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That’s because the hearings have turbocharged the investigation by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, into potential election interference and offenses by Donald Trump and his allies.
Any charges in that investigation may define a big part of the committee’s legacy, even as it looks to extend its work into the fall.
Normally, the primary question after congressional revelations like those we have heard would be whether there would be federal charges, as in Watergate. Here, the Justice Department may be contemplating possible actions, but Ms. Willis is further along. Her flurry of target letters to Georgians who formed an alternate slate of 2020 presidential electors strongly suggests she is considering charges.
Ms. Willis has operated with calculated urgency since she opened her investigation in February 2021. She has moved from building a prosecution team and conducting voluntary interviews to convening a special grand jury to issuing those target letters (at least 16 of them) to the Republican electors who, despite his election loss in the state, covertly met to cast votes for Mr. Trump and submit an alternate electoral slate on Dec. 14.
Target letters typically mark the progression of an inquiry by notifying recipients that they are under active investigation. They also often implicitly push those receiving them to flip — that is, to cooperate against others higher up in a conspiracy early, while the best deals are available. As she proceeds, Ms. Willis has made no secret that she is looking at the man at the top: Mr. Trump.
Even before the hearings, Ms. Willis had two pieces of compelling evidence against the former president. The first was the recording of the conversation on Jan. 2, 2021, in which he urged Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes.” The second was the phony electoral slate that Trump electors sent to Congress and the National Archives on Dec. 14. No matter what Mr. Trump or his allies may have believed about the election results, they were not permitted to demand the creation of nonexistent votes or to forge official documents.
Ms. Willis is in a very favorable jurisdiction to prosecute charges. Arguably more so than comparable federal statutes, the state’s laws for crimes like solicitation to commit election fraud appear to offer a close fit with the accusations against Mr. Trump and his allies, which include asking for those fraudulent votes or electors. Georgia law also allows Ms. Willis to sweep a broader array of Mr. Trump’s alleged wrongful acts under the state racketeering statute than the more narrowly defined federal one would.
It is also to Ms. Willis’s advantage that she is a state official and not a federal one. Any charges brought by the attorney general of a president against his former election opponent are fraught with ethical questions of politics. Ms. Willis has less partisan baggage than her federal counterparts.
She is a local prosecutor who, while a Democrat, had little to do with the former president until he committed alleged crimes in her jurisdiction. And her 2015 prosecution of a cheating scandal involving Atlanta teachers, a traditionally Democratic group, burnishes her nonpartisan prosecutorial credentials. Unlike federal prosecutors, she is also unencumbered by Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinions on the powers of the presidency that can complicate charging current or former presidents.
None of this is to say that she will not encounter extreme scrutiny. Her every act will now be examined, as suggested by recent critical comments from a Georgia judge hearing a motion for her recusal from the Trump investigation. It was filed by a false elector (and many others later joined the motion), based upon what ultimately seems to be ethically permissible campaign activity. Still, she must proceed with extra care going forward.
Her prosecutorial task will not be easy. When you charge a president, you need more than the standard proof beyond a reasonable doubt; you need proof way beyond a reasonable doubt. That is what the committee has helped deliver, producing a mountain of additional evidence that might have taken her years to gather — if she could have gotten it at all.
For example, take the testimony by former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and other witnesses about Mr. Trump’s attempt to hijack the Justice Department — which included an effort by Jeffrey Clark to send a letter to state officials in states, including Georgia, that falsely claimed that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” that would affect the state’s election results.
Then there is the phony electors scheme. Here again, the committee came to Ms. Willis’s aid, obtaining testimony from Ronna Romney McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, and others describing Mr. Trump’s personal involvement in helping recruit false electors in states like Georgia. That testimony directly linked Mr. Trump to the conspiracy Ms. Willis may charge.
Any prosecution must consider intent, and the committee has also secured proof of Mr. Trump’s state of mind that might not have been otherwise available. Testimony from an array of witnesses — especially those closest to Mr. Trump, like his former attorney general Bill Barr and his former White House counsel Pat Cipollone — demonstrated both that Mr. Trump was told he had lost the election and that, after Dec. 14, when the Electoral College cast its votes, he was told that there was no legitimate legal basis to continue his attack.
Those witnesses would probably not have traveled to Georgia to give live testimony to Ms. Willis without a fight. Just look at the battle Senator Lindsey Graham and Representative Jody Hice, two comparatively less important witnesses in the Georgia case, are putting up to avoid testifying there.
Perhaps most valuable of all, there are Mr. Trump’s own words — the outtakes from his taped speech to supporters a day after the Capitol assault that were revealed in the Thursday hearing. Most memorably in proving his intent, he said at one point, “I don’t want to say the election is over.” Ms. Willis will be able to put these statements unearthed by the committee into evidence in any trial against Mr. Trump under the rules of evidence prescribed by the Georgia code. The same is true of much more of the proof the committee has collected.
We learned Thursday night that the hearings will likely continue in September, not long before the midterm elections. The committee dropped hints of the direction it will go, in a less prosecutorial and more political mode. The Josh Hawley segment offered an example of that material, as did Representative Adam Kinzinger’s statement that “the forces Donald Trump ignited that day have not gone away,” and they are “all still out there ready to go.”
Prosecutors do not charge or try cases in a vacuum, and these hearings have surely stiffened Ms. Willis’s already considerable resolve to follow the evidence wherever it may lead. That — together with the vast amount of relevant proof of possible Georgia crimes — may prove to be the Jan. 6 committee’s most consequential legacy.
The post This Georgia Prosecutor Has Donald Trump in Her Sights, and She’s Not Stopping appeared first on New York Times.
Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
26 july 22
Thomas, who was briefly a member of Lifespring — a controversial group that was part of the "human potential movement" — before becoming an anti-cult activist, has surprised many who once knew her by aligning herself with far-right conspiracy theory groups such as QAnon that some say have cult-like qualities.
Nonetheless, Steven Hassan, a former-cult-member-turned-cult-expert who worked with Thomas during her anti-cult activism days, told Insider he is not surprised by her involvement with the far-right conspiracy theory movement.
"Ginni Thomas was in a cult, and anyone who has ever been in a cult is vulnerable to another cult if they haven't properly counseled and done their homework," Hassan said.
Thomas' transition from cult member to anti-cult activist
Founded in 1974 by John Hanley Sr., Lifespring held training seminars to teach its members "self-confidence, self-esteem, lowered job stress, a heightened sense of control in life, and a more positive and pleasurable range of events and experiences in their lives," according to the now-dissolved group's website.
Thomas became involved in the 1980s. But shortly after, the group garnered controversy when reports emerged of unsavory practices and several trainees dying, according to a 1987 article in The Washington Post in which Thomas discussed how the group pushed her away from her loved ones.
She eventually left the group after being "deprogrammed" and became a passionate anti-cult activist in the 1980s and '90s.
"She was at the time an attorney in Washington DC, and she had worked for, I believe, a Republican congressman, and she was very well connected," Rick Alan Ross, a cult expert who was familiar with Thomas' work during her anti-cult activism days, told Insider.
