11 October 22
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I can’t pinpoint exactly when the idea first crossed my mind. Maybe it was in 2008, when I was learning to be an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army and was exposed to sensitive information for the first time. Or maybe the germ of the idea was planted when I was stationed at Fort Drum, in upstate New York. I was tasked with transporting a cache of classified hard drives in a large box in the summer heat, and I began to imagine what might happen if I screwed it up and left the box unattended. If someone managed to get ahold of a stray hard drive, what ripple effects might it cause?
I knew the official version of why these secrets had to be kept secret. We were protecting sources. We were protecting troop movements. We were protecting national security. Those things made sense. But it also seemed, to me, that we were protecting ourselves.
While I felt that my job was important, and I took my obligations seriously, a part of me always wondered: If we were acting ethically, why were we keeping so many secrets?
The months I spent in Iraq in 2009 changed the way I understood the world. Every night, I woke up in the desert at 9 p.m. and walked from my tiny trailer to the Saddam Hussein-era basketball court that the military had converted into an intelligence operations center.
I sat at a computer screen for hours at a stretch, going through reports from our troops in the field. Monitoring reporting was like drinking from a fire hose: The military used at least a dozen different intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets. Each gave us a different view of the conflict and of the people and places we were watching. My job was to analyze, with emotional detachment, what impact military decisions were having on this giant, bloody “war on terror.”
The daily reality of my job was like life in a trauma ward. I’d spent hours learning every aspect of the lives of the Iraqis who were dying all around us: what time they got up in the morning, their relationship status, their appetites for food and alcohol and sex, whether they were engaged in political activities, and all the people they interacted with electronically. In some cases, I probably knew more about them than they knew about themselves.
I couldn’t talk about my work with anyone outside my unit, nor about this conflict that looked nothing like the one I’d read about back home or watched on the TV news before I enlisted.
We were seven years into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and people in the United States had begun to pretend that all of the conflict — all the lost American lives and the still-uncounted lost lives of Iraqis and Afghans — had been worth it. Attention turned away. The establishment moved on. There was the recession to deal with. People at home were losing everything. The health care debate was on the news every night. Yet we were still there. Still dying.
I was constantly confronted with these two conflicting realities — the one I was looking at, and the one Americans at home believed. It was clear that so much of the information people received was distorted or incomplete. This dissonance became an all-consuming frustration for me.
The idea that the information I had access to held real power began to flash into my brain more often. I’d try to ignore it, and it would come back.
In the intelligence field, you are vigorously inculcated with the notion that you can’t tell anyone anything about what you do, ever. This secrecy comes to control how you think and how you operate in the world. But the power of prohibition is fragile, especially once the justifications start to seem arbitrary.
During my time in intelligence, I had noticed that there was inconsistent internal logic to classification decisions. And I came to see that the classification system exists wholly in the interest of the U.S. government — in other words, it seems to exist not to to keep secrets safe but to control the narrative.
In December 2009, I began the process of downloading reports of all our activities from Iraq and Afghanistan.
These were descriptions of enemy engagements with hostile forces or explosives that detonated. They contained body counts, coordinates and businesslike summaries of confusing, violent encounters. They contained, in their aggregate force, something much closer to the truth of what those two wars really looked like than what Americans were learning at home. They were a pointillist picture of wars that wouldn’t end.
I burned the files onto DVDs, labeled with titles like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Manning’s Mix. I later transferred the files to a memory card, then shattered the discs with my boots on the gravel outside the trailers. On my next leave, I brought the documents back to America in my camera, as files on an SD memory card. This was every single incident report the U.S. Army had ever filed about Iraq or Afghanistan, every instance where a soldier thought there was something important enough to log and report. Navy customs personnel didn’t blink an eye. No one cared enough to notice.
Uploading the files directly to the internet wasn’t my first choice. I tried to reach traditional publications, but it was a frustrating ordeal. I didn’t trust the telephone, nor did I want to email anything; I could be surveilled. Even pay phones weren’t safe.
I went into chain stores — Starbucks, mostly — and asked to borrow their landline because supposedly my cellphone was lost or my car had broken down. I called The Washington Post and The New York Times, but I didn’t get anywhere.
I recalled that in 2008, during intelligence training, our instructor — a Marine Corps veteran turned contractor — told us about WikiLeaks, a website devoted to radical transparency, while instructing us not to visit it. But while I shared WikiLeaks’ stated commitment to transparency, I thought that for my purposes, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information on the site wouldn’t be taken seriously.
