16 October 22
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Final Jan. 6 committee hearing yields no blockbusters but a clear narrative: It was all planned in advance. By him
For most of us who closely followed events in real time, both on Jan. 6 and through the subsequent investigations and revelations, much of this was not news. But it's been a while since we focused on some of these details, and to see it presented in narrative form, with so much video and documentary evidence, is still powerful. For instance, the fact that Trump had planned to contest the election if he lost was no secret. Indeed, he had signaled back in 2016 that he would never concede defeat, famously declaring in the days before that election, "I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win." For years after that victory he insisted that he'd actually won the popular vote but had been victimized by millions of immigrants illegally voting in California. He even convened something called the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to try to prove that case. Even his hand-picked hacks couldn't turn up any evidence, and the "commission" was quietly disbanded without even issuing a report.
As 2020 approached with Trump down in the polls and the pandemic wreaking havoc around world, he began to lay the groundwork for denying his loss once again. For months he railed against mail-in ballots — which were being instituted in many states in response to the pandemic — setting up a narrative that they were inherently fraudulent. He threatened to withhold federal funds from states that used mail-in voting and accused California of setting up massive fraud by sending out ballots to all registered voters. Trump's 2020 campaign manager, Bill Stepien, told the committee that he couldn't be talked out of his irrational opposition to voting by mail, even though there were numerous states where it would likely benefit him and Republicans in general.
Outside advisers and surrogates like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone publicly discussed the plan to claim victory regardless of the actual vote count. Most strikingly, the committee dug up a draft speech sent to Trump by right-wing activist Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch — now among his most influential advisers in the Mar-a-Lago documents case — proposing that Trump should declare victory on election night and declare that all votes not yet counted were illegitimate. Which is almost exactly what he did.
So he clearly planned to say the election was rigged long before the first votes were cast, and the coup plot in which Trump and his legal lackeys contested the results in numerous states was also planned well in advance. But those cases got thrown out of courts across the country, by Republican and Democratic judges alike, and as Thursday's hearing revealed, this made Trump furious. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that after the Supreme Court refused to hear the crackpot lawsuit meant to overturn the results in several battleground states (which of course Trump saw as a personal betrayal), she ran into the president in a hallway where he was "raging" about the decision. Trump told chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to Hutchinson, that he didn't want people to know they had lost the case, tasking Meadows with making sure they didn't find out. That's nuts, of course, but it's also highly revealing.
Hutchinson also testified that during Trump's diatribe to Meadows, he asked, "Why didn't we make more calls?" That's a curious thing to say, and raises the unanswered question of exactly who they were calling as the Supreme Court was considering the case. Is that how things work with the court's conservative majority?
Since the committee finally got its hands on a considerable number of emails and other Jan. 6-related documents from the Secret Service — although not the missing and apparently erased text messages — there was some disturbing new information about what the agency knew ahead of time about the threats of violence. Something is deeply wrong with the Secret Service, it seems, and it doesn't stop with them. Law enforcement in general appears to have ignored a mountain of incoming intelligence telegraphing the fact that pro-Trump extremists were highly agitated and violence was possible or even likely.
Trump knew that too. Jason Miller, the Trump campaign's senior communications adviser, forwarded to Mark Meadows a link to a startling social media page that included such comments as "Gallows don't require electricity" and "our lawmakers in Congress can leave one of two ways; one, in a body bag, two, after rightfully certifying Trump the winner." Miller didn't express alarm or concern; he boasted: "I got the base fired up." (Miller claimed after the fact that he didn't know about the more extreme comments.)
As a result of law enforcement's failure to prepare for Jan. 6, Congress was left vulnerable after Trump gave his big speech on the Ellipse, urging his rabid followers to march to the Capitol. (Some of them, in fact, were already there.) He wanted to go there too but his Secret Service detail refused to take him, leading to the purported fight between Trump and his agents in the presidential SUV. What he planned to do there we can only imagine — but now we know what the leaders of the House and Senate were doing during that time: responding to the crisis, which Trump refused to do.
While the president was sitting in the Oval Office dining room reveling in the images of his mob storming the Capitol and threatening to kill Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, congressional leaders had been taken to a secure location where they were working hard to get police and National Guard troops to the Capitol to put down the insurrection. As it happens, a documentary crew was on hand that day to record the historic vote and they captured Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer (then the minority leader) taking charge, calmly reaching out to various government officials and trying to get Cabinet members, including the acting attorney general and acting defense secretary, to persuade Trump to call off the mob. It's an impressive display of leadership, considering they knew they were being hunted like animals as it was happening.
The cumulative effect of all the Jan. 6 hearings, culminating in Thursday's wrap-up of the central narrative, has made clear that Donald Trump set up the coup before the election, was personally involved in the various attempts to execute it, understood that violence was possible on Jan. 6, and incited the crowd to storm the Capitol and refused to take any action to stop them. Everything that happened came at his direction and was done in his name.
Beyond that, Trump has turned the country upside down for two years and built an anti-democratic movement dedicated to destroying the right to vote and sabotaging elections, entirely in service to his injured ego and his refusal to admit that he could ever possibly lose. He is a damaged, destructive narcissist, beyond all help. But the really disturbing question now is why so many people are eager to believe his dangerous fantasies.
Tehran, Iran. (photo: AP)
The prison fire occurred as protesters intensified anti-government demonstrations along main streets and at universities in some cities across Iran on Saturday.
