akleh family rejected the findings, denouncing their lack of transparency and questioning their political nature. “The notion that the American investigators, whose identity is not disclosed in the statement, believe the bullet ‘likely came from Israeli positions’ is cold comfort,” they wrote in a blistering statement. “We continue to call on the American government to conduct an open, transparent, and thorough investigation of all the facts by independent agencies free from any political consideration or influence.” They demanded a meeting with President Joe Biden during his trip to Israel and the West Bank this week. The White House did not answer a question from The Intercept about Biden’s plans to meet with them.
“In the days and weeks since an Israeli soldier killed Shireen, not only have we not been adequately consulted, informed, and supported by U.S. government officials,” they wrote to the president, “but your administration’s actions exhibit an apparent intent to undermine our efforts toward justice and accountability for Shireen’s death.”
B’tselem, an Israeli human rights group, called the outcome of the U.S. review a “whitewash.” A colleague of Abu Akleh’s at Al Jazeera wrote that the State Department’s statement felt like the journalist “was shot again today.”
In the U.S., progressive legislators introduced an amendment to the defense budget to force the State Department and the FBI — which regularly investigates serious crimes committed against U.S. citizens overseas — to investigate Abu Akleh’s killing, though the amendment failed to pass. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., a co-sponsor of the bill and the first Palestinian American in Congress, also called for an ombudsman investigation of the State Department’s response.
Jamil Dakwar, a Palestinian American human rights lawyer who has advised the Corries since 2003, told The Intercept that the U.S. government was “effectively an accomplice” in Israeli crimes.
“Had it been any other foreign government, there would already be a Shireen Abu Akleh and Rachel Corrie Accountability Act and sanctions leveled against that country and its highest officials for killing an American human rights activist and journalist with impunity,” Dakwar said. “Frankly, I would not trust the United States with conducting a credible and independent investigation into serious abuses by close U.S. allies such as Israel. The price tag for real accountability is too high.”
The State Department did not address The Intercept’s questions about how U.S. officials conducted their review, and a department spokesperson struggled to answer reporters’ questions about it at a briefing last week. Still, the fact that such a probe even happened, however cursory and flawed, was a sign of the increasing pressure the Biden administration has come under following Abu Akleh’s killing.
The U.S. government never investigated the killing of Rachel Corrie, despite dozens of members of Congress calling for such an investigation at the time. Nor has it investigated the deaths of other U.S. citizens at the hands of Israeli forces, including 18-year-old Turkish American Furkan Dogan, one of nine peace activists killed by Israeli soldiers in 2010 aboard the Mavi Marmara, a flotilla headed for Gaza to deliver humanitarian supplies; 16-year-old Mahmoud Shaalan, an unarmed Palestinian American boy killed in 2016 while crossing a checkpoint in the West Bank; and 78-year-old Omar Assad, a former Milwaukee grocery store owner who died of an apparent heart attack earlier this year after Israeli soldiers dragged him from his car, then blindfolded and handcuffed him.
The U.S. government also failed to investigate severe injuries inflicted on several American citizens by Israeli forces, including the 2014 beating of 15-year-old Tariq Abu Khdeir, who was visiting family in Jerusalem from Florida. A day earlier, Abu Khdeir’s 16-year-old cousin Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who was not a U.S. citizen, had been kidnapped by Israeli settlers and burned alive.
On each occasion, and as they did for weeks after Abu Akleh’s killing, U.S. officials — some of them the same individuals the Corries met with over the years — called on Israel to carry out a “credible” investigation. It was hearing those words again that drove the Corries to reluctantly end their silence about the conversations they had with members of the U.S. government and how fruitless the years of behind-the-scenes efforts in Washington had been.
“They shouldn’t have to be asking the exact same questions we were asking in 2003,” said Sarah, speaking of Abu Akleh’s family. “My question to the Biden administration is, what are you doing differently for Shireen’s family that you didn’t do in our case, so that they will get accountability? What’s your real expectation here? There has to be a little bit more honesty about that, and if they’re not going to be honest, then I have to speak up again.”
Breaking the Silence
As public as they had been in their efforts to get answers about Rachel’s killing, and as outspoken as they remain about the Palestinian cause, the Corries never talked in detail about their private discussions with U.S. officials, at first because they trusted that the process would yield the results they were seeking and later because revisiting the odyssey felt too overwhelming. The experience of seeking justice for Rachel, they say, at times felt just as traumatizing as her death itself.
“Emotionally, it’s damaging to keep having to go back and revisit it over and over,” said Sarah, who stopped counting the family’s meetings with U.S. officials when they reached 200, years ago.