The website was the publication of last resort, but as the weeks went by and I got no response from traditional newspapers, I grew increasingly desperate. So, on the very last day of my leave, I went to a Barnes … Noble with my laptop.
Sitting at a chair in the bookstore cafe, I drank a triple grande mocha and zoned out, listening to electronic music — Massive Attack, Prodigy — to wait out the uploads. There were seven chunks of data to get out, and each one took 30 minutes to an hour. The internet was slow, and the connection was bad. I began to worry that I wouldn’t be able to complete my work before the store closed. But the Wi-Fi finally did its job.
The fallout was instant and intense. The documents proved, unambiguously and unimpeachably, just how disastrous the war still was. Once revealed, the truth could not be denied or unseen: This horror, this constellation of petty vendettas with an undertow of corruption — this was the truth of the war.
The disclosures became a flash point for a larger argument about how the United States should engage internationally, and how much the public deserved to know about how their government was acting in their name. I had changed the terms of the debate and pulled back the curtain. But while all that was happening, I knew nothing about it. I was in a cage.
Everyone now knows — because of what happened to me — that the government will attempt to destroy you fully, charge you with everything under the sun, for bringing to light the ugly truth about its own actions. What I was trying to do had never been done before, and therefore the consequences were, at the time, unknowable.
Daniel Ellsberg, who had disclosed the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, avoided prison because of illegal evidence-gathering by the Nixon White House (which had ordered a break-in of his psychiatrist’s office, in search of information that might discredit Mr. Ellsberg).
Nobody had gone to prison for this sort of thing; I hadn’t heard of Mr. Ellsberg at the time, but I was very aware of Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency whistle-blower who had been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He’d faced charges that carried a 35-year prison sentence, but shortly before trial he’d cut a deal that left him with only probation and community service.
I certainly weighed the potential consequences. If I was caught, I would be detained, but I figured at most I was going to be discharged or lose my security clearance. I cared about my work, and it was frightening to imagine losing my job — I had been homeless before enlisting — but I thought that if I was court-martialed, it would damage only the government’s own credibility. I never really reckoned with the notion of a life spent in prison, or worse.
The details of what happened to me are, by now, well known. I was held for several months in a cage in Kuwait. I was sentenced to 35 years in a maximum-security prison, where I spent seven years, much of it in solitary confinement. During that time, I came out as transgender and transitioned. Denied gender-affirming health care, I went on a hunger strike. I attempted suicide twice.
But even in prison I remained active. I began writing a column for The Guardian. I drafted a bill, “Bill to Re-establish the National Integrity and to Protect Freedom of Speech, and the Freedom of the Press,” which I proposed on Twitter and sent to members of Congress. It was meant to outlaw some of the most egregious ways that the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act had been used against me, so that others wouldn’t be put in such a bind for wanting to do the right thing. It also included fixes to the Freedom of Information Act and would give stronger federal protections to journalists. It was a pipe dream and was treated as such.
On Jan. 17, 2017, President Barack Obama commuted my sentence, and I was released. Everyone expected me to be in shock at being out, to kiss the ground or something. It did feel surreal to be free, but it also felt as if what I’d been dealing with for the previous seven years would never be over. It certainly isn’t over now. I can never leave it behind.
This was my first time as a free woman. I had spent several years transitioning, so I felt comfortable in the way my body moved and felt. Even in prison, with restrictions on hair length and clothing, people had begun to accept me as a woman. They treated me as a human being. But now I needed to navigate a larger world with this new identity.
I emerged from prison a celebrity. I had been made, without consultation, into a symbol and figurehead for all kinds of ideas. Some of that was fun — Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vogue’s September issue. Some of it — the C.I.A. director pressuring Harvard to uninvite me from a visiting fellowship, Fox News seizing upon my very existence as a cheap way to rile up its viewers — was much less so.
The main upside to my notoriety has been that I can do important work. Activism quickly became almost a full-time job. I went to the Pride parade in New York City; I ran for Senate in Maryland; I protested the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and refugees, and President Donald Trump’s reinstatement of the ban on transgender personnel in the military. The political moment into which I emerged is one in which we are figuring out what got us here as a country.
What I did during my enlistment was part of a deep American tradition of rebellion, resistance and civil disobedience — a tradition we have long drawn upon to force progress and oppose tyranny. The documents I made public expose how little we knew about what was being done in our name for so many years.
Despite becoming notorious for my acts of divulgence, I am still, in many ways, bound to secrecy. There are things the media has made public about this story that I can’t comment on, confirm or deny. Certain details remain classified. I am limited to some degree in what I can put on the record.
