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ALSO SEE: Jan. 6 Committee: Trump Should Be Charged With Four Crimes,
Including Insurrection
The decision by the January 6th committee to recommend criminal prosecution for the former President is unprecedented in American history.
In a hundred-and-fifty-four-page executive summary of its findings, the committee said that Trump—more than any other individual—was responsible for the storming of the Capitol by a violent mob that tried to disrupt the certification of his defeat in the 2020 election.“The central cause of Jan. 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the report states. “None of the events of Jan. 6th would have happened without him.”
The committee also identified five Trump allies for potential prosecution for their roles in aiding his effort to overturn the 2020 election: the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and four lawyers: Rudolph W. Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, and Kenneth Chesebro. Among other findings, the committee concluded that the attempt by Eastman, a Trump legal adviser, to submit slates of fake, pro-Trump electors to Congress and the National Archives constituted making “materially false statements to the federal government.”
In November, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to take over the Justice Department’s own investigations of Trump’s actions on January 6th and of his alleged mishandling of classified documents. The House select committee has no formal prosecutorial authority, so the referrals have only symbolic power. Law-enforcement officials, however, told me that the most important contribution that the committee can make to the ongoing Trump investigations is to immediately give prosecutors access to the more than a thousand witness interviews the committee conducted over the past year. The committee has also gathered more than a million documents related to the January 6th attack. “We have been very clear in saying that we want everything,” one law-enforcement official told me. “We still don’t have all of them.”
The report contains new information that could aid prosecutors. It describes a text sent by the Trump adviser Hope Hicks to a campaign aide, in which she stated that, before the riot, aides had repeatedly pressed the President to urge his supporters to remain peaceful. “I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused,” Hicks wrote. She said that another senior adviser, Eric Herschmann, told her that he had made the same recommendation to Trump, but the President had refused to speak out against violence.
In a conversation with his adviser Kellyanne Conway, which took place the day after the riot, Trump downplayed the significance of the attack. Conway said that after she had described the situation as “terrible” and “crazy” Trump deflected. “No, these people are upset,” he said. “They’re very upset.”
The executive summary also includes new evidence demonstrating that Trump knew his claims about the 2020 election were false. Robert C. O’Brien, who served as Trump’s last national-security adviser, said that he dismissed the theory that voting machines had been hacked, during a December 18th call to the Oval Office. “Somebody asked me, was there—did I have any evidence of election fraud in the voting machines or foreign interference in our voting machines,” O’Brien said. “And I said, no, we’ve looked into that and there’s no evidence of it.” The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said that she tried to dissuade Trump as well, by “waving him off” the theory, but Trump subsequently tweeted about it anyway.
Legal experts have said that such evidence would bolster prosecutors’ chances of convincing a jury that Trump was intentionally defrauding the U.S. when he tried to block the certification of the results. The referrals, depending on their exact content, will be reviewed by the office of the special counsel or by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Washington D.C., which has prosecuted hundreds of rioters who entered the Capitol.
Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, told me that he believed the committee’s referral has increased the odds that Trump will face prosecution. “While it’s still not completely certain that Trump will be prosecuted, I think the referral and the appointment of the special counsel make it more likely that it will happen,” he said.
For the purposes of the committee, whether its referrals result in actual prosecutions may not matter. A congressional committee has very different goals from a criminal prosecutor. Investigations by Congress are, by their nature, designed to unearth facts that sway public opinion. Some of the January 6th committee’s methods, including its effective use of snippets of testimony in videos produced for public airing, have prompted complaints about selective editing. But any committee’s ends are inherently political. A criminal prosecutor faces far more restrictions and must convince a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a defendant committed a crime.
The poor performance of Trump-backed candidates in the midterms suggests that the committee’s public hearings have already tarnished Trump politically, particularly among independents and moderate Republicans. And, now, with its criminal referrals, the committee has placed Trump in a position of political ignominy occupied by no other American President.