“We deal with Rachel not being here, and in a lot of ways that’s just a part of our lives,” her mother said. “But the process of seeking the accountability that she deserved, that all these people deserve, the intensity of that … it was such a long struggle.”
Over two days last month at Sarah’s home in a suburb of Olympia, the Corries spoke at length about their conversations with senior officials, including Blinken, CIA Director William Burns, and staffers working closely with Biden during his time in the Senate and as vice president. Sarah dug out the old boxes of documents and shared dozens of files detailing the efforts of U.S. officials to pressure Israel into an investigation and their unequivocal rejection of its conclusions. The documents, a selection of which The Intercept is publishing, include communications with current and former senior officials, notes from meetings, and hundreds of pages the Corries obtained through public records requests, such as diplomatic cables, internal State Department memorandums, and letters between the Bush and Obama administrations and members of Congress.
Together, the files and the Corries’ testimony paint a damning picture of the futility of U.S. efforts to seek accountability. The documents show that several senior officials attempted for months to extract answers from their Israeli counterparts. But the lack of political will on the part of the U.S. executive branch and Congress to impose consequences for Israeli human rights abuses reduced those efforts to meaningless gestures, with all players involved fully aware that they would lead to no real change.
When they embarked on that process, however, the Corries knew none of this. So when they learned that Anton Abu Akleh, Shireen’s brother, had expressed the desire to meet with them, they readily agreed. “There is no manual,” Craig said of the battle for justice. “We wanted to warn them.”
On a Zoom call last month, the Corries spoke to members of the Abu Akleh family, who called in from Jerusalem and elsewhere in the U.S. Even over video, they felt immediately connected.
It was a heartbreaking meeting. “It is really hard to see the situation continue the way that it is … knowing that it might be decades before they find any satisfactory — or maybe unsatisfactory — answer, until the point that they just get tired,” Cindy said. “They’re going through the exact same thing,” echoed Craig, “trying to keep control as best as they can over this process.”
There had been early signs that the U.S. response to Abu Akleh’s killing might be different, like the fact that Blinken personally called her family to offer the administration’s support. Colin Powell never called the Corries, they noted, though he wrote them a letter of condolence. But those hopes quickly faded, and the results of the U.S. probe earlier this month all but put an end to them.
“The U.S. can do whatever they want; at the end of the day, they are a superpower,” Lina Abu Akleh, Shireen’s niece, said in an interview in June, before U.S. investigators reached their conclusions. “But they haven’t been doing what they’re supposed to do, which is protect their citizens outside of the U.S.”
Of course, it shouldn’t matter that Shireen and Rachel were American citizens — something the Corries have long stressed throughout their advocacy on Rachel’s behalf. Israeli forces have killed more than 10,000 Palestinians since the end of the Second Intifada in 2005, at least 50 this year alone, virtually all without accountability.
“The Corries have painfully learned firsthand that while they were welcomed to bring Rachel’s case to America’s halls of power and even extract expression of sympathy from U.S. officials, Rachel’s case is no different from thousands of Palestinians who were victims of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity over the last seven decades,” Dakwar, who co-represented the family in a civil suit against the Israeli government, told The Intercept.
Still, the U.S. is Israel’s closest ally, and Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II — to the tune of $146 billion in military assistance and missile defense funding. The U.S.-made bulldozer that killed Rachel Corrie was sold to Israel through a Defense Department program, and the Abu Akleh family has asked U.S. officials to “clarify the extent to which American funds were involved” in her killing.
While the Corries also fought a decadelong legal battle against the Israeli government, they placed greater expectations in their own government’s ability to deliver justice. The U.S. government’s failure, in the end, was more devastating. “I have very little say over what the Israeli government does, but I have a much greater responsibility for what my own government does,” Sarah said.
As they sat in Sarah’s dining room, surrounded by artwork she had collected over months spent in Haifa when the lawsuit against the Israeli government went to trial, the Corries sometimes quibbled over details of their recollections. They had also come to process their experiences in different ways. Sarah was more outspoken about her deep frustration with U.S. officials. Cindy stressed how grateful and indebted the family felt toward the individual officials who showed them so much kindness. She remembered meeting former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer in his home, for instance, after he left the diplomatic corps, and talking to him for hours. “He never acted like we should leave,” she said. “I’m pretty sure that with everything else that was going on, I never wrote him a thank-you note.”
Cindy sometimes feels that the family gave up fighting too soon — that if they had kept traveling to Washington and kept pushing for more meetings, then maybe Abu Akleh’s family wouldn’t be in the same position today.