"She was helpful to people that were part of the Cult Awareness Network in hooking them up with people that were in the Washington political world," Ross added.
In March, a video circulated on Twitter showed Thomas speaking at a 1986 Cult Awareness Network event in Kansas City, Missouri, about her experience of leaving Lifespring.
"When you come away from a cult, you've got to find a balance in your life as far as getting involved with fighting the cult or exposing it," Thomas said. "And kind of the other angle is getting a sense of yourself and what was it that made you get into that group. And what open questions are there that still need to be answered."
QAnon becomes conspiracy theory du jour
Thomas' embrace of QAnon-esque conspiracy theories has perplexed many who knew her as an anti-cult activist. She blamed the "deep state" when her allies weren't hired onto Trump's administration and made several written attempts to overturn the 2020 election. In text messages to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, she'd even claimed that Trump watermarked mail-in ballots to track voter fraud and that politicians were being arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay.
Ross told Insider that he also believes QAnon is a cult – a key distinction being that it lacks a single all-powerful leader.
"QAnon, in my opinion, is a cult. But there's an exception, which is typically the most identifiable element of a destructive cult is an all-powerful, omnipresent, charismatic leader that becomes an object of worship. And Q remains anonymous," Ross said.
However, Ross believes that Thomas's anti-cult activism should be viewed separately from her affiliation with the current conspiracy theories, as he says her current beliefs align with her long-held political views.
"In my opinion, Ginni Thomas's involvement with Lifespring in the 1980s has nothing whatsoever to do with her current politics. Thomas was always a very conservative Republican before, during, and after her time with Lifespring," Ross said.
"The text messages that she sent, some of the conspiracy theories that she believes, I'm sorry to say that a majority of Republicans may agree with."
Since 2017, QAnon has moved to the forefront of conservative discourse, forming a community of people who believe in unfounded secret wars and baseless plots.
According to a December 2020 poll by NPR and Ipsos, 17% of the US population believes in the primary QAnon theory that "a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring is trying to control our politics and media."
Thomas' conservatism vs her cult past
Thomas grew up in a staunchly Republican family in Omaha, Nebraska. Throughout her adult life, she has been linked to deeply conservative groups, such as the Tea Party movement and later the more fringe Groundswell, a group she founded in 2013 after consulting with Steve Bannon – who went on to become Trump's chief strategist.
Now, she has more deeply embedded herself in the political sphere, spewing far-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories typically supporting Trump.
"Ginni Thomas has very, very deeply held beliefs. They are not the product of brainwashing. They are the beliefs that she sincerely held before she entered Lifespring, which was many years ago, and the same beliefs that she held when she married Clarence Thomas, who shares those beliefs," Ross said. "I mean, she is who she is."
Ross also says that Thomas' current foray into conspiracy theories should not detract from all the useful work she did as an anti-cult activist and all of the people that she helped.
Hassan argued that "Congress should have congressional hearings on brainwashing, cults, [and] QAnon." He added that it's important to educate people on "how someone who's very intelligent and educated can come to believe" conspiracy theories.
"I haven't called [Ginni Thomas] stupid or crazy, which the media does, because I know that she's been unduly influenced into these beliefs. She's a very intelligent, educated person, but her brain has been hacked," he claimed.
Joe Biden. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
His latest climate defeat has affirmed what we’ve long feared: that he just isn’t the man for the moment
It was painful to watch. The fossil fuel oligarchs had him right where they wanted him: his climate ambitions foiled, his rhetoric defanged, his hat in his hand. For their part, they had never been under any illusions that they were waging a war. Over the course of his presidency, they had deployed every weapon at their disposal to protect their profit margins from the public’s desire for a dignified life on a habitable planet.
Their final blow was delivered on Thursday by US senator Joe Manchin, puppet to the plutocrats, a man capable of patting his grandchildren on the head while selling their future to the highest bidder. With a fickleness bordering on sadism, Manchin killed our last chance at federal climate action for years, effectively completing the corporate capture of our nation’s climate policy.
Biden’s failure to prevent this capture has confirmed, with almost eerie precision, the worries that dogged him on the campaign trail. That he was too milquetoast, too norm-bound, too nostalgic for the 1970s. Young people have waited in vain for the administration to evince a fiery, existential urgency around climate, a willingness to start twisting arms and cracking skulls. But Biden has shown himself either unwilling or unable to don the same brass knuckles as his opponents. His latest defeat has affirmed what we’ve long feared: that he just isn’t the man for the moment.
There are still ways that he could flip this script. He could declare a climate emergency and leverage the Defense Production Act and the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act to circumvent a Congress corrupted by corporate polluters. He could wage rhetorical and political war on Manchin, stripping him of his committee chairmanship, and parading his naked corruption in front of the American people. He could appeal privately to Mitt Romney, perhaps the last Senate Republican with any integrity, who just last month bemoaned our nation’s lack of progress on climate. He could say the truth out loud, at the top of his lungs: that the fossil fuel industry has declared war on the American people. That we are fighting for the soul of our democracy and the future of our planet.
If he’s unwilling to do even that, he shouldn’t run for president in 2024. What young voter in their right mind would nominate him again? Why would we trust him to succeed without a congressional majority when he’s failed so abjectly with one? His entire theory of governance will have been disproved: his “decades of experience”, his purported “knowledge of the Senate”, his reputation as a “deal maker” – if he couldn’t land a climate bill, what good were they?
Surrounded by a suffocating gauze of Beltway consultants, he made mistake after mistake. He failed to use his bully pulpit to rally the public around the dangers of climate change. He almost never named – let alone declaimed – that those dangers were the direct result of burning oil, coal and natural gas. He held up executive climate regulations and approved fossil fuel projects, miscalculating that it was carrots and not sticks that would win Manchin’s approval. Over the remonstrations of the Squad, he decoupled his own climate agenda from Manchin’s beloved infrastructure package, promising everyone that he could get Manchin’s vote on the former.
Was that a lie, or just deeply naive? I’ll still be agonizing over this question in 2024, when I pull the lever for his primary opponent.
I want to emphasize that Biden is not the villain here. It is Republicans – and Joe Manchin – who are making the sociopathic choice to further enrich the already-super-rich at the expense of all life on earth. I have no doubt that Biden wants sincerely to address the climate crisis. But presidents are not judged on their intentions. They are judged on their results. And on climate especially, the results of the Biden administration – of the entire, gerontocratic leadership of the Democratic party – have fallen dangerously short of what’s needed.
With summer heatwaves intensifying and federal climate legislation wilting, young people are rightfully desperate. There are only so many losses we will accept before taking our chances on a different formula: the charismatic fire of an AOC, the crossover appeal of a John Fetterman, the judicious futurism of a Ro Khanna.
Joe Biden may be a “decent man”, as his defenders constantly contend. But what does my generation care about decency, when the planet’s going up in flames? If he really wants a second term in office, he should show us why he deserves one. He needs to realize he’s at war with the oligarchs. And then he needs to start winning.