Some people have characterized me as a traitor, which I continue to reject. I have faced serious consequences for sharing information that I believe to be in the public interest. But I believe that what I did was my democratic and ethical obligation.
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A medical worker walks near a burned car after Russian military strike, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues, in central Kyiv, Ukraine, October 10, 2022. (photo: Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
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Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT/Redux)
Those opposing prosecution say that such a meting out of justice would backfire, galvanizing Trump’s base. Some go so far as to suggest that seeing the former president “decked out in full orange, successfully prosecuted and dragged off to prison” would be a spectacle “more commonly associated with third world nations or undemocratic states.”
Growing up in Israel, in the shadow of the world’s longest-running conflict, I often considered whether it is better to forgo prosecution in favor of other forms of accountability and healing. As a young lawyer writing a doctoral thesis on international-dispute resolution, I served for a time at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and, later, as an adviser to the emerging government of what is now the Republic of South Sudan. For several years I’ve convened a course on international conflict resolution in Jerusalem, bringing together Jewish, Arab and international students, many from conflict zones, to talk about conflict and justice. That experience has convinced me, as it has others, that criminally prosecuting leaders can help heal polarized countries.
Some 30 years of research in transitional justice — the multidisciplinary study of how societies can constructively emerge from conflict and assert or reassert democratic values — provide evidence that, contrary to the understandable worry that a trial would be divisive, trials can instead help heal. In fact, they are considered one of the main methods to bring about “truth and reconciliation.”
Examples of such “transitional trials” include the prosecutions of Slobodan Milosevic in the aftermath of the Balkan wars, and of Augusto Pinochet for human rights violations committed during his presidency of Chile. In a less dramatic example of alleged corruption (rather than human-rights violations and war crimes), former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing criminal charges in a deeply divided Israel. In Italy, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been convicted of tax fraud.
The reasons trials help promote reconciliation are many. Trials are a performative affair. They are, among other things, a drama in which conflict is enacted and resolved. As such, they can compel attention in a way that pierces the disinformation bubble that has contributed to this era’s divisiveness. A trial of a former U.S. president is certain to be covered by news outlets that lean both right and left. The same would be true of a trial of a sitting president’s son, should federal prosecutors decide to charge Hunter Biden with tax crimes or a false statement related to a gun purchase.
Criminal trials are also easily understood by most, if not all, of the population. Consider how memorable and enduring was the trial of O.J. Simpson. Or recall President Bill Clinton’s infamous testimony about the nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Now, compare that with how impenetrable the Mueller report was, and how little traction its findings have found in the general discourse, let alone the popular imagination.
Trials are about the establishment of truth through evidence, beyond reasonable doubt. The truth gathered and amplified through the drama of a trial creates a historical record and shapes the collective memory. Trials are a stage upon which individuals with firsthand knowledge can be compelled to testify about what they know, and must do so truthfully under penalty of perjury. Trials are as much about educating the public about wrongs that have been done as they are about seeking retribution for harms done (though they are about that as well).
At trial, the defendant gets to testify and be heard, and has the opportunity to compel the testimony of others. Milosevic, for instance, used his stage at The Hague to great effect. Any defense to alleged crimes that Trump — or, again, Hunter Biden — might testify to, without committing perjury, would similarly be amplified through the trial.
High-profile criminal trials should not be the only or the primary tool of reconciliation on our path to national healing. Bipartisan dialogue and resurrecting the tradition of appointing members of the opposing party to the Cabinet are examples of important measures that should be put into practice, no matter who holds office.
But the bar to clear for any decision to prosecute should not be any lower when it comes to former president Trump, or any other politician or politician’s family member, than the one for everyday Americans. Nor should the bar be any higher in a rule-of-law society, especially not in a divided country in need of truth and reconciliation.
Assuming sufficient evidence of criminality, Trump should face prosecution. The same is true for Hunter Biden. To borrow from a favorite courtroom drama, we can handle the truth. We need to, even, so we can start to heal.
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German troops parade in front of Adolf Hitler and Nazi generals. (photo: Keystone/Getty Images)
The way the Nazis used “the politics of legality” to gain absolute power after a failed coup is an ominous lesson about the fragility of a republic.
During its first four years, Weimar was under constant attack—above all, from the Big Lie that the republic was a totally illegitimate government because it owed its genesis to a “stab in the back” delivered on the home front. According to this Big Lie, the German army had not been defeated on the battlefield in 1918—when in fact General Erich Ludendorff’s spring offensive was a gamble that ended in military disaster. Instead, the myth went, a cabal of “November criminals”—Jews, Marxists, democrats, and internationalists—had betrayed the country, subverted the war effort, driven out the kaiser, signed the shameful Treaty of Versailles, and imposed an un-German democracy.