“There’s a burden on our shoulders every time somebody is seriously injured or killed, particularly when it’s a U.S. citizen; you always feel like if we could have just done something more, that maybe we could have helped,” Sarah said. “But it’s not really a burden any family should carry. It really is a burden that the United States government should carry.”
The Only People on the Hill
The United States invaded Iraq three days after Rachel was killed, but for weeks leading up to the attack, the prospect of war dominated public discourse. In emails to her parents, Rachel often wrote about the impending war alongside accounts of Israeli violence. In her last email, she thanked them for their anti-war work.
With the invasion around the corner and their daughter in Gaza, Cindy and Craig Corrie had begun to follow in her footsteps. In North Carolina, where they lived for a short time, Cindy joined a peace group, and days before Rachel’s death she traveled to Washington, D.C., for an anti-war rally. She had never been on the Hill before, but she and Craig had campaigned for Washington Rep. Brian Baird, so she decided to go to his office to relay the injustices her daughter had been writing home about. She called Rachel from Union Station that day to make sure the details were accurate. It was the last time they spoke.
Baird, who served in Congress until 2011, recalled meeting Cindy in an interview with The Intercept. “I told her, ‘We’re about to launch an invasion of Iraq. … You’ve got to tell your daughter to be super careful right now, because with the war about to happen, all eyes will be away.’”
Less than a week later, Sarah learned of her sister’s killing when the news broke on television. She was at home in Olympia when a friend left a voicemail telling her how sorry she was. Sarah didn’t know what she was talking about. She turned on the news and read, “Olympia woman killed in Rafah, Gaza.” Moments later, her sister’s name was flashing across the ticker.
Sarah called everyone she knew who might know somebody in government. The family didn’t know what they were supposed to do, whether they should be traveling to Israel, or how to bring Rachel’s body home. When Sarah reached Baird on the phone, he immediately asked, “Was your mother in my office last week?”
Baird told Sarah he would be on the Hill the next morning to meet her parents, who had gotten on a flight back to D.C. “I will help them,” he promised. He spent the rest of his time in Congress making good on that pledge.
“I felt a moral obligation,” he told The Intercept, “to ensure that our country investigated fully how one of our citizens was killed by a country that receives billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid, that we consider an ally.”
Baird’s congressional office became the Corries’ headquarters for those first, frantic days, and Cindy and Craig recall that time of anguish as one interspersed with countless gestures of humanity. On the Tuesday after Rachel was killed, a staffer brought them sandwiches when he realized they had not eaten since Saturday. In the rush of leaving home, Craig had packed pillowcases instead of shirts; Baird offered him one of his own. Craig remembers laughing at that: “You’re a U.S. congressman, and you just offered me the shirt off your back,” to which Baird replied that he had “a clean one.” At one point, Craig lay down on the floor, overwhelmed. He remembers the congressman gently draping a blanket over him.
The Corries spent the next weeks, months, and years on an exhausting tour of Washington offices. Baird introduced a resolution calling for a U.S. investigation of Rachel’s death, and members of her family, including uncles and aunts, hand-delivered personal requests for signatures to every single office in Congress. Seventy-seven representatives signed on, but the bill was never moved to a vote.
Sarah and Rachel had grown up in a state capital, with politically engaged parents who would rush the kids home when there were important hearings on TV. Despite her experience, Sarah still fundamentally believes in the promise of the U.S. government to do the right thing and of its citizens’ responsibility to help it get there. “I’m very realistic, I think anybody that has walked down the halls of Congress is very realistic,” she said. “But what do you do if you give up on that hope?”
So the family traveled across the country every three months to meet with anyone who would meet with them. They scheduled as many as 10 appointments a day. They would catch overnight flights from Seattle, quickly change, and be on the Hill by 9 a.m. Often, Rachel’s aunts would join them from Iowa, riding Greyhound buses to the capital because they didn’t like to fly. In Iowa, where Craig and Cindy had grown up, relatives pounded the campaign trail, asking candidates to address Rachel’s killing.
The family prepared packets for everyone they met, with photos of Rachel, background information, and clips about the latest news from Palestine. Sarah carried around two large folders labeled “Corrie Case files for Washington DC” and “Rachel Files DC Work.” After their meetings, they would sit down in a café, without talking to one another, to write down everything they remembered and compile a meticulous record. It was full-time, often discouraging work.