The forest near the city of Mbandaka, Democratic Republic of the Congo. (photo: Thomas Nicolon/Reuters)
The oil and gas blocks, which will be auctioned in late July, extend into Virunga National Park, the world’s most important gorilla sanctuary, as well as tropical peatlands that store vast amounts of carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere and from contributing to global warming.
“If oil exploitation takes place in these areas, we must expect a global climate catastrophe, and we will all just have to watch helplessly,” said Irene Wabiwa, who oversees the Congo Basin forest campaign for Greenpeace in Kinshasa.
Congo’s about-face in allowing new oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas comes eight months after its president, Félix Tshisekedi, stood alongside world leaders at the global climate summit in Glasgow and endorsed a 10-year agreement to protect its rainforest, part of the vast Congo Basin, which is second in size only to the Amazon.
The deal included international pledges of $500 million for Congo, one of the world’s poorest nations, over the first five years.
But since then, the world’s immediate priorities have shifted.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring and led to U.S. and British bans on Russian energy and, last week, a call to ration natural gas in Europe.
At the same time, Norway, a leading advocate of saving forests, is increasing oil production with plans for more offshore drilling. And President Biden, who pledged early in his term to wean the world from fossil fuels, traveled to Saudi Arabia recently where he raised the need for more oil production. Back home, Mr. Biden’s ambitious domestic climate agenda is largely doomed.
Congo has taken note of each of these global events, said Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, the nation’s lead representative on climate issues and an adviser to the minister of hydrocarbons.
Congo’s sole goal for the auction, he said, is to earn enough revenue to help the struggling nation finance programs to reduce poverty and generate badly needed economic growth.
“That’s our priority,” Mr. Mpanu said, in an interview last week. “Our priority is not to save the planet.”
Congo announced the auction in May, with a video posted on Twitter that showed a shining river nestled in a deep bed of lush rainforest. The video quickly cut to a close-up of a filling station pump, where yellowish gas gushed into an automobile tank. The American and French oil giants Chevron and TotalEnergies were tagged in the post.
Environmental groups were outraged. Last week Congolese officials doubled down, expanding the number of blocks — vast parcels of land — up for grabs, from 16 to 30, comprising 27 oil and three gas blocks. TotalEnergies said it did not intend to bid, and Chevron did not respond to a request to comment. Other oil major producers also declined to comment.
The auction highlights a double standard that many political leaders across the African continent have called out: How can Western countries, which built their prosperity on fossil fuels that emit poisonous, planet-warming fumes, demand that Africa forgo their reserves of coal, oil and gas in order to protect everyone else?
And it raises a question asked by many communities whose very survival is based on cutting trees for sale or for cooking fires: If they protect carbon stocks of incalculable value to the whole world, what do they get in return?
“Maybe it’s time we get a level playing field and be compensated,” Mr. Mpanu said.
Many Congolese officials believe that after decades of colonialism and political mismanagement, their country’s needs should be prioritized against those of the world.
For President Tshisekedi, casting his nation as a bulwark against global warming has met with political realities. The country’s next presidential election is 18 months away, but the jostling has already begun with Mr. Tshisekedi running for another term. In 2018, he was declared the winner in a highly contested election. He cut a deal with his predecessor, the unpopular but still powerful Joseph Kabila, whom western officials have labeled corrupt. The pair’s arrangement fell apart in 2020, but some analysts caution that Mr. Kabila or his cronies could wind up on the ballot at a time when foreign investment is pouring into the country.
Just how much compensation is at stake for Congo is something that will not be known until seismic surveys are carried out — by itself a very destructive process, according to scientists.
In May, Didier Budimbu, Congo’s minister of hydrocarbons, said the country, which currently produces about 25,000 barrels of oil a day, had the potential to produce up to 1 million barrels. At current prices that’s the equivalent of $32 billion a year, more than half of Congo’s GDP.
Mr. Mpanu pointed to the Amazon as an example of how nations with natural resources must act if richer nations would not compensate them.
In 2007, Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president at the time, set up a trust fund that the international community could finance to stop the country from exploring an oil block in the Yasunà National Park, one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. The goal was to raise around $3.6 billion. Years later, it had only raised $13 million. So in 2013, the government decided to allow oil exploration. Drilling began three years later.
“We’re not into threats,” Mr. Mpanu said, dismissing the notion that Congo’s auction was merely an attempt to scare countries into offering more financial assistance. “We have a very humble attitude. We have a sovereign right to go ahead.”
But scientists say going ahead could destroy precious rainforests and peatlands, which provide one of the last lines of defense for a planet struggling to limit rising temperatures.
Seismic surveys to identify oil deposits would entail long trails being cut through the rainforest and explosive charges being set off. Waste from the oil production process, which contains salt and heavy metals, could upset the salt balance of the entire Congo Basin ecosystem, as it has in the Amazon. Road construction, necessary for the oil industry, would open up vast areas of sparsely populated rainforest to human habitation, leading to increased logging.
It would likely also drain and dehydrate peatlands, peat experts said, ultimately leading to their decomposition and the release of the carbon they trap.
If this happened, said Susan Page, a physical geography professor at the University of Leicester in Britain, the huge amount of carbon very rapidly released “could be a type of tipping point, effectively, for global climate.”
Mr. Mpanu asserted that drilling could be “surgical” and that companies could find a way to drill diagonally to avoid touching the peat. He insisted that any action would be in keeping with global climate commitments and would come after extensive environmental impact reviews and studies of how local populations would be affected.
A Greenpeace team recently consulted people living inside the proposed oil blocks and said inhabitants were opposed to drilling and would launch protests, according to Ms. Wabiwa.
Rather than alleviating poverty, she said, the sale of oil blocks would make a lot of money for a few people.
Mr. Budimbu, Congo’s hydrocarbons minister, has consulted some of Africa’s biggest oil producers, like Angola, Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea, “so that the D.R.C. can take the same path,” according to a recent release on the ministry’s website.
But if Congo were to follow in their footsteps, it could mean a fate some call the “resource curse,” in which citizens don’t benefit from their country’s natural wealth and economic development remains anemic. In Nigeria, oil is the mainstay of the economy but its production has also led to devastating spills and widening inequality. In Equatorial Guinea, the majority of the population lives below the poverty line and reaps no benefit from the country’s vast oil wealth.
The decision to allow more exploration was carefully considered, government officials said, though it appeared to be the subject of some internal debate.
In March, Ève Bazaiba, Congo’s minister of environment, told The New York Times that officials were mulling going ahead. “Should we protect peatland because it’s a carbon sink or should we dig for oil for our economy?” she said.
Last week she indicated a willingness to back down on the auction.
“If we have an alternative to the oil exploitation, we’ll keep them,” she said, speaking of the peatland.
But Mr. Mpanu said Congo already has paid its climate dues. It allows the mining of minerals and metals such as cobalt and lithium that are key to the renewable energy industry and it plans to develop hydropower.