Not just Hitler and the Nazis but the entire German right latched on to this message and promoted it. Two factors distinguished Hitler from the rest of the German right. First was his self-awareness and cool calculation in deploying the Big Lie. In Mein Kampf, published in 1925–26, he explained that “the masses … more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one,” and that even a propaganda claim “so impudent that people thought it insane” could ultimately prevail. Essential to the “stab in the back” conspiracy theory’s effectiveness were a simple appeal to the emotions, not the intellect, and its endless repetition without concession to contrary evidence. Commitment to the Big Lie, he realized, had to be total and uncompromising.
The second factor was Hitler’s decision to make the conspiracy theory the justification for violent action, moving rapidly from merely denigrating Weimar democracy to staging an outright insurrection. In November 1923, he instigated the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted local coup d’état in the Bavarian capital of Munich. Hitler hoped—and expected—that this would set off a chain reaction causing the Weimar Republic to implode; an authoritarian government could then take over.
The coup failed. Hitler was arrested and put on trial for treason. His defense strategy was to use the trial as a platform to amplify the Big Lie. In a spectacular example of shameless historical inversion, he claimed that the founders of Weimar democracy, not he, were the real traitors, the November criminals. The insurrectionist on trial was the true patriot. Bavaria’s conservative judicial system was sympathetic; Hitler served just nine months in prison, where he held court and received more than 330 visitors.
Most important, what both conservative politicians and a conservative judiciary in Bavaria failed to do was rid themselves of this dangerous agitator by expelling him from the country as an unwelcome convicted felon of Austrian citizenship. Instead, they—and eventually the old-guard establishment right throughout Germany—enabled his improbable political comeback.
Hitler’s lesson from the failed putsch was that he needed to pursue revolution through “the politics of legality” rather than storm Munich City Hall. The Nazis would use the electoral process of democracy to destroy democracy. As Hitler’s associate Joseph Goebbels said, the Nazis would come to the Reichstag, or Parliament, as wolves to the sheep pen. By 1929, the press empire of Alfred Hugenberg had embraced and even financed Hitler as a right-wing spokesperson, giving him nationwide exposure and recognition.
Then the Great Depression and the political discontent that followed opened the way for a Nazi surge. First, in 1930, the party achieved an electoral breakthrough that made it the second-largest group in Parliament. Less than two years later, it became the largest party in Germany, winning a plurality of votes (about 37 percent) by vacuuming up those of virtually everyone who had previously backed one of several center and right-wing parties. Despite this electoral triumph, the Nazis were blocked from an absolute majority in the Reichstag because voters for the Social Democratic, Communist, and Catholic Center parties did not, for the most part, succumb to Nazi blandishments.
This time Hitler attempted no coup, but he would not be denied what the German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher later dubbed a “legal revolution.” By January 1933, Germany’s old guard saw that they were not remotely competitive in any election without the Nazi base, and opted to have Hitler legally appointed chancellor (or first minister). But because non-Nazi conservatives still held eight of 11 cabinet positions in the new government, they persisted in their delusion that they could control him—or, as some might say in today’s parlance, that they could preserve the “guardrails” that would contain him. As Franz von Papen, the new vice chancellor and President Paul von Hindenburg’s favorite, smugly boasted that, far from being controlled by Hitler, “We’ve hired him.”
Weimar has bequeathed three distinct cautions for the political right of any era about what not to do in comparable situations: join in disseminating a Big Lie; take inadequate action and impose an inadequate penalty after a treasonous uprising; and cement an alliance between traditional conservatives and fascists. The next stage of the Nazis’ legal revolution of course had its unique characteristics and circumstances, yet the way Hitler’s faction benefited from the conservative establishment’s support, exploited constitutional vulnerabilities, and undermined political norms to subvert German democracy suggests some portents for American politics today.
The parallel may seem less direct, but is nonetheless ominous. Hitler was installed as chancellor without a majority in the Reichstag by the exemplar of the old guard, von Hindenburg. To do so, von Hindenburg exercised one of the emergency powers granted to him under the Weimar constitution (in this case, the power to appoint a minority chancellor when political polarization and gridlock meant that no majority government could form). The appointment gave Hitler the opportunity to transform the German political system from within.
Hitler soon prevailed on von Hindenburg to use other powers entrusted to the president. In short order, the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly were suspended. An extrajudicial power to arrest and detain people without trial voided normal due process, and this provided a legal basis for the Nazi concentration-camp system. In addition, non-Nazi state governments were deposed, and full legislative powers were vested in the chancellor instead of the Reichstag—in effect allowing rule by fiat. That enabled Hitler to disband labor unions, purge the civil service, and outlaw, one by one, opposing political parties. Within five months, Germany was a one-party dictatorship and a police state.
