19 November 22
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The backdrop for our offering is the barbarity of which humans are sadly capable. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen staggering levels of death and suffering. Whenever Russian forces are repelled, the stories that emerge, along with the mass graves, speak of unconscionable atrocities and war crimes.
The most recent location where this is taking place is the city of Kherson, which had been under occupation for more than eight months. Once again, we are hearing a narrative of unimaginable brutality. But we are also seeing something else: hope born from the remarkable resilience of the human spirit. The courage, bravery, and resourcefulness of the Ukrainian military and its citizens is inspiring.
As Ukrainian troops liberated the city, residents who had lived in fear streamed out of their homes and gathered with ebullient expressions of relief and joy. We are living in a time when the forces of autocracy have felt ascendant. Yet we should not discount the resolve of people to live in freedom.
We should also recognize that the path to freedom and liberation from the forces of tyranny is never assured and is full of hardship. Kherson remains a humanitarian crisis — littered with landmines, facing a scarcity of water, electricity, and food, and still near the frontlines. Yet it is also a place where its residents can step out into the light and feel free. It is a symbol to the world of what resistance can accomplish. It is a reason for hope, and we believe, to smile.
The clip today is from about a week ago, when Ukrainian forces took back the city. It features the longtime CNN correspondent Nic Robertson, who has reported from countless war zones over his storied career. Here we see the power of live television as he conducts interviews with residents of Kherson. A crowd gathers, and the spirit they exude, along with the words they share, is something to behold.
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A Ukrainian soldier at the Kyiv airport, where the author and his wife were held captive by the Russians. (photo: Celestino Arce/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Desperate to escape Ukraine, we were captured, questioned, and held in a bunker. Then our teenage son tried to save us
“Weaponry!” screamed my wife, Iryna, who was in the front seat and spotted the Russians first. “Go back, go back!” she told the driver as he frantically tried to reverse.
It was too late. Without any warning, Russian infantrymen began spraying our Toyota Camry with automatic-weapons fire and started to chase after our vehicle. As I ducked behind the driver’s seat, I could hear the glass shattering into a million pieces as the bullets struck the windows.
The next few moments are a blur. Somehow we were able to jump out of the moving car, hop over a fence, and take cover behind a bright-blue port-a-potty. Our Camry careened down an incline and smashed into a fence around a small apartment house. It was a complete wreck — and full of more bullet holes than I could count.
“Come out from behind there — you there, hiding behind that toilet,” yelled one Russian soldier. We stepped out from our impractical shelter (plastic toilets usually not being effective shields against bullets), hands raised and explaining we were unarmed civilians on our way to a train station. The Russian soldiers approached and pointed rifles in our faces.
It was just the start of a terrifying ordeal: imprisonment and interrogation by one of the most murderous militaries that the modern world has ever seen. And for our teenage son, thousands of miles away, the beginning of an impossible rescue mission.
THE STORY OF our capture started with a miscalculation. “There will not be a war.” I heard that phrase over and over in Kyiv from many supposedly intelligent or informed people. My wife, Iryna Samsonenko, and I had been living in Ukraine for 21 years. I worked as a military-affairs and Russian political analyst, and as a consultant to the aerospace industry. Putin threatening Ukraine was a movie we had seen many times, and I assumed the saber rattling was just that and nothing more. I was never more wrong.
Iryna and I had taken a flight to Stockholm on Feb. 14 for some business meetings. My son, Antonio Brasileiro, was on break from his boarding school in Cambridge, England, and joined us in Sweden. Normally, Antonio would fly home to Kyiv to be with us over the holidays. He was born in the city, had attended school there until 2018, and many of his best friends were still living in Ukraine. However, this time, with the threat of the Russian invasion having put the entire country on edge, we decided to meet Antonio outside of Ukraine. “I wonder if I am ever coming back here to our home again,” he told us before he flew back to school in early January. “If there’s a Russian invasion, this could be the last time I ever see it.”
After Antonio flew back to London, we decided against the safe choice of remaining in Sweden and instead flew home to Kyiv. It seems an incomprehensible decision now, but it was too difficult for us to sit in some faraway European city and wait for Russia to invade or not.
Iryna’s brother, his family, and her mother were still in Ukraine. We had many friends in Kyiv and all over the country — people we did not want to leave behind. The place where you raised a son, where you remember every birthday, every holiday, has a strong pull. Too strong in our case.
Three days later, when the missile strikes began at around four in the morning and the air-raid sirens sounded, we sought shelter in the underground garage across the main street that we lived on in Kyiv. The building housed one of the most modern, luxury-shopping centers in the city and an upscale, 24-hour supermarket with two cafes and a wine bar in the basement. We waited out the day’s bombardment and watched as news reports of attacks by the Russian army in Ukrainian cities continued hour after hour.
When we finally returned home later that day, it was only a few hours into the evening before the missile strikes began anew. We did not know what to do. Getting in our car and driving to the west of the country was impossible. The roads were clogged with traffic for miles, and there was not a drop of petrol to be had anywhere from Kyiv to the border with Poland. Anyone left in the city was now trapped there.
Adding to the sense of helplessness was the odor of exploded ordnance permeating the air. This was not just a campaign against Ukraine’s armed forces; this was, and still is to this day, a war to terrorize the civilian population and to obliterate their way of life first and achieve tangible military objectives second.
After spending two nights in air-raid shelters in the center of Kyiv, we decided to evacuate. We had some close friends about an hour outside the city, and we asked them if we could come stay in their guesthouse until the bombardment subsided. They kindly agreed, but there had been no news about what was happening in their area. This turned out to be another disastrous mistake.
Within two days of arriving, the fighting in and around nearby Gostomel Airport had shut down all utilities. The artillery and mortar duels between Ukrainian and Russian forces destroyed the water and power lines. Reaching their house was not so difficult, but now going back to Kyiv was impossible — every bridge between where we were and the city had been blown up behind us to stall the Russian advance. In our attempt to reach safety, we had become trapped. There was no exit from this place as the entire area was now ringed with Russian troops and armor.
The battle raged for days all around us, with explosions sometimes so frequent that it was not clear if they would ever stop. Months after our ordeal, the slightest sound makes me flinch or look for cover. The immediate impulse now is to feel like we are always under attack.
For Antonio’s part, he was monitoring the war 24/7. He spent long nights speaking with people in Ukraine, in some cases even helping them to find air-raid shelters and ways to get out of one battle zone or another, but he had only limited contact with us.
No electricity except for about three hours a day from a petrol generator meant smartphones were almost impossible to recharge. Even when the phones had power, I had to climb to the top of the stairs of the guesthouse where we were staying to get a working signal, which was not the safest place to be with explosions taking place all around at all hours. In the city, air-raid sirens would warn everyone to head for an underground shelter. In the countryside, the only warning was the high-pitched whistling of an incoming mortar or artillery round.
Wednesday, March 2, was the last time we were able to talk to Antonio. The next day, I had expended most of the battery remaining on my MacBook Pro to compose an article on how the war was developing badly for the Russians. At one point I had to stop working and all of us — Iryna and I, our friends and their children, their housekeeper and nanny — had to take shelter in their root cellar while several Russian armored vehicles were stopped on the road outside the house. The Russians appeared to be lost in the maze of country roads.
They eventually moved on, but this incident, plus the fact that we were using flashlights in order to make trips to the toilet, were unable to bathe regularly, and had no place anywhere nearby to purchase food was making remaining in this place untenable. We thought we might return to our home in the center of Kyiv. The city had not fallen, as had been predicted. If we were home, we would at least be able to shower, the supermarkets were still working, and if we had to sleep in an air-raid shelter, it would be a small price to pay for creature comforts.
So we decided to make a break back to Kyiv — and fell into the hands of the Russian army.
WE WATCHED IN horror as the Russians looted our car. Still in shock over its demolished state, we were treated to the spectacle of our belongings being violently ransacked and everything of value being smashed or stolen. Iryna had a hard drive full of nothing but family pictures, photos, videos of our son playing piano. It was among the many items stolen and later sold somewhere by these war criminals and thieves in uniform. A lifetime of memories gone in an instant.