“We are part of the solution, but the solution also includes us making use of our oil resources,” he said.
He said the nation could seek to protect other land to offset what would be lost by drilling in places like Virunga, and noted that it would be up to oil companies to decide whether they would drill inside the park boundaries.
“If we lose 10 hectares we could now protect 20,” he said. “Sure, it won’t have the same biodiversity and fauna, but the country has that right.”
Asked what oil company, in an era where consumer awareness is higher than ever, would consider drilling in a protected gorilla habitat, Mr. Mpanu did not hesitate.
“It is what it is,” he said. “We just have to see how much people value that resource.”
The post Congo to Auction Land to Oil Companies: ‘Our Priority Is Not to Save the Planet’ appeared first on New York Times.
Elizabeth and James Weller at their home in Houston two months after losing their baby girl due to a premature rupture of membranes. Elizabeth could not receive the medical care she needed until several days later because of a Texas law that banned abortion after six weeks. (photo: Julia Robinson/NPR)
26 july 22
Elizabeth Weller never dreamed that her own hopes for a child would become ensnared in the web of Texas abortion law.
She and her husband began trying in late 2021. They had bought a house in Kingwood, a lakeside development in Houston. Elizabeth was in graduate school for political science, and James taught middle-school math.
The Wellers were pleasantly surprised when they got pregnant early in 2022.
In retrospect, Elizabeth says their initial joy felt a little naive: "If it was so easy for us to get pregnant, then to us it was almost like a sign that this pregnancy was going to be easy for us."
Things did go fairly smooth at first. Seventeen weeks into the pregnancy, they learned they were expecting a girl. They also had an anatomy scan, which revealed no problems. Even if it had, the Wellers were determined to proceed.
"We skipped over the genetic testing offered in the first trimester," Elizabeth says. "I was born with a physical disability. If she had any physical ailments, I would never abort her for that issue."
Elizabeth thought of abortion rights in broad terms: "I have said throughout my life I believe that women should have the access to the right to an abortion. I personally would never get one."
And at this particular point in her life, pregnant for the first time at age 26, it was still somewhat abstract: "I had not been put in a position to where I had to weigh the real nuances that went into this situation. I had not been put in the crossroads of this issue."
But in early May, not long after the uneventful anatomy scan, the Wellers suddenly arrived at that crossroads. There they found themselves pinned down, clinically and emotionally, victims of a collision between standard obstetrical practice and the rigid new demands of Texas law.
It was May 10, 2022. Elizabeth was 18 weeks pregnant. She ate a healthy breakfast, went for a walk outside and came back home.
In the nursery upstairs, they had already stashed some baby clothes and new cans of paint. Down in the kitchen, images from recent scans and ultrasounds were stuck to the fridge.
Elizabeth stood up to get some lunch. That's when she felt something "shift" in her uterus, down low, and then "this burst of water just falls out of my body. And I screamed because that's when I knew something wrong was happening."
Her waters had broken, launching her into what she calls a "dystopian nightmare" of "physical, emotional and mental anguish." She places the blame for the ensuing medical trauma on the Republican legislators who passed the state's anti-abortion law, on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who signed it, and on the inflamed political rhetoric, which Elizabeth says only sees abortion "as one thing, a black-and-white issue, when abortion has all of these gray areas."
State abortion laws are complicating other types of obstetric care
Elizabeth's pregnancy crisis began — and ended — weeks before June 24, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion in its Dobbs v. Jackson ruling.
But the Wellers and 28 million other Texans had already been living under a de facto abortion ban for 8 months, since September 2021. That's when a new state law banned all abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected — usually at about six weeks of pregnancy. Since that time, thousands of women have left Texas to obtain abortions in other states.
Today, abortion is also illegal in Texas under an old 1925 law that the state's Attorney General Ken Paxton declared to be in effect after Roe was overturned. Another pending ban, a so-called "trigger law" passed by Texas in 2021, is expected to go into effect within weeks.
The crisis the Wellers endured is emblematic of the vast and perhaps unintended medical impacts of the criminalization of abortion in Republican-led states. The new abortion bans — or the old laws being resurrected in a post-Roe world — are rigidly written and untested in the courts. Many offer no exemptions for rape, incest or fetal anomolies.
But the most confusing development involves the exemptions that exist for the woman's life or health, or because of a "medical emergency." These terms are left vague or undefined.
The result has been disarray and confusion for doctors and hospitals in multiple states, and risky delays and complications for patients facing obstetrical conditions such as ectopic pregnancies, incomplete miscarriages, placental problems, and premature rupture of membanes.
"It's terrible," says Dr. Alan Peaceman, a professor of maternal-fetal medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. "The care providers are treading on eggshells. They don't want to get sucked into a legal morass. And so they don't even know what the rules are."
'I need you to tell me the truth'
James rushed home from work and drove Elizabeth to the nearby Woodlands Hospital, part of the Houston Methodist hospital system. An ultrasound confirmed that she had suffered premature rupture of membranes, which affects about 3% of pregnancies.
A doctor sat down and told her: "There's very little amniotic fluid left. That's not a good thing. All you can do now is just hope and pray that things go well."
The staff remained vague about what came next, Elizabeth recalls. She was admitted to the hospital, and later that night, when her own obstetrician called, she begged her for information.
"I told her 'Look, Doctor, people around me are telling me to keep hope. And they're telling me to think of the positives. But I need you to tell me the truth, because I don't think all the positive things that they're telling me are real. I need you to give me the facts.'"
The facts were grim. At 18 weeks, the watery, protective cushion of amniotic fluid was gone. There was still a fetal heartbeat, but it could stop at any moment. Among other risks, both the fetus and Elizabeth were now highly vulnerable to a uterine infection called chorioamnionitis.
The ob-gyn, who said she could not speak to the media, laid out two options, according to Elizabeth.
One option was to end the pregnancy; that's called "a termination for medical reasons." The other option is called expectant management, in which Elizabeth would stay in the hospital and try to stay pregnant until 24 weeks, which is considered the beginning of "viability" outside the womb.
Outcomes from expectant management vary greatly depending on when the waters break. Later in pregnancy, doctors can try to delay delivery to give the fetus more time to develop, while also warding off infection or other maternal complications such as hemorrhage.
But when membranes rupture earlier in pregnancy, particularly before 24 weeks, the chance of a fetus surviving plummets. One reason is that amniotic fluid plays a key role in fetal lung development. For a fetus at 18 weeks, the chance of survival in that state is almost nonexistent, according to Peaceman: "This is probably about as close to zero as you'll ever get in medicine."
Fetuses who do survive a premature delivery can die soon after birth, or, if they survive, may experience major problems with their lungs, or suffer strokes, blindness, cerebral palsy or other disabilities and illnesses.
For the women, expectant management after premature rupture of membranes comes with its own health risks. One study showed they were four times as likely to develop an infection and 2.4 times as likely to experience a postpartum hemorrhage, compared with women who terminated the pregnancy.