No such scenario looms in the U.S., although the speed of Weimar’s collapse is sobering. In 21st-century America, the threat of a “legal revolution” gutting democracy is visible only in a far more protracted and incremental manner, and on a variety of fronts. If U.S. democracy should fail, its ultimate successor will not be a Nazi-like dictatorship, nor will its leader be a Hitler-like dictator. Any post-democratic American future would reflect not only the nation’s specific past but also its sensibilities of this century—a very different time and place from interwar Europe. Unlike interwar fascism, which openly condemned parliamentary democracy, the current wave of ethnonationalist authoritarian populism in the West—dubbed “illiberal democracy” by the new darling of the American right, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—prefers to preserve elections as a legitimizing mechanism. The aim of this illiberalism is a “managed democracy” unchecked by an independent judiciary and untrammeled by the inconvenience of real democratic accountability that comes through the hazard of electoral defeat and alternating parties in government.
The American political system has some built-in vulnerabilities to illiberal, antidemocratic actors—flaws that the Republican Party exploited even before Donald Trump took it over. Since 1992, Republicans have won the popular vote in a presidential election only once. But the U.S. Constitution has provided them with intrinsic advantages in the forms of the Electoral College and the Senate: Both bodies overrepresent parts of the country where Republicans are strong (less-populated states and areas) and underrepresent more Democratic-leaning localities (populous states and urban areas). As a result, the Democrats have to win the popular vote by a disproportionately large margin to prevail in either the Electoral College or the Senate.
The post-2010 gerrymandering of state legislature and U.S. House redistricting—executed with unprecedented precision through sophisticated data processing—has hugely exacerbated the problem. (Democrats are guilty of the practice too, but Republicans are unrivaled in the ruthlessness they’ve brought to the task.) The only electoral suspense in what should be toss-up states such as North Carolina and Wisconsin is whether Republicans can attain veto-proof supermajorities in state legislatures based on roughly half the popular vote. Supreme Court decisions gutting crucial parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have cleared the way for a host of voter-suppression measures. The purging of electoral officials and the Republican nomination of election deniers for governor and secretary of state in battleground states are even more ominous warnings. This pattern of GOP activity adds up to an effort to rule by executing a specifically American form of legal revolution.
A significant difference with Weimar Germany, where Hitler started a new party and gradually made its growing base the indispensable ally of vote-starved establishment conservatives, is that Trump dispensed with the need to build his own movement by swiftly dispossessing America’s establishment conservatives of their existing party. After his hostile takeover of their political franchise, he expanded the Republican base in new ways and secured the presidency. Small numbers of Never Trumpers left the party, but most rank-and-file party operatives accepted that they had no future outside a Trump-led GOP. The price of being a Trump Republican was obsequious submission to a cult of personality and unembarrassed acceptance of a post-truth web of lies and conspiracy theories. That now includes, of course, the Big Lie of the stolen election.
During Trump’s presidential term, his conservative enablers in the Republican Party nursed an illusion that they could maintain the guardrails and constrain his worst instincts. Clear now, as Jonathan Rauch recently argued, is that no one will even be there to try in a second Trump term. Judging by the appointments he made, or tried to make, in the last months of his first term, if he runs again and is elected, he will surround himself with absolute loyalists. Despite the failure of the “Stop the Steal” attempted coup of January 6, 2021, which briefly shocked traditional Republicans, their hopes for a successful legal revolution in 2024 continue to bind them to Trump and his base.
Compared with Hitler’s national-socialist ideological fixations, which led to brutal dictatorship, war, and genocide, Trump’s preoccupations seemed mainly to involve attention, adulation, and fundraising. But the twin humiliations of Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020 and the failure of the insurrection he fomented have raised the stakes. They have cemented the connection between Trump’s obsession with the myth of a stolen election and the long-term project of transforming American democracy into a managed system of entrenched minority rule. In the immediate postelection period, Trump and his inner circle plotted to create fake electors, pressured state election officials to “find” the necessary votes to reverse the outcome, and ultimately instigated the January 6 insurrection. More broadly, 147 congressional Republicans voted against certifying Biden’s election, and 17 Republican state attorneys general joined a suit to overturn the election results in four battleground states; the party then rallied together to condemn and withdraw support for Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for daring to expose the Big Lie.