Iran’s state-run IRNA reported that there were clashes between prisoners in one ward and prison personnel, citing a senior security official. The official said prisoners set fire to a warehouse full of prison uniforms, which caused the blaze.
He said the “rioters” were separated from the other prisoners to de-escalate the conflict. The official said that the “situation is completely under control” and that firefighters were extinguishing the flames.
But footage of the blaze continued to circulate online. Videos showed shots ringing out as plumes of smoke engulfed the sky in Tehran amid the sound of an alarm.
Witnesses said that police blocked roads and highways to Evin prison and that at least three strong explosions were heard coming from the area. Traffic was heavy along major motorways near the prison, which is in the north of the capital, and many people honked to show their solidarity with protests.
Riot police were seen riding on motorbikes toward the facility, as were ambulances and fire trucks. Witnesses reported that the Internet was blocked in the area.
The U.S.-based Center for Human Rights in Iran reported that an “armed conflict” broke out within the prison walls. It said shots were first heard in Ward 7 of the prison. This account could not immediately be verified.
The prison fire occurred as protesters intensified anti-government demonstrations along main streets and at universities in some cities across Iran on Saturday. Human rights monitors reported hundreds dead, including children, as the movement concluded its fourth week.
Demonstrators chanted “Down with the Dictator” on the streets of Ardabil in the country's northwest. Outside of universities in Kermanshah, Rasht and Tehran, students rallied, according to videos on social media. In the city of Sanandaj, a hotspot for demonstrations in the northern Kurdish region, school girls chanted, “Woman, life, freedom,” down a central street.
The protests erupted after public outrage over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody. She was arrested by Iran’s morality police in Tehran for violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code. Iran’s government insists Amini was not mistreated in police custody, but her family says her body showed bruises and other signs of beating after she was detained.
At least 233 protesters have been killed since demonstrations swept Iran on September 17, according to the human rights monitor, HRANA. The group said 32 among the dead were below the age of 18. Earlier, Oslo-based Iran Human Rights estimated 201 people have been killed.
Public anger in Iran has coalesced around Amini’s death, prompting girls and women to remove their mandatory headscarves on the street in a show of solidarity. Other segments of society, including oil workers, have also joined the movement, which has spread to at least 19 cities, becoming one of the greatest challenges to Iran’s theocracy since the country’s 2009 Green Movement.
Riots have also broken out in prisons, with clashes reported between inmates and guards in Lakan prison in the northern province of Gilan recently.
Commercial strikes resumed Saturday in key cities across the Kurdish region, including Saqqez, Amini's hometown and the birthplace of the protests, Bukan and Sanandaj.
The government has responded with a brutal crackdown, arresting activists and protest organizers, reprimanding Iranian celebrities for voicing support, even confiscating their passports, and using live ammunition, tear gas and sound bombs to disperse crowds, leading to deaths.
In a video widely distributed Saturday, plainclothes Basij, a paramilitary volunteer group, are seen forcing a woman into a car and firing bullets into the air amid a protest in Gohardasht, in northern Iran.
Widespread internet outages have also made it difficult for protesters to communicate with the outside world, while Iranian authorities have detained at least 40 journalists since the unrest began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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Men work clearing sugar cane fields in Romana province, Dominican Republic, on Aug. 24, 2021. (photo: Pedro Farias-Nardi/Intercept)
One of the largest sugar supplies to the U.S., Central Romana in the Dominican Republic is coming under government scrutiny for labor practices.
The armed force dismounted from their motorcycles and approached the tin-roof dwelling. It was the home of Flexi Bele, a Haitian sugarcane worker who had lived with his family in this distant corner of this Caribbean nation for decades. Now, he was facing a peril that many of his fellow cane cutters dreaded: The masked men, employed by the billion-dollar Central Romana Corporation, pounded on his door.
“They kicked me out of the batey,” said Bele, using the term for a sugarcane work camp in the Dominican Republic. After 40 years as a Central Romana cane cutter, Bele, 66 years old, had been told there was no more work for him. He was being laid off. “I worked, and worked, and worked, I gave them so much work.”
Bele lived in a camp known as Batey Lima, company housing owned by Central Romana. The armed men standing at his door had come to evict him.
“After they kicked me out of my job, they kicked me out of the batey,” said Bele, whose story was corroborated by a fellow cane worker who lived nearby.
“They were armed,” Bele said. “They are always armed. I didn’t argue with them.”
Instead, he gathered some belongings and climbed into the back of a Central Romana truck, to be driven off the plantation. He never received a pension.
The eviction at Batey Lima are part of a series of incidents involving Central Romana’s special security force: an elite, Colombian-trained motorcycle force, with their identities cloaked, often in the pre-dawn hours. The Intercept chronicled similar evictions with nearly identical descriptions of the special forces — masked; wearing dark blue-black uniforms; armed with shotguns and 9-mm pistols; conveying a fearsome presence to local residents — in more than 15 interviews over the last six months.
Many of the residents in the bateyes hail from Haiti, the impoverished nation on the other side of the island of Hispaniola. These cane workers, most without Dominican citizenship, and often undocumented, are left vulnerable to wage theft and other labor abuses. An estimated 200,000 stateless Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, many of them facing racial and national discrimination.