Someone had advised them early on to focus only on Rachel’s death, that speaking out in support of Palestinians wouldn’t get them far in Washington. “You can talk about the cause of Rachel, but you can’t talk about Rachel’s cause,” that person told them. They did the opposite. All along, they were fully aware that few Palestinians would get the same access to U.S. officials — which made their sense of responsibility even heavier.
Most of the work involved teaching U.S. officials about a place and context they knew almost nothing about. They had to “explain Rafah to people,” said Sarah, pulling out maps and showing where Gaza was, where Israel planned to build a wall. “So many offices really didn’t have a clue,” she added. “We recognized very quickly that it was not just about educating about what happened to Rachel and trying to get accountability, but it was also trying to get some information back to them.”
Most officials and staffers listened intently and compassionately; a few went out of their way to help. At one point, Sarah got Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., to hand-deliver a letter she had written to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. William Burns, who at the time was assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, called Craig to encourage him and Cindy to travel to Gaza after Rachel’s death. “‘You need to go,’” Craig remembers him saying. “He wanted us to see it firsthand.” The State Department had an advisory in place warning Americans against traveling to Gaza — something the Israelis later used to suggest that Rachel was responsible for her own death. But Burns didn’t seem concerned about that. “Stay with the Palestinians,” he told the Corries. “They will keep you safe.”
The Corries traveled to Gaza several times and met with the Nasrallah family, whose home Rachel was protecting the day she was killed. A spokesperson for the CIA wrote in a statement to The Intercept that when Burns was a State Department official, “he had the opportunity to meet with the Corries and express his heartfelt condolences as they worked with U.S. officials to pursue a full and transparent investigation of their daughter Rachel’s tragic death — an investigation for which he strongly advocated.”
Some officials were dismissive or unresponsive. Others simply never found time for them. Once, after a rare, unpleasant meeting during which a congressional staffer had berated them, a receptionist asked to meet the family in a discreet corner of Congress’s cafeteria, where, watching his back, he apologized for the way they had been treated.
At times, the Corries felt like they were barely being tolerated. They laughed when public records they obtained included a comment from a Justice Department staffer to an official in Congress, saying, “The family is not going to go away, so slow walking a decision is just going to make the committee’s life more difficult and subsequently yours as well.” In executive offices in particular, the Corries sometimes felt like they were being given the runaround. They began to jokingly refer to it as being “woozled,” after the woozles haunting Winnie the Pooh’s nightmares. “We’ve been woozled by the best,” Sarah told her father when they left Blinken’s office for the last time.
Some officials told the Corries privately what they would never say publicly. A longtime congressman warned them, “Nobody will ever tell you no. And nobody will ever do anything.” A senior staff member in Biden’s office encouraged them to keep up their advocacy for Rachel as well as the Palestinian people: “You have to keep doing this because you are the only people on the Hill talking about this.”
There were uplifting moments, sometimes funny ones. Once, Sarah spilled her latte over the papers of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff — she immediately went to the gift shop and bought a mug with a lid, which she nicknamed “the Nancy Pelosi.” The family became friendly with security guards on the Hill and the shuttle driver who ferried them to the city from their cheap hotel on the outskirts of D.C. After a few trips, the driver asked why they kept coming back, and they told him Rachel’s story. From then on, he dropped them off at the Capitol with a “You go get them!”
For Baird, the family’s champion in Washington, the experience was a disillusioning one.
Some people went to bat for them, he stressed, aware that it could be career-ending. “There are members of the State Department who know full well the imbalance of our relationship with Israel, they know full well the damage that does to our integrity and our standing, and they know full well that their hands are tied by the American political system,” Baird said. “And it breaks their heart.”
The best-intentioned efforts were ultimately undermined by foreign policy priorities that were at odds with the quest for justice, Baird realized. The same dynamic is now playing out in the aftermath of Abu Akleh’s killing — and the killing of U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In the absence of U.S. action, those responsible for such abuses know that “as time passes, we will forget about it,” said Baird. “And that encourages them to act with impunity.”
Baird’s greatest frustration was with his fellow members of Congress. After speaking up on behalf of the Corries, he faced a barrage of accusations that he was antisemitic. Criticizing Israel, he quickly learned, inevitably led to lost funding and votes. “For having the audacity, the hubris, the courage maybe, to investigate the death of one your own constituents, you get essentially branded as a nonsupporter of Israel,” he said. “There is a reinforced lack of objectivity and curiosity, and there is a reinforced, reflexive obedience and repetition of the Israeli line.”
That level of conformity to the Israeli position has been challenged in recent years, as a number of legislators have questioned U.S. support for Israel in light of ongoing abuses and growing solidarity with Palestinians among the American public. But those voices remain a small minority in Congress. While some legislators have issued a flurry of statements in recent months — about Abu Akleh’s killing but also other Israeli abuses — their concerns are a long way from shaping U.S. foreign policy.