The GOP has now embraced an accelerated strategy of legal revolution to control the outcome of future elections. This fall, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear Moore v. Harper, which concerns the power of the judicial branch in North Carolina to protect the state constitution’s guarantee of free and fair elections by overturning a gerrymandered congressional redistricting map. The state-court ruling was stayed so that the Supreme Court could hear arguments and rule on the claims of the “independent state legislature doctrine,” according to which the elections and electors clauses of the Constitution vest sole authority in state legislatures to determine the manner in which federal elections are held and presidential electors selected (absent any specific mandate of federal law passed by Congress). A ruling in favor of the independent state legislature doctrine would leave gerrymandered state legislatures in total control over federal elections, unchecked by any other branch of state government.
Hitler and his conservative allies in Weimar Germany started with many overlapping goals, but once he had seized absolute power, those allies became dispensable. They were either cast aside or forced to commit to unquestioning loyalty. In contrast, traditional Republicans have had a reprieve, since the 2020 election defeat and Trump’s failed putsch, to rethink and adjust their position. Yet they also continue to need their leader’s base to stay politically relevant.
Just as von Hindenburg and the rest of Weimar’s old guard chose complicity with Hitler’s Big Lie, dooming Germany’s interwar democracy, today’s Republican faithful are going along with Trump’s Big Lie, which casts Biden’s Democrats as the November criminals of 2020 and Trump himself as the patriotic defender of American freedom. America is not Weimar, Trump is not Hitler, Republicans are not Nazis, yet the fate of this republic hangs in the balance.
Fadwa Mahmoud holds portraits of her son and husband, who disappeared in 2012, as about 300 landline telephones placed by Syrian families stand as a call to governments to do more to seek information about detained people in Syria. (photo: Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters)
Member states must back Secretary-General António Guterres’ proposal to set up a body on Syria’s disappeared.
Families’ searches for detained relatives are fraught with the danger of being arrested, extorted and abused. The Syrian government and other parties have deliberately prolonged the suffering of hundreds of thousands of family members by withholding information on the fate and whereabouts of those missing or disappeared.
A much-awaited step has now been taken, providing the international community with a pathway to address the practical concerns and real-life implications of this terrible phenomenon.
In August, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres released his landmark report on how to bolster efforts to clarify the fate and whereabouts of missing persons in the Syrian Arab Republic and provide support to their families, as requested by the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 76/228.
The report unequivocally recommends that member states establish a new entity to help coordinate and build on existing efforts to address this situation.
We warmly welcome the secretary-general’s recommendation as it is consistent with the forceful advocacy led by Syrian associations of families of the missing. For years, the UN Syria Commission of Inquiry has flagged the need for such a body to consolidate claims filed with a wide variety of non-governmental and humanitarian organisations, to efficiently and effectively track and identify those missing and disappeared, and to assist their families who are taking many risks and facing hardships in their continuing search. We have always stressed that family, victim and survivor participation must be central to its functioning.
With the release of the secretary-general’s report, there should no longer be a debate about the need for such an international entity. His message is very clear: any progress towards addressing the continuing tragedy of missing persons in Syria requires a coherent and holistic approach going beyond current efforts. The UN General Assembly should move swiftly, passing a resolution establishing this new entity, setting out its mandate and framing its priorities.
Experience globally shows that the longer it takes to establish such a mechanism, the more difficult it will be to ever clarify the fate and whereabouts of the missing and those forcibly disappeared.
The secretary-general’s report described the gaps in current efforts that a new mechanism can fill: It can provide a one-stop shop to support families searching for missing loved ones. It can coordinate and consolidate their claims to learn how many are missing. And it can advocate for access to all places of detention and other relevant locations controlled by all actors in the conflict.
This mechanism would not only focus on those who have disappeared in detention, but also on all the Syrians who have gone missing as a direct result of more than a decade of fighting. The war rages on, still forcing civilians to flee, while conditions for Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries grow increasingly difficult and uncertain as refugee-hosting countries grapple with complex economic, social and political challenges.
With welcomes wearing thin and the looming threat of being forced back to Syria, refugees often choose to risk their lives during perilous sea journeys or to go on dangerous overland treks to reach the borders of Europe. The recent disaster off the Syrian coast with more than 100 desperate refugees drowning in the sea, and so many tragedies before, show the transnational complexities of the issue of the missing and disappeared stemming from the conflict in Syria.
We have had the privilege of meeting on many occasions with the families, mothers, husbands, wives, children, friends and colleagues of the disappeared over the past decade. We and our team have listened to them, and while individual circumstances may differ, their message is consistent and clear – they will not stop until they find their missing relatives or uncover the truth about their fate. Families have the right to know the fate of their loved ones.
