14 August 22
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The warrant set a raid on Mar-a-Lago in motion; it suggests a potential investigation into federal crimes.
Together, the documents provide a clearer picture of how the search came together, and both the size and scope of the seizure.
The documents indicate the warrant was issued to investigate potential violations of the Espionage Act. That act states, among other things, that an official entrusted with sensitive or classified information who allows it to be taken away from its secure location through “gross negligence” or who knows it’s been removed from safety and doesn’t tell federal officials can be fined or imprisoned for up to 10 years. They also suggest an inquiry into possible improper removal or destruction of federal records, and obstruction of a federal investigation.
The receipt suggests 11 sets of documents were recovered, including items related to French President Emmanuel Macron, handwritten notes, photos, and top-secret materials.
Trump decried the search, claiming in a statement, incorrectly, that his home was “under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.” Reports quickly began to emerge that the search was premised on recovering sensitive information that needed to be secured. A Thursday Washington Post report stated that classified nuclear documents may be among those recovered; that’s concerning given the wide range of allies and adversaries who’ve had, and continue to have, access to the golf club that serves as one of the former president’s homes.
The National Archives recovered at least 15 boxes of presidential records earlier this year; federal law requires presidential administrations to turn over their records to the National Archives. A tipster reportedly told the federal government that not all important documents had been recovered. The FBI reportedly visited Mar-a-Lago in June and told Trump to better secure the remaining items; a subpoena was also issued after that visit in an attempt to recover them.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday that the Justice Department asked the judge who authorized the search that the warrant and property receipt be unsealed. Trump quickly released a statement saying he was “ENCOURAGING the immediate release of those documents.”
Now they have been released. Read them here,
tRump's LIES continue!
It's time to STOP INCITING VIOLENCE!
The JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, THE JUDGE & THE FBI DID THEIR JOB!
It's time for tRumpers to do theirs and abide by the law & STOP THE THREATS!
tRumpers don't want to hear TRUTH or FACTS because they're blind sheep in love with a loser, but the information is available.
There are likely documents redacted from the INVENTORY due to the National Security risk:
Key lines from the search warrant and receipt for Trump's Florida home
THEY TRIED TO GET THE DOCUMENTS:
Timeline: The Justice Department criminal inquiry into Trump taking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/09/politics/doj-investigation-trump-documents-timeline/index.html
Trump Lawyer Says He Watched Search On Camera, Muddling Claim That FBI Planted Evidence - PROVE IT WITH SURVEILLANCE VIDEO! YOU CAN'T!
LEGAL JEOPARDY:
Trump lawyer claimed no classified material was at Mar-a-Lago in signed letter to Justice Department
Trump’s Excuses for Hoarding Classified Documents Are Getting More Absurd
No, Obama did not keep 30 million pages of his administration’s records
Criminal case against Trump Organization and ex-CFO Weisselberg can proceed, judge rules
Robin Vos fires Michael Gableman, ending a 2020 election review that's cost taxpayers more than $1 million and produced no evidence of fraud
U.S. Marines fire a M777 howitzer during a military exercise at Adazi Training Area in Latvia. (photo: Sgt. Andy Martinez/Marine Forces Reserve/WP)
ALSO SEE: Lawmakers Want Better Weapons for Ukraine.
Biden Isn't so Sure.
About 100,000 U.S. troops are deployed across Europe, with a growing center of gravity in the east. But for those on Russia’s doorstep, it’s not yet enough.
Like Ukraine, which is not a NATO member but considered a close partner of the alliance, the countries closest to Russia say they are desperate for more Western military aid. It is essential to arm themselves as well as Ukraine, Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks said during a visit from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this month, because there is a real risk the war will “come to our borders.”
The Biden administration has vowed to boost side-by-side exercises in the region to hone proficiency in air-defense capability and other vital combat skills, not only in Latvia but across the Baltics and in other nations within easy striking distance of Russian forces. About 100,000 U.S. troops are deployed across Europe, an increase of 20,000 in recent months, with a growing center of gravity in the east. But for those on Russia’s doorstep, it’s not yet enough.
The NATO members bordering Russia and Belarus — which, once considered a buffer state, has functioned as a forward-operating base for Russian troops since the start of the Ukraine war — are pleased, they say, that the United States along with Europe’s financial powerhouses have embraced the view that Russia poses an existential threat to the West.
The military investments made over the past six months are accepted with gratitude, but leaders in the region believe the alliance must become more aggressive in the long term. They are mindful of the resistance from some corners of Congress to moving more U.S. personnel to Europe during a time of rising tensions with China, but most insist that having a greater American footprint in Europe is necessary to keeping Moscow at bay.
Even more vital, Baltic and Eastern European officials say, is a turbocharging of defense production lines to accelerate fulfillment of long-standing orders for weapons that these front-line countries say they require.
“HIMARS, Reapers, counter-battery radars: these are what we will need most in terms of military lethal power that is imminently needed to deter Russia,” Kusti Salm, secretary general of the Estonian Defense Ministry, said in an interview. He was referring to high-mobility artillery rocket systems, drones capable of conducting surveillance and precision strikes, and technology used to detect incoming fire.
“We are on the brink of taking risks,” Salm said. “Very heavy risks of our own national security tapping into some of our reserves. … And I know that there are other allies doing the same. So the only solution is rapidly ramping up the manufacturing power, and making sure the policy framework and policy financing signal support for this.”
Earlier this year, Congress approved hundreds of millions of dollars to support, train and equip foreign countries that aided the Ukraine war effort — a category that includes all of the frontline NATO states — as part of a $40 billion package of assistance for the government in Kyiv and other measures to strengthen Western defenses.
Part of the initiative calls for accelerating efforts to replace with NATO-standard weapons the Soviet-legacy systems many frontline states rushed to Ukraine early in the conflict. Many of those countries also have been supplying Ukraine with NATO-compatible heavy weapons from their own stocks.
A senior U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon, said that, in the case of Latvia, its government felt comfortable providing Ukraine with some weapons because Russian forces that had been positioned near their shared border were withdrawn to join the war effort.
But Moscow’s hostility toward NATO remains unchanged, this official said, and Western countries need to backfill those capabilities at some point. The official did not say how long that may take. The United States is looking for the Baltic countries to build training ranges and other military infrastructure, the official added, while noting that U.S. security assistance for the region has risen to $180 million this year.
In an interview, the Polish defense attache, Brig. Gen. Krzysztof Nolbert, said “winning that war is absolutely fundamental to security in Europe.” Poland is the third-largest donor to the Ukrainian military, Nolbert added, and has routinely urged the West to support Kyiv “more decisively as opposed to incrementally,” including by sending in fighter jets.
At the same time, Polish officials believe it would greatly help their own defense posture if the United States could accelerate delivery of certain weapons Warsaw has already been promised. Poland is awaiting Patriot missile batteries, HIMARS, F-16 fighter aircraft and Abrams battle tanks, all along multiyear schedules set before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Recently, the head of Poland’s national security bureau, Pawel Soloch, spoke with President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, about the need for defense production to be more responsive to escalating threats, impressing upon him that the U.S. foreign military financing protocols needed an upgrade, according to people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail a private conversation.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the characterization of their discussion.
“I know they are working at maximum speed,” Nolbert said. But, he added: “It’s an emergency situation. We need it now.”
In Latvia, meanwhile, the defense minister, Pabriks, told reporters this month that his country is seeking the sophisticated long-range rocket artillery that has bedeviled Russian troops in eastern Ukraine plus air and coastal defense systems generally out of reach for countries with modest budgets.
Latvia now considers the Belarus and Russian borders as one and the same, Pabriks said, and officials here closely watch what’s happening on the other side with the aid of intelligence provided by the United States and other partners.
There are currently about 600 Americans deployed in Latvia, up from about 100 last winter.
The persistent deployments of NATO troops and weapons to countries along Russia’s flank is a strategy Western military leaders call the porcupine defense. It seeks to make the idea of invasion unpalatable to adversarial war planners by demonstrating NATO troops can instantly mobilize and back up allies already toughened by Western training and equipment.
During a stop at Latvia’s Lielvarde Air Base, where U.S. troops have taken up residence, Austin heard from a Latvian service member who professed to be the first in his country to return from Black Hawk helicopter training in the United States. In recent years, Latvian pilots were more focused on missions like search and rescue, he told the defense secretary, but now he knows how to fly in combat.
The meeting underscored, though, that even some small challenges remain. One U.S. soldier, deployed here from Ohio, disclosed that it’s often difficult to work with his Latvian counterparts in person. They’re based an hour’s drive from one another, the soldier said, and transportation is lacking.
“We’ll work on that,” Austin responded. “We’ll figure it out. … We’re going to make sure we know the people that we’re committed to fighting alongside, and you get a chance to see some of the land you may have to protect one day.”