The special sugarcane force, known to cane workers as “LINCE,” was formed in recent years by the billion-dollar company, according to multiple on-site observers, including two regular security guards. The force’s ostensible purpose was to protect sugarcane and the company’s livestock across its sprawling properties of a quarter million acres in the eastern Dominican Republic. According to sugarcane workers; the current Central Romana security guards and one former member of the regular security force; a former Dominican military officer; and legal experts, the special force’s mandate since its formation is actually about power over sugarcane workers.
The motorcycle-mounted guards are part of Central Romana’s “repressive team of paramilitaries,” said attorney Mario Jacobs, who is representing more than a dozen former Central Romana employees in wrongful-termination cases. The force’s real purpose, he said, is to “intimidate and control the workers.”
A Central Romana spokesperson, Jorge Sturla, confirmed the existence of the special police detail, including its nocturnal nature. He said it was “false” that the unit is called LINCE, the name that many of the company’s employees use. Sturla said the unit is part of the company’s larger security force, known as the Guardiacampestre, or Country Guards. He acknowledged that the special force wears darker uniforms “to make them less visible to outsiders who might aim to harm them” and masks “to cover their eyes from the dust and debris on the dirt roads.” Sturla insisted that the “sole purpose” of Central Romana’s security forces “is to protect the company’s property,” including its sugarcane and cattle operations.
Many of the company’s own employees, however, including members of the wider Guardiacampestre, are skeptical.
“I think to protect cows, they should not wear a mask, right?” a former Central Romana security guard wondered in an interview. Like others in this story, he asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. Rather, he said, the main aim of the force is to instill fear in the impoverished workers, whose wages, as recently as 2021, were as low as $4 per day. “They want to maintain control so that the cañeros will always work for them,” the ex-guard said. “So that they may be like slaves.”
The ex-guard and a current member of the Guardiacampestre both said the purpose of the special force is to create “terror.” The current guard has accompanied the elite squad on night raids. “They see the people as dogs,” he said. The weapons, the head-to-toe blue-black uniforms, and the full facial masks, he said, create an atmosphere of intimidation so that the cane cutters and their families “always live in fear.”
In an email, Sturla, the Central Romana spokesperson, wrote that “[w]e have never received a report of a Guardiacampestre member intentionally intimidating any of our employees.” Rather, he indicated, the company’s patrols aim to catch cattle rustlers and landless peasants. “It is unfortunately a common occurrence in our country for land squatters to invade and illegally settle in private property, and there are many livestock thieves,” Sturla said, adding that the patrols are necessary due to Central Romana’s “vast and open areas.”
Central Romana is often compared to a state within a state, a government unto itself, where local or federal law enforcement officials are rarely seen. The massive plantation is larger than all of New York City, with its own private roads, its network of bateyes, endless acres of cane, an international airport, a five-star tourist resort, and a port from which it ships its main product to the United States.
The company exported more than 240 million pounds of raw sugar from its sprawling plantation to the U.S. last year, much of it poured into bags of Domino Sugar or folded into Hershey bars and other U.S. confections. The 110-year-old company was bought by a team of investors led by Florida sugar barons Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul in 1984. In recent years, Fanjul family members are executives at both their own company and its subsidiary, Central Romana, according to official documents.
In the last year, U.S. Congress and American federal agencies have expressed alarm, largely as the result of reporting in Mother Jones and Reveal that exposed appalling living and working conditions. The House Ways and Means Committee asked the Biden administration to investigate evidence of forced labor by Dominican sugar companies.
Central Romana holds nearly two-thirds of the Dominican Republic’s coveted sugar export quota to the U.S., especially lucrative due to the inflated price each pound of sugar fetches on the U.S. market. But those exports, and tens of millions in annual profits provided by the price supports, could be halted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection if the agency finds “reasonable suspicion” of forced labor in the Dominican cane fields.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., chair of the trade subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee, called the reports of the paramilitary-style force “very disturbing.” Blumenauer said, “The notion that we don’t know who they are — disguised identity — is exceedingly troubling. And if these folks are in the employ of the company, that raises red flags. It’s just a signal that something is wrong.”
In January, Blumenauer and 14 other members of the House committee called on three federal agencies — the Department of Labor, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and Customs and Border Protection — to investigate reports of forced labor in the Dominican cane fields. Since then, numerous U.S. delegations, some also including State Department officials, traveled to Central Romana’s plantation to talk with workers and company officials. Blumenauer himself was part of a delegation in early July. The reports of the militarized security force, Blumenauer said, “raises questions of a different degree” regarding forced labor.
“These people feel powerless. These people are basically stateless and they feel trapped,” Blumenauer said — a condition that is only made more dire due to “intimidation by masked, armed paramilitary security officers for the company.”
Labor and human rights advocates monitoring company compliance, along with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, look for potential violations of the International Labor Organization’s 11 indicators of forced labor — in this case, “intimidation and threats.”
“The behavior of Central Romana’s private security is relevant to determining whether forced labor exists in the sugar bateyes,” said Charity Ryerson, founder and executive director of Corporate Accountability Lab, a Chicago-based labor rights watchdog group.
“The relevant question is: How are these private security forces perceived by workers?” Ryerson said. If the intimidation is such that “a reasonable worker would fear leaving the bateyes, or speaking out about living or working conditions, or organizing with their fellow cane cutters,” she said, then these security forces may present a “menace of penalty” — a defining feature of forced labor, according to the International Labor Organization.