The considerable wealth of information that our Commission has collected over 11 years will be made available to the new mechanism in line with the consent provided by our sources. The Commission has already begun preparing for the transmission of the data entrusted to it by our sources, in line with their consent, and we hope other organisations dealing with missing people in Syria are doing the same.
Families have waited far too long for action at the international level. The time to act is now. Member states from the different regions of the globe have a rare opportunity to put their weight behind this meaningful humanitarian effort that will help address the suffering caused by the scourge of missing and disappeared Syrians.
Last, we should not forget that the Syrian government and the armed groups hold primary responsibility for this tragedy and can act swiftly to resolve it. They can begin by allowing immediate access by international humanitarian organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross to all places of detention. They can permit visits by the families. Knowing who is alive and their whereabouts would be a major step forward in breaking the wall of silence around the fate of the missing and the disappeared.
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Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Tampa prosecutor Andrew Warren said he wouldn’t prosecute cases against women for having an abortion. Ron DeSantis wasn’t having it. Warren says that’s an assault on democracy.
But now that prosecutor, Andrew Warren, is suing to get his job back, and the twice-elected state attorney tells The Daily Beast this is more than a fight over his employment; it’s about whether a strongman governor can single-handedly toss a democratically elected local official out of office.
“Can a governor just overturn elections in the state of Florida? If the governor has the power to do so, then what’s left of democracy?” Warren said in an interview Friday.
DeSantis, whose sycophantic political ads vowing loyalty to then-President Donald Trump got him into office in 2019, followed the president’s lead and turned Tallahassee into a MAGA hot zone that rejected bipartisanship and waged war on progressives. But he did it more effectively than Trump, launching a crusade to ban certain books in schools, halt transgender health care for young people, isolate and bully gay kids, and target transgender athletes in schools.
It’s that unrelenting conservative crusade that concerns Warren, who says DeSantis could feel emboldened to next target elected school board members for defying his book bans and punitive crackdowns on gay and transgender kids.
“There’s so much more at stake than my job. This is a fight to stop the erosion of our democracy. It’s to ensure our democracy has meaning, so we have elected officials and not a king, so no governor can steal the people’s vote and silence their voice. Regardless of what party you belong to, your vote matters,” Warren said.
This particular battle started shortly after the Supreme Court stripped women of abortion rights in June, when Warren and other elected prosecutors across the country sought to temper widespread fears about misogynistic crackdowns. Warren signed a joint statement vowing to not “criminalize reproductive health decisions.” DeSantis, seething over what he called a “woke” resistance, announced with much fanfare on Aug. 4 that he was suspending the Hillsborough County state attorney. The executive order accused Warren of “eroding the rule of law” and “encouraging lawlessness.” Warren sued two weeks later in federal court.
Things haven’t gone well for DeSantis so far.
For starters, the Warren case landed before U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle, who already had some experience throwing a damp towel on DeSantis power grabs. In 2021, DeSantis and MAGA Republicans tried to throw Trump and extreme right-wing conservatives a lifeline by passing a law forbidding any social media company from deplatforming a political candidate. Hinkle was the judge who blocked them, issuing a preliminary injunction that was eventually upheld on appeal and is currently awaiting input from the Supreme Court.
In Warren’s case, the judge has already refused the DeSantis administration’s request to dismiss the lawsuit. On Sept. 29, he issued an order saying that Warren can continue claiming his First Amendment rights were violated when he was fired.
And just last week, Hinkle again sided against DeSantis—and hinted at how this case might go. The judge issued an order reiterating how wrong the governor’s legal theory is, namely that public employees’ on-the-job statements aren’t protected by the First Amendment and can be subject to discipline by their employer.
The law DeSantis’s lawyers are trying to cite “does not apply to speech of elected officials, who are not subject to employer discipline,” the judge wrote. It shows how the judge is already making a distinction here that Warren was an elected official, not an agency employee the DeSantis administration can target vindictively—as it is accused of doing to Rebekah Jones, the Health Department researcher who claims she was pressured to resign when she wouldn’t fake COVID-19 data to make Florida look good.
“The judge ruled quite clearly I’m not an employee of the governor, and I’m accountable to the people,” Warren told The Daily Beast. “If you believe in the principles of conservative government, local control, why is Tallahassee dictating to the voters in Hillsborough who their state attorney should be?”
This isn’t the first time DeSantis and this local prosecutor have been at odds.