Pabriks sounded a more urgent and ominous tone, telling the assembled troops, “If something happens on our borders, we are ready to die.”
China views Taiwan as its own territory to be seized one day, by force if necessary. (photo: Tyrone Siu/Reuters)
The White House says Washington’s ‘freedom of navigation’ transits will reflect its response to China’s ‘provocative’ military operations in the strait.
China conducted its largest-ever military drill around Taiwan, which Beijing considers its territory, during a trip by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi earlier this month.
Kurt Campbell, the White House coordinator for Asia-Pacific issues and adviser to President Joe Biden, said despite tensions, US forces “will continue to fly, sail and operate where international law allows, consistent with our longstanding commitment to freedom of navigation”.
“That includes conducting standard air and maritime transits through the Taiwan Strait in the next few weeks,” he told reporters.
Campbell did not confirm what kind of deployment would be made to support the manoeuvres, saying he had no “comments about either the nature of our crossings or the timings across the Taiwan Strait”.
He said Washington is set to announce an “ambitious roadmap” for deeper economic ties with Taiwan in the wake of tensions with China over the self-governed island.
Largest-ever military drills
Beijing carried out its largest-ever military drills around the self-ruled island during Pelosi’s trip. It has accused the US of working against its official policy on China and Taiwan.
Taiwan has accused China of using the visit by Pelosi, the highest-ranking elected American official to visit in decades, as an excuse to start drills that Taipei called a rehearsal for invasion.
China views the island as its own territory to be seized one day, by force if necessary.
Campbell said Pelosi’s visit was “consistent” with Washington’s existing policy and that China had “overreacted”.
Beijing used the pretext to “launch an intensified pressure campaign against Taiwan to try to change the status quo, jeopardizing peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and in the broader region”, he said.
“China has overreacted and its actions continue to be provocative, destabilising and unprecedented.”
In response to China’s drills, the US is reasserting its involvement in the area, while reiterating its policy of “strategic ambiguity” – diplomatically recognising China while simultaneously supporting the island’s self-rule.
Washington’s ‘one China’ policy
Andrew Leung, a China analyst, told Al Jazeera that US actions on Taiwan are working against its official policy towards China in that the “one China” policy has been hollowed out over many years by the dispatching of senior US officials to the island.
Such visits give Taiwan increasing diplomatic space to assume an “almost independent role as if Taiwan was a separate country” from China, Leung said.
“The reality remains that most Taiwanese people do not support unification but nor do they dare to declare independence. They want to prolong the status quo forever.
“However, forever is not an option because President Xi has made it quite plain that 2049 is the absolute deadline for unification which is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China,” said Leung, referring to the island by its official name.
Island’s foreign ministry thanked Washington for its “firm support” in a statement on Saturday that pointed to its “concrete action to maintain security in the Taiwan Strait and peace in the region”.
Criticising China’s decision to halt cooperation with Washington on issues including the fight against climate change, Campbell said, “We have and will continue to keep lines of communication open with Beijing.”
The official noted that Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping have asked staff to arrange an in-person summit, but he declined to comment on reports that this could take place during the G20 meeting in Bali this November.
“We don’t have anything further in terms of details on time or location,” he said.
Police officers face off with demonstrators at the scene of the fatal police shooting of 37-year-old Harith Augustus on July 14, 2018, in the South Shore neighborhood. (photo: Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune)
After Chicago police killed Harith Augustus, the question was not: What happened? It was: How do we justify what happened?
Moments later, his body lay motionless in the middle of 71st Street, having been shot five times by Officer Dillan Halley.
In previous reporting for The Intercept, and in a collaborative project with Forensic Architecture titled “Six Durations of a Split Second,” we used video evidence to show that Augustus’s death was the result of aggressive policing rather than any criminal conduct on his part. The police stopped him because he appeared to be carrying a gun, but in a concealed carry state that alone is not a sufficient basis for an investigative stop. Augustus had committed no crime, and at no point did he remove his gun from its holster. It was actions by the police that produced the “split second” of perceived threat to which they responded with lethal force.
Now, by virtue of unedited body camera footage released in the context of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, it is possible to examine the sequence of police actions immediately after Halley killed Augustus: the moments when the official narrative of what just happened crystallizes. Viewed together with previously released footage, it deepens our understanding of how a demonstrably official false narrative of a police killing takes shape.
Narrative Construction
As officers cordoned off the crime scene with yellow caution tape, onlookers stopped on the sidewalk and sought to engage with the police. Augustus lay unattended on the ground. His gun was holstered, and his wallet with his Firearm Owners Identification card was in his hand. He had been attempting to show the card to Officer Quincy Jones when three other officers encircled him from behind. Without warning, Officer Megan Fleming grabbed his arm. Startled, Augustus reflexively bolted, stumbled into the street, at which point his hand came near his holstered gun: the “split second” that prompted Halley to shoot.
Halley fires his final shot at 5:30:43 p.m. At 5:30:53 p.m., Jones unfastens Augustus’s holster and removes his gun.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there is a great deal of police activity. At the same time, a crowd of community members — some curious, some outraged — rapidly forms. Footage from body cameras worn by various officers allows us to deconstruct the scene from multiple concurrent perspectives and thereby see more deeply into the reality of what happened.
Officer Dillan Halley [5:30:47 – 5:31:02 p.m.]
In the instant after Halley fires the fifth and final shot into Augustus’s body, the audio on his body camera activates. “Shots fired,” he shouts. “Shots fired at the police.”
When I first heard this, I was stunned by the brazenness with which Halley misrepresents what happened a moment earlier. Having now listened to it many times, it appears he doesn’t know what to say: He doesn’t know how to name what just happened. His voice dissolves into confusion: “Or police officer shoots.” And then, under his breath, a whispered “Fuck.”
Officer James Aimers [5:31:20 – 5:31:54 p.m.]
Having just arrived on the scene as the shooting occurred, James Aimers approaches Augustus laying in the middle of the street. He bends down and handcuffs the immobile Augustus. As he walks away, he takes out a bottle of hand sanitizer and vigorously cleans his hands.
Officer Dillan Halley [5:31:37 – 5:32:17 p.m.]
Megan Fleming seeks out Dillan Halley, who is on the sidewalk
“You OK? You OK?” Fleming asks, then answers for him. “Come here. You’re good, you’re good.”
“It was a gun?” Halley asks.
“Yes,” she replies.
“You get the gun?”
“Yes.”
Halley paces back and forth on the sidewalk. Fleming follows him. While talking, they are in constant, agitated motion.
“Breathe in,” she instructs him. “Through your nose.”
“Why did he have to pull a gun out on us?”
“Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. I feel like I wasn’t there for you,” Fleming says. “I was trying to grab him.”
“I had to. He was going to shoot us.”
“I know you did. He was going to shoot us. He was about to kill us.”
Halley continues to pace back and forth on the sidewalk.
“Come here.” Fleming says, trying to reel him in. “Look at me. You’re OK, you’re OK.”
“He pulled a gun on us.”
“I know he did,” she confirms. “I know he did. Look at me. You’re OK.”
What we observe here, as the officers contend with their shock and disorientation, is the birth of what will become the official narrative. It is not initially, as it will soon become, an exercise in institutional damage control. Rather, it is born in a moment of narrative convulsion, as Halley and Fleming seek to manage the existential crisis into which their precipitous actions have plunged them. As if his next breath depends on it, Halley struggles to find the magic words to rationalize the act he has just committed, and Fleming, in a frantic call and response, validates those words.
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:31:07 – 5:33:32 p.m.]
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich is the first supervisor to appear on the scene. He arrives less than 30 seconds after the shooting and immediately encounters Halley and Fleming.
“You?” he asks Halley.
“He pulled a gun on me,” Halley replies.
“Was it only one? Just you? Who else shot?”
Fleming, breathing rapidly, interjects, “He grabbed me, and he cut me.”
A woman on the sidewalk questions Aldrich about what happened.
“He pulled a gun on a copper,” he responds impatiently. “If you pull a gun on a police officer, he’s got the right to defend himself, and he shoots back, OK?”
The woman then says something to the effect that Augustus may have had a concealed carry permit.
“Yeah,” Aldrich says in the same overbearing tone, “but if he pulls a gun on a police officer, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have the right to pull a gun.”
Thus the frantic effort by traumatized officers to rationalize the catastrophic event in which they just participated begins to morph — within little more than a minute of the last shot being fired — into the official narrative.
This process of narrative construction requires deafness to dissonant voices. When an eyewitness — a man in a red shirt with a knapsack who was walking a few strides behind the officers as their encounter with Augustus unfolded — vigorously tries to engage with Aldrich, he shoos the man away.
Community members stream toward the site of the shooting to find out what happened. Some question or challenge the police. Aldrich and other officers respond harshly, barking out commands. We can hear Fleming’s voice. “Get the hell out of here,” she yells. “Shut the fuck up.”