I noticed blood running down Iryna’s face. Although by some miracle none of us had been struck by a single bullet, flying fragments of glass had lacerated her left cheek, and there were even small grains of glass in her eye. Fortunately, a Russian combat medic was on the scene and managed to treat her before the condition could become worse. She still suffers from what she says feels like pieces of glass embedded in her cheek.
All of our computers and other hard drives were taken. All of the work, every article I had ever written, every document I had ever saved, every photograph I had ever taken were all gone. These were the same Russian soldiers who would later become known throughout the world for leaving chambers of horrors where they had tortured dozens of civilians before executing them, countless numbers of rape victims, half-burned bodies of violated women and children, and shocking numbers of mass graves in their wake.
But the big bonanza for these war criminals was yet to come. As they tore into my computer bag, they found the portfolio where I was keeping the money we had saved for my son’s education. “Foreign currency!” exclaimed the worst and most criminal of the group as he slammed down the bundles of cash on the bullet-ridden Toyota with glee.
This to them was the best payday they were ever going to see. The sums of money that they took from us when combined with the value of our car, our computers, and equipment, all of our iPhones, jewelry, cameras, clothing, and personal items are well in excess of $150,000.
Although their immediate attention was focused on anything that they could steal, these soldiers then began rifling through a pile of research materials I was using for some writing I was doing on the history of missile systems. The entire spectacle would have been humorous had we not felt terrified that they were just going to kill us at any moment.
Despite the fact these were articles from open-source publications, press releases, government publications with the word “unclassified” in bold type across the top and bottom of every page, these dimwits were convinced they had stumbled across some top-level intelligence operative. The same soldier so overjoyed at the prospect of stealing all our money put a grenade in the pocket of my coat and threatened to pull the pin if I did not tell him which secret agency I must be working for.
Once they had finished stealing everything that we owned, we were sent into a dark basement of a nearby building where numerous civilians were being held. One of them kept repeating his mobile number in the hope that I would remember it and report it to someone. Why these people had been detained was unclear, but I would be shocked if any of them are still alive today. Groups of people who were held in this area ended up in mass graves.
In the next step, we were packed into an armored vehicle and then had two Ukrainian civilians with their hands tied behind their backs thrown in on top of our legs. We traveled this way over some distance for what seemed like an hour and a half. While in transit one of the Russian soldiers stole a gold ring that I had owned for 25 years. Its sentimental value was incalculable, and I had planned to give it to Antonio once he had graduated from university.
At some point we stopped in the middle of a forest. The two Ukrainians thrown in on top of us were tossed out onto the freezing cold mud. I never saw what happened to them, but given the brutality we witnessed, I fear the worst.
We were told to stand, not sit, in one place with temperatures dropping precipitously. By nightfall we were freezing. Were we just going to be taken into the woods and shot once the troops around us went to sleep for the night — so there would be no witnesses?
We stood this way for two hours face-to-face, trying to keep our hands warm by holding onto each other and shifting the handbag that Iryna had been allowed to keep — the only item that was not stolen — from one hand to another. At some point, a group of soldiers took pity on us and gave us half cups of hot tea. Then we waited, with the temperature dropping and no word as to our fate.
Finally, after some questioning about my papers, they left us in a van overnight with a box of the Russian equivalent of C rations and some water, and said we would be taken someplace else the following day. The driver would come in periodically during the night and run the engine for 10 minutes or so to warm up the interior and then shut it down again. We tried to sleep on the hard benches in the back of the van, but without knowing what the next day would bring, sleep was not really possible.
The next morning, we were packed into a 4×4 vehicle and taken down roads strewn with burned-out military and civilian vehicles. The back half of rockets protruded from out of the ground — unexploded duds — and signs of explosions and devastation were everywhere. It was a journey through the landscape of hell.
Then we saw our destination: Gostomel Airport. Given all the criticism I had written about Putin, I was seriously worried about being whisked to Russia in an aircraft and thrown into a gulag. Or worse. But the runways were no longer serviceable, and the Russian army was using Gostomel as a command post of sorts. We were blindfolded and taken to an underground bunker, and when the blindfolds were removed, we were in a small room with a wooden desk with all its drawers removed, three cheap chairs, and nothing else.
The floor was filthy; the air cold, wet, and perfect for catching pneumonia. Hope faded, but Iryna and I found solace in each other and thoughts of our son. There was no clock to tell time and no calendar to know the date. Iryna began keeping track of the days Alexandre Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo-style, by making the traditional six vertical lines and then a seventh horizontal line at an angle on the wall. How long we would be in this place was impossible to determine. No one told us why we were there or under what auspices we were held. No one in the outside world knew where we were, or if we were even still alive. All we knew was each morning when the radios and phones in the room on the other side of the corridor began ringing, it was the beginning of another day of war.
BACK IN CAMBRIDGE, Antonio knew something was wrong. It was now Sunday, and he had not heard from us since Wednesday. He finally managed to get a call through to our friends whose place we had been staying at, and they told him the horrifying news.
They learned what had happened from the driver we had hired. He was not sent with us to the forest and on to Gostomel the next day. He had instead been taken with a group of people, but somehow managed to escape. We learned later he was able to make his way back to the home of our friends, which was how they learned of our fate.
My son knew many of my friends and colleagues, numerous people who were retired military and now defense contractors or worked in the Pentagon. Even at age 18, he knew how the U.S. government bureaucracy worked and went straight to work trying to save his parents.
Antonio’s first call was to the U.S. Embassy in London. Trying not to panic, he began to explain how he needed to come to the embassy to speak to someone about his parents. The person he spoke to told him robotically he “would have to make an appointment.”
His next step was to ring a close friend of ours, retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. John Schoeppner. Schoeppner is a fighter pilot’s fighter pilot. He flew 154 combat missions over Vietnam and was the commander of Edwards Air Force Base.
He was also famous for being very direct or otherwise having a sense-of-humor failure when he felt he was being misunderstood, misinterpreted, or ignored.
When Antonio relayed the situation, Schoeppner’s general’s stars began flashing — at about 50,000 lumens. He rang the U.S. Embassy in London in what I was told was “an exercise in focusing their attention.” (The notes I have taken in Russian by Antonio read “General John made a big noise with them.”)
His intervention had the desired effect. Antonio received a call back from someone further up the food chain in the London embassy within just a few minutes, who then relayed him to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The State Department, to its credit, then put our situation in the hands of some very focused people.
The person who spoke to Antonio was very thorough and asked all the right questions. Our health condition, where we were taken, where we might be held, etc. They also told him that arrangements for how and where we could be exchanged or released were being explored.
In the meantime, Schoeppner was on the phone to those he knew in the Pentagon, raising an equal level of attention with people there. I was a longtime consultant there and have been a regular visitor to the building for more than 30 years, so I was not an unknown quantity.
After these initial interactions, Antonio was on the phone constantly with people from almost every government entity in the U.S., U.K., and Ukraine that you could think of. In Kyiv they were beginning to put together a rescue plan that would involve Ukrainian special-ops troops storming the airport.
But we knew none of this. Antonio had no way of communicating with us. He was sleeping just two hours a night and overwhelmed with anxiety. The emotional strain on him was tremendous. I am sure it will be a long time before his wounds heal.
TO SAY WE were in an information vacuum is being generous. All we knew was that there would be no quick end to this war. This was a fact becoming very clear at this point in early March, even to the Russian soldiers now guarding us. After a few days, when we were able to talk to them and were able to get to know them, they confessed — like the rest of the Russian army — their superiors had told them, “You will be in Ukraine only four to five days, and then the country will be conquered and you can come back home.”
We were held in a windowless, underground room with a door we could have never opened without fear of being shot. There was always a soldier on watch with an AK-47 cradled on his lap all hours of the day. The guards rotated off duty every hour. We were alone only when we were asleep. There was no possible escape, not even MacGyver could have found a way out.
We slept on a flimsy, wafer-thin mattress large enough for only one person, and we had only a single blanket against the clammy cold of early March. We had to fold up my overcoat for a pillow and used Iryna’s fur coat as a second blanket. The floor was rock-hard. The same floor did nothing but exacerbate bodily harm inflicted when our car was machine-gunned and I had to jump out while it was still in motion. It has taken months to recover from some of the physical trauma.