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Lee Harvey Oswald talks to the media as he is led down a corridor of the Dallas police station on Nov. 23, 1963. (photo: AP)
An unredacted memo adds depth to our understanding of the CIA’s response to allegations that Oswald worked with the spy agency.
Atsugi was a launching pad for U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union and was also a hub of the CIA’s research into psychedelic drugs. “A CIA memo titled ‘Truth Drugs in Interrogation’ revealed the agency practice of dosing agents who were marked for dangerous overseas missions,” wrote author David Talbot in “The Devil’s Chessboard,” his 2015 biography of former CIA Director Allen Dulles.
Talbot’s exploration of the link ended there: “Some chroniclers of Oswald’s life have suggested that he was one of the young marines on whom the CIA performed its acid tests.”
A new document released in full last week relates directly to Oswald’s time at Atsugi, revealing details about the CIA’s response to testimony from a former agency accountant that the spy service had employed Oswald — who went on to be a gunman in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The CIA’s role in Kennedy’s assassination remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of American history. A majority of Americans believe the president was killed as part of a conspiracy that went beyond Oswald, and roughly a third believe the CIA or elements within the CIA had a hand in it.
The main theory posits the assassination as a response to Kennedy’s firing of Dulles, a cloak-and-dagger powerbroker, following the failed CIA Bay of Pigs operation to unseat Fidel Castro’s Communist government in Cuba. Some believers of the theory also point to evidence Kennedy was souring on the Vietnam War or militarism in general. If Dulles did orchestrate a coup against Kennedy, it would be far from his first.
A memorandum from 1978 reports that a finance clerk with the CIA, James Wilcott Jr., had informed a House panel exploring the assassination that “the CIA hired Lee Harvey Oswald when Oswald served in Atsugi.” The memo goes on to cast doubt on Wilcott’s claim, noting that he arrived in Tokyo in 1960, after Oswald had left the base, suggesting that Wilcott’s claim is based on “second hand” information.
A version of the document was declassified by the Trump administration in 2017, though it redacted a portion of a note that runs along the bottom of it. That redaction obscured the name of a CIA official, Dan Nieschur, who fielded requests from congressional investigators in the 1970s and searched Oswald’s files. Jefferson Morley, editor of the Substack newsletter JFK Facts, said that inconsequential lifting of such redactions seems to be common in this latest document release, allowing the government to claim it is releasing thousands of documents, while most had largely already been in the public domain.
The memo, written to a person identified only as “JHW,” explains that CIA official Russ Holmes “inherited the so-called Oswald files, but that he has assured me the Agency had no contact with Oswald.” The memo says that “contrary records” might be in “EA” — a likely reference to the CIA’s East Asia desk — and that they would be searched for and checked if found.” “He is after it,” the memo says of Holmes, who became legendary for his now-declassified CIA archive on the assassination.
The new JFK files include a number of personnel records connected to Wilcott, whose testimony before the House committee in the late 1970s made news at the time.
Oswald’s next few years make much more sense with a connection to the CIA than without them.
After studying Russian while in the military — perhaps trained at the Army Language School in Monterey, California, according to Talbot, sourcing the claim to the Warren Commission chief counsel J. Lee Rankin — Oswald was discharged with a false claim of his mother’s ill health.
Completely broke, with only $203 in his bank account, he took a boat to England nine days after his discharge. Then, according to his wife, Oswald took a military transport flight to Finland, staying at two of the nicest hotels in Helsinki.
Oswald then took an overnight train from Helsinki to Moscow. Once there, he presented himself at the U.S. Embassy to announce he’d become a defector. Embassy staff later recalled that his defection speech sounded odd and rehearsed. He spent two and a half years in the Soviet Union and then, just as curiously as he’d defected, returned home to the United States.
If the series of moves — from the discharge to the flight to the defection to the return — were made at the behest of the CIA, they make sense, with Oswald playing some type of role in the inscrutable world of spycraft. Absent an intelligence link, the tick-tock of Oswald’s post-military years would be situated somewhere between extraordinarily implausible to impossible to pull off.