In response to one woman whose words are inaudible on the body camera footage, Aldrich yells, “Lady, everything you’re saying is on camera. If you want to go to jail, keep it up.”
After nightfall, the standoff between the community and the police will give way to a violent melee in the shopping center parking lot across from the site of the incident, as officers charge into the crowd with their batons raised. Now, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, we can see in officers’ hostile, defensive responses to questions from residents the seeds of the disorder that will later ensue.
Officer Megan Fleming [5:33:01 – 5:33:33 p.m.]
When the audio on Fleming’s body camera activates, she is screaming at bystanders on the railroad tracks. “Get off the tracks! Get off the tracks!”
One of them says, “He didn’t do shit.”
“Really?” responds Fleming. She is standing over Augustus’s body. “That’s why I fucking got scratch marks all over me.” She is addressing not the onlookers but other officers standing nearby. She holds up her right forearm to show a reddish area. “He fucking tried to get away. Fuck. He fucking scratched the shit out of me. The fucker pulled a gun right at us.”
It will be a recurring theme for Fleming that Augustus assaulted her. It’s possible she was scratched as he sought to pull away after she grabbed him from behind. It is also possible the injury occurred when Halley grabbed her arm and pushed it out of the way in order to clear his line of fire. In any case, the detective’s supplemental report notes that the “abrasions” on her arm did not require medical treatment.
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:34:07 – 5:35:19 p.m.]
Less than five minutes after the incident, Aldrich responds to the growing crowd of onlookers by taking what appears to be an M4 carbine from the trunk of his vehicle and slinging it over his shoulder.
Officer Dillan Halley [5:33:40 – 5:41:01 p.m.]
Halley is wandering around the crime scene without any obvious purpose, as if disoriented.
A moment earlier, the man in the red shirt wearing a knapsack had vigorously pointed at him and Fleming and then at his own eyes as if to say, I saw what you did.
Fleming approaches Halley.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he says.
“I know you do,” she responds. “Come here.”
They rush over to a supervisor who has just arrived on the scene, Lt. Davina Ward.
“Lieutenant,” Fleming says, “my partner needs to get out of here now.”
“I’m a target,” says Halley.
“We’ve got to go,” Fleming insists. “He’s got to go.”
As if pursued, the two officers and the lieutenant run to Ward’s vehicle on the other side of the red tape.
“Get in the car,” Fleming instructs Halley, then says to Ward, “I’m going with him.”
As she drives away, Ward explains, “I can’t take you completely away, but I’ll take you away from here.”
“He pointed a gun at us,” Halley blurts out. “I had to.”
One of the officers — it is not clear who — releases a shudder of distress.
“Calm down, OK?” says Ward.
Having been unable to reach her commander on the radio, Ward uses her cellphone. “I’ve got the officers who did the shooting,” she reports. “I had to get away from the scene. They were coming after him.”
The panic of Halley and Fleming in the aftermath of the shooting has now entered the police narrative as something akin to a mob “coming after” the two officers.
Ward is unsure how far away from the scene she should go — neither Halley nor Fleming gave official statements about the shooting before fleeing the scene — so she pulls to a stop about half a mile away on a quiet residential street. There is a large vacant lot nearby. No one is visible on the sidewalk.
In a reassuring tone such as one might use with frightened children, Ward seeks to soothe the two officers in the backseat.
“It’s OK,” she says. “Listen. Listen. Listen. It’s OK. It’s OK. OK? I just need you to relax. You OK? … Listen. Listen. Listen. You are OK. You are OK. You did nothing wrong. OK? I want to make sure you know that.”
They get out of the car. Fleming and Halley put their arms around each other’s shoulders. He is largely silent, while she resumes her breathless monologue.
“You’re OK, you’re OK, you’re OK,” Fleming says. “Dude, he had a fucking gun. He was gonna kill us. I thought I was gonna die. You did the right thing. You’re OK. I’m here, I’m not leaving you. You’re OK. You did the right thing. I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was not going home to my kids. I’m fucking pissed that I didn’t — Look at this.” She holds out her forearm. “I should have fucking had him. I fucking should have had him.”
At this point, Halley’s body camera catches Fleming’s anguished face. She can’t stop talking.
“You’re OK. Dude, he fucking — Look at this,” she says, showing him a reddish spot on her right forearm again. “Dude, I went behind that car and I thought I was gonna — You did the fucking — You saved everyone. You saved my fucking life. You know that, right? You did the right thing. I’m telling you right now, I thought we were going to die. Soon as Jones asked him if he had concealed carry —”
The story Fleming is frantically piecing together has several telling details, all of them false:
- Augustus took flight because Jones asked him whether he had a concealed carry permit, not because Fleming grabbed him from behind without warning.
- In his effort to escape, Augustus assaulted Fleming.
- When several of the officers dropped to the ground and took cover behind a police vehicle, they were responding to Augustus drawing his gun and preparing to shoot at them, not to the sound of gunfire from Halley’s weapon.
In the video footage from Halley’s body camera, none of these things actually happened. Yet on the basis of Halley and Fleming’s initial utterances, the Chicago Police Department released a statement later that day under Superintendent Eddie Johnson’s letterhead that described the incident as “an armed confrontation.”
Ward instructs Halley and Fleming to get back inside the car. Halley suggests that maybe they should relocate to “an alley or something. This is a lot of traffic right here.”
“The thing is,” Ward reassures him, “they don’t know you’re in this car.”
The officers’ fear is palpable. It’s as if they are in a war zone where they could at any moment and from any direction come under attack. How much did this fearful mindset, so vividly apparent after the shooting, contribute to the sequence of actions leading up to it?
Now back inside the vehicle, Halley says, “I couldn’t let him shoot around here.”
“Right, right,” replies Ward. “I’ve got you.”
As she pulls away from the curb, she asks, “He just walked up on you guys?”
“He walked right past us,” Fleming replies. “I said, ‘He’s got a gun.’ And then Jones, he tried to stop him. … That’s when he scratched the shit out of me. I had him but fucking didn’t get him.”
“That’s OK, that’s OK.”
Halley sobs.
“You all didn’t do anything wrong,” says Ward. “I want you all to know that.”
Officer James Aimers [5:32:10 – 5:47:31 p.m.]
Back at the site of the shooting, Aimers, having handcuffed Augustus and thoroughly cleaned his hands, is engaged in securing the crime scene with red tape. This operation is complicated by the fact that community members have gathered within the area he and other officers are trying to cordon off.
“He didn’t do shit,” says a man standing in the railroad tracks directly across from the crime scene. “He’s the fucking barber. He don’t gangbang. He don’t do nothing.”
Aimers and other officers are intent on herding community members behind the cordon they are in the process of establishing. As they install the tape, they yell at onlookers for being on the wrong side of it. They make no effort to identify civilian witnesses. The man in the red shirt with a knapsack again tries to engage with the police and again is shooed away.
By the time Aimers has finished securing the area with tape, the medics are on the scene. They are standing around Augustus’s body. From other camera perspectives, it’s apparent they arrived five minutes earlier, checked Augustus’ pulse, did some tests, and determined he had died.
“Shit,” Aimers says to Jones, who is standing nearby holding Augustus’s gun. “Who got him?”
Jones gestures toward his chest and says, “Camera running.”
“That’s right,” Aimers acknowledges. “No talking.”
Commander Gloria Hanna, the senior police official on the scene, approaches them. She is not in uniform. She asks Jones and Aimers what their beat numbers are. She is trying to figure out who to assign as the “paper car,” the reporting officers tasked with filling out the initial incident report. The paper car cannot have been involved in or witnessed the incident.
Aimers cautions her not to step on evidence scattered on the ground. This includes a pistol magazine and shell casings. Officers walk back and forth heedlessly through the area.
Jones stands beside the magazine laying on the ground. He has been told to stay there until someone relieves him of Augustus’s gun.
“Hey, do you have any hand sanitizer?” Aimers asks Jones. He has lost track of his own bottle. Jones does not.
Aimers offers Jones a bag to put the gun in. It’s not an evidence bag but a plastic bag in which he had some papers. Jones puts the gun in the bag and places it on the ground beside the magazine.
Discovering a new piece of evidence on the ground, Aimers observes, “There’s a credit card over here.” Then he immediately refocuses, “Oh, here it is.” He has found his hand sanitizer. He shares it with Jones. His search continues, though. “I don’t know where my gloves went. That’s what I was looking for.”
Aimers resumes vigorously cleaning his hands with sanitizer.
A supervisor is giving instructions to the officer who “has the paper.” Aimers joins the conversation.
“The handcuffs,” he interjects, “are mine.”
He and the reporting officer have a confused, increasingly testy exchange. Fully 15 minutes after the shooting, the reporting officer asks, “We shot him or we got shot?”