Other possible International Labor Organization indicators at play in Central Romana’s cane fields, Ryerson said, include isolation, abusive living and working conditions, and “abuse of vulnerability.” Another indicator, physical violence, is more difficult to document.
Sturla, Central Romana’s spokesperson, did not respond to specific questions about possible violations of International Labor Organization indicators of forced labor, declaring categorically that “there is no forced labor” on its cane fields, “as proven by the numerous sustainability audits performed yearly, by respected third-party international auditors.”
In 2020, one respected sugar trade group, Bonsucro, rejected Central Romana’s application for admission, in part over concerns of possible forced labor, according to an email from the trade group. And a September 13 Labor Department report “identified several potential indicators of forced labor” on Dominican cane fields. The report found that “[p]recarious legal status and a lack of documentation limit workers’ movement and have led to their isolation, fear of dismissal or deportation for complaining about unlawful labor conditions, and fear of deportation or denouncement to authorities for ceasing work or leaving the bateyes.”
Central Romana’s special security force was formed under the direction of Marcos Tulio Reynoso Ramirez, director of security for Central Romana, according to multiple sources who asked for anonymity to avoid retribution. According to a decree by then-Dominican President Leonel Fernández, Reynoso Ramirez was hired by the private corporation a year after he stepped down as brigadier general in the Dominican military.
The high-level government approval, both of the general’s retirement and of his hiring by Central Romana, is one example among many of the revolving door between the powerful sugar company and senior government ministries. The former president of Central Romana, for example, later served as the nation’s vice president, foreign minister, and ambassador to the United States. Central Romana did not respond to repeated questions about Reynoso Ramirez, or why it was necessary to hire a top military official to oversee an agricultural security force.
The hiring of a former general to run security for a private sugar company underscores that, in the Dominican Republic, sugar is still king. “Sugar is considered a national security issue,” a former high-ranking American official, who asked for anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities, told us. “They will do anything in their power to protect it.”
In interviews, Central Romana employees familiar with the group they call LINCE said they understood the force’s stated mandate as benign, mostly to protect the cane, equipment, and the company’s livestock. This however does not explain the extensive weapons and other training that is conducted by Colombian security experts, according to four sources familiar with the training.
“Every year when the harvest ends, they bring a group from Colombia to do the training,” said a former Central Romana security employee, who went through part of the seven-week training and asked for anonymity to avoid reprisals. He said the training was conducted by Colombians overseen by Central Romana security chiefs, including Reynoso Ramirez and ex-Dominican military officer Pedro Medrano, and conducted on the site of the company’s 7,000-acre luxury resort, Casa de Campo. (Central Romana did not respond to questions about the military-style training.)
“They teach you how to use all kinds of weapons,” said the former employee, adding that he was personally trained on 12-gauge shotguns and 9-mm Browning semi-automatic handguns. “They teach you how to shoot from the motorcycles.” Eventually, the former employee said, he left the training course, disillusioned by its purpose. “The more I saw of what they did, the more I asked myself, ‘How can I be part of this?’” This sentiment deepened, he said, when he witnessed an eviction of a terminated cane worker in a nearby batey.
“Everything was thrown in the street,” he recalled. “They ripped off their door, threw all their things away.” He said the cane worker’s wife kept crying. “They left those people without knowing where they were going.”
Other members of Central Romana’s regular Guardiacampestre expressed similar misgivings after accompanying the elite force on nocturnal operations. There existed a pattern of intimidation by masked forces who arrive to evict people who have been fired, fallen out of favor with the company, or are deemed to be squatting on lands the company claims to own, according to interviews with the guards and evicted workers.
“I have witnessed a lot of outrages,” said the current security guard, of his time alongside the nocturnal forces. In a 2019 incident, he saw some 40 men with the special force, accompanied by an equal number of regular security officers, raided a ramshackle collection of about 25 houses, known as Villa Guerrero. It was 4 in the morning. The settlement was quiet; most residents were asleep in their homes. Suddenly, the elite guards began pounding on the doors, evicting all of the families. “They had to leave their houses with all of the things,” said the security guard.
“And they broke everything,” said the guard, describing what he witnessed in the morning raid. “Every house that was there. All the mothers with their children, crying. At that moment — imagine! I felt powerless. I couldn’t do anything.”
The guard noted that he had to follow orders, but nonetheless resented what he was being asked to do. “I didn’t feel good about it,” the guard said. “Why do they treat them that way? Why? It hurt me.”
For those who lost their homes, or were evicted, it hurt more.
Angel Calis García, the cane worker and neighbor who witnessed Flexi Bele’s eviction in Batey Lima, said he complained to his bosses about the way Bele, his wife, and young children were treated. García had watched as Bele’s daughter clung to her father’s leg during the family’s eviction. “He is a very dear person,” García said, explaining why he fought for his neighbor. “He would do anything for you.”
In the bateyes, however, trying to hold the Central Romana’s special security forces to account can come with costs. In March 2021, the month after García made his complaint, the masked men returned to Batey Lima. Eight guards rolled in, two to a motorcycle. They dismounted and promptly ordered García to vacate his home. The darkly dressed, masked security guards, García recalled, fired three shots in the air as García’s wife and daughter looked on. One guard grabbed him roughly by the arm. “They were very aggressive,” García recalled. “They treated me as if I were a drug trafficker.”
Soon, the family’s possessions were in the back of a pickup truck, and García, after 15 years in the cane fields, rode away with no home and no job.