Sanitary conditions were nonexistent. I had to urinate into an empty plastic water bottle. Defecating was done into a bucket in the corner of the room that we thankfully had a cover for to suppress the foul smell. We were provided more boxes of the Russian army C rations but did not consume much. “You are not eating anything,” said the one officer who came in to question us several times in the first few days.
Although originally the soldiers who looted our car forbid us to take any clothing or any belongings, in an act of personal bravery, Iryna confronted these people pointing automatic weapons at her and shamed them into permitting her to retrieve my medicines, a few personal items, and a journal that I began writing a record of our ordeal in — one that I hoped to give to Antonio someday.
The medicines were essential as I suffer from hypertension, and the tablets in my travel pouch were the only way to keep it under control. However, the strain of being in this modern-day dungeon began to cause considerable stress. I began to show signs of dangerously high blood pressure.
Our captors did everything they could to hide what was going on in the other sections of the bunker, but we could hear everything. The room next to ours was a medical triage unit. The doctors were supposed to stabilize wounded soldiers to make them fit for transport to a field hospital. The sounds of the maimed and dying haunts me. Soldiers screaming from their injuries. Others babbling incoherently, slipping in and out of consciousness as the morphine could only partially kill their pain.
Then there was the sound of a big, wide roll of packing tape being dispensed and wound around something. We knew what this sound was: Tape is used to bind the ankles of dead soldiers inside a body bag. These, I told myself, are the worst sounds of war. Another life gone because of this maniac in the Kremlin.
Every day we were under bombardment. The Ukrainian forces were never far away, and by conducting “shoot and scoot” harassment attacks against the aerodrome, they made it impossible for the Russians to repair the runways. The building shook from the proximity of the sustained blasts. Even in the middle of the night an artillery or mortar duel was not uncommon. We began to worry when the bombardments were accompanied by the sound of small-arms fire, signs the fighting was almost on top of us.
One day, the guard sitting in the corner with his AK-47 was visited by another soldier from the group that traded off the duty to watch over us. He brought in sets of combat-grade body armor. The building was in danger of being overrun, so they were prepared for a firefight that could end up as a last stand outside of the room we were held in.
THE PEOPLE HOLDING us hostage must have known about the efforts to free us stateside, but they never said a word. Only one officer, who I saw only twice, came into our room and told us “your transport from here is being organized,” but the supposed commander of this outfit found it impossible to be honest with us. After a time we never saw him again.
The only impressive person in the bunch was one of the doctors in the triage section who began treating my high blood pressure. Intelligent, conscientious, considerate, capable of normal conversation — it was hard to believe he was a member of the same army that had done so many horrible things to us.
He also turned out to be — just as a hobby — an aviation-history enthusiast. We would have long conversations about old aircraft that could be seen today only in museums. He looked to be about 28 years old and was extremely capable and competent. Much too good for the officers who were leading his army.
I never found out if he survived. We were told that just after we were taken from Gostomel the airport was assaulted by a large Ukrainian force and the Russians remaining wiped out. My fear is that he was another casualty of this insane war.
Eight days after we were captured, Antonio was contacted by another Ukrainian friend of ours who now lives and works in Washington, D.C. The call was from a Ukrainian-émigré colleague I knew in Kyiv. She had been active for years as a translator and analyst for high-level U.S. military and retired military officials interacting with Ukraine, and she had her own connections to the Pentagon. She informed Antonio that there was a solution to our situation. She spoke with the same people at the State Department who were working on our case and also with Schoeppner. It was at this pressure point that something was put into motion.
We still had no idea that any of this was taking place, but there was ultimately a number of people working on our release.
Schoeppner and his wife, Martha, and two of our close friends in Boca Raton, Florida, Todd and Lena Markel, brought in friends and political contacts like Thomas Gaitens, a successful businessman who was also one of the founders of the Tea Party. Gaitens informed the office of Sen. Marco Rubio. Todd’s sister Cindy contacted the office of Sen. Ted Cruz.
Others were engaged through their own channels. Charlie Mount, who runs the catamaran charter-cruise service Lena works for, met with one of his friends. His friend phoned someone — he never told Charlie who it was — but when he put the phone down, he said, “Something is in motion. Don’t ask me what, but things are happening.”
Two days later, two soldiers we had never seen before appeared in our room and told us we were leaving. We were again blindfolded, then brought to the surface for the first time in 10 days. Supposedly we were going to be taken from the airport to another location, but it almost became the trip that never happened.
When we were halfway between the bunker and the truck to transport us, Gostomel was hit with a mortar attack. Our escorts scampered for cover and left us out in the open, blindfolded, exposed to furious shelling, and with a good chance of being killed. How we managed to avoid being hit I do not know, but when the firing subsided, our escorts shoved us into a truck that was piled inside with assorted junk and our two carry-on bags.
We were taken to a nearby village and put into a small building being used by the Russians as a command post. Inside, they stuck us in a shower room with the shower heads removed, almost like in the movies about Nazi death camps during World War II. We were fed a small hot meal — the first one in two weeks — and then told we had to sleep sitting up on cold, metal chairs.
The next morning, March 15, we were driven for hours toward the north. The trip wound through the radiation zone of Chernobyl. The road was littered with cars shot to pieces like ours. There were burned-out military vehicles, endless signs of explosions, and the tracks of heavy vehicles that had chewed up the road. Ukraine’s infrastructure will take decades to be repaired.
Several hours later, we were dropped in the middle of nowhere. The driver of our vehicle gave us back our passports and said, “Back the way you came is Ukraine, and that way is Belarus.” Pointing toward Belarus, he said, “You should start walking.” We could see nothing but empty fields and forests off in the distance. It was 5 p.m. and less than two hours from nightfall, so we started walking.
We finally reached a Belarus border checkpoint some time later and explained that we were refugees. They let us cross after a series of questions from their immigration, customs, and security personnel. Then came the greatest moment of our lives. A Red Cross worker had a tablet, and we were able to call Antonio on Telegram and tell him we were alive. I was never so happy to hear my son’s voice.
The next day we boarded a night train that took us to the Polish border at Brest, and the great nightmare was over. Several hours later, we were in Warsaw. First Iryna, and then I, some days later, flew to the U.S. The following month, Antonio had his Easter break and flew from London to America. We were reunited.
“Welcome home, Papa,” he said as I hugged him, my body shaking with emotion. “I will always be here waiting for you.”
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Members of the Oath Keepers militia group stand among supporters of Donald Trump occupying the east front steps of the U.S. Capitol, January 6, 2021. (photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)
Jurors hear closing arguments in seditious conspiracy trial of founder Stewart Rhodes and four associates of far-right group
Prosecutor Kathryn Rakoczy said in her closing argument to jurors after nearly two months of testimony in the high-stakes case that Rhodes’s own words show he was preparing to lead a rebellion to keep Democrat Joe Biden out of the White House. Rhodes and his co-defendants repeatedly called for “violent overthrow” of the US government and sprang into action that day, she said.
“Our democracy is fragile,” Rakoczy said. “It cannot exist without the rule of law, and it will not survive if people dissatisfied with the results of an election can use force and violence to change the outcome.”
The closing arguments began in Washington federal court after the final pieces of evidence were presented in the trial alleging Rhodes and his band of anti-government extremists plotted for weeks to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power from Republican Donald Trump to Biden.
Rhodes’s attorney sought to downplay his violent rhetoric in the run-up to January 6, describing it as “venting” and insisting there was no agreement or conspiracy. Defense attorney James Lee Bright said Rhodes’s language was focused on persuading Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act over what he saw as a stolen election.
Rhodes “wasn’t hiding his opinions, he wasn’t hiding any plans”, Bright told jurors. He was “as open as daylight with every plan on what he was asking President Trump to do”.
Evidence presented by prosecutors shows Rhodes and his co-defendants discussing the prospect of violence and the need to keep Biden out of the White House in the weeks leading up to January 6, before stashing a cache of weapons referred to as a “quick reaction force” at a Virginia hotel across the Potomac River.
On January 6, Oath Keepers wearing helmets and other battle gear were seen pushing through the pro-Trump mob there and into the Capitol. Rhodes remained outside, like “a general surveying his troops on a battlefield”, a prosecutor told jurors. After the attack, prosecutors said, Rhodes and other Oath Keepers celebrated with dinner at a local restaurant.