“I don’t think he got a round off,” replies Aimers.
“But I’m just saying,” the officer persists, “did we shoot him? Did the police shoot him?”
“Yeah, we were right here. Everybody was lined up right there. They went to stop him, and he went through the car.”
“Just calm down. I’ll ask your partner,” says the reporting officer, referring to Jones.
“I’m all right,” says Aimers sharply. “That’s not my partner.”
“I’m just trying to say, ’cause we got the paper: Which officer shot?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t know either,” says Aimers, adding, “We’re on camera, by the way.”
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:41:15 – 5:41:38 p.m.]
As Aldrich is helping rearrange the red tape so the ambulance can back in to remove Augustus’s body, a man from the barber shop approaches him.
“He works with me,” the man says.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Aldrich. “You’re beyond the red tape.”
“The sergeant told me to come talk with you.”
“OK, but you can’t come through the red crime scene tape. You can come talk to me, but you can’t come through the red tape. You gotta stay in the red tape.”
Aldrich then walks away without talking to the man.
Officer James Aimers [5:47:58 – 6:00:22 p.m.]
“Hey, Sarge,” Aimers calls out to Aldrich. He wants to know whether he should interview people in the stores on 71st Street near the site of the shooting. “We don’t want any of these people leaving, right?”
Aldrich, having just driven away an eyewitness to the shooting and a colleague of Augustus’s without taking statements or getting their contact information, appears uninterested.
Standing with the M4 across his chest, he asks Aimers, “Did you see it? I saw you come out of the spot.”
“I pulled up because I was gonna get ahead of him. Then he ran behind the car, and that’s when everything went off.”
Looking down at his own body camera, Aldrich asks, “Are you still on?”
“Yeah, I’m still on. I have to be on right now, right?”
Aldrich says he couldn’t see what happened from where he was parked. “I was wondering what you saw, because you pulled off.”
“I saw a bulge on the side, and then I saw them say, ‘Hey,” and I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to try to stop him,’ and so I went ahead. He dipped out and started freaking out. Then he dipped away, and then I saw him drop, with the gun in his hand.” He then says something to the effect that he thought Augustus had fired his gun, “but he didn’t. Luckily.”
Aimers then briefly enters three stores on 71st Street. Unlike the witnesses on the sidewalk who were shooed away by the police, it’s highly unlikely anyone inside the shops saw anything, but it’s not impossible. Someone might have been looking out the window or stepping out the door at the moment of the shooting.
In each store, Aimers asks whether anyone saw anything, whether there is surveillance video that might have captured the incident, and he collects people’s names. His questioning is perfunctory. At one point, he sums up the point of the exercise, “I have to get everybody’s name down to tell the detectives you didn’t see anything.”
One of the shopkeepers asks, “Did he make it?” Although Aimers was present when the medics indicated Augustus had died, he replies curtly, “I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.”
Talking with several men in a sandwich shop, he appears to assume they are reluctant to speak with him, as if it were a gang shooting rather than a police shooting and they fear retribution.
“So, none of you guys saw anything?” he says. “Want to talk to me in the back individually? I know nobody wants to, you know, narc on anybody. I got that.”
No one takes him up on his offer.
Among those present is Darren Coleman, a security guard who was standing beside Jones as the incident unfolded and later gave me a detailed description of how Augustus’s civil interaction with Jones was disrupted when Fleming grabbed him from behind without warning. He also described Halley as having been, in his view, “pumped, ready. It seemed like he had a point to prove.”
On the tape, Coleman begins to describe to Aimers what he witnessed. Aimers has only one question for him: Did he “see anything” in Augustus’s hands? No, says Coleman, his view was obscured by a car. Aimers shows no interest in anything else Coleman might be able to tell him about what happened.
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:44:40 – 5:44:50 p.m.]
Just before Aldrich turns off his body camera — some 14 minutes after the incident, and more than 10 minutes after Halley and Fleming fled the scene — he has an exchange with the two most senior police officials on the scene, Commander Hanna and a lieutenant.
“I guess Halley’s the only one who shot,” says Aldrich, “but he drew a gun out on Halley.”
“The guy did?” the commander asks.
“The guy drew the gun what?” asks the lieutenant.
“He drew a gun out on Halley. That’s what they’re saying.”
“On who?” the lieutenant asks.
While body camera footage makes it possible to isolate various police interactions, some of them occurring simultaneously, another perspective is required to fully comprehend what is happening in the wake of the shooting. It is provided by a stationary CPD surveillance camera on 71st Street that serves to reconstitute the full incident within a single frame.
From that perspective, what arrests the eye is a fixed point amid all the movement. While Halley and Fleming rehearse their shared narrative in a traumatized duet; while Aimers repeatedly cleans his hands after handcuffing Augustus; while Aldrich responds to community grief and anger by reaching for an assault rifle; and while officers confound the crime scene and drive away civilian witnesses: Augustus lies motionless on the ground.
Four minutes pass before an ambulance arrives. During that interval, no officer is moved to assess Augustus’s condition, to offer a comforting word, or to minister to him in any way. Is he dead or alive? It appears not to matter to the officers flooding the area. To observe the terrible isolation of the human being lying in the middle of the street, while the police are wholly preoccupied with their own welfare, is to confront the question that reverberates through our times and is yet to be answered by meaningful reform: Do Black lives matter?
Official Oversight
The 2021 report on the incident by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the oversight agency tasked with investigating police shootings, does not provide a fully satisfactory answer to that question. As was widely expected, COPA found “Halley’s use of deadly force was consistent with Chicago Police Department policy.” Although Augustus’s movements were ambiguous and could plausibly be interpreted in different ways (Was he perhaps trying to stabilize his holster while he ran?), COPA concluded that it was reasonable for Halley to have perceived an imminent threat.
We are thus left with the official finding that this gratuitous killing of a Black man by the police, at once tragic and absurd, was lawful and within policy. Given the prevailing paradigm embodied in the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous 1989 ruling in Graham v. Connor that great deference must be shown to an officer’s perceptions of risk and judgments within the temporal frame of the “split second,” that dispiriting conclusion was perhaps inevitable. It should not, however, be allowed to obscure the several ways in which the COPA report enlarges the analytic frame beyond the narrow focus on the split second.
The agency found that the officers had no legal basis to stop Augustus in the first place. And it found that Fleming had no reason to seek to physically restrain Augustus, who was being cooperative. It recommended that she receive a 60-day suspension.
Of equal importance is its analysis of police actions following the shooting. In order to prevent officers from colluding to construct a common narrative, CPD policy dictates that, following the discharge of a firearm, the officers involved are to refrain from discussing details of the incident with one another, and supervisors are to ensure that involved officers remain separated and do not communicate with one another.
COPA found that Ward, the senior supervisor at the scene in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, failed to separate Halley and Fleming and to restrict their communication with each other. It recommended a 30-day suspension.
By assessing police actions leading up to and following the moment of deadly force, the COPA report begins to shift the paradigm. It demonstrates, in effect, that the Supreme Court’s split-second logic in Graham v. Connor need not dictate the outcome of administrative disciplinary processes.
The report also does something else. The breadth and quality of the COPA investigation makes clear the need to overhaul the video release policy adopted at the height of the political maelstrom provoked by the police murder of Laquan McDonald. In that case, the city withheld video footage of the incident for 13 months, until forced to release it by a judicial order and a surging mass movement.
Among the first reforms adopted in the wake of the McDonald debacle, the current policy — touted at the time as the most progressive in the country — provides that “all video and audio recordings relating to” an incident in which use of force by a police officer results in death or great bodily harm shall be made public no more than 60 days after the incident.
In most instances, COPA implements the policy by posting videos and other materials deemed relevant on its website. Yet much of the video footage described above is, to this day, not available to the public on the COPA site, raising questions about the basis on which the agency is making editorial judgments as to relevance.
The time has now come, in light of experience, to overhaul the policy in two fundamental respects.
First, the 60-day timeline should be shortened to no more than a week, absent a compelling showing of why it is necessary to extend it. Second, COPA should not make editorial decisions as to “relevance.” Rather, all body camera footage of all officers at the scene (not only the officers directly involved in the incident), as well as all video from other sources, should be released in its entirety. As the COPA investigation of the Augustus killing shows, once analysis is no longer limited to a narrow focus on the split second, it is not possible to determine relevance until the full investigation is completed, a process that routinely takes a year and often longer.
At the most fundamental level, the principle — with respect to categories of information acknowledged to be public — should be to release it all, and let the public determine what is in the public interest.
Such an expansion of transparency would operationalize a central insight of the era after Laquan McDonald’s killing: In cases such as these, we are not dealing with discreet “cover-ups.” That is the wrong frame for understanding the phenomenon. What we are dealing with is standard operating procedure.