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Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has been embroiled in public spats with Ukrainian leaders angered by his controversial proposals for de-escalating the conflict (photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
ALSO SEE: Musk Threatens to Stop Funding
Starlink Internet Ukraine Relies on in War
Founder of SpaceX says although Starlink is losing money, he will ‘just keep funding Ukraine gov’t for free’, a day after suggesting he cannot.
“The hell with it,” the world’s richest man wrote on Saturday on Twitter.
“Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”
Although it was not immediately clear whether Musk’s change of mind was genuine, he later appeared to indicate it was. When a Twitter user told Musk “No good deed goes unpunished”, he replied, “Even so, we should still do good deeds”.
A day earlier, Musk had said on Twitter that SpaceX would not be able to pay for Starlink in Ukraine indefinitely. And the US military confirmed it was communicating with the billionaire’s company about funding for the critical network.
The discussions come as Musk has been embroiled in public spats with Ukrainian leaders who were angered by his controversial proposals for de-escalating the conflict.
While Ukraine has long maintained it will never agree to relinquish land taken by force, Musk suggested that it permanently cede the Crimea region to Russia, that new referendums be held under United Nations auspices to determine the fate of Russian-controlled territory, and that Ukraine agree to neutrality.
Starlink, a constellation of more than 3,000 small satellites in low Earth orbit, has been vital to Ukraine’s communications as it fights against Russia’s invasion.
Musk activated Starlink in late February after Ukraine’s internet services were disrupted because of Russia’s invasion. Its internet terminals have since been crucial in keeping the Ukrainian military online.
SpaceX has donated some 25,000 ground terminals to Ukraine, according to an updated figure given by Musk last week.
The disruption of the service may have dire consequences for Ukraine. Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said this week that Starlink services helped restore energy and communications infrastructure in critical areas after more than 100 Russian cruise missile attacks.
Encrypted satellite messages have been used for military communications after the local mobile phone network was severed during heavy shelling.
Mykola Balaban, the deputy head of the Ukraine Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security, told Al Jazeera that Musk’s support is crucial for Ukrainian military efforts.
“For the last six months, Ukraine has showed very good strategic communication,” he added. “Of course there is sometimes lags in the communication and some misunderstanding, but at the end of the day, as you see with this tweet [from Musk], we managed to communicate to our partners around the world the importance of supporting Ukraine and Ukrainian people in their fight against the war from Russia.”
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Russian men, conscripted to fight in Ukraine, say goodbye to family members Oct. 7 at a recruiting office in Moscow. (photo Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
“I have no idea why they took him,” said Alexei, who, like dozens of others in the office complex, was rounded up and taken to the nearest military enlistment office, part of a harsh new phase in the Russian drive.
In cities and towns across Russia, men of fighting age are going into hiding to avoid the officials who are seizing them and sending them to fight in Ukraine.
Police and military press-gangs in recent days have snatched men off the streets and outside Metro stations. They’ve lurked in apartment building lobbies to hand out military summonses. They’ve raided office blocks and hostels. They’ve invaded cafes and restaurants, blocking the exits.
At a predawn sweep on the MIPSTROY1 construction company dormitories on Thursday, they took more than 200 men. On Sunday, they rounded up dozens at a Moscow shelter for the homeless.
The press-gangs appear to descend at random. It is terrifying — and, at times, comically haphazard. Alexei, a 30-something pacifist, lives with his cat and, until he was hauled off, enjoyed hanging out with friends in bars, cafes and parks, going to concerts and planning his next holiday in Europe. (He and others in this report spoke on the condition that his last name be withheld out of concern for his safety. The Washington Post has confirmed the raid, but could not independently verify the details he provided.)
An official barged into Alexei’s office on Tuesday. Two police officers and several plainclothes military officials arrived and demanded his identification. They ordered him to go with them quietly “or we will use force,” he said.
“I was panicking,” he said. “I’d never been detained before. Everyone knows that if you are detained by the police in Russia, it’s very bad.”
Suffering massive military casualties and repeated defeats in Ukraine, Russia has begun cannibalizing its male population. The hard-eyed pundits on state television are demanding more Ukrainian blood and more sacrifice from Russian men who they say have grown too used to soft living.
But the new phase of Putin’s mobilization risks denting Russians’ tacit support for the war and even his manufactured popularity — and could stir social unrest. Particularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg, major cities that until now have been largely untouched by the war.
More than 300,000 Russian men and their families have fled Russia since mobilization, reports from neighboring countries indicate. Authorities have set up mobilization points at border crossings to prevent departures. Many others want to leave after seeing the aggressive police raids and the first reports of the newly conscripted men dying in the war.
Activist Grigory Sverdlin, who left Russia and is based in Georgia, this month launched an organization, Go By The Forest, to advise men in Russia on avoiding the draft. He said group has consulted with 2,700 men in 11 days and told 60 drafted men how to surrender in Ukraine. At least eight have succeeded, he said.
“Obviously, people are very stressed because they are worried they will be pushed to shoot other people,” Sverdlin said. “So people are afraid not only for themselves, but about taking part in this unjust war.”
Yevgeny, 24, quit his job as a mechanic and is hiding at a relative’s dacha far from Moscow. He has deleted his social media profiles and cut contact with friends. He spends his days working in the garden, and he goes to bed early and watches a lot of YouTube.