Defense attorneys have spent weeks hammering prosecutors’ relative lack of evidence that the Oath Keepers had an explicit plan to attack the Capitol. Rhodes, who is from Texas, testified that he and his followers were only in Washington to provide security for rightwing figures including Roger Stone. Those Oath Keepers who did enter the Capitol went rogue and were “stupid”, he said.
Rhodes testified that the mountain of writings and text messages showing him rallying his band of extremists to prepare for violence and discussing the prospect of a “bloody” civil war ahead of January 6 was only bombastic talk.
The prosecutor sought to rebut suggestions that Rhodes’s rhetoric was simply bluster, telling jurors that his messages weren’t “ranting and raving” but were “deadly serious”.
“The way they have appointed themselves to be above the law is why they are here today,” she said. “The sense of entitlement that led to frustration followed by rage and then violence – that is the story of this conspiracy.”
Rhodes’s lawyer said his client was back at a hotel room eating chicken wings and watching TV when the first rioters started storming the Capitol. He noted that the Oath Keepers never deployed their “quick reaction force” arsenal.
“You’re either the Keystone Cops of insurrectionists, or there is no insurrection,” he told jurors, referring to the inept police officers of silent movies.
Two other defendants testified in the case. Jessica Watkins, of Woodstock, Ohio, echoed that her actions that day were “really stupid” but maintained she was not part of a plan and was “swept along” with the mob, which she likened to a crowd gathered at a store for a sale on the popular shopping day known as Black Friday.
Defendant Thomas Caldwell, a navy veteran from Virginia, downplayed a chilling piece of evidence: messages he sent trying to get a boat to ferry weapons from Virginia across the Potomac into Washington. He testified that he was never serious about his queries, though he struggled to explain other messages referencing violence on January 6.
Two other defendants, Kelly Meggs and Kenneth Harrelson, both from Florida, did not testify. Meggs’s attorney Stanley Woodward argued that there were thousands of people involved, and his client was not among the first people to enter the Capitol.
Defense attorneys’ closing statements are expected to continue on Monday.
The group is the first among hundreds of people arrested in the deadly Capitol riot to stand trial on seditious conspiracy, a rare civil war-era charge that calls for up to 20 years behind bars upon conviction. The justice department last secured such a conviction at trial nearly 30 years ago and intends to try two more groups on the charge later this year.
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Firefighters work after a drone attack on buildings in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, Oct. 17, 2022. (photo: Roman Hrytsyna/AP)
The Ukrainian prime minister warns that Kyiv could face a ‘complete shutdown’ of the power grid due to Russian strikes.
“Unfortunately Russia continues to carry out missile strikes on Ukraine’s civilian and critical infrastructure. Almost half of our energy system is disabled,” Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said during a joint news conference with Valdis Dombrovskis, a vice president in the European Commission.
Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said about 10 million people were without power in a country with a pre-war population of about 44 million. He said authorities in some areas ordered forced emergency blackouts.
Ukraine’s national grid operator Ukrenergo said Russia had launched six large-scale missile attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure between October 10 and November 15.
Russia has carried out significant strikes across Ukraine after a key bridge connecting the Crimea Peninsula was partially damaged in a blast in October. Moscow blamed Kyiv for the attack, a charge Ukraine denies.
With temperatures falling as low as zero degrees and Kyiv seeing its first snow, officials were working to restore power nationwide after some of the heaviest bombardment of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure in nine months of war.
The United Nations has warned of a humanitarian disaster in the country this winter due to power and water shortages.
“We are preparing for different scenarios, including a complete shutdown,” Mykola Povoroznyk, deputy head of the Kyiv city administration, said in televised comments.
Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had used long-range weapons on Thursday to strike defence and industrial facilities, including “missile manufacturing facilities”.
A spokesperson for the Ukrainian army said in an evening report that Russian forces, now redeployed on the east bank of the Dnieper River in the Kherson region, had shelled towns including Antonivka and Bilozerka on the west bank as well as Chornobaivka, which they had used as a depot for equipment.
Moscow was forced to pull out of the region’s capital city, also called Kherson, on November 9.
Investigators in liberated areas of the Kherson region have uncovered 63 bodies bearing signs of torture after the Russian forces left, Ukraine’s interior minister was quoted as saying.
The Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, released a video of what he said was a torture chamber used by Russian forces in the Kherson region.
Reuters was unable to verify the assertions made by Lubinets and others in the video. Russia denies its troops deliberately attack civilians or have committed atrocities.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 in what Moscow said was a special military operation to eliminate dangerous nationalists. Kyiv calls Russia’s action an unprovoked imperialist land grab.
Thousands of Russian men have fled abroad to escape conscription to a conflict which has killed thousands, displaced millions, turned cities to ruins and reopened Cold War-era divisions.
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Cattle pass by Fivemile Tank in late September, near Sierra Blanca, Texas, November 6, 2022. (photo: Paul Ratje/The Intercept)
The shooting victims were part of a group of 13 migrants, including a 13-year-old girl. Many were kin and friends from a cluster of small farming communities in northern Mexico. Most were poor and wanted to immigrate to the U.S. to work and send money to their families. One was fleeing homicidal violence in Mexico that had already landed him in the hospital with bullet wounds.
They walked into Texas illegally and hiked for two days through mountains, desert, and arroyos. They planned to meet up with a driver who would take them into the U.S. interior. Just before reaching their pick-up spot, they happened upon a shallow body of water ringed by lush greenery and golden wildflowers. They were at Fivemile Tank.
In Texas, tanks can refer to ponds of water that ranchers maintain for their cattle and other livestock. All kinds of wild animals are also drawn to them, and sometimes so are people, especially near the border. The migrants were exhausted and thirsty. They walked to the water and crouched down to drink.
The migrants said they ducked into the brush after hearing a vehicle approach. They had been drinking from the west side of the tank, which is shaped roughly like a circle some 200 feet in diameter, when they heard the noise from a public farm road on the east side. In an affidavit written by an investigator with the Texas Rangers and later made public, the Mexicans said the driver then backed up, exited the truck, and laid a firearm on the hood. Then, according to the affidavit, one of the Americans yelled, in Spanish, the English equivalent of “Come out, you sons of bitches, little asses!”
The shooter fired twice. One shot hit Jesús Iván Sepúlveda, a young father, in the head; it proved fatal. The other tore into the gut of Brenda Casias Carrillo, a mother of three children.
A national uproar ensued, with civil rights advocates and politicians denouncing the shootings as attacks against immigrants — as murder, attempted murder, and hate crime.
I reconnoitered the tank in the mid-afternoon a few days after the killings, and weeks later at sunset, the approximate time when the shootings occurred. I also reviewed the tank’s history with its owner and interviewed most of the migrants who were eyewitnesses to the shootings and who remain in the United States. People in Sierra Blanca acquainted with the men arrested in the shooting also spoke with me. And I connected with their lawyers.
What I found casts doubt on the commonly offered scenario — that this was a shooting deliberately done to harm the Mexicans — though the alternative explanation for the shootings is equally disturbing. Instead, they appear to have been a hunting accident, albeit one caused by indifference to various kinds of life — animal and human — on the border with Mexico. These days on the north side of the Rio Grande, it doesn’t take consciously bad actors to hurt and kill. The entire region is now a bad actor, saturated with fear, loathing, and suffering, especially among the newly arrived.
The accused shooters are Mike and Mark Sheppard, 60-year-old twins originally from Florida’s rural Panhandle. They are charged with manslaughter in the death of 22-year-old Sepulveda and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in the wounding of Casias Carrillo. Neither of the charges implies an intent to harm or kill. Both imply criminal recklessness, behavior that any reasonable person would avoid as dangerous and deadly.
According to the Texas Ranger affidavit, Mark Sheppard said that, at Fivemile Tank, his brother used a shotgun on what they thought were javelinas, the Southwestern term for collared peccaries, 40- to 60-pound mammals that look something like wild hogs.
In Texas, javelinas are classified as game that must be retrieved, dressed, and processed for meat after being killed. But many people dislike the animals’ rank smell and taste. “I don’t know anyone who eats them or that brags about killing them,” said Liz Rogers, a longtime, small-town West Texan. “Lots of folks kill javelina just to kill them.”