In some cases, the infection can become severe or life-threatening, leading to sepsis, hysterectomy or even death. In 2012, a woman died in Ireland after her waters broke at 17 weeks and doctors refused to give her an abortion. The case spurred a movement that led to the overturning of Ireland's abortion ban in 2018.
A clinical battle begins behind the scenes
Although distraught and heartbroken at this news, Elizabeth forced herself to think it through.
After talking with James, they both agreed they should end the pregnancy. The risks to Elizabeth's health were simply too high.
To Elizabeth, termination also felt like the most merciful option for her fetus. Even with the slim chance of survival to 24 weeks, the newborn would face intense physical challenges and aggressive medical interventions.
"You have to ask yourself, would I put any living thing through the pain, and the horrors, of having to try to fight for their life the minute that they're born?"
The next day, Elizabeth's ob-gyn came to the hospital to arrange the procedure. Right away, she ran into obstacles because of the Texas law. A fight began, which Elizabeth first became aware of as her doctor paced the hall outside her room, talking on her phone.
"I remember hearing her, from my room, speaking loudly about how nothing is being done here."
After one conversation, the doctor returned to her bedside.
"I can tell that she's been beat down, because she has been trying to fight for me all day, advocating on my behalf," Elizabeth says. "And she starts to cry and she tells me: 'They're not going to touch you.' And that 'you can either stay here and wait to get sick where we can monitor you, or we discharge you and you monitor yourself. Or you wait till your baby's heartbeat stops.'"
It was because of the state law which forbids termination of a pregnancy as long as there is fetal cardiac activity. The law, which still remains in effect, does contain one exception – for a "medical emergency." But there is no definition for that term in the statute. No one really knows what the legislature means by that, and they are afraid of overstepping.
A wait for fetal death, or her own encroaching illness
To Elizabeth, it seemed obvious that things were deteriorating. She had cramps, and was passing clots of blood. Her discharge was yellow and smelled weird. But the hospital staff told her that those weren't the right symptoms, yet, of a growing infection in her uterus.
They told her the signs of a more severe infection would include a fever of 100.4 degrees and chills. Her discharge had to be darker. And it had to smell foul, really bad. Enough to make her retch.
Houston Methodist Hospital declined to comment on the specifics of Elizabeth's care, except to say they follow all state laws and that there's a medical ethics committee that sometimes reviews complex cases.
To Dr. Peaceman at Northwestern, it sounded like the hospital's clinicians were using the most common clinical signs of chorioamnionitis as a guideline. If Elizabeth exhibited enough of them, then it would be possible to document the encroaching infection, and therefore terminate the pregnancy under the law's "medical emergency" clause, he said.
Elizabeth found this maddening.
"At first I was really enraged at the hospital and administration," she says. "To them my life was not in danger enough."
Their conundrum became painfully, distressingly clear: wait to get sicker, or wait until the fetal heartbeat ceased. Either way, she saw nothing ahead but fear and grief — prolonged, delayed, amplified.
"That's torture to to have to carry a pregnancy which has such a low chance of survival," says Dr. Peaceman. "Most women would find it extremely difficult and emotionally very challenging. And that's a big part of this problem, when we as physicians are trying to relieve patients' suffering. They're not allowed to do that in Texas."
Later on, Elizabeth said she realized that her anger at Methodist was misplaced. "It wasn't that the Methodist Hospital was refusing to perform a service to me simply because they didn't want to, it was because Texas law ... put them in a position to where they were intimidated to not perform this procedure."
Under Texas law, doctors can be sued by almost anyone for performing an abortion.
An agonizing wait at home
Elizabeth chose to go home rather than wait to get sick at the hospital.
But she was barely out the door, still in the parking lot, when her phone rang. It was someone else at Methodist Hospital, perhaps a clerk, calling to go over some paperwork.
"It's this woman who was saying 'Hi Miss Weller, you're at the 19 week mark. We usually have our moms register for delivery at this point. So I'm here to call you to register for your delivery on October 5th, so I can collect all your insurance information. How are you doing, and are you excited for the delivery?'"
Elizabeth knows it was just a terrible coincidence, an awful bureaucratic oversight, and yet it drove home to her how powerless she was, how alone, in that vast medical system of rules, legal regulations and revenue.
"I just cried and screamed in the parking lot," she recalls. "This poor woman had no idea what she was telling me. And I told her 'No, ma'am. I'm actually headed home right now because I have to await my dead baby's delivery.' And she goes 'I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't know.'"
For Elizabeth, that tragic conversation was just "the beginning of the hell that was going to ensue" for the rest of the week.
The next day, a Thursday, she started throwing up. But when she called, they told her that nausea and vomiting weren't among the symptoms they were looking for.
On Friday, when she woke up, she was still passing blood and discharge, still feeling sick, and feeling strange things in her uterus. She felt lost and confused. "I was just laying in bed, you know, wondering: Am I pregnant or am I not pregnant? And it's this stupid, like, distinction that you're just making in this grief. You're trying to understand exactly what's going on. Because at this point, I'm in survival mode. I'm trying to understand. I'm trying to mentally survive this."
How the law led to medical trauma
Elizabeth's experience amounts to a kind of medical trauma, which is layered on top of the grief of pregnancy loss, says Elaine Cavazos, a psychotherapist specializing in the perinatal period, and the chief clinical officer of Reproductive Psychiatry and Counseling in Austin.
"It's just really unimaginable to be in a position of having to think: How close to death am I before somebody is going to take action and help me?"
Losing a pregnancy is a particular kind of loss, one that tends to make other people — even health professionals — uncomfortable. All too often, Cavazos says, patients are told to get over it, move on, try again. These dismissals only increase the sense of isolation, stigma and shame.
And now the Texas abortion law has created an additional bind, Cavazos explains.
In a sudden obstetrical emergency, a termination might be the least risky option, clinically. But now "your medical provider says that it's illegal and they can't provide it. And not only can they not provide it, but they can't talk to you about it," Cavazos says.
"It might even be scary for you to reach out and seek support — even mental health support. Because the state has made it very clear that if you talk about this, you're vulnerable to to being sued," she added.
An invisible panel weighs their case
As Friday dragged on, Elizabeth started wondering if maybe the heartbeat had stopped. She called her doctor and begged to get in. At the office, her ob-gyn turned down the ultrasound volume so they wouldn't have to hear.
"I said 'Well, is there a heartbeat still?' And she says 'Yes. And it's strong.'"
"It was devastating to hear that," Elizabeth says. "Not because I wanted my baby to die, but because I needed this hell to end. And I knew my baby was suffering, I knew I was suffering, I knew my husband was suffering."
Her doctor said she had been calling other hospitals, but none of them would help. She said Houston Methodist had convened an ethics panel of doctors, but her doctor didn't seem very optimistic.
Right there in the office, James pulled out his cell phone, and started looking for flights to states with less restrictive abortion laws. Maybe they could get the abortion in Denver or Albuquerque.
"He and I kept telling each other 'What is the whole point of the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm?'" Elizabeth says. "And yet we're being pulled through this."