The CIA is known to have explored creative uses of psychedelics — and Dulles was specifically aware of these activities, even proposing some of the uses. On March 2, 1960, according to a declassified CIA report included in last week’s document release, the CIA director briefed Richard Nixon, then the vice president, on a proposal to deal with Fidel Castro and Cuba. The report, which appears to be another version of a previously declassified document, included plans for economic sabotage of cane production and interference with oil deliveries.
A more innovative idea presented in the briefing, according to the CIA, appears to be a reference to dosing Castro with LSD, which the agency was at the time experimenting with. Nixon was told that the agency had “a drug, which if placed in Castro’s food, would make him behave in such an irrational manner that a public appearance could have very damaging results to him.”
The CIA’s claim to have had no contact with Oswald is undercut by the fact that George de Mohrenschildt, a CIA asset, became close friends with Oswald in the months before the assassination. That spring, de Mohrenschildt traveled to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. According to documents found in the newly declassified files, at the same time as his trip, the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division ran a search on de Mohrenschildt, “exact reason unknown,” according to two documents created by a CIA analyst included in last week’s declassification.
The covert arm of the division was run at the time by E. Howard Hunt, a black ops specialist who confessed later in life to learning ahead of time of a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy that involved high-level figures in the CIA.
“It is interesting that Allen’s interest in de Mohrenschildt coincided with the earlier portion of this trip,” the memo concludes, referring to Gale Allen, a case officer with the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division at the time, “and the information would suggest that possibly Allen and de Mohrenschildt were possibly in the same environment in Washington, D.C., circa 26 April 1963.”
In the wake of the latest document release, which also withheld countless additional documents, Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported that a source who reviewed the undisclosed records said they included evidence of CIA involvement in the assassination. Carlson said that he had invited his friend Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director who also withheld crucial documents, on to his show to respond. “Though he rarely turns down a televised interview, he refused to come,” Carlson said. “We hope he will reconsider.”
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Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov meets Russian president Vladimir Putin during a visit to the joint headquarters of the Russian armed forces in this picture released on December 17, 2022. (photo: Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik/Kremlin/Reuters)
Russian President also ordered strengthening of Russia’s borders and safety of residents in annexed regions of Ukraine.
Speaking on Security Services Day, widely celebrated in Russia, Putin on Monday instructed his security officials to protect the borders, increase control of society, and maximise their “use of the operational, technical and personnel potential” to prevent risks coming from abroad and internal traitors.
“Maximum composure, concentration of forces is now required from counterintelligence agencies, including military intelligence,” the TASS state news agency cited Putin as saying.
“It is necessary to severely suppress the actions of foreign special services, quickly identify traitors, spies and saboteurs,” TASS said.
Russia’s borders must also be strengthened, he said.
“Work must be intensified through the border services and the Federal Security Service [FSB],” Russia’s state-owned RIA news agency cited Putin as saying on Monday.
“And it [the border] must be reliably covered. Any attempts to violate it must be thwarted quickly and effectively using whatever forces and means we have at our disposal, including mobile action units and special forces,” he said.
Putin also said that it is the task of special security services to ensure the safety of people living in regions in Ukraine that Moscow claimed in September had been incorporated into Russia. Kyiv and its Western allies have branded the moves as illegal annexations.
“It is your duty to do everything necessary to ensure their security to the maximum, respect for their rights and freedoms,” Putin said, promising them more “modern equipment and weapons”.
Putin’s comments come as Russian missile attacks on Ukraine have intensified and there is no end in sight to Russia’s war on Ukraine, now in its 10th month.
Speaking to the leaders of several NATO countries via video link on Monday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continued to urge Ukraine’s allies to supply its military with more weapons.
“Russian aggression can and must fail. And our task now is to accelerate it,” he told the NATO leaders assembled in Riga, Latvia.