Before the shootings, Mike Sheppard was warden of the West Texas Detention Facility, about a mile up the road from Fivemile Tank. A private jail that used to house noncitizens held on immigration law charges, it has been wracked in the past by reports of physical and verbal abuse, particularly against Black detainees — violations said to have been inflicted even by Sheppard himself. In 2018, 30 African detainees, represented by immigration advocate organizations including RAICES, alleged abuse by authorities at the jail. Among the accusations was that Sheppard had told one African inmate to “shut your black ass up” and called two others “boy.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General immediately launched an investigation of Sheppard in his capacity as warden, and the department’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties followed months later with its own probe. Both organizations verified that, during Sheppard’s tenure in 2018, African detainees were tear-gassed on two occasions. The inspector general found that the gassings occurred after large groups of detainees became agitated, unruly, and violent about their impending mass deportations. A nurse said she heard Sheppard yell and curse at detainees during one of these events and call one African man a derogatory name.
Homeland Security’s Office of Detention Oversight also did an inspection. It found that some supervisors were not certified in the proper use of “less lethal munitions,” such as tear gas. The inspector general produced evidence suggesting substandard medical care. The detention oversight office noted unacceptable levels of dirt, dust, and debris in detainees’ living areas and toilets.
Nevertheless, the inspector general report declared that all the African detainees’ allegations of abuse were “unsubstantiated.” The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties found no improper behavior by the warden or his staff. And the Office of Detention Oversight only recommended that the local field office “work with the facility to remedy any deficiencies.” Sheppard stayed on at the West Texas Detention Facility as warden.
The government reports remained virtually unpublicized until this year — when the shootings scandal erupted.
After the Fivemile Tank incident, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, organized 16 Democratic members of Congress to write to the Department of Justice, urging an investigation into the September shootings as hate crimes. RAICES had co-sponsored the original abuse report, more than four years earlier. Now RAICES denounced the shootings as “xenophobic attacks” and the Sheppard brothers as white supremacists.
“Mike loves to hunt,” Arvin West told the New York Times. West is the sheriff of Hudspeth County, where the shootings occurred, and runs the county jail, where he employed Mark Sheppard as a maintenance worker. West also sometimes substituted for Mike Sheppard at the West Texas Detention Facility when Mike was unavailable to work. (Mike Sheppard was fired from the jail after the shootings.)
Hudspeth County owns the West Texas Detention Facility and leases it to LaSalle, a national private prison company. LaSalle detention centers, many of which are part of a sprawling network of Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities for detaining migrants, have been the subject of numerous media reports and government investigations for allegations of substandard conditions and violations of detainees’ civil rights. The most infamous involved accusations that a LaSalle facility in Georgia contracted a doctor who performed invasive, often unnecessary gynecological procedures on women detainees without their knowledge or consent. (ICE no longer holds immigrant detainees there.)
Both the Hudspeth County jail and the West Texas Detention Facility are located in Sierra Blanca, a town 80 miles east of El Paso. Only about 800 people live there, most of Mexican American heritage.
Few outsiders have heard of Sierra Blanca. It consists of little more than crumbling old buildings, a gas station that sells fast-food pizza, a couple of cafes, and the state’s only courthouse made of adobe. The town is known mainly for its proximity to a Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 10, infamous for arrests of celebrities caught driving with small amounts of marijuana, including Willie Nelson, Snoop Dogg, and Fiona Apple.
Fivemile Tank lies a few miles south of town. It’s popular with locals for shooting and hanging out. When I walked its perimeter a few days after the migrants were shot, the crime scene evidence had been removed. Left behind were dozens of spent shotgun shells, several empty beer containers, and the tattered straps of an old backpack, likely discarded by a migrant passing through.
Gwen Wilbanks owns the tank. She is the 87-year-old widow of Russell “Rusty” Wilbanks, a cattle rancher and for years the chief deputy sheriff of Hudspeth County. Rusty, who died in 2010, looked and acted the part. A 2001 book about Texas mountains described his lanky, Western good looks and cowboy attire, complete with Wranglers. His nickname was “Paladin,” after the hero of the television show “Have Gun – Will Travel.”
Gwen Wilbanks has known for years that people trespass onto Fivemile Tank with recreational alcohol and recreational guns. The property is all that’s left of over 12,000 acres that she and Rusty ranched until about two decades ago, when they sold the land to a Miami real estate investor. The investor created Sunset Ranches LLC, selling off hundreds of tiny plots that people in the area call “ranchettes.” Other companies have subdivided additional ranchland, with the parcels averaging 20 acres each. Many can be purchased for no money down and less than $300 a month. They generally come with no water hookup, no well, no electricity, and spotty internet. Street signage is irregular. Roads are often impassible, mired in drifts of desert sand.
Many ranchette newcomers hail from states far from the Mexico border. Knowing little or nothing about the area where they just bought land, they arrive with fantasies of peace and quiet and the Milky Way. Many are shocked by the hard reality of life off the grid, and many stop making their monthly payments. They leave, abandoning junked campers and cabins.
For generations, it’s been common to see migrants walking across the land. Many longtime Sierra Blanca residents have grandparents who came to Texas illegally from Mexico, and many speak Spanish. In the past, when she and her neighbors saw migrants, Hudspeth County Administrator Joanna MacKenzie recently told local media, “We would help them, we would give them a ride, it was not a problem.”
Last year, however, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott began pushing border counties to issue “disaster declarations” describing migrant men as dangerous criminals out to commit violence and vandalize and steal landowners’ property. Hudspeth County issued one, and many newcomers seem to take the warnings seriously. Social media is littered with tips on how to prevent trespassing on the ranchettes. Responding on a “neighborhood watch” page on Facebook, one commenter wrote: “If I catch someone on my property without my permission they will be leaving in a body bag.” On another page discussing similar concerns, a poster said, “A twelve gauge will solve your problem.”
Other ranchette owners hunker down, like Sharon Smoot. A 63-year-old ex-Floridian, Smoot was a full-time massage therapist until the Covid-19 pandemic decimated her business. Now she lives alone on desert scrub about five miles north of the border. She bought the land sight unseen and occupies an old camper trailer, surrounded by jury-rigged wood corrals for her seven dogs. She has arranged mystic-looking crystals and rocks into circles. Her closest neighbor is almost half a mile away.
“There’s just not much to do,” Gwen Wilbanks said, while explaining why she is fatalistic about trespassers at Fivemile Tank. “Young people go there to smooch and drink beer. People target-shoot and hunt quail. They should ask me for permission, but they don’t, though someone called recently and asked if they could shoot coyotes.”
Coyotes are the only big game in Texas that may legally be shot and left to rot. All other prey must be collected after being killed and harvested for meat. Wilbanks said she is happy to have people slaughter coyotes at Fivemile Tank. She readily told the caller yes.
She said she never gave the Sheppard brothers permission to hunt anything at the tank.
In addition to the shooters and drinkers, another set of denizens that frequent Fivemile Tank are green-uniformed Border Patrol agents. The state ranch road fronting the tank hosts a veritable parade of their vehicles, passing by every few minutes. Smoot said she often sees agents on a ridge overlooking the tank, surveilling for undocumented migrants who are trying to avoid detection.
The Border Patrol’s work intensified over the past two years. For the first time in local memory, the Big Bend Border Patrol Sector, which encompasses Sierra Blanca, saw dramatically rising numbers of undocumented immigrants. One of the largest and most remote of the nine Border Patrol sectors on the southern border, Big Bend covers 165,000 square miles of mostly unpopulated desert and mountains. It is a brutal place to hike through and historically has been the least traveled sector by migrants.
Lately, however, that has changed. According to Border Patrol statistics, only about 3,000 single adults were apprehended in Big Bend during the first quarter of fiscal year 2020, during the Trump administration. A year later, the numbers spiked, with over 14,000 single adults apprehended. Today, this group makes up the vast majority of unauthorized migrants encountered by Border Patrol agents in Big Bend.