In 2018, when 65 percent of Floridians approved Amendment 4 to restore voting rights to some ex-felons, DeSantis and the GOP scrambled to limit it the following year. Six months later, Warren announced a new program that would make his state attorney’s office part of the process, showing a commitment that was more consistent with what voters actually approved.
Then in March 2020, just as the new COVID-19 pandemic was killing 1,000 Americans a day and overwhelming hospitals that still didn’t know how to treat it effectively, Warren cracked down on a conspiracy-spewing pastor putting his congregation at risk. Rodney Howard-Browne kept ignoring new social distancing rules and instead packed his megachurch, where he preached about the threat of the “globalist agenda” and celebrated Donald Trump for supposedly fighting back the “New World Order.” The pastor was arrested and Warren’s office initially prosecuted the case for violating public health emergency orders, but DeSantis relaxed state rules for churches immediately after the arrest, and Warren eventually dropped the case.
And in 2021, Warren pushed back on the governor’s ploy to threaten the lives of street protesters. DeSantis signed a so-called “anti-riot” law that gave enraged drivers a green light to run over demonstrators and denied bail for people arrested at a riot. Warren shot back with a statement saying that it “tears a couple corners off the Constitution.”
Warren told The Daily Beast he hasn’t thought about what actions he’ll take to counter the DeSantis administration next if he gets his old job again, but he vowed to keep pushing back.
“I think he’s abused his power to advance his ambition of running for president. My suspension’s not the only example. He’s pulled other political stunts that just reek of political gamesmanship that don’t do anything to help Floridians,” he said. “I’m not in a position to comment on the legality of all of them. But what we’re doing is holding him accountable for this stunt.”
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Deforestation near Humaita, in Amazonas state, Brazil. (photo: Bruno Kelly/Reuters)
Chicken raised in Brazil and sold in UK supermarkets has been linked to Amazon deforestation for the first time.
That’s the conclusion of a new investigation from Reporter Brasil and Ecostorm published Thursday which found that chickens sold to the UK by U.S.-based company JBS had been fed with soya and corn grown on cleared land that had once been home to Brazil’s ecologically important Amazon rainforest and Cerrado savanna.
“This investigation shows that the purchasing procedures applied have blind spots and still cannot fully prevent mechanisms of grain laundering,” the investigation found, as The Independent reported.
JBS is the world’s largest meat company and it sells Brazilian-raised chicken, beef and pork to Europe, China and the Middle East, among other international markets. It has come under fire in the past for sourcing its cattle from deforested land, according to another Reporter Brasil investigation published in 2019.
The new report claims that it is feeding chickens with soya and corn linked to deforestation in the Amazon and Cerrado, according to The Independent. In one instance, a soy farm in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state that supplied JBS illegally cleared 243.890 acres of land, The Guardian reported. Some of those soy-fed chickens, in turn, have ended up in the UK through JBS subsidiary Seara, which produces more than five million Brazilian chickens each day from 9,000 farms. Britain imported at least $500-worth of Seara chickens over the last three years, which were distributed via wholesale companies to grocery stores, schools, hospitals and nursing homes.
JBS maintained to Reporter Brasil that it requires all of its grain suppliers to sign the soy moratorium, which bans the sale of soy grown on land that was deforested after 2008.
“JBS requires that 100% of its grain procurement contracts meet social-environmental criteria in all Brazilian biomes,” the company further told The Guardian. “In the case of purchases from trading companies, the contracts require that their supplier farms are not located in areas of illegal deforestation; are not under federal or state interdictions; are not located in conservation units or on indigenous or quilombola lands; or do not use labour under conditions analogous to slavery.”
The company further said it required all suppliers in the Amazon biome to sign the moratorium and that three farms mentioned in the report had met their environmental standards when they sourced grains from them. When the farms were later cited for violations, the company blacklisted them.
However, JBS also continued to source cattle from deforested land after paying a 24.7-million-Brazilian-real fine for the practice, according to the 2019 Reporter Brasil investigation, which was also conducted by The Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
The news comes during an urgent time for the Brazilian Amazon, which saw record deforestation during the first six months of 2022. The country is in the midst of a presidential election which will determine if current pro-exploitation President Jair Bolsonaro will maintain power, or whether his left-wing opponent Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, himself a former Brazilian president with a better Amazon track record, will win. Bolsonaro’s policies have pushed the Amazon towards a tipping point after which it would transform into grassland. During the first six months of 2022, deforestation was up 80 percent compared to the first six months of 2018, the year before he was elected, according to Nature World News.
The Cerrado is less well known internationally, but is also an important carbon sink that has lost around 50 percent of its native vegetation because of agricultural expansion since the 1950s.
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