Back at home, the Wellers got more serious about their travel plans and started booking tickets.
Then Elizabeth felt another sudden, forceful gush of fluid leave her body. The color was darker and the odor was foul. Enough to make her retch.
When they called the doctor's office back, they were told to go straight to the emergency room. And quickly. They now had some of the symptoms they needed to show the infection was getting worse.
Before they drove off, Elizabeth paused to do something. She took a swipe of the new discharge, and placed the toilet paper in a Ziploc bag to carry with her.
It was like an evidence bag. She was through with being dismissed, being told to wait. There was an infection, and she did need treatment. She had the proof.
"Because I didn't want anybody to tell me they did not believe me," she says. "And if they didn't believe me, I was going to show it to them and say "Look! You open it. You smell it yourself. You're not going to tell me that what I'm experiencing isn't real, again."
She never had to use that bag. Because once they reached Methodist, while they were still checking in at the emergency room, her doctor called.
The ethics panel had reached a decision, the doctor told them. Unnamed, unknown doctors somewhere had come to an agreement that Elizabeth could be induced that night.
As Elizabeth recalled hearing, it was one particular doctor who had argued her case: "They found a doctor from East Texas who spoke up and was so patient forward, so patient advocating, that he said 'This is ridiculous.'"
James and Elizabeth cried out their thanks to the doctor. They stood up in the middle of the ER and embraced.
"We shouldn't have been celebrating," Elizabeth says. "And yet we were. Because the alternative was hell."
A mournful birth
Elizabeth was induced late Friday night, and the labor became painful enough that she had to get an epidural. Midnight came and went in a blur. On Saturday, May 14, about 2 a.m., she gave birth. Their daughter, as expected, was stillborn.
"Later they laid down this beautiful baby girl in my arms. She was so tiny. And she rested on my chest ... I looked at her little hands and I just cried. And I told her 'I'm so sorry. I couldn't give you life. I'm so sorry."
When Roe v. Wade fell in June, Elizabeth's pain and anger surged up again.
"You know they paint this woman into being this individual that doesn't care about her life, doesn't care about the life of the children she creates or whatever. And she just recklessly and negligently goes out and gets abortions all willy-nilly, left and right," she says.
"Abortions are sometimes needed out of an act of an emergency, out of an act of saving a woman's life. Or hell — it honestly it shouldn't even get to the point where you're having to save a woman's life."
The Wellers do want to try again, but first they need to get to a "mentally healthier place," Elizabeth says. "It's not just the fear that it could happen again, but also the added fear of what if it happens again and I can't get help?"
"Let's say I do have to go through this situation again. And how can I be so sure I'm not going to get too sick to the point where that's it ... now you can't have kids. It is a horrible gamble that we are making Texas women go through."
Elizabeth has been sharing her story, and has found that whatever the political affiliation of the listener, they all agree her experience was horrible.
Now she wants those sentiments translated into action.
"We live in a culture that advocates small government and yet we are allowing states, we are allowing our Texas state government to dictate what women do with their own bodies and to dictate what they think is best, what medical procedures they think is best for them to get."
In the medical profession, doctors will continue to grapple with the new legal restrictions, and the resultant dilemmas in obstetrical care, says Dr. Peaceman.
"It's going to take a while before ... the medical community comes to some kind of consensus on where you draw this line, and where you say enough is enough."
"Because that doesn't really exist right now," he added. "And if you leave it up to individuals, you're going to get uncertainty and people unwilling to make decisions."
"Google is providing the Israeli government with the full suite of machine-learning and AI tools available through Google Cloud Platform." (image: Alex Hinton/The Intercept)
Google employees, who have been kept in the dark about the “Nimbus” AI project, have concerns about Israeli human rights abuses.
Google engineers have spent the time since worrying whether their efforts would inadvertently bolster the ongoing Israeli military occupation of Palestine. In 2021, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International formally accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity by maintaining an apartheid system against Palestinians. While the Israeli military and security services already rely on a sophisticated system of computerized surveillance, the sophistication of Google’s data analysis offerings could worsen the increasingly data-driven military occupation.
According to a trove of training documents and videos obtained by The Intercept through a publicly accessible educational portal intended for Nimbus users, Google is providing the Israeli government with the full suite of machine-learning and AI tools available through Google Cloud Platform. While they provide no specifics as to how Nimbus will be used, the documents indicate that the new cloud would give Israel capabilities for facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and even sentiment analysis that claims to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and writing. The Nimbus materials referenced agency-specific trainings available to government personnel through the online learning service Coursera, citing the Ministry of Defense as an example.
Jack Poulson, director of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, shared the portal’s address with The Intercept after finding it cited in Israeli contracting documents.
“The former head of Security for Google Enterprise — who now heads Oracle’s Israel branch — has publicly argued that one of the goals of Nimbus is preventing the German government from requesting data relating on the Israel Defence Forces for the International Criminal Court,” said Poulson, who resigned in protest from his job as a research scientist at Google in 2018, in a message. “Given Human Rights Watch’s conclusion that the Israeli government is committing ‘crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution’ against Palestinians, it is critical that Google and Amazon’s AI surveillance support to the IDF be documented to the fullest.”
Though some of the documents bear a hybridized symbol of the Google logo and Israeli flag, for the most part they are not unique to Nimbus. Rather, the documents appear to be standard educational materials distributed to Google Cloud customers and presented in prior training contexts elsewhere.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
The documents obtained by The Intercept detail for the first time the Google Cloud features provided through the Nimbus contract. With virtually nothing publicly disclosed about Nimbus beyond its existence, the system’s specific functionality had remained a mystery even to most of those working at the company that built it. In 2020, citing the same AI tools, U.S Customs and Border Protection tapped Google Cloud to process imagery from its network of border surveillance towers.
Many of the capabilities outlined in the documents obtained by The Intercept could easily augment Israel’s ability to surveil people and process vast stores of data — already prominent features of the Israeli occupation.
“Data collection over the entire Palestinian population was and is an integral part of the occupation,” Ori Givati of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation advocacy group of Israeli military veterans, told The Intercept in an email. “Generally, the different technological developments we are seeing in the Occupied Territories all direct to one central element which is more control.”
The Israeli security state has for decades benefited from the country’s thriving research and development sector, and its interest in using AI to police and control Palestinians isn’t hypothetical. In 2021, the Washington Post reported on the existence of Blue Wolf, a secret military program aimed at monitoring Palestinians through a network of facial recognition-enabled smartphones and cameras.
“Living under a surveillance state for years taught us that all the collected information in the Israeli/Palestinian context could be securitized and militarized,” said Mona Shtaya, a Palestinian digital rights advocate at 7amleh-The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, in a message. “Image recognition, facial recognition, emotional analysis, among other things will increase the power of the surveillance state to violate Palestinian right to privacy and to serve their main goal, which is to create the panopticon feeling among Palestinians that we are being watched all the time, which would make the Palestinian population control easier.”