For those acting within this gravitational field, lying is not an isolated act but a state of being. The police account of what happened and why it was justified begins to form instantly. The process by which it then hardens into the official narrative is fluid and dynamic — less a matter of deliberate conspiratorial deception than an expression of the institution’s fundamental orientation.
For the CPD at every level, the question is not: What happened? It is: How do we justify what happened? That orientation affects perception — what one sees and does not see — and it shapes interactions that in turn shape the narrative. At bedrock, the assumption is: It is justified because it happened.
This culture has proved difficult to capture in legal categories. A case in point is the failed prosecution of three officers charged with conspiring to protect Officer Jason Van Dyke after he killed Laquan McDonald. Van Dyke was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder. And there were grave political consequences for a number of officials — including former Mayor Rahm Emanuel — who withheld public information from the public in order to maintain a false narrative. Yet the officers charged with conspiring to cover up the McDonald murder were acquitted on all charges. While the judge in the case has been widely criticized, the paradox remains that the more pervasive the code of silence is as a culture, the more elusive it is as a matter of law. Conspiracy requires agreement, but there is no need to agree when everyone knows what they are expected to do.
Given the nature of the problem, there is no more effective antidote than robust transparency that honors the compelling public interest in access to information about what happens in the seconds and minutes and hours that follow the split second in which the police shoot someone.
Video clips referenced in this article:
Officer Dillan Halley [5:30:47 – 5:31:02]
Officer James Aimers [5:31:20 – 5:31:54]
Officer Dillan Halley [5:31:37 – 5:32:17]
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:31:07 – 5:33:32]
Officer Megan Fleming [5:33:01 – 5:33:33]
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:34:07 – 5:35:19]
Officer Dillan Halley [5:33:40 – 5:41:01]
Officer James Aimers [5:32:10 – 5:47:31]
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:41:15 – 5:41:38]
Officer James Aimers [5:47:58 – 6:00:22]
Sgt. Jeffrey Aldrich [5:44:40 – 5:44:50]
President Joe Biden watches during tour of the Lockheed Martin Pike County Operations facility where Javelin anti-tank missiles are manufactured, Tuesday, May 3, 2022, in Troy, Ala. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
A small group of students stood nearby, signs in hand, protesting Lockheed’s presence and informing others about a recent massacre.
Weeks earlier, 40 children had been killed when a Saudi-led coalition air strike dropped a 500-pound bomb on a school bus in northern Yemen. A CNN investigation found that Lockheed — the world’s largest weapons manufacturer — had sold the precision-guided munition to Saudi Arabia a year prior in a $110 billion arms deal brokered under former President Donald Trump.
Back in Storrs, Conn., Lockheed, which has a longstanding partnership with UConn, appeared on campus to recruit with TED-style talks, flight simulations, technology demos and on-the-spot interviews. A few lucky students took a helicopter flight around campus.
UConn is among at least a dozen universities that participate in Lockheed Martin Day, part of a sweeping national effort to establish defense industry recruitment pipelines in college STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) programs. Dozens of campuses nationwide now have corporate partnerships with Lockheed and other weapons manufacturers.
Lockheed is the country’s single largest government contractor, producing Black Hawks, F-35 fighter jets, Javelin anti-tank systems and the Hellfire missiles found on Predator drones. With more than 114,000 employees, the company depends on a pool of highly skilled and highly specialized workers, complete with the ability to obtain proper security clearances when needed. In its most recent annual report, Lockheed tells investors, “We increasingly compete with commercial technology companies outside of the aerospace and defense industry for qualified technical, cyber and scientific positions as the number of qualified domestic engineers is decreasing and the number of cyber professionals is not keeping up with demand.”
Lockheed has hired more than 21,000 new employees since 2020 to replace retiring workers and keep up with turnover. Student pipelines are integral to the company’s talent acquisition strategy.
As tuition costs and student debt have skyrocketed, Lockheed has enticed students with scholarships, well paid internships and a student loan repayment program. When the pandemic made in-person recruitment more difficult, Lockheed expanded its virtual outreach — after one 2020 virtual hiring event, the company reported a 300% increase in offers and a 400% increase in job acceptances among the STEM scholarship program participants over the previous year.
And in a self-described effort to diversify its workforce and build an inclusive culture, Lockheed has also put new focus on financial support and recruitment at historically Black colleges and universities.
Lockheed’s recruitment efforts are intertwined with various types of “research partnerships.” Universities receive six- and seven-figure grants from Lockheed and other defense contractors — or even more massive sums from the Department of Defense — to work on basic and applied research, up to and including designs, prototypes and testing of weapons technology. A student might work on Lockheed-sponsored research as part of their course load, then intern over the summer at Lockheed, be officially recruited by Lockheed upon graduation and start working there immediately, with defense clearances already in place — sometimes continuing the same work. In 2020, Lockheed reported that more than 60% of graduating interns became full-time employees.
Lockheed is not alone among corporations or military contractors in its aggressive university outreach, but the expansive presence of private defense companies on campuses raises questions about the extent to which corporations — particularly those profiting from war — should influence student career trajectories. In April, student and community protesters at Tufts University shut down a General Dynamics recruiting event, then protested outside a Raytheon presentation later that month, chanting, “We see through your smoke and mirrors. You can’t have our engineers.”
Illah Nourbakhsh, an ethics professor at Carnegie Mellon University with a background in robotics, presents the question this way: “If you have a palette of possible futures for students, and you take some possible future, and you make it so shiny and exciting and amazing by pouring money on the marketing process of it that it overcomes any possible marketing done by alternatives that are more socially minded — do the kids have agency? Is it a fair, balanced field?
“Of course not.”
Lockheed did not respond by deadline to requests for comment on this article.
For more than a year, In These Times investigated the presence of Lockheed and other arms manufacturers on campuses, combing through company and university annual reports, IRS filings, LinkedIn profiles, budgets, legislative records and academic policies, as well as interviewing students and professors. Most students requested pseudonyms, indicated with asterisks*, so as not to adversely impact their career prospects. Several spoke positively of Lockheed.
“It’s probably what most engineers, especially in mechanical and aerospace who want to go into defense prospects, aspire to,” says Sam*, who graduated with a bachelor’s in aerospace engineering in December 2021. “They’re one of the biggest defense contractors in this country, so you have the opportunity to work on very state-of-the-art technology.”
Other students believe putting their skills to military use is unethical.
Alan*, a December 2021 graduate in electrical engineering at the University of West Florida who is currently job-hunting while living with his parents, says he’s not looking at defense contractors and is instead holding out for a position that allows him to leave the Earth better than he found it. “When it comes to engineering, we do have a responsibility,” he says. “Every tool can be a weapon. … I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.”
Located near the world’s largest Air Force base in the Florida panhandle, the University of West Florida regularly hosts recruiters from the defense industry, including Lockheed. Alan says companies like Lockheed set up tables in student buildings to recruit in the hallways.
“I just walked past those tables,” he says, “but sometimes they’ll call you over. It’s kind of like going to the mall, and people want you to try their soap. It’s kind of annoying, but I get that they always need new people.”
Our investigation found this unfettered recruiting access to be part of a deeper and growing enmeshment between universities and the defense industry.
Decades of state disinvestment in public higher education have converged with a growing emphasis on sponsored research, and in an era of ballooning student debt, the billions in annual defense spending prop up university budgets and subsidize student educations. The result is that many college STEM programs around the country have become pipelines for weapons contractors.
BIG NAME ON CAMPUS
The Georgia Institute of Technology’s campus in Midtown Atlanta features 400 acres of manicured lawns, sports facilities and collegiate Gothic-style red brick buildings, interspersed with an eclectic mix of facilities that chronicle the university’s evolution over 13 decades.
Romanesque, neoclassical and Renaissance revival facades clash with the concrete, Brutalist design of the architecture school and the jutting steel-and-glass exteriors and green roof of the LEED-certified Clough Commons. Portions of the 1996 Olympic Village have been converted into student housing. Academic buildings are connected by glass skywalks.
The barracks erected during World War II have been taken down, and the athletic fields no longer double as gunnery practice. Military training, once required for freshmen and sophomores, has been discontinued.
But if you’re an engineering student at Georgia Tech, Lockheed is omnipresent.
You may run into Lockheed’s recruiters at career fairs or in the lobbies of the Student Success Center, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering or the College of Computing.
They may be hosting a seminar on space exploration in the Clary Theatre.
They may be sponsoring challenges and awarding prizes to students during “Engineering Week” or hosting workshops where teams use Minecraft and Lego bricks to explore the future of digital work.
You’ll see Lockheed’s logo displayed on the career center’s website and job portal alongside such other corporations as ExxonMobil, Capital One and The Home Depot — just one of Lockheed’s privileges as a member of the university’s Corporate Partnership Program.