Zelenskyy said in a late-night address on Sunday that some nine million of Ukraine’s estimated 40 million people had their electricity restored after Russia’s missile barrage last week focused on electricity and water infrastructure.
Also on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Zelenskyy of a “lack of understanding of the seriousness of the moment and lack of concern for his people”.
Lavrov also made a sharp verbal attack on the West and what he described as the “hysterical reaction” to the situation in Ukraine in an interview with the Belarus 1 TV channel in Minsk.
Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine had destroyed the “geopolitical games of the West”, which had wanted to turn Ukraine into a permanent threat to Russia, TASS quoted the Russian foreign minister as saying.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in a year-end news conference on Monday, said with regret that he expected the war in Ukraine “will go on”.
“I am not optimistic about the possibility of effective peace talks in the immediate future,” Guterres said.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice Prime Minister & Minister of Digital Transformation, Government of Ukraine, on Centre stage during day two of Web Summit 2022 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. (photo: Getty Images)
Using suitcase-sized solid-state hard drives, called Snowball Edge units — delivered to Ukraine through the Polish border — Amazon has helped back up critical infrastructure and economic information beginning the day Russia launched its invasion.
"This is the most technologically advanced war in human history," The Los Angeles Times reported Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's 31-year-old vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, said, adding that Amazon Web Services' "leadership made a decision that saved the Ukrainian government and economy."
More than 10 million gigabytes of Ukrainian government and economic data has been saved so far, including data from "27 Ukrainian ministries, 18 Ukrainian universities, the largest remote learning K–12 school (serving hundreds of thousands of displaced children), and dozens of other private sector companies," according to a statement from Amazon.
On February 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Liam Maxwell, Amazon Web Services' director of government transformation, met with Ukrainian Ambassador Vadym Prystaiko to discuss how the company could assist Ukraine. The pair quickly came up with a plan for saving the country's most essential data.
While it is unclear if Amazon has assisted other countries with such data transfers previously, Maxwell told The Los Angeles Times reported several East Asian countries have since inquired about out-of-the-country cloud backups of their government's data.
On November 29, Fedorov and Maxwell signed a memo agreeing to continue the partnership into 2023.
"AWS made one of the biggest contributions to Ukraine's victory by providing the Ukrainian government with access and resources for migrating to the cloud and securing critical information," Fedorov said at the signing.
In July, Amazon was awarded the Ukrainian peace prize for its work assisting the invaded country in backing up essential files to the cloud. While much of the data is transferred to the cloud through secure networks, the Snowball Edge units, still loaded with terabytes of critical information, are then shipped back to Amazon for safekeeping and to complete the data transfer.
"It's a tense moment around the baggage carousel," The Los Angeles Times reported Maxwell said. "Here's government in a box, literally."
With the valuable drives safely stored and data uploaded, critical information regarding Ukraine's economy, tax and banking systems, and property records are prevented from theft and intentional damage from the Russian invasion.
"You can't take out the cloud with a cruise missile," The Los Angeles Times reported Maxwell said.
Additional companies, including FedEx, The Clorox Company, and Microsoft, have also assisted the war effort in Ukraine, either through direct financial donations or offering specific services, and suspending business in Russia. The Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship has reported more than 50 companies that have followed suit.
Representatives for Amazon and the office of President Zelenskyy did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.
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A man handcuffed holding heroin and a syringe. (photo: Getty Images)
Politicians are floating more and more extreme solutions to the U.S. overdose crisis—ones that won’t even solve the problem.
But experts say the proposed solutions violate human rights and won’t solve the problem.
During a recent meeting with Mineral County residents, West Virginia state Sen. Randy Smith, a Republican, said he wants to draft a bill that would give people convicted of drug crimes the option to sterilize themselves in order to receive shortened prison sentences.
“If you get caught with drugs—and it’s all voluntary, you don’t have to—but if you want to lessen your prison sentence, if you’re a man, you can get a vasectomy so you can’t produce anymore,” Smith said, according to the Cumberland Times-News.