The spike occurred in good part because the Biden administration has been accepting families and minors into the U.S. after they turn themselves in at the border. When single adults have tried to cross, however, most have been immediately expelled, under the Trump administration containment policy known as Title 42. It’s an old, little-used public health law ostensibly being employed lately to protect the country against immigrants with Covid-19, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said the law should not be implemented in this manner. Its use against immigrants has widely been seen as an excuse to deny people the right to claim asylum.
On November 14, a federal judge in Washington blocked this use of Title 42, calling it “arbitrary and capricious.” The order is now scheduled to be lifted on December 21. Meanwhile, the government used it to summarily expel over a million migrants in 2021 alone. Most were from Central America and, like the group who stopped at Fivemile Tank, from Mexico.
Single adults turned back by Title 42 at places like El Paso discovered the Big Bend sector as a good crossing spot because its vastness makes it easier to elude Border Patrol. Traversing the area on foot, though, can be deadly. Over the past two years, border counties in far West Texas have become charnel houses. In the fiscal year 2021, Hudspeth County recovered some two dozen bodies from the mountains and desert, up from only three the year before. All were presumed to be migrants who succumbed to exposure. Up and down the southwest border, migrant deaths recorded by Homeland Security have more than tripled since fiscal year 2020, from 247 to at least 853 deaths in 2022. The United Nations International Organization for Migration now calls the Mexico-U.S. border the deadliest land crossing for migrants in the world.
Out on her ranchette, Sharon Smoot feels bad about the deaths, but she’s also annoyed by migrants walking through her land. She keeps guns for protection, though she said the migrants have never made her feel unsafe.
“It’s usually men walking alone,” she said. “They’re thirsty and hungry and exhausted. I give them water and crackers. They inhale the food! While they’re eating, I call Border Patrol. I have them on speed dial.”
“I am humanitarian toward the illegals,” Smoot said, employing the word practically every English speaker in Sierra Blanca uses. “It’s wrong for them to come into this country, but I don’t want them to be hurt. I don’t target-shoot out here; that would be dangerous. Whether or not I see them, I know there are people who are hiding.”
Mass concealment is a fact of life in the area. Gwen Wilbanks’s grown sons still manage family ranchlands, and when they go out to work, they go armed. Yet, Wilbanks said, the migrants are never glimpsed by her sons: “They hide.”
Both times I visited Fivemile Tank, I found a multicolored riot of empty shotgun shells among crushed Pabst Blue Ribbon cans and Coors bottles, and the occasional ragged backpack. I unzipped one and shook it. Empty paper wrappers fell out, wrappers for Mexican candy. At the tank, animals and people in varying states of legality, vulnerability, and hiddenness share space with each other — and with deadly weapons.
On September 27, the day the migrants were shot, the tank was ringed by foliage that was unusually dense due to recent monsoon-like rains. Gwen Wilbanks said she doesn’t like that much vegetation. It blocks the view of the tank from the road, and she likes to see her water when she drives by. She’d been thinking she needed to send some maintenance workers to cut back the brush.
The sun would have set at 7 p.m., the approximate time the Sheppards and the migrants encountered each other, according to the affidavit. I later visited at sunset to compare visibility at that time with the same conditions on September 27. The light was remarkably dim. Looking west from the road 200 feet eastward, the shrubbery, brightly colored and crisply edged in the daytime, now resembled a grayish-black smudge. It was difficult to impossible to distinguish objects in front of the smudge — much less anything or anyone who might be hiding inside it.
The Texas Ranger affidavit does not mention visibility problems. It also appears flawed by numerous omissions and inaccuracies. For one, it has Mark Sheppard saying that Mike used a shotgun on the migrants. Shotguns have a relatively short range, and Kevin Marcantel, the assistant district attorney assigned to the Sheppards’ cases, referenced the affidavit while remarking at a recent court hearing that Mike must have fired on the migrants from close up. “I can’t hardly believe these guys didn’t know those were human beings they were shooting at, versus javelina,” Marcantel said.
According to Mike Sheppard’s defense lawyer, Brent Mayr, however, Mike did not use a shotgun; instead, he employed a .204 Ruger rifle. It shoots over a long distance compared to shotguns, with exceptional lethality.
Mayr and Richard Esper, Mark’s attorney, did not allow me to speak with their clients. In a phone interview, Mayr said, “Mike has been hunting his entire life and has a hunting license.” He said the brothers arrived at Fivemile Tank with shotguns in their truck, and their plan was to hunt doves. Then Mike took up the Ruger, Mayr said. Looking through its scope, he thought he saw javelinas, and he took a shot. He saw movement and asked Mark to look through binoculars. “Mark told Mike he thought he saw the black butt of a javelina,” Mayr said. He said Mike fired again but didn’t think he’d hit anything with either shot.
“Hunters have a sixth sense about whether or not they’ve hit things,” Mayr said. He contended that Mike did not know his bullets had struck anything. Mike apparently did not have the sixth sense Mayr described: His bullets did hit living things — two members of the species Homo sapiens.
Why didn’t Mike and his brother go looking for what they might have shot? Mayr noted that javelinas are considered by many hunters to be “trash,” as he put it — animals so derided that they are not worth looking for if the hunter is unsure of having hit one. This could well explain why Mike and Mark immediately drove off after the shootings, Mayr suggested.
Yet, in Texas, neglecting to retrieve javelina carcasses after killing them is illegal. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department calls such behavior poaching, said Jen Shugert, a department spokesperson.
Taken as a whole, however, there is no convincing evidence that the Sheppards meant to harm human beings at Fivemile Tank — or commit hate crimes against migrants. In the weeks after the shootings, I located and interviewed five eyewitnesses: most of the eight survivors who are still in the United States. Not one of them reported hearing the Sheppards utter any epithets, in any language.
Three of the eyewitnesses recalled that Mike said something after firing the first shot — but his utterance was not Spanish, as the affidavit said. Instead, according to those I spoke with, Mike said something in English, incomprehensible to the Mexicans, who said they don’t speak or understand the language. A fourth eyewitness recalled hearing Spanish, but the words he reported are innocuous: “Van a verlo” — You (plural) will see it. Another witness said that Mike said nothing at all, nor did Mark.
Within minutes of the shootings, the brothers attended a county water board meeting. A woman who was there told me that no one noticed them acting at all out of the ordinary. The next day, Mike spent time on Facebook, writing on the page of a friend who has cancer and was complaining that he was suffering from intense discomfort. “You need anything?” Mike asked in the comments. And later: “You want something for pain?”
A day and a half after the shooting, Mike and Mark were arrested and moved to a county jail in El Paso. Each was charged with manslaughter in Jesús Sepúlveda’s death. Jail records indicate that neither of them was able to sign for his jail-issued toothpaste or toilet paper, because both were put on suicide watch.
Days later, they received a second charge, for the wounding of Brenda Casias Carrillo. Punishment for each crime is two to 20 years in prison. The brothers have paid large bonds and been released from jail. So far, their charges have not been presented to a grand jury for formal indictments.
In Sierra Blanca, the community is torn. Were their neighbors hapless, if careless, shooters in a tragic hunting accident? Or did they mean to murder and maim migrants?
A resident, whose job until Mike Sheppard’s arrest brought the two in frequent contact, said they had heard Mike use derogatory language about migrants. On multiple occasions, they heard Mike disparage Border Patrol agents as “lazy asses” for not making more arrests. (The person asked that their name not be published, for fear of losing work.) In addition, the person said, Mike complained about migrants passing through Sierra Blanca. “He said, ‘Why do these motherfuckers come when there’s nothing here for them?’” (Mike’s lawyer said his client “vehemently” denies making such statements.)
Echoing statements to the media from other locals, Sharon Smoot called the brothers her friends. “They were always kind to me,” she said, adding that many townspeople who used to like the Sheppards now condemn them as hate-crime perpetrators. She denounced the rush to judgment.
Standing at Fivemile Tank at sunset six weeks after the shootings, however, Smoot admitted that she herself felt anguished. She did not know what to believe.
Struggling with her thoughts, she gazed at streaks of orange turning purple in the sky. Down on the ground, beer cans, shotgun shells, and backpack trash littered the shore, with a flock of birds dotting the water. Though their species was impossible to discern in the waning light, their presence suggested other life, maybe nearby and maybe hiding.