As an Executive Partner, Lockheed is provided with interview rooms, consultations with the school’s employer relations team, and access to an online résumé book featuring current students and recent graduates. Georgia Tech also assists students with a Lockheed cover letter template.
And, of course, there’s Lockheed Martin Day.
“They show off some flight simulations but also you might give a recruiter your résumé and they might give you an interview,” says Sam, who was set to do an internship at Georgia Tech’s satellite laboratory on the grounds of Lockheed’s Marietta, Ga., aircraft plant before Covid shifted the internship remote. “I definitely aspire to get into Lockheed someday.”
Sam’s been set on the defense field since high school, inspired, in part, by watching documentaries about Area 51, the classified Air Force facility in Nevada at the center of UFO conspiracy theories, which was used to test Lockheed’s U-2 reconnaissance aircraft during the Cold War.
The opportunity to work on secret, cutting-edge technology attracts him to the company.
Other students aren’t as enthused about Lockheed’s campus presence.
Cameron Davis, who graduated from Georgia Tech with a bachelor’s in computer engineering in 2021, says, “A lot of people that I talk to aren’t 100% comfortable working on defense contracts, working on things that are basically going to kill people.” But, he adds, the lucrative pay of defense contractors “drives a lot of your moral disagreements with defense away.”
In 2019 and 2021, Lockheed was the university’s largest alumni employer, and the company has been one of Georgia Tech’s most frequent job interviewers since at least 2002.
“Even in my field — which isn’t even as defense-adjacent as aerospace engineering or mechanical engineering — companies like Raytheon will have dedicated programs to recruit people,” says Davis. “I’ve been in line with other companies at a career fair and defense contractors literally walk up to me in line and be like, ‘Hey, do you want to talk about helicopters or something?’”
“The corporate presence at Georgia Tech is a little bit overwhelming at times,” says Adam*, a graduate student in machine learning. “The college very aggressively pushes getting a career, which is great for a lot of people, but sometimes I feel like there’s not enough emphasis placed on taking into consideration the moral and ethical side of it.”
As alternatives to employment with defense contractors, STEM students could be working on technologies to decarbonize the power grid, revolutionize transportation or reimagine the built environment. Upon graduation, they could take jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration, EPA or NASA.
“I talk a lot about opportunity costs,” says Nourbakhsh, who teaches a freshman ethics class at Carnegie Mellon. “It doesn’t matter whether somebody else will do that work or not. What matters is what you want to be proud of doing in your life. If you choose to do thing A and work on this military project, then you’re explicitly choosing not to do things B, C, D and E.”
THE MILITARY’S STUDENT RESEARCHERS
Clifford Conner recalls his freshman year at Georgia Tech, in 1959, when the school was still segregated. He studied experimental psychology. When graduation approached, his professors — who also worked in the Lockheed Corporation’s Marietta office just north of Atlanta — said they could help him get a job at Lockheed. Conner accepted.
His work on the wing design of the C-5 Galaxy, then the largest military cargo plane in the world, took him to England, where he began reading a lot about the war in Vietnam. “I wasn’t under the spell of the American press,” Conner says. After a few years with Lockheed, he quit and joined the antiwar movement.
It took him another year to find a job at about a third of the salary he was making at Lockheed.
Conner went on to become a historian of science and a professor at the CUNY School of Professional Studies. His most recent book, The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump (2020), explores how the STEM fields have moved away from improving the human condition to advancing corporate and defense interests. He writes about the Bayh-Dole Act, which removed public-licensing restrictions in 1980 and “opened the floodgates to corporate investors seeking monopoly ownership of innovative technology.” The law allowed universities and nonprofits to file patents on projects funded with federal money, from weapons to pharmaceuticals. The rationale was to encourage commercial collaboration and underscore the idea that federally funded inventions should be used to support a free-market system.
“After the Bayh-Dole Act, the lines between corporate, university and government research were all blurred,” Conner tells In These Times.
Then, in the 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s administration hatched the idea of giving large federal research grants to universities with a partner company built in, explains Peter Asaro, a philosopher of science, technology and media and an associate professor at the New School.
“The idea is, you get basic research or proof of concepts of technological innovations to come out of the university system, and then you transition that to a defense contractor who is going to develop it to the point where it becomes something that the military can actually use,” Asaro says. “Starting around 2000, [the government] really targeted specific institutions with strong engineering programs with partnership models. A big part of that initiative in the early 2000s was to establish research collaborations between universities and defense contractors.”
Lockheed’s relationship with Georgia Tech has only strengthened since Conner’s time as a student.
Georgia Tech’s applied research division, known as the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), now has four laboratories directly on Lockheed’s aeronautics campus in Marietta, after borrowing an estimated $62 million in 2017 to purchase the facilities from Lockheed and renovate them. The sprawling new facility, dubbed the Cobb County Research Facility South (CCRF-South), is located on an old Air Force plant adjacent to the Dobbins Air Reserve Base, which shares a runway with Lockheed. Next door, Lockheed assembles C-130 military transport planes and the center wing of the F-35 fighter jet.
As a financially independent lab affiliated with Georgia Tech, GTRI relies on sponsored funding for its research.
In 2021, GTRI received more than $780 million in sponsorships, which exceeds the university’s combined revenue from tuition and state appropriations. Ninety percent of GTRI’s funding comes from the Pentagon.
CCRF-South features more than 200,000 square feet of offices, laboratories, an auditorium, a communal dining area and bright co-working spaces. An additional 140,000 square feet of high-bay industrial warehouse space is dedicated to individual assembly labs equipped with cranes capable of lifting up to 30 tons. Inside the laboratories, researchers and students work on everything from missiles, sensors and radar to target identification, drone testing and weapons systems simulations.
Details of weapons research can take years to obtain through public records requests, if at all, because they are deemed proprietary or classified. Students at Georgia Tech were reluctant to speak with the press about the details of their defense work. An unspecified number are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and obtain security clearances.
But publicly available CVs, résumés and job listings for student researchers at GTRI explicitly detail work on weapons technology.
Additionally, GTRI’s annual reports show that the labs have worked on simulators for Lockheed’s Black Hawk helicopters and flight data analysis for the F-35 fighter jet. It also has an office at the Army’s Aviation … Missile Center and an “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” research contract with the army, potentially worth $2.35 billion over 10 years. GTRI provides technical support and prototyping to the Distributed Common Ground System, the Pentagon’s 24/7, global, near-real-time intelligence and combat network that analyzes data from Global Hawk, Predator and Reaper drones.
Since 2012, GTRI has more than doubled its revenue, and CCRF-South is set up to accommodate its expansion.
“There are graduate students who are dependent on those [defense grants],” says Asaro. “That’s the pipeline because basically you’re paying for the degree, you’re paying the room and board, their salaries while they’re getting the degree, and then they’ve become an expert in the system that is going to transition to this private contractor who’s standing there with a job waiting for this graduate student to finish this degree.”
Georgia Tech did not respond by deadline to requests for comment on this article.
Nourbakhsh, at Carnegie Mellon, does not take military funding for research at his Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment Lab. Today, he says, it’s not unusual for professors to refuse defense funding in their labs.
He believes seeing professors “do the right thing” can have a great influence in the STEM field. But he also says universities have become fundamentally reliant on defense funding.
“If 50 other professors in my department did it [refused military funding], there just wouldn’t be enough money,” says Nourbakhsh. “The research direction here gets set by the industrial, military-industrial, and government complexes, rather than by individual professors.”
Unlike Europe, the United States does not provide universities with general funding to support basic research, or “research for the sake of research.” A 2019 analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for example, notes, “on average, one-third of R…D in OECD countries” is funded by “government block grants used at the discretion of higher education institutions” — but the United States does not have the same mechanism.
U.S. appropriations to public higher education, meanwhile, have declined significantly in the past two decades, while the research environment has seen universities performing an ever-larger share of the nation’s technology research. The Defense Department has been the third-largest source of federal research and development funding to universities for decades (after the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation).
But universities also seek out private-sector money to fund research directly, and the defense sector has been a willing donor.
In recent years, Lockheed has partnered with a network of more than 100 universities to advance hypersonics technology — weapons traveling so fast they’re undetectable by radar — and signed master research agreements for multi-year collaborations with Purdue, Texas A…M and Notre Dame in 2021.
While delivering technological innovations to defense companies, these partnerships also double as employment pipelines. The University of Colorado Boulder has collaborated on space systems with Lockheed for nearly two decades. In a statement on the university’s website, one Lockheed executive (and school alum) writes, “Lockheed Martin employs about 56,000 engineers and technicians, 35% of which could retire in the next few years. We must keep up a ‘talent pipeline’ to fill this pending gap: currently, our major source of talent is CU-Boulder.”