“I don’t want to kill people, and I don’t want to be killed, so I really have to lie low now,” he said. “But even here, I don’t feel safe. We live at a time when your neighbors could report on you. They might call police and say that there is a young guy staying in this house when he should be fighting fascists in Ukraine.”
Yevgeny never supported the war. Now he has stopped driving for fear of being pulled over by police. He cannot leave Russia, because he has no passport, and even going to the store in the small village feels risky.
“I am panicking, and my mom is very nervous,” he said. “I’m stressed, and I’m depressed. I try not to think how long this could go on, because you can go crazy.”
Two of his friends are worse off. They were conscripted late last month, he said, and with little training are on their way to the front.
“I have a couple of friends who supported the war believing that there are Nazis there who kill poor Ukrainians and that Ukrainians should be liberated and so on. But they are changing their opinions after mobilization. They have started to ask questions and surf the internet for information,” Yevgeny said.
“They don’t want to die, especially when you don’t understand why you should die,” he said. “What is the point?”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that 222,000 of the 300,000 target had been conscripted and that the process would be completed within two weeks. Pro-war hard-liners insist a second round will be needed.
The raids in Moscow and St. Petersburg have been deeply controversial, in part because the cities have suffered comparatively few casualties in Ukraine. The burden of fighting has largely been borne by small ethnic groups and poorly educated men from impoverished rural regions.
In a sign that the government fears a growing urban backlash over the raids, Andrei Klishas, a senior member of Putin’s United Russia party, said Friday that the conscription drives were illegal.
“It is inadmissible to grab everyone on the street indiscriminately,” he said.
Antiwar sentiment could harden as the bodies of soldiers who were deployed just weeks earlier begin returning home for burial. Alexei Martynov, the 29-year-old head of a Moscow government department, was mobilized Sept. 23 and was killed Oct. 10. He was buried last week. Five soldiers from the Southern Urals region, mobilized on Sept. 26 and Sept. 29, were killed in Ukraine in early October, authorities in Chelyabinsk reported.
A comrade of the Chelyabinsk men who survived an overwhelming Ukrainian assault called a friend and described what happened, according to the transcript of a phone call published by BBC News Russian. He said he had been given no training. When he fled, he said, corpses lay everywhere.
“We got there the first day, having never fired a shot, and they sent us, like meat, straight to an assault unit, with two grenade launchers. I had at least read the instructions on how to use them.” By Day 3, the soldier and his comrades were in front-line trenches.
Almost daily, videos surface on Russian social media of conscripted soldiers, angry because they have not been given decent uniforms, weapons, training or quarters. Testimonies about men who should be exempt being sent to fight are common. Aleksei Sachkov, a 45-year-old Moscow doctor, signed a contract to treat wounded soldiers in Voronezh, Russia, near the border with Ukraine. He stopped calling his wife, Natalia, on Sept. 24. She learned from Russia’s military hotline a week later that he was fighting in Ukraine as part of a tank unit, she said in a video posted online.
As unease grows, men of military age are being turned back at borders as they try to leave the country. In March, weeks after Putin launched the invasion, he promised there would be no mobilization. But last month, he dashed the tacit assurance that the conflict would be fought only by professional soldiers in return for the Russian public’s passive acceptance of the war. The widespread anger over Putin’s Sept. 21 announcement suggests that public support for the war is lower than the Kremlin claims.
“It’s the regime’s agony, because quite a common opinion in Russia now is that this war is lost,” Sverdlin said. “And it seems that just giving out summonses, detaining many thousands of people and sending them to war just buys this regime a bit more time. But it’s just buying time, because, obviously, these people who were caught on the streets now won’t make good soldiers because they don’t know how to fight.”
As the backlash intensifies, some Russians are confronting authorities and recording videos. A woman berated a team in the lobby of her St. Petersburg apartment building. A Russian truck driver posted video of himself confronting a police officer and a military enlistment official who tried to take him to the enlistment office.
“I don’t give a s--- about your mobilization. You’re the one who is eligible, not me. You’ve got a gun after all, not me. Why don’t you go mobilize yourself?”
The police officer tried to write a charge, demanding the driver’s documents.
“I’m not giving you my documents. Why should I?” the truck driver said, “If you fail to create order in your country, why do it in another country? And how? By just destroying it completely?”
In the rowdy hubbub of the military enlistment office where Alexei wound up, he said, many of the men were agitated, some were furious and others shrank into themselves. They queued at one office after another, where they were made to sign the military summons, submit their documents and undergo a medical examination. Many were office workers seized on the street. A couple of “strange ones” told Alexei they were volunteers, looking for an exciting lifestyle change.
He was shocked by how many men meekly donned the army uniforms that were handed to them and let themselves be taken, apparently directly to training bases. One of his work colleagues was among them.
“I saw men who were lost and confused, and at the same time very weak,” he said. “They didn’t want to fight for themselves. They were given papers and obediently signed them all. They weren’t focused. They just stared into space, as if they had given up.”
For Alexei, the threats and bluff continued for hours as officials pressured him to sign the military summons. He refused. Police were called. They took no action, but a police guard at the door would not let him leave.
He watched the queues of nervous men. The drunken city worker was in a deep sleep. A member of the elite Russian Guard special police threw a noisy tantrum about the attempt to enlist him.
Alexei called a lawyer. He entered the office of the military commissar, filming him on his cellphone, demanding to know the legal basis for holding him.
“He got very angry and shouted at me to leave his office.” At 8 p.m., he was finally allowed to leave. Now he wants to leave Russia but fears he could be conscripted at the border.