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Starbucks workers striking on November 17, 2022, in New York City, New York. (photo: Seth Wenig/AP)
Starbucks has undertaken an unceasing union-busting campaign since the first cafe unionized a year ago. But if the 114 cafes that saw baristas go on strike yesterday for its annual Red Cup Day are any indication, the company won’t be victorious any time soon.
SBWU targeted Starbucks on the day the company annually gives away free red cups to customers. As many as two thousand baristas who are organizing under the umbrella of Service Employees International Union (SEIU)’s affiliate Workers United gave away their own union-messaged red cups at picket lines across the country.
SBWU also received a boost from a concurrently launched solidarity campaign by Unite, the United Kingdom’s largest union, which is now attempting to organize baristas in that country. Starbucks workers in Chile, Brazil, Germany, Serbia, Belgium, and Spain also engaged in solidarity actions.
In the past nine months, SBWU says Starbucks has intentionally short-staffed stores, cut worker hours unilaterally, fired over one hundred fifty union supporters, selectively provided benefits and raises to nonunion stores, installed hostile managers at union stores, and, in one case, accused workers of kidnapping and assault for conducting a march on the boss. The company also accused the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) of colluding with the union.
Most recently, the company refused to provide workers at the upscale Reserve Roastery in New York City with an inspection report that their store was free from bed bugs and mold after both had allegedly been sighted, forcing a quarter of the staff out on indefinite strike.
“[They want to] make our lives absolutely miserable and regret voting for a union [while] delaying and stalling the contract process,” says Boston barista Kylah Clay.
Starbucks appeared to refuse for months to bargain at all with stores that had won union elections, bargaining it is legally required to do. Now that the company is negotiating with many stores, Starbucks’s representatives have almost immediately walked out of most sessions on the grounds that there were SBWU members joining by Zoom. Previously, the company had agreed to Zoom-based bargaining but appeared to get cold feet when SBWU used the sessions to bring in members from other bargaining units. Each Starbucks store that has unionized is its own bargaining unit.
“[Their] goal is to keep doing this until they hit the year mark and start decertifying the union,” Clay says, an assessment which Workers United confirmed.
If 30 percent of workers at a bargaining unit petition the NLRB to decertify, a vote is held to remove the existing union as representative in that shop. The union must receive a majority of votes to remain the workers’ representative.
While baristas have won elections at over two hundred fifty company-run stores, a concerted effort to decertify them would force SBWU to re-win those votes, essentially moving the campaign back into a state of trench warfare.
The catch for Starbucks is that the NLRB prohibits decertification petitions within a year of the initial approval of a union. But such a counter-organizing campaign could begin relatively soon — the first SBWU union, the Elmwood Avenue store in Buffalo, was certified on December 17 last year. Dozens of others followed soon after, leaving little time for the union.
Starbucks has already managed to substantially staunch new union filings since the initial flurry, though the union notes a slight uptick recently. As a result, if Starbucks were successful in a campaign of demoralizing union workers and driving out strong SBWU supporters, then pushing decertification campaigns, it could put a substantial dent in or even eliminate SBWU as a national presence altogether.
But this isn’t all up to Starbucks. SBWU is planning a coordinated, multiple-city rally on December 9, the first anniversary of the vote at Elmwood.
While strikes at individual stores are routine — the union says there have been about two hundred thus far — yesterday’s action was the first such coordinated labor stoppage on a large scale. It followed a regionally coordinated strike in Massachusetts the week of Labor Day.
On a national level, the network of baristas and its parent union have thus far largely relied on filing over four hundred unfair labor practice charges against Starbucks with the NLRB. The legal work has yielded some results: the NLRB has issued more than three dozen complaints against Starbucks, one of which led to the rehiring of the “Memphis 7” fired baristas after a federal judge ordered it.
And several days ago, as part of an effort to get Ann Arbor barista Hannah Whitbeck rehired, the NLRB’s Michigan region filed in federal court for a nationwide cease and desist order that would require Starbucks to stop firing workers for union support.
But such efforts tend to be slow moving and out of the public eye, whereas actions like the Red Cup Rebellion allow workers to publicly go after the company. Moreover, the NLRB is an administrative body that can’t itself enforce penalties on Starbucks; it relies on the court system to do so.
As a result, yesterday marked a return to the court of public opinion for SBWU. “[We want to] talk to our customers [and] we can’t really have the most open and honest conversations about our workplace [while at work],” says Clay.
Where all this goes next is unknown for now. It is possible that Starbucks could succeed in gutting the union within the next year. But yesterday’s Red Cup Rebellion showed that if the company does make moves to make that happen, it’s not going to happen without a fight.
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Alaa Abd El-Fattah ended his full hunger and water strike after he collapsed inside his prison shower last week. (photo: Omar Robert Hamilton/Reuters)
The family of imprisoned British Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah visited him on Thursday for the first time since he ended his full hunger and water strike, which they say occurred after he collapsed inside his prison shower last week. El-Fattah had intensified his strike on the first day of the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh to draw international attention to the country’s human rights violations and protest his seemingly indefinite imprisonment. We go to Cairo to speak with his aunt, Ahdaf Soueif, who was among the visitors and says El-Fattah may resume his hunger strike if the British government does not more aggressively demand his release. “It really breaks my heart to think of him going back on hunger strike when he is so thin and so weak,” but the campaign so far “has left no one in any doubt that Alaa should be free,” she says.
We begin with a story we’ve been following closely. It’s Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s 41st birthday today. The imprisoned technologist, writer and activist had a near-death experience last week, according to his family, who were able to visit him in prison Thursday for the first time in almost a month. In a statement released last night, the family said he appeared “exhausted, weak, vulnerable and very very thin.”
Alaa, a dual Egyptian British citizen who’s been in prison for most of the past nine years, began a hunger strike over seven months ago to protest his imprisonment and to demand a consular visit from the British Embassy. On November 6, he escalated his strike and stopped drinking water altogether to coincide with the first day of the U.N. climate summit.
Last Thursday, prison authorities said they began an unspecified medical intervention on Alaa, while his sister Sanaa Seif campaigned here at COP27 to raise awareness about her brother’s case. Then, earlier this week, Alaa informed his family in handwritten notes he had started drinking water again and had ended the hunger strike.
But it wasn’t until his family was able to visit him Thursday in the Wadi el-Natrun Prison that they learned the details of what happened. Speaking through a glass barrier via a phone hookup, Alaa told his family he had repeatedly smashed his head against the wall on Tuesday and Wednesday last week. He did so the first time after having a meltdown when prison officials refused to acknowledge his strike. He was restrained, tied down, put on suicide watch. The second, to force authorities to send an investigator to file an official report about his hunger strike. On November 11th, Alaa collapsed in the shower, woke up surrounded by his cellmates and a medical team who put an IV in his arm. They gave him electrolyte fluid, a spoonful of honey and a pickle. This is how his hunger strike was broken.
In the statement, his family said, quote, “He says he could see then that his wish for the end was getting the better of him. That there was a strong part of him that was ready to die. He also recognized that this was partly to do with his physical weakness, and so he had to fight it.”
All of this was happening as tens of thousands of delegates are convening here in Sharm el-Sheikh for COP27. Alaa’s case has been at the forefront of the summit with calls by climate justice activists for his release and world leaders, including the heads of state of Britain, France, Germany and the United States, raising his case in their meetings with the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. But the Egyptian government has made no indication they will release him.
On Wednesday, I caught up with the Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ahmed Abu Zeid here at the summit and tried to ask him about the case.
AMY GOODMAN: This is too important.
AHMED ABU ZEID: It’s just because I have an appointment now.
AMY GOODMAN: I know, but it’s just 30 seconds. If you might tell me if President Sisi will be freeing Alaa Abd El-Fattah?
AHMED ABU ZEID: I have — as I mentioned, I have to be back again. For you, after I finish this meeting, I will come back to you. OK?
AMY GOODMAN: Do you promise?
AHMED ABU ZEID: Yes, sure.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you promise?
AHMED ABU ZEID: Yes, sure.
AMY GOODMAN: Despite his promise, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesperson did not join us for the show. So we approached him again on Thursday.
AMY GOODMAN: Mr. Abu Zeid, we waited for you on the show yesterday.