SADDLED WITH DEBT
Nearly half of the nation’s discretionary budget goes toward military spending; of that money, one-third to one-half goes to private contractors, according to a 2021 analysis by military researcher William Hartung for Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
Today, 46 million Americans hold student debt totaling $1.7 trillion, which is the projected lifetime cost to U.S. taxpayers of Lockheed’s F-35 fighter jet program — the most expensive weapon system ever built.
One featured employee on Lockheed’s website, Luis, says he’s worked as a circuit design engineer at Lockheed for five years. Before starting at Lockheed, he racked up $187,000 in student debt.
“As a first-generation immigrant college student, my parents did not have the wisdom to provide me with the proper guidance,” he says on the Lockheed website, referring to the college application process.
After earning a master’s in electrical engineering, Luis got a job with Lockheed, where he took advantage of the company’s tuition reimbursement program to earn a second master’s in computer engineering. “This was accomplished while paying off both my wife’s and my student loan debt totaling over $337K,” Luis says. “After five years, we are now DEBT FREE!”
Lockheed is among a growing number of companies that offer student loan assistance to its employees. The company’s Invest In Me program offers incoming graduates a $150 monthly cash bonus for five years and a student loan refinancing program. Every year, Lockheed awards $10,000 scholarships to 200 students that may be renewed up to three times for a potential $40,000. Lockheed also lists 61 universities participating in its STEM scholarship program, projected to invest a minimum of $30 million over five years as part of a larger $460 million education and innovation initiative using gains from Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts.
In a 2015 survey by American Student Assistance, 53% of respondents said student debt was either a “deciding factor” or had a “considerable impact” on their career choice.
“Pushing people into higher education has been our labor policy,” explains Astra Taylor, a writer, filmmaker and co-founder of the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union with roots in Occupy Wall Street. “You’re indebting yourself for the privilege of being hired, and it gives companies this economic power because then they can say, ‘We can help relieve some of the economic pain that you’ve incurred to make yourself appealing to us.’”
Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Boeing all provide some form of student aid, such as scholarships and tuition reimbursement.
DIVERSIFYING WEAPONS MAKING
The private defense sector targets much of its financial support toward historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and students from minority groups as part of stated efforts toward workforce diversity and promoting STEM jobs among a demographic that is critically underrepresented in STEM fields. Lockheed’s website and annual report note that minority groups are the “fastest-growing segment in the labor market” and that recruitment through “internships, early talent identification, outlying educational programs, co-ops, apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships” is integral to building diverse employee pipelines.
This trend stirs up old controversies around military recruiting in communities of color. The Army has long targeted minority-majority high schools and HBCUs with its Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs and scholarships, to the extent that critics refer to it as a school-to-soldier pipeline. Without enlisting and the ensuing funding, many students wouldn’t receive a higher education. According to a 2016 report from the Brookings Institution, Black students hold an average of $7,400 more in student debt than their white counterparts upon graduating — a gap that widens to nearly $25,000 four years later. The Army leverages students’ predicaments to meet its recruiting goals.
Regardless, “the racial implications” of U.S. military actions “are hard to evade,” civil rights activist and Rep. John R. Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) said at the outset of the Iraq War in 2003. “Would this be happening to [the Iraqis] if they were not nonwhite?” A Gallup poll at the time found 7 in 10 Black Americans opposed the war, while 8 in 10 white Americans favored it.
Joshua Myers, an associate professor of Africana studies at Howard University, an HBCU, and author of We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989, notes the history of resistance to military recruiting at HBCUs. “Howard students shut down the university in 1925 over mandatory ROTC,” he says.
Today, ROTC’s offers to HBCU students of a debt free education are mirrored by offers from the defense industry.
Lockheed has started STEM education and recruiting initiatives at 20 minority serving institutions (MSIs), including 16 HBCUs. Of Lockheed’s 2021 scholarship recipients, 60% identified with a minority racial or ethnic group. In the 2020 to 2021 academic year, more than 40% of Lockheed’s early-career hires identified as people of color, with 450 coming from MSIs.
“Students who work in these spaces don’t know the gravity — are systematically made ignorant of the gravity — of participating in these systems,” says Myers.
The defense industry fills funding gaps for HBCUs, which have endowments averaging 70% less than their non-HBCU counterparts. Howard has a formal partnership with Lockheed, which sponsors the business school’s Cybersecurity Education … Research Center and is listed in the Trustees’ Circle of donors. In 2020, Lockheed was named the top industry supporter of HBCU engineering institutions for the seventh consecutive year by U.S. Black Engineer and Information Technology Magazine.
Howard also hosts one of the country’s 25 chapters of Dissenters, a youth-led antiwar group that launched in January 2020 with the ambitious goal of defunding the military.
In February 2020, Howard’s chapter posted a video of organizers passing out flyers and raising awareness about Lockheed outside of the College of Engineering as company representatives recruited students in the lobby.
“You said that the CEO was an advocate for women and minorities,” a student organizer says during a recruitment presentation. “How does she maintain that role as head of a company that produces weapons which bomb and kill women and children in places like Palestine, Yemen, Libya and the Middle East?”
The recruiter responds: “I have no idea.”
MONEY TALKS
Ultimately, Lockheed’s deep reach into higher education reflects national priorities.
Since 9/11, the United States has spent $8 trillion on war. In 2020, for the first time, federal funding to Lockheed surpassed that of the U.S. Department of Education, the federal agency tasked with dispensing scholarships and Pell grants. Biden requested $813 billion in defense spending for fiscal year 2023, which includes the largest-ever allocation for research and development.
“Of course it’s the defense industries that have the ability to offer these favorable terms to people, because they’re also parasites on the public purse,” Astra Taylor says. “If these students weren’t worried about the cost of college, would they be as apt to take a job at a defense contractor versus doing something else in their community?”
Conner doesn’t fault students for taking jobs in the defense industry. “[They] realize that if they’re going to get a job when they graduate, it’s going to be at one of these places. And they can protest all they want, but they’ve got to be the spearpoint of a larger protest that involves the whole society.”
Colombian soldiers during a military parade celebrating Colombia's independence from Spain, in Bogota, Colombia, on July 20, 2022. (photo: Fernando Vergara/AP)
In July, criminal groups staged almost 90 attacks on the police and military, killing 13 police officers, monitor says.
Colombia and the National Liberation Army (ELN) rebel group also took steps on Friday to restart peace talks.
Colombia’s security forces have a long history of corruption scandals and human rights abuses committed during the country’s nearly six decades of conflict.
“The concept of human security means that success lies not in the number of dead, but in substantially reducing deaths, massacres and increasing substantially people’s liberties and rights,” Petro told a news conference on Friday to name his new officials.
Petro said his criteria for selecting the new commanders were “zero corruption, zero violation of fundamental rights”.
Enemy death tolls would cease to be a reason for the promotion of security personnel, he added.
Petro, a critic of Colombia’s military establishment and former member of the M-19 armed group, promised during his election campaign profound changes to the country’s security forces and he urged the new officials to protect life.
General Helder Fernan Giraldo was named commander of the armed forces, General Luis Mauricio Ospina is to direct the army and Vice Admiral Francisco Hernando Cubides will head the navy. General Luis Carlos Cordoba will direct the air force and General Henry Armando Sanabria the national police.
Armed conflict has plagued Colombia for almost 60 years, causing about 450,000 deaths between 1985 and 2018 alone.
‘Desire for peace’
Colombia’s national peace commissioner, Danilo Rueda, said on Friday that the government would take the necessary “judicial and political steps” to make peace talks possible with ELN after a meeting between the representatives of both sides in Havana, Cuba.
Observers consider it likely that those steps will include lifting arrest warrants for ELN negotiators who are currently living in exile in Cuba.
“We believe that the ELN has the same desire for peace as the Colombian government,” Rueda said in a statement. “And hope that they are listening to the many voices in different territories who are seeking a peaceful solution to this armed conflict.”
Peace talks between Colombia’s previous government and the ELN were terminated in 2019 after the rebels set off a car bomb at a police academy in Bogota and killed more than 20 cadets.
Following that incident, Colombian authorities issued arrest warrants for ELN leaders who were in Cuba for peace negotiations. But Cuba refused to extradite them, arguing that doing so would compromise its status as a neutral nation in the conflict and break with diplomatic protocols.
The United States responded by placing Cuba on its list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Petro has said he wants to start peace talks with the nation’s remaining armed groups to reduce violence in rural areas and bring lasting peace to the nation of 50 million people.
A 2016 peace deal between the government and the nation’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), helped reduce kidnappings, homicides and forced displacement.
But violence has picked up in some parts of the country as FARC holdouts, drug trafficking groups and the ELN fight over cocaine smuggling routes, illegal mines and other resources that were abandoned by the FARC.
The ELN has an estimated 2,500 fighters in Colombia. It also runs drug trafficking routes, extortion rackets and illegal mines in neighbouring Venezuela.