“Are We Going to Do Nothing?”
Lawrence Wilkerson learned early in his time as chief of staff to the secretary of state that the United States was simply “in a different relationship with Israel than any other of its allies.”
He remembers sitting in a meeting with top Bush administration officials at the height of Israel’s targeted assassination campaign, during the Second Intifada. More than once, Israeli forces firing Hellfire missiles from Apache helicopters had targeted militant leaders but killed children and other civilians in the process. This was a war crime, Wilkerson said, and it was a violation of U.S. law, which prohibited the use of U.S. military sales for the kinds of activities the Israelis were engaging in. He recommended a strongly worded rebuke but was overruled.
“We had photographs of the women and children who had died,” Wilkerson recalled. “And I said, ‘This is going to happen again, and again, and again. Are we going to do nothing each time?’”
He looked around the room. “There was no answer to my question.”
Wilkerson has since come to regret his role in the Bush administration and doesn’t mince words, particularly about the Iraq War. In an interview last month, he spoke for the first time about the key role he played in seeking accountability on behalf of the Corrie family — and how his efforts ultimately fell short.
Powell, the secretary of state, had been locked in a power struggle with other members of Bush’s Cabinet over foreign policy issues, Wilkerson said, and when Rachel was killed, he instructed Wilkerson to make her case a priority, even though it was not for the administration. “He said, ‘I want you to take this on, and I want you to do the best you can, and I want you to be speaking for me.’”
With that mandate, Wilkerson became a staunch advocate for the Corries, who remember him, along with Baird, as one of the officials who worked the hardest to get the U.S. government to do something about Rachel’s killing. For his part, Wilkerson came to see parallels between Rachel, as her family described her, and his own daughter.
In the aftermath of Rachel’s killing, Sharon had personally promised Bush that the Israeli government would undertake a “thorough, credible, and transparent” investigation. Documents the family shared with The Intercept show that several State Department officials, including Wilkerson, repeatedly took up the case with their Israeli counterparts, receiving similar commitments.
U.S. officials also made commitments. “When we have the death of an American citizen, we want to see it fully investigated,” Richard Boucher, a State Department spokesperson, said at a public briefing three days after Rachel’s killing. “That is one of our key responsibilities overseas, to look after the welfare of American citizens and to find out what happened in situations like these.”
The Israeli government conducted two investigations. The first, by the Israel Defense Forces, was an inquiry normally carried out by the military unit involved in an incident and intended to identify operational issues. The second, by the military police, was supposedly more thorough. But both investigative processes are regularly mired in flaws, as human rights observers have repeatedly detailed. “At the heart of the problem is a system that relies on soldiers’ own accounts as the threshold for determining whether serious investigation is warranted,” Human Rights Watch concluded in a 2010 report. “Exculpatory claims of soldiers are taken at face value, at best delaying and at worst foreclosing a prompt and impartial investigation worthy of the name.”
U.S. officials soon came to similar conclusions in Rachel’s case. When he first saw a copy of one of the two investigations — he couldn’t remember which — Wilkerson told Kurtzer, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, “This stinks.” He instructed Kurtzer to relay to the Israelis that they needed to do “a better investigation.” And he pressed his own contacts within the Israeli military about the inconsistencies in the report but “never got really good, satisfactory answers.”
Other State Department officials also raised objections. “Many questions remain unanswered,” Kurtzer wrote in a letter to the Israeli minister of defense. “I must inform you that my government does not consider this matter closed.”
The full military police report was never released to the U.S. government, and only after considerable pressure were its conclusions made available to U.S. officials. Later, after yet more pressure, some U.S. officials were allowed to see a copy of the report. One of them was Richard LeBaron, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. LeBaron flagged “several inconsistencies worthy of note” in a memo to the State Department.
The Corries were also eventually allowed to review the report at the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco. The consul there had offered his condolences after Rachel’s killing, and when Cindy thanked him for that, he stressed awkwardly that it had been “a personal call,” not on behalf of his government. He then led the Corries into a room where he handed them a single paper copy of the report and told them he would be gone but that they could stay as long as they needed. The Corries took that as tacit permission to copy the report word for word. Like the operational investigation that preceded it, the military report cleared the IDF of any wrongdoing. The Intercept reviewed copies of both.