AHMED ABU ZEID: I swear to God, I have to finish things now. I’m so sorry. I’m just passing by here.
AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, I know. I saw your foreign minister. Can we — can we — can you join us on the show at 3:00?
AHMED ABU ZEID: Difficult. Very difficult now. Believe me, it’s very difficult.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you gotten an answer to the question if they’re freeing Alaa?
AHMED ABU ZEID: [inaudible] I will sit with you. Hello?
AMY GOODMAN: The Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesperson refused to answer our questions once again.
The family says Alaa will resume his hunger strike imminently if there continues to be no real movement in his case. He has been in prison for almost all of the last decade.
For more, we go to Cairo to speak with Ahdaf Soueif. She’s the author of a number of books, including Cairo: My City, Our Revolution and The Map of Love, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is also Alaa’s aunt and visited Alaa yesterday along with Alaa’s mother Laila and his sister Sanaa.
Ahdaf Soueif, welcome back to Democracy Now! I’m so sorry it’s under these circumstances.
AHDAF SOUEIF: Thank you, Amy. It’s always good to talk to you.
AMY GOODMAN: Ahdaf, can you just describe what happened yesterday? Describe the scene at the prison after waiting for hours. What was it like to see Alaa? What does he look like?
AHDAF SOUEIF: He is very, very thin, and he seems very frail. And we saw him in a glass cabin with a barrier between us. The conversation had to happen through a handset, which was quite faint. So, one person would be holding the handset, and the others would be just waiting and watching. So I was watching Alaa for a while, and the frailty really, really got to me, as well as he, from time to time, had to just gently lean against the wall. But he had a great deal of energy. It was like nervous energy.
AMY GOODMAN: [inaudible]
AHDAF SOUEIF: He was talking — I’m sorry. He was talking, talking. He needed to describe what had happened with him.
AMY GOODMAN: Keep going. He was talking.
AHDAF SOUEIF: Yeah, he was talking. He needed to describe what happened to him. He was talking very fast. He was using a lot of hand gestures. So there was a lot of energy there and a lot of need to relay what had happened.
We received a letter from him, which we took away with us yesterday and we’re just about reading now, in which he says that he tried to write down this experience and put it in a letter so he wouldn’t have to spend the 20 minutes of the visit describing it. But the authorities had preferred that this would be described in person rather than committed to writing.
AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday you spoke to some reporters, along with your niece Sanaa, Alaa’s sister. She said, quote, “It was my advice to Alaa that he shouldn’t go back to a hunger strike, not because I think a hunger strike is wrong but because psychologically he’s very, very unstable. I’m not sure if he will try to hurt himself again. They’re very cruel in how they operate, and a body on hunger strike is a very vulnerable body, and a mind on hunger strike is a very vulnerable mind.” Ahdaf, Alaa says he will go back on hunger strike if there is no movement on his case. Your thoughts?
AHDAF SOUEIF: If Alaa had not gone on hunger strike, and if we hadn’t managed to ignite the international campaign for him, there would be no hope at all of his release or even of acceding to any of his demands. Therefore, the step of going on hunger strike again has to be one that is considered, even though it really breaks my heart to think of him going back on hunger strike when he is so thin and so weak.
But Alaa is a strong person, and he is a wonderful combination of rationality and emotion. And what he said, which you mentioned earlier, is that when he was coming back from being unconscious and for a while, he felt the sweetness of allowing it to be the end, the relief. And at the same time, he realized that this was probably partly to do with weakness and that this was — he sort of — I am really going to look at this properly, but he describes it as something like a possible virus getting into and sort of riding on his struggle to be free. And therefore, he decided that he really had to fight it and he had to strengthen in himself the will to live. And so, he decided that he would eat, that he would not go back to the hunger strike straightaway, that he would build up his strength again, that he would give his cellmates a break, because they had been having a really hard time because of his ordeal, and that he would ask us for a birthday cake so that he could celebrate not just his birthday, but celebrate life itself, as he puts it, and all the births that had been and that were yet to come.
So, he is in there. He is reestablishing a positive sense and positive attitude. And he’s trying to build up his strength and the strength of his cellmates, so that if he has to go back on hunger strike, he will. I passionately hope that he does not have to do this, that we don’t have to start counting the days again.
And so, really, the campaign, yes, it was linked — the urgency of it was linked to his hunger strike, but the campaign has left no one in any doubt that Alaa should be free. And there are voices in Egypt that are saying this, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: In the visit yesterday, you and your sister Laila, your niece Sanaa told Alaa about what’s happening here in the outside world and the global wave of support for him. In response, Alaa said, quote, “Any form of political organizing that may solve our global crises has to stem from personal solidarity. Like this.” Can you talk about what it meant to him when you described what was happening? I mean, here at the summit, it has changed the whole discussion, the issue that climate justice cannot be talked about without considering human rights.
AHDAF SOUEIF: Yeah, it has. We see that. And it transformed COP27. And I have to say, as well, that there are our friends and colleagues, Egyptian NGOs, people like Hossam Bahgat, who have really taken a huge risk in speaking out at COP, and we are waiting to see what happens when COP is over and the guests go home. We really hope that this might be a turning point, or at least some kind of, I don’t know, new page or new beginning, and things can open up a bit here, because that is very much what is needed.
For Alaa, yes, of course, he was very — I mean, he had no idea. I mean, for three weeks, he had no idea what was happening outside his cell. Even being admitted to the medical center was not permitted, probably in order to keep him in isolation so that he wouldn’t know what’s going on. So it was very important and very big for him to learn the size of what happened.
But also, when I told him about a couple of personal messages, letters that had been written to him by Palestinian prisoners and by Moroccan prisoners and a picture that someone had sent of herself celebrating her birthday with her partner and saying that she would never again take the presence of loved ones on your special occasions for granted and that she and her partner were thinking of Alaa on their day, he has — there’s a very sort of special smile that overtakes all of Alaa’s face sometimes, and it’s a very tender smile. And it was when I mentioned personal things like that, that that really shone through. And it was after that that he said this thing about personal solidarity perhaps being the basis for organizing for global issues.
AMY GOODMAN: Ahdaf Soueif, is the British government doing enough? He is an Egyptian British citizen. Rishi Sunak, the new prime minister, was here. He had already issued a statement of concern about Alaa. And you’ve got the German chancellor calling for his freedom. Biden raised the issue when he was here. What are you demanding of world leaders?
AHDAF SOUEIF: Well, Alaa is a dual national. He’s a British citizen. And we completely don’t understand how the British can allow a friendly nation with a lot of shared interests to stall on as simple and small an issue as a consular visit. When Sanaa received her British — her passport, within six weeks she had a consular visit, when she was in prison, as well. So, Alaa is being singled out for very special, very harsh treatment. And really, really, the British government should not allow it. It’s insulting, actually.
And we have had questions. We have had really sharp and pointed questions in the House of Lords, in the House of Commons. The British media have really done its bit. But, unfortunately, the language that’s coming from Downing Street and from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, yes, they speak about being committed, they speak about a high priority, they speak about constant mentionings of the case, but we have had no results. Of course —
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Ahdaf, you — Alaa asked for an MP3 player, which for the first time he got in years. Can you talk about the significance of that moment? He said that music makes him feel alive.
AHDAF SOUEIF: Yeah. It’s actually incredibly important, because he has been asking for music for three years now. And music is just a very — it’s a central part of Alaa’s life. And getting the MP3 — in the letter, he describes how it had run out of battery already, and they got batteries and so on. And then, actually, he says that there was a moment of almost sufi, exultation, when he heard “Comfortably Numb.” And he says the — that amazing, great solo ringing in my ears while the blood came back to my limbs.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ahdaf Soueif, we want to thank you so much for being with us, for reporting on your visit with Alaa yesterday along with Alaa’s mother, your sister, and your niece Sanaa, his sister, and his mother. Ahdaf Soueif is the author of several books, including The Map of Love and Cairo: My City, Our Revolution.
We’re going to play in our music break with the first piece of music that Alaa heard in three years, Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” and then we speak with a Ukrainian climate activist and the leading Ukrainian climate scientist. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd, the first music Alaa Abd El-Fattah heard in three years.
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