The educational materials obtained by The Intercept show that Google briefed the Israeli government on using what’s known as sentiment detection, an increasingly controversial and discredited form of machine learning. Google claims that its systems can discern inner feelings from one’s face and statements, a technique commonly rejected as invasive and pseudoscientific, regarded as being little better than phrenology. In June, Microsoft announced that it would no longer offer emotion-detection features through its Azure cloud computing platform — a technology suite comparable to what Google provides with Nimbus — citing the lack of scientific basis.
Google does not appear to share Microsoft’s concerns. One Nimbus presentation touted the “Faces, facial landmarks, emotions”-detection capabilities of Google’s Cloud Vision API, an image analysis toolset. The presentation then offered a demonstration using the enormous grinning face sculpture at the entrance of Sydney’s Luna Park. An included screenshot of the feature ostensibly in action indicates that the massive smiling grin is “very unlikely” to exhibit any of the example emotions. And Google was only able to assess that the famous amusement park is an amusement park with 64 percent certainty, while it guessed that the landmark was a “place of worship” or “Hindu Temple” with 83 percent and 74 percent confidence, respectively.
Google workers who reviewed the documents said they were concerned by their employer’s sale of these technologies to Israel, fearing both their inaccuracy and how they might be used for surveillance or other militarized purposes.
“Vision API is a primary concern to me because it’s so useful for surveillance,” said one worker, who explained that the image analysis would be a natural fit for military and security applications. “Object recognition is useful for targeting, it’s useful for data analysis and data labeling. An AI can comb through collected surveillance feeds in a way a human cannot to find specific people and to identify people, with some error, who look like someone. That’s why these systems are really dangerous.”
The employee — who, like other Google workers who spoke to The Intercept, requested anonymity to avoid workplace reprisals — added that they were further alarmed by potential surveillance or other militarized applications of AutoML, another Google AI tool offered through Nimbus. Machine learning is largely the function of training software to recognize patterns in order to make predictions about future observations, for instance by analyzing millions of images of kittens today in order to confidently claim that it’s looking at a photo of a kitten tomorrow. This training process yields what’s known as a “model” — a body of computerized education that can be applied to automatically recognize certain objects and traits in future data.
Training an effective model from scratch is often resource intensive, both financially and computationally. This is not so much of a problem for a world-spanning company like Google, with an unfathomable volume of both money and computing hardware at the ready. Part of Google’s appeal to customers is the option of using a pre-trained model, essentially getting this prediction-making education out of the way and letting customers access a well-trained program that’s benefited from the company’s limitless resources.
Cloud Vision is one such pre-trained model, allowing clients to immediately implement a sophisticated prediction system. AutoML, on the other hand, streamlines the process of training a custom-tailored model, using a customer’s own data for a customer’s own designs. Google has placed some limits on Vision — for instance limiting it to face detection, or whether it sees a face, rather than recognition that would identify a person. AutoML, however, would allow Israel to leverage Google’s computing capacity to train new models with its own government data for virtually any purpose it wishes. “Google’s machine learning capabilities along with the Israeli state’s surveillance infrastructure poses a real threat to the human rights of Palestinians,” said Damini Satija, who leads Amnesty International’s Algorithmic Accountability Lab. “The option to use the vast volumes of surveillance data already held by the Israeli government to train the systems only exacerbates these risks.”
Custom models generated through AutoML, one presentation noted, can be downloaded for offline “edge” use — unplugged from the cloud and deployed in the field.
That Nimbus lets Google clients use advanced data analysis and prediction in places and ways that Google has no visibility into creates a risk of abuse, according to Liz O’Sullivan, CEO of the AI auditing startup Parity and a member of the U.S. National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee. “Countries can absolutely use AutoML to deploy shoddy surveillance systems that only seem like they work,” O’Sullivan said in a message. “On edge, it’s even worse — think bodycams, traffic cameras, even a handheld device like a phone can become a surveillance machine and Google may not even know it’s happening.”
In one Nimbus webinar reviewed by The Intercept, the potential use and misuse of AutoML was exemplified in a Q…A session following a presentation. An unnamed member of the audience asked the Google Cloud engineers present on the call if it would be possible to process data through Nimbus in order to determine if someone is lying.
“I’m a bit scared to answer that question,” said the engineer conducting the seminar, in an apparent joke. “In principle: Yes. I will expand on it, but the short answer is yes.” Another Google representative then jumped in: “It is possible, assuming that you have the right data, to use the Google infrastructure to train a model to identify how likely it is that a certain person is lying, given the sound of their own voice.” Noting that such a capability would take a tremendous amount of data for the model, the second presenter added that one of the advantages of Nimbus is the ability to tap into Google’s vast computing power to train such a model.
A broad body of research, however, has shown that the very notion of a “lie detector,” whether the simple polygraph or “AI”-based analysis of vocal changes or facial cues, is junk science. While Google’s reps appeared confident that the company could make such a thing possible through sheer computing power, experts in the field say that any attempts to use computers to assess things as profound and intangible as truth and emotion are faulty to the point of danger.
One Google worker who reviewed the documents said they were concerned that the company would even hint at such a scientifically dubious technique. “The answer should have been ‘no,’ because that does not exist,” the worker said. “It seems like it was meant to promote Google technology as powerful, and it’s ultimately really irresponsible to say that when it’s not possible.”
Andrew McStay, a professor of digital media at Bangor University in Wales and head of the Emotional AI Lab, told The Intercept that the lie detector Q…A exchange was “disturbing,” as is Google’s willingness to pitch pseudoscientific AI tools to a national government. “It is [a] wildly divergent field, so any technology built on this is going to automate unreliability,” he said. “Again, those subjected to them will suffer, but I’d be very skeptical for the citizens it is meant to protect that these systems can do what is claimed.”
According to some critics, whether these tools work might be of secondary importance to a company like Google that is eager to tap the ever-lucrative flow of military contract money. Governmental customers too may be willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to promises of vast new techno-powers. “It’s extremely telling that in the webinar PDF that they constantly referred to this as ‘magical AI goodness,’” said Jathan Sadowski, a scholar of automation technologies and research fellow at Monash University, in an interview with The Intercept. “It shows that they’re bullshitting.”
Google, like Microsoft, has its own public list of “AI principles,” a document the company says is an “ethical charter that guides the development and use of artificial intelligence in our research and products.” Among these purported principles is a commitment to not “deploy AI … that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” including weapons, surveillance, or any application “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
Israel, though, has set up its relationship with Google to shield it from both the company’s principles and any outside scrutiny. Perhaps fearing the fate of the Pentagon’s Project Maven, a Google AI contract felled by intense employee protests, the data centers that power Nimbus will reside on Israeli territory, subject to Israeli law and insulated from political pressures. Last year, the Times of Israel reported that Google would be contractually barred from shutting down Nimbus services or denying access to a particular government office even in response to boycott campaigns.