Perhaps the strongest condemnation came from Wilkerson, in a letter to the Corries about a year after Rachel’s death. “Your ultimate question,” he wrote, “is a valid one, i.e., whether or not we view that report to have reflected an investigation that was ‘thorough, credible and transparent.’ I can answer your question without equivocation. No, we do not consider it so.”
That statement, which the Corries quoted for years as they sought further U.S. action on the case, had come with Powell’s signoff, Wilkerson told The Intercept. While his letter to the Corries was private, it was intended to be a record of the U.S. government’s rejection of the Israeli investigation. Wilkerson also encouraged the Corries to file records requests for official deliberations about the case and fast-tracked those they sent to the State Department.
“I was aware of the fact that I was speaking to the Corries as the United States government,” Wilkerson told The Intercept. “That doesn’t mean that the president agreed with me or the vice president agreed with me. They probably couldn’t have cared less.”
Rewriting History
There are a number of laws the U.S. government could wield to hold Israel accountable for human rights abuses, including provisions under the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, and the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which was signed into law in 2017 and allows for sanctions against individuals “responsible for extrajudicial killings, torture, or other gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”
There are also the “Leahy laws,” named after Sen. Patrick Leahy, which limit the ability of the State and Defense departments to provide military assistance to foreign units that have a record of human rights violations.
As they searched for avenues to accountability, the Corries met with Leahy’s office several times, and through public records requests, they learned that U.S. diplomats had flagged Rachel’s killing early on as a potential “Leahy case.” But there was no impact on U.S. security assistance to Israel, and while Caterpillar Inc. temporarily suspended delivery of some bulldozers to the IDF, the sales soon resumed. A civil suit the Corries brought against the bulldozer manufacturer in the U.S. was dismissed on the grounds that, because the vehicles were sold to Israel as part of a U.S. military program, a ruling would intrude upon the foreign policy authority of the government.
With Wilkerson’s help, the Corries also pushed for a U.S. probe of Rachel’s death. Like the Abu Akleh family today, they couldn’t understand why the FBI never investigated her killing. So far, the Justice Department, which would need to authorize such an inquiry, has given no indication that it plans to do so in Abu Akleh’s case.
The Corries met with several Justice Department officials and filed records requests to understand why an investigation was never authorized. In the process, they were told that no attorney general “past, present, or future” would certify such an investigation against Israel. “My guess is that either [the attorney general] made the decision on his own with a telephone call to [Vice President Dick] Cheney, or Cheney made the telephone call himself to the AG and made sure that he was not going to do something in this case,” said Wilkerson. A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment.
By 2005, with the Israeli investigations concluded and little prospect of further U.S. action, the Corries decided to sue the Israeli government. Once again, it was Wilkerson who suggested it. During a late 2004 meeting with several senior officials held in Burns’s office — though Burns was not in attendance — Wilkerson raised a few eyebrows when he unexpectedly quipped, “If it were my daughter, I’d sue.” The family hadn’t considered the prospect until that point. Craig remembers asking those in the room whether the U.S. government would do anything to stop the family if they did sue. He already knew it wouldn’t help.
Wilkerson told The Intercept that he had hoped a lawsuit could offer the Corries the satisfaction of a legal authority ordering the Israeli government to at least reopen the investigation into Rachel’s killing. “When we struck out completely with the AG, with the IDF, with the ambassador, and with the Israeli government, I said to them, ‘There is one element of Israel’s power that’s still legit: It’s the court system,’” he recalled. “Of course, by the time they got into the court system — it’s my view anyway — it had been corrupted too.”
It took five more years for the trial to begin. The Corries relocated to Haifa for months on end. They described the proceedings as a “kangaroo trial,” a “farce.” The hearings, held in Hebrew, were riddled with delays and errors, with translators sometimes relaying to the judge the very opposite of what someone had testified. Sarah knew on day one that they were never going to win.
Still, the family showed up for every hearing. They obtained the court transcripts, paid for them to be translated, and sent them to several offices at the State Department so there would be a record somewhere in the U.S. government, Sarah said. She wanted the U.S. government to bear witness to the trial, and every time a hearing was scheduled, she notified the embassy in advance, asking the office to send a representative to the courtroom.
On the day of the bulldozer driver’s testimony — behind a screen protecting his identity — the Israelis had packed the small courtroom so that journalists and human rights observers couldn’t get in. Sarah had to argue with court officials to make sure the U.S. consul general would be allowed into the room. Still, U.S. representatives were not there in an official capacity and made no comments. On only one occasion, outside Israel’s Supreme Court, the consul hugged Craig before the cameras — as close to a statement of support as the U.S. government would give.