In July, criminal groups staged almost 90 attacks on the police and military, killing 13 police officers, according to CERAC, a think-tank that monitors violence in Colombia. That made it one of the most dangerous months for Colombia’s armed forces in the past 20 years.
Farmers harvest corn under wind turbines in Massena, Iowa. Tax credits provided by the new law are expected to promote a dramatic expansion of renewable energy in the U.S. (photo: David Guttenfelder/National Geographic)
The Inflation Reduction Act is expected to cut roughly a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year by 2030, save thousands of lives a year, and prompt a transformation of the U.S. energy and transportation landscape.
Now the country is finally preparing to move on.
Thanks to the climate section of the new Inflation Reduction Act, which the U.S. House of Representatives passed on August 12, coal burning, already in decline, may generate as little as 9.7 percent of all U.S. electricity by 2030, just eight years from now, according to an independent analysis. That would mark a 75 percent drop in coal use since 2010. Natural gas use, which had been rising, could also drop 28 percent.
In fact, this new legislation is expected to speed the transition to clean technology so much that non-polluting energy—solar, wind, nuclear power, geothermal energy, hydropower—could supply up to 81 percent of the country’s electricity by the end of this decade, another review finds.
Decades after scientists began warning with increasing alarm that burning fossil fuels was dangerously heating the planet, a $369 billion response finally squeaked through the U.S. Congress and is headed to the president’s desk. It is the biggest, most transformative climate measure in U.S. history. It should signal, experts argue, the dawn of a new era.
“This is the most consequential piece of U.S. legislation for the climate ever,” says Richard Newell, chief executive of Resources for the Future, a nonprofit energy research organization.
Three independent groups of researchers, using separate computer models, agree the act could help reduce U.S. fossil fuel emissions up to 41 or 42 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. That’s if President Joe Biden takes no further executive action to reduce emissions, and if states don’t increase their own clean-energy ambitions—yet analysts expect both those things to occur.
The new act alone is not enough to meet the target Biden set of reducing emissions by half by 2030. It’s less ambitious than his“Build Back Better” proposals, which died in the U.S. Senate. But it still provides 80 percent of the cumulative emissions cuts found in those earlier measures.
U.S. emissions were already declining. But thanks to the new law, by 2030 the U.S. can expect to emit roughly a billion tons less greenhouse gases each year than it otherwise would have, according to the independent researchers. As a side effect, there will be less soot coming out of smokestacks and tailpipes as well—and that reduced air pollution will prevent more than 3,500 premature deaths a year, according to one analysis.
The new act is “historic, transformative, imperfect,” the result of lengthy negotiation and compromise, says Sam Ricketts, a former climate policy adviser to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s short-lived presidential campaign. Ricketts, co-founder of Evergreen Action, worked behind the scenes to help craft the proposals.
“It is a catalyzing moment,” he adds, “but we have more work to do.”
How the new climate law works
The new act is so big and came together so quickly that experts are still trying to understand how the pieces will interact to reconfigure our energy landscape.
Unlike previous failed efforts, the legislation relies primarily on incentives to support clean energy and spur innovation, rather than on penalties to deter the use of fossil fuels. It is largely paid for with a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations.
It subsidizes purchases of electric cars, low-energy appliances, and solar panels, and helps cash-strapped families retrofit homes with heat pumps and electric water heaters. It provides tens of billions of dollars in incentives for manufacturing and deployment of wind turbines, solar modules, batteries, and electric vehicles, and gives tens of billions of dollars to states and utilities to hasten the transition to clean energy.
It focuses on disadvantaged communities through direct grant programs and by setting aside money to clean up ports and heavy industry. It pumps billions into soil enrichment programs and other efforts to promote climate-friendly agriculture, and dramatically boosts tax credits for efforts to capture and store carbon-dioxide from industries or to slurp it from the skies. It funds grant programs to create greener jet fuel.
Combined with last year’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which set aside billions of dollars to upgrade the nation’s electric grid, the Inflation Reduction Act amounts to the greatest infusion of government cash for energy programs since the Manhattan Project.
The bill is expected to transform the electricity sector most quickly, driving adoption of more solar and wind, but also helping keeping nuclear plants in operation. Jesse Jenkins, a climate expert at Princeton University who led one of the independent efforts to forecast the bill’s impacts, projects that the act could prompt emissions reductions of 360 million metric tons a year from electricity generation by 2030.
But he and other analysts also see it setting the stage for a larger and harder transition in transportation, which since 2016 has been the greatest source of U.S. emissions. Across all transport segments—from delivery vehicles and heavy freight trucks to passenger cars—the legislation could reduce emissions by 280 million metric tons, according to the analysis by Jenkins and his colleagues. That would be the equivalent of getting 60 million gasoline-powered cars off the road.
Meanwhile, Rhodium Group, another independent research organization, projects that electric vehicles could account for as much as 57 percent of all vehicle sales in the U.S. by 2030. While supply chain bottlenecks could also cause growth to fall far short of that number, Rhodium researchers expect EV growth eventually will escalate and spill over into other countries.
How a U.S. law could affect the world
In fact, many elements of the new law are expected to tilt the political and economic landscape globally toward cleaner power and fuels. After decades of promises, these actions should make it easier for the United States to push other countries to follow suit. (The U.S. today accounts for 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, second to China, but its cumulative historical emissions are greater than any other country’s.) By further driving down prices for renewables and clean technologies, the act also is likely to make it cheaper for businesses everywhere to adopt them.
For example, the price of solar has plummeted 99 percent since the 1970s, after countries like Germany invested heavily in the technology. That change in cost has probably had a far greater impact on global emissions reductions than the actual installation of solar did for Germany’s emissions.
“The transition is already under way, but what the bill does is basically turbo charge the shift,” Jenkins says.
“Businesses that understood the arc of history knew we were going in this direction eventually,” he adds, “But it’s very hard to plan a multinational business when you have half of the states moving very clearly and half of states and the federal government out to lunch. For the first time, we’ve got the financial might of the federal government supporting all the major climate tools.”
After years of stalled efforts to make progress, “it’s hard to find the words to describe just how important this all is,” says Leah Stokes, a political scientist and climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Yet to appreciate the importance, many Americans need only look out the window or read the news.
How the law meets the moment
The vote come near the end of an unnerving summer when record-breaking fires raged across Europe and threatened 1,800-year-old sequoias in Yosemite National Park. Thousand-year floods closed northern Yellowstone, killed dozens in Kentucky and Missouri, and stranded tourists in Death Canyon National Park—where people expect to worry about heat stroke, not drowning. Pakistan and India, on the other hand, endured a lengthy, lethal heat wave that scientists said was made 30 times more likely by climate change. And Great Britain hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time ever.
With the heightened awareness of climate change’s impact, it should be no surprise that the measure hasn’t satisfied everyone. One compromise provision ties more leasing for oil and gas drilling offshore and on federal lands to increased leasing for renewable energy.
Stokes understands why that provision angers many pushing for climate action. “The fossil fuel leasing is not ideal; it’s bad,” she says. But she urges critics “to keep their eyes on the prize.” All three independent analyses found the increase in emissions resulting from more fossil fuel leasing would likely be orders of magnitude less than overall reductions.
In the worst case, says Robbie Orvis, with Energy Innovation, oil and gas leasing could add 50 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere—while the bill overall reduces emissions, in his group's analysis, by 1,150 million metric tons.
“For every one-ton increase there are 24 tons of reductions,” Orvis says.
Critics also worry that massive incentives for so-called carbon capture and storage would make it easier for natural gas and coal-fired power plants to stay in business, using that technology to capture their dirty exhaust. But all three reviews found that the economic incentives promoting solar and wind were so much higher that carbon capture would mostly be used in heavy industries, such as ammonia production—where cutting emissions is much harder to do.
When it comes to power generation, “we actually don’t see a lot of carbon capture in our models,” says John Larsen, who oversees Rhodium’s energy and climate policy work.
Finally, some observers worry that the modelers’ projections could ultimately turn out to be too rosy. Supply chain issues, bureaucratic constraints, environmental reviews, and local opposition to clean energy projects might all slow progress, in spite of the financial incentives provided by the new law. Right now, for example, hundreds of gigawatts of renewable energy have been financed across the country, but developers are awaiting permitting to build or connect to the energy system, Orvis says.
But he and others also point out that there are plenty of other reasons to think that the positive changes triggered by the law will snowball beyond their predictions.
“Pretty much every model ever has under-predicted cost declines,” Orvis says. “There’s lots of evidence telling us that whatever emissions reductions we project, it’s probably too low.”
Ricketts, at Evergreen, agrees. “Emissions modeling is neither destiny nor is it an uneducated guess like throwing a dart at a wall,” he says. By its very nature it’s an exercise and weighing uncertainty.
But the past has shown that as technology costs plummet, we often “wildly underestimate” how rapid change may be.
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