Google employees interviewed by The Intercept lamented that the company’s AI principles are at best a superficial gesture. “I don’t believe it’s hugely meaningful,” one employee told The Intercept, explaining that the company has interpreted its AI charter so narrowly that it doesn’t apply to companies or governments that buy Google Cloud services. Asked how the AI principles are compatible with the company’s Pentagon work, a Google spokesperson told Defense One, “It means that our technology can be used fairly broadly by the military.”
Moreover, this employee added that Google lacks both the ability to tell if its principles are being violated and any means of thwarting violations. “Once Google offers these services, we have no technical capacity to monitor what our customers are doing with these services,” the employee said. “They could be doing anything.” Another Google worker told The Intercept, “At a time when already vulnerable populations are facing unprecedented and escalating levels of repression, Google is backsliding on its commitments to protect people from this kind of misuse of our technology. I am truly afraid for the future of Google and the world.”
Ariel Koren, a Google employee who claimed earlier this year that she faced retaliation for raising concerns about Nimbus, said the company’s internal silence on the program continues. “I am deeply concerned that Google has not provided us with any details at all about the scope of the Project Nimbus contract, let alone assuage my concerns of how Google can provide technology to the Israeli government and military (both committing grave human rights abuses against Palestinians daily) while upholding the ethical commitments the company has made to its employees and the public,” she told The Intercept in an email. “I joined Google to promote technology that brings communities together and improves people’s lives, not service a government accused of the crime of apartheid by the world’s two leading human rights organizations.”
Sprawling tech companies have published ethical AI charters to rebut critics who say that their increasingly powerful products are sold unchecked and unsupervised. The same critics often counter that the documents are a form of “ethicswashing” — essentially toothless self-regulatory pledges that provide only the appearance of scruples, pointing to examples like the provisions in Israel’s contract with Google that prevent the company from shutting down its products. “The way that Israel is locking in their service providers through this tender and this contract,” said Sadowski, the Monash University scholar, “I do feel like that is a real innovation in technology procurement.”
To Sadowski, it matters little whether Google believes what it peddles about AI or any other technology. What the company is selling, ultimately, isn’t just software, but power. And whether it’s Israel and the U.S. today or another government tomorrow, Sadowski says that some technologies amplify the exercise of power to such an extent that even their use by a country with a spotless human rights record would provide little reassurance. “Give them these technologies, and see if they don’t get tempted to use them in really evil and awful ways,” he said. “These are not technologies that are just neutral intelligence systems, these are technologies that are ultimately about surveillance, analysis, and control.”
Oil pumps. (photo: History)
"It’s a green light for the conventional oil and gas industry to continue to do what they’ve done, which is abandon these wells whenever they feel like it."
To prevent the backlog of abandoned wells from growing, Pennsylvania’s Environmental Quality Board and Department of Environmental Protection were beginning to examine ways to strengthen rules requiring companies to post bonds before drilling. These financial assurances can be claimed by the state if a company goes bankrupt or otherwise tries to get out of its environmental obligations. The idea is that even companies that skip town are still on the hook, and taxpayers don’t end up footing the bill.
Those efforts were put to an end last week, however, when Democratic Governor Tom Wolf failed to veto a bill that banned future increases in financial assurance amounts for conventional vertical wells (as opposed to fracking wells), for the next ten years. Wolf reportedly allowed the bill to pass as part of a deal with Republican lawmakers to secure additional education funding.
“It’s a green light for the conventional oil and gas industry to continue to do what they’ve done, which is abandon these wells whenever they feel like it,” said David Hess, a former director of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP.
Pennsylvania’s current financial assurance requirements are inadequate to cover the cost of plugging and cleaning up wells. The state requires operators to post $2,500 per well or a “blanket” bond of $25,000 for all of a company’s wells. For operators with a hundred wells, that can work out to $250 per well. DEP has estimated that average plugging costs for conventional wells are approximately $33,000 per well, meaning public funds are a critical backstop if operators fail to plug wells. Nearly 70,000 of the state’s wells were drilled prior to April 1985 and are exempt from bonding requirements altogether. As a result, the state has less than $15 in bonds per operational well.
In recognition of this, in November the state’s Environmental Quality Board accepted petitions filed by environmental groups to raise bonding amounts to cover the true cost of cleanup. House Bill 2644, which was sponsored by state House Representative Martin Causer, a Republican from northwest Pennsylvania, was a direct response to the rulemaking that the Board was considering.
The new law, which took effect on Wednesday, does raise the blanket bond amount from $25,000 to a maximum of $100,000 for new wells drilled six months from now, but it also bans the Environmental Quality Board and DEP from raising or otherwise adjusting bond amounts. It codifies the exemption for wells drilled prior to 1985, and it requires DEP to hand out 20 percent of funding provided to it by a well plugging grant program in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to “qualified well pluggers” — a category that appears to include the very companies that drill and abandon wells in the first place. Pennsylvania is eligible to receive $395 million over 15 years from the federal government to plug abandoned oil and gas wells. The state has been allocated $104 million so far.
The bill defines “qualified well plugger” as any entity that has either drilled or plugged 10 wells or otherwise demonstrates access to equipment and services needed to plug wells. Hess worries that the new law will allow noncompliant fossil fuel companies to access cleanup funds through the grant program, meaning the money would “go to the bandits in the industry that have caused the problems in the first place.” DEP has issued more than 4,270 notices of violations to operators for abandoning wells over the last six years, he said, and without adequate guardrails, the new funding could end up in their hands.
“Setting aside an automatic 20 percent of this money to go to [oil and gas companies] with very few restrictions on them and with no bidding sets up a bad precedent,” Hess told Grist.
About $40 million of the funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is contingent on the state making efforts to reduce the number of new abandoned wells through “financial assurance reform, alternate funding mechanisms for orphan well programs and reforms to programs relating to well transfer for temporary abandonment.” It’s unclear whether the new law jeopardizes that funding, since it weakens the bonding program overall.
“The administration has serious concerns” with the law, said Jamar Thrasher, a spokesperson for the DEP. “The administration is currently exploring the next steps to ensure the industry is held accountable in order to protect the environment and that we don’t lose out on millions of dollars in federal funding for well plugging.”
In a presentation before a DEP advisory committee, Kurt Klapkowski, the department’s acting deputy for oil and gas management, noted that there were still options that the agency could pursue to secure the additional funds that didn’t depend on increasing bonding amounts — the option the legislature had just taken off the table.
While the law prevents the Environmental Quality Board and DEP from increasing bonding amounts for conventional oil and gas wells, it doesn’t take away the authority to increase bonding for unconventional or fracking wells, which account for less than 5 percent of wells drilled in the state historically. Some states have strengthened their bonding programs by adding requirements that oil and gas operators report when they expect to retire old wells. These requirements allow state environmental agencies to keep a closer watch on wells nearing the end of their lives that may potentially be abandoned. Some states have also used regulation at the time of transfer, when operators sell off old wells to other companies, as an opportunity to require cleanups.
“They have taken one tool out of our toolbox, but they haven’t eliminated all of the tools,” Klapkowski said in his presentation.
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