The yearslong trial was harrowing for the family, but it was also an opportunity to finally get some answers. In court, the Corries learned that the coroner in the case was still in possession of parts of Rachel’s body, a decade after her death. Sarah screamed when she found out. The family had agreed to the autopsy on the condition that a representative from the U.S. Embassy be in the room. But nobody from the embassy was there — the office later said it was not aware that had been the family’s wish. The Corries ultimately received Rachel’s last remains in 2016, after yet another lawsuit.
In 2012, an Israeli district court judge ruled that the IDF was not to blame for Rachel’s death and that she alone was responsible. The family appealed, and in 2015, 10 years after they first sued, the Supreme Court of Israel upheld the ruling.
By that point, the Corries’ battle had moved on to ensuring that the U.S. government did not backtrack on its earlier condemnation of the Israeli investigation. The “whitewash” had already begun, said Sarah, whose lobbying in later years became about challenging the “rewriting of history.” That’s in part why she kept such a thorough record. “You have to document everything,” she said. “Because down the road, in history, it will all be rewritten to the way that somebody else wants it to be, and that won’t be the truth.”
As the years passed, U.S. statements about the killing in press briefings and State Department reports grew weaker. In frustrated emails to Blinken, Burns, and others, Sarah reminded them that the U.S. government itself had found the Israeli investigation to lack credibility. “There is no walking back,” she wrote. “It is unacceptable for the Administration to repeatedly reiterate these positions in correspondence, conversations, etc. with our family, in unequivocally strong terms, but then fail to address them as forcefully when asked for public comment.”
At the last public mention of the case from a U.S. official, in 2015, then-State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said that officials didn’t have “anything new” to say about it.
“The reality of it is, there will never be the truth,” Wilkerson now says. He also offered a word of caution about the U.S. government’s repeated failure to hold Israel accountable for its crimes. “This was my point the whole time I was in government, and it’s my point now to whomever will listen: We’re not being a good ally. We are setting Israel up to one, apartheid, two, pariah status in the international community, and three, an untenable future. … This is not good for Israel.”
Most Powerful People in the World
The Corries first met Blinken in Jerusalem in March 2010. Biden had sent Blinken, then national security adviser to the vice president, in his place after the family requested a meeting. Just before the meeting, Israeli officials seized on Biden’s trip to the region to announce the construction of 1,600 new illegal settlements in East Jerusalem. Blinken was furious and made no secret of it.
The episode was emblematic of the ways in which U.S. officials would express anger and indignation about Israel privately, issue careful, critical statements, and then ultimately do nothing to ensure consequences.
In May, Sarah watched the video of a Palestinian American student snubbing Blinken’s handshake at a graduation ceremony, in protest of the administration’s response to Abu Akleh’s killing. When he later met with that student, Blinken reportedly told her, “I see you, and I hear you.”
Sarah thought he was sincere. She and her parents had been there before, experiencing both the genuine compassion of U.S. officials and its pointlessness in the absence of meaningful action. It was a failure larger than the secretary of state or any other individual official, they came to understand. But these were the most powerful people in the world, and they had achieved nothing. The United States government had been impotent.
“These are good people. They are good people who still, as far as our foreign policy is concerned, can’t get accountability and can’t get the job done,” Sarah said. “I know they want accountability for Shireen. But they’ve got to be willing to spend the political energy to go out and get accountability.”
The Biden administration’s willingness to spend political capital for the sake of accountability remains very much in doubt.
On Wednesday, hours before the president arrived in Israel, Blinken called Shireen Abu Akleh’s family to invite them to visit the White House, though he offered no timeline, her niece told The Intercept. The family still doesn’t know whether the president will meet them during his trip.
The butterflies have experienced major losses in populations on both the East and West coasts. (photo: Flickr)
From the depths of the ocean to the peaks of mountains, species are moving out of their historical homes in search of cooler conditions
His book Nowhere Left to Go: How Climate Change Is Driving Species to the Ends of the Earth (The Experiment Publishing) came out on July 5. In it, von Brackel examines this question and others that have arisen from the massive migrations spurred by global warming. The book discusses the research into how ecosystems might change as old species leave and new ones arrive, as well as the substantial implications for human societies.
Scientific American spoke with von Brackel about what science is telling us we can expect from having so many species on the move and how we might help some persist in the face of climate change.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Where did the idea for this book come from?