“I want to wait until this is over, in a safe place.”
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon poses for a photograph in front of a building in Bethesda, Maryland, U.S., September 28, 2022. (photo: Raphael Satter/Reuters)
In a lawsuit filed late Friday, Jay Solomon, the Journal’s former chief foreign correspondent, said Philadelphia-based Dechert LLP worked with hackers from India to steal emails between him and one of his key sources, Iranian American aviation executive Farhad Azima.
Solomon said the messages, which showed Azima floating the idea of the two of them going into business together, were put into a dossier and circulated in a successful effort to get him fired.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, said Dechert “wrongfully disclosed this dossier first to Mr. Solomon’s employer, the Wall Street Journal, at its Washington DC bureau, and then to other media outlets in an attempt to malign and discredit him." It said the campaign “effectively caused Mr. Solomon to be blackballed by the journalistic and publishing community.”
Dechert said in an email that it disputed the claim and would fight it in court. Azima - who filed his own lawsuit against Dechert on Thursday in New York - had no immediate comment. read more
Solomon’s suit is the latest in a series of legal actions that follows Reuters’ reporting about hired hackers operating out of India. In June, Reuters reported on the activities of several hack-for-hire shops, including Delhi area-companies BellTroX and CyberRoot, that were involved in a decade-long series of espionage campaigns targeting thousands of people, including more than 1,000 lawyers at 108 different law firms.
At the time, Reuters reported that people who had become hacking targets while involved in at least seven different lawsuits had each launched their own inquiries into the cyberespionage campaign.
That number has since grown.
Azima, Solomon’s former source, is among those who have gone to court over the alleged hacking. His lawyers, like Solomon’s, allege that Dechert worked with BellTroX, CyberRoot and a slew of private investigators to steal his emails and publish them to the web.
BellTroX and CyberRoot are not parties to the suit and could not immediately be reached. Executives at both firms have previously denied wrongdoing.
Solomon and Azima allege that Dechert undertook the hack-and-leak operation in the interest of its client, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al-Qasimi, ruler of the Middle Eastern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah. Reuters has reported that lawyers for Ras Al Khaimah’s investment agency – RAKIA – used the emails to help win a fraud lawsuit filed against Azima in London in 2016.
Azima, who denies RAKIA’s fraud allegations, is trying to have the judgment thrown out.
In addition to being deployed in court, the leaked emails also made their way to The Associated Press, which published two articles about Azima in June of 2017, including one that revealed the airline mogul had offered reporter Solomon a minority stake in a company he was setting up. The Journal fired Solomon shortly before the AP’s story was published, citing ethical violations.
Solomon says he never took Azima up on his proposal or benefited financially from their relationship. In a first-person account of the scandal published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2018, the ex-journalist said he never pushed back on Azima’s talk of business opportunities because he was trying to humor a man who had been crucial to his reporting on the Middle East. Solomon acknowledged “serious mistakes in managing my source relationship with Azima” including accepting stays on the businessman's yacht. But he said he had been the target of an “incredibly effective” information operation.
The Journal, which is not a party to suit, declined comment. The AP did not immediately return a message.
Solomon said in a statement Saturday that the hack-and-leak he suffered was an example of "a trend that's becoming a great threat to journalism and media, as digital surveillance and hacking technologies become more sophisticated and pervasive. This is a major threat to the freedom of the press."
Gas combustion appliance create pollution. (photo: Getty Images)
Americans run “mini fossil fuel plants” in their homes. It’s time for change.
“Many of us are basically running mini fossil fuel plants,” said Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California Santa Barbara and senior adviser to the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action.
There are over 200 million of these “mini fossil fuel plants” throughout the country — all heaters, clothes dryers, and stoves that run on oil and gas, according to research from Rewiring America. Replacing all of these isn’t an easy thing to imagine or do. But a growing number of advocates argue it’s past time to try.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, both the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency published reports raising concerns about air pollution inside homes from gas stoves and heaters. One of the problem pollutants was nitrogen dioxide, which can inflame and aggravate the lungs, but the agencies also reported other concerns about the ozone and particulate matter that built up inside when the appliances are in use.
All this time later, neither agency has made much progress acting on the science and regulating these gas appliances indoors. But climate experts are arguing they still can.
A new Evergreen Action road map shared with Vox envisions an ambitious transition for clean buildings that don’t run on gas, arguing that President Joe Biden could use the full powers of the federal government and explore untapped regulatory powers at the EPA and Energy Department to slash building emissions.
Further action is needed, Evergreen argues, because the incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act to electrify buildings will be far from enough to slash pollution in the short timeframe we have.
If the administration indeed enacts the steps recommended here, Americans may even look back someday and wonder how they could have tolerated fossil fuel combustion in the home for so long.
No agency is taking responsibility for gas’s impact on air quality
Gas appliances have fallen through the cracks of federal regulation in part because the EPA sees the Clean Air Act as charging it with overseeing outdoor air. “There’s no equivalent clean indoor air act,” said New York University’s Jack Lienke, co-director of the Institute for Policy Integrity and a co-author of a history of the EPA law.
No matter where it’s burned, natural gas emits a cocktail of dangerous emissions, including nitrogen dioxide, nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, and carbon monoxide. It’s also a contributor to climate change, as a source for carbon dioxide and methane — a greenhouse gas that’s 80 times more powerful a planet warmer than carbon in the short term.