It was a couple of years ago, when I had been reading a study on ocean acidification, and there was this passing mention that cod are moving hundreds of kilometers north in the North Sea. I had to read the sentence twice. I thought, “Okay, wow, if the cod is doing this, maybe other fish species are doing this, too, and maybe other land-dwelling creatures also—and maybe all species on Earth.” In my mind’s eye I saw some kind of living tsunami rolling over the planet and confronting human societies. I thought, “Okay, wow, this could be huge.” When I found out that this is actually happening—and except for the scientists dealing with this, nobody knows about the extent of this phenomenon—I thought, “Okay, well, I have to immerse myself in it.”
What happens to species that can’t move anymore?
The species that are not able to move and to conquer new places, they have a high risk of becoming extinct—that’s it. Right now many species can move poleward. In latitudes like Europe or North America, species are expanding, so they can have new ranges. But the problem is in the tropics. There you have tropical mountains, where we now see the first species becoming extinct because they are at some point at the summit, so they can’t move anywhere. It’s a dead end.
The book talks about how insects and animals moving into new areas can bring health threats to humans. What are some of those potential threats?
I think it's one of the issues we should be most concerned about in terms of species range shifts. Let’s take the Asian tiger mosquito [which can spread pathogens, including the dengue viruses and West Nile virus]. This insect is already conquering much of the U.S. and Europe. They initially came from Asia via international shipping to the U.S. in, I think, the 1980s—and then, afterward, to Italy in the 1990s. It was funny, because, two weeks ago, I was in Italy, and I wondered, “What are all these little mosquitoes biting me all the time?” Then I took a close look and I saw the zebralike white stripes on it. They actually were Asian tiger mosquitoes and, oh my God, I clobbered so many of them.
What are the possible economic impacts of these mass migrations?
There are already a lot. For example, in Germany, the two most important tree species for timber production are the Scots pine and European spruce, and their ranges are both retracting because of climate change. So they retract up the mountains, and they retract to Scandinavia. This has huge impacts, because models say that by the year 2100, 20 to 60 percent of the forest land will only be suitable for Mediterranean oak forest types—and they have much lower economic output.
Are there species that might leave a cultural loss as they move away?
Probably the people most affected by species shifts are Indigenous people, and that’s because they live close to nature, and many of them depend on specific animals or plants. Many of them have circled their whole culture around just one species—like the Inupiat in Alaska, who hunt bowhead whales. Bowhead whales now migrate much farther north. That’s a big problem for the Inupiat. Everything is changing, and they can’t easily adapt by choosing another species as their main species.
Is there a similar situation with the disappearing kelp forests in Japan? That was another example you mention in the book that seems like a big shift, considering how central kelp and the fish species found in kelp forests are to Japanese culture and cuisine.
The kelp forests, on one hand, are so important for the Japanese as a food resource but also culturally. They do everything to protect them, but in the end, they can’t stop this process. Maybe one good thing is that the species that follow the kelp forests are corals, so they have new coral reefs emerge. I find that kind of magical.
That was actually something that I took away as a glimmer of hope: some of the most at-risk species are moving, so maybe they won’t go extinct.
I think this is the main message in the book: that species are able to respond to climate change. So this is a positive thing. In the last 2.6 million years of the ice age, there were many times that species had to respond to climate warming and climate cooling. And the interesting thing is that every time there were not many species that did go extinct. So they managed to do this. And this is a very hopeful thing.
What is different about today?
The thing that’s different today is us. First of all, we have occupied so many places on Earth—about half the surface of Earth—with agricultural land and cities. And we also crisscrossed the land with streets and canals. That makes it very hard for many species to move to respond to climate change.
How can we help species adapt to this very drastic change in climate?
So the most important and most obvious thing is to curb emissions. Without stopping climate change and curbing emissions fast enough, species don’t have a chance. But on the way to do this, we can do a lot of other things. In general, we have to give species the room to respond to climate change and to create enough conservation areas where they can thrive and to connect them with enough wildlife corridors—and that’s starting to happen already. Some scientists recommend protecting about 30 percent of Earth’s surface and some even more—around 50 percent. In fact, at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, coming up in autumn, nations are about to decide on [how much land to protect]. So this is a real possibility, and I think this will be an important first step. But afterward, one has to see, “Okay, where are the conservation areas built?” and “Will this be implemented?”
Can individual people help by, for example, not growing lawns?
I think everybody who has a garden can help species to create a stepping-stone so that they can move to higher latitudes. And yeah, as you said, a lawn isn’t very helpful. Here in Berlin, I see many gardens that are even paved or full of gravel—and that’s also not very helpful. What you can do is to have a hedge instead of a fence, to have fruit trees and berry bushes where bumblebees or honeybees can thrive or have little branch piles so birds and rodents can hide. You can do a lot with the garden.
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