Outdoors, the EPA considers these pollutants hazardous to breathe; scientific evidence shows they’re just as, if not more, dangerous indoors. Gas cooking, for instance, can raise the risk of childhood asthma by 42 percent, according to a 2013 meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
The science is also clear that what happens inside doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Furnaces and water heaters have to vent their emissions directly outdoors, for example (stoves and ovens face no such requirements), and that pollution doesn’t just disappear. The consequences are exacerbated in communities of color, where homes tend to run on less efficient appliances and communities already bear the burden of greater outdoor particulate matter. One analysis by RMI found that Black Americans are 55 percent more likely to die prematurely from the impacts of fossil fuel appliance pollution compared to white Americans. Another study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, found residential gas combustion and commercial cooking to be the largest drivers of the racial disparity in pollution exposure for people of color compared to white people.
Gas appliances have also grown to become a leading cause of death from cross-state air pollution, according to a 2020 paper published in Nature. They emitted 425,000 tons of nitrogen oxide in 2017 alone, almost three times the amount attributable to gas-fired power plants in that year. In another study, scientists at Stanford found leaky pipes and valves can leech methane into the air even when the appliance is off.
If the pollution source were a tailpipe, or a power plant, then the EPA would regulate it. The EPA has made, admittedly slow, progress regulating vehicles, power plants, and oil operators. As a result of regulations and market changes, electricity is less polluting overall, now second to transportation in its share of US greenhouse gas emissions. Coal is shrinking as a part of the power sector since its peak in 2007, and it’s going to shrink further as a result of new IRA spending.
As the grid is getting cleaner, buildings hooked up to electricity will also have a dwindling footprint and, hopefully, use less energy overall with more energy-efficient machines. But a building that runs on gas will always burn a fossil fuel for its heat. And today that footprint is considerably large: 13 percent of the nation’s climate pollution comes directly from these gas-burning machines.
There’s a large federal investment coming to support electrified buildings through the Inflation Reduction Act, but it only goes so far. Take, for example, the $4.5 billion for the electrification rebate program for lower- and moderate-income households. “That money is going to be spent relatively quickly,” Stokes said.
It’s far from ideal when “we have to be pointing all decisions in the economy toward clean buildings,” she added. “Whenever somebody has a hot water tank or a furnace that dies, we need the next appliance to be a clean one, because these appliances can operate for 10 to 30 years. Every decision we make now has a consequence decades down the line.”
Buildings are gaining more scrutiny from the Biden administration
The Biden administration has made some limited progress on buildings, mostly through pledges, executive orders, and summits focused on indoor air quality.
One development so far has been at Energy Star, a joint program run by the EPA and Energy, which helps promote products that reduce energy consumption for consumers. Up until this year, the program included gas dryers, furnaces, and boilers in its most efficient categories. But the agencies announced for the foreseeable future it will discontinue gas categories on the list, as it monitors market changes. The agencies agreed with commenters’ case that gas technology was trailing far behind Energy Star’s standards, and the distinction wasn’t serving the program’s environmentally conscious consumers or Biden’s climate goals.
What will come next? Evergreen’s road map indicates the Biden administration has plenty of unexplored territory to clean up building pollution.
One of the most ambitious of the proposals suggests that, because what happens indoors affects air quality and climate change everywhere, the EPA should finally take action through the Clean Air Act, through a section of the law meant to deal with new sources of pollution. Enacting rules under this section would mean manufacturers have to meet certain performance standards for new appliances. It is a bold step, but not one without precedent. The EPA already issues standards for wood stoves and heaters, and applies the same section to manufacturers of other consumer products, like the car.
The EPA has a model to follow. States have adopted gas appliance emission standards, including in Texas, California, New York, and Utah. Evergreen suggests the EPA adopt one of two proposals. One is an ambitious draft proposal from California’s South Coast air quality management district, which set a zero-emissions target for nitrogen oxides from appliances. Evergreen recommends this target to be national no later than 2030, effectively phasing out manufacturer sales of these appliances.
The clearest drawback to leveraging the Clean Air Act is the arduous road to regulation. The EPA has a series of steps it follows in issuing new regulations, and it can take many years to check all the boxes (not to mention work through ensuing court challenges).
Despite the time it would take, some climate wonks are already eager to move this plan into gear. In August, 27 environmental organizations submitted a formal petition to EPA calling for the inclusion of appliances as a source category under Section 111(b) in the Clean Air Act.
EPA regulation doesn’t prevent the Energy Department from issuing its own rules for energy efficiency, which might be much faster. There are 47 efficiency standards for appliances that the department could enact or upgrade. These would affect not just gas appliances, but electric models like air source heat pumps, too. Upgrading all 47 of these standards, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, would lessen the energy demands buildings put on the grid, saving up to 25 coal plants of carbon pollution by 2050.
None of these regulations would touch existing stoves and furnaces. But eventually, it would mean fewer gas appliances on the market and likely lower the cost of electric replacements over time. It’s also a signal to manufacturers that gas combustion is a technology to leave behind.
There are other avenues the Biden administration could take, setting national performance standards for the federal government’s own building stock among them. Stokes said it’s not an either-or situation, but an all-of-government approach that’s needed to make real progress on cleaner buildings. “If we delay on that, it’s not going to get easier to do.” “We need as much time as possible,” she added, to find and replace the millions of mini-fossil fuel plants inside the home.
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