“If you’re a woman, then you get your tubes tied, so you don’t bring any more drug babies into the system. Now, you don’t have to. If you don’t you’re going to jail for a very long time. If you volunteer for the program, then you get a lesser sentence.”
More than 107,000 Americans died of a fatal overdose in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with fentanyl and other synthetic opioids claiming the lives of over 70,000 people. West Virginia has the highest fatal drug overdose rate in the U.S. with 81.4 deaths per 100,000 people.
Smith’s suggestion is a form of eugenics—a practice of controlling the human population by reproducing “desirable” traits and breeding out those considered undesirable, often based on racist and prejudiced assumptions. As VICE News previously reported, the non-profit Project Prevention gives drug users money to get sterilized. Government-funded sterilization programs have also taken aim at people with mental illness, poor people, incarcerated people, and people of color.
“This is part of a broader trend for some people to say that certain people aren't worthy of becoming parents and that they could pass on— genetically or environmentally—certain traits that are undesirable,” said Sheila Vakharia, deputy director of research and academic engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance.
Vakharia said a eugenics-based solution writes off people with addictions as having problems that they can never overcome. It also ignores the fact that people who use drugs can be good parents, she added.
However, she thinks Smith’s suggestion is mostly “political theater.”
“A lot of politicians are grasping at straws and want to look like they're doing something, but also want to look like they're proposing new solutions,” she said.
Hostility has also been ramping up toward drug dealers. Former President Donald Trump, for example, said he wants the death penalty for everyone caught selling drugs—a position shared by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. At a Nov. 7 rally, Trump also expressed admiration for the idea of having a “quick trial” for drug sellers, that he dubiously claimed came from China.
“If they’re guilty, they are executed,” he said. “The bullet is sent to their families… It’s pretty tough stuff. There’s no games. So they have no drug problem whatsoever.”
While there has been an increase in states passing drug-induced homicide laws, through which dealers are charged with murder if they sell drugs to someone who dies, there’s no evidence that those prosecutions make a dent in the overdose crisis.
In fact, media coverage about such cases have led to spikes in overdoses because people get scared to call the authorities if someone needs help, according to a 2021 report from the Health in Justice Action Lab at Northeastern University.
Vakharia said this is an example of “individualizing the problem,” rather than addressing systemic issues.
“Many people's analysis is that we’ve got to blame individual dealers, drug transporters, and distributors because that's what the problem is, rather than actually seeing that the reason why the drug supply is so unpredictable is because of broader social, structural, and policy factors, namely prohibition, which by its definition leads to an unregulated and adulterated drug supply,” she said.
Hiawatha Collins, community and capacity building manager at National Harm Reduction Coalition, said this rhetoric ignores the fact that a lot of drug dealers are selling drugs to manage their own addictions.
“Nobody's really making a whole lot of money and getting rich doing that,” said Collins, a former marine who has used heroin in the past.
“If people had jobs, if people had education, if people had good health care, if people were able to pay their rent If he was able to pay their rent and keep food on the table—nobody wants to sell drugs.”
As the pandemic has exacerbated societal inequities, large homeless encampments have become another political flashpoint in the War on Drugs. Some policymakers have even suggested forcibly removing them as a solution—or started the process.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently launched an initiative that directs city employees, including the police, to hospitalize mentally ill people who are in public against their will, “even when there is no recent dangerous act,” per state guidelines. In Spring, the mayor also directed the city to start clearing homeless encampments, and some people who refused to leave were arrested.
Many of the encampments are most visible on the West Coast. California had cleared more than 1,250 homeless encampments between September 2021 and August 2022, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office. In a recent op-ed in the California Globe, Edward Ring, co-founder of the conservative think tank California Policy Center, wrote that people addicted to drugs “could be removed to regional camps set up in inexpensive parts of California’s urban counties.”
“To help earn their keep, they could participate in conservation projects and other character building work, and recover their sobriety, their dignity, and eventually their freedom. The truly mentally ill would have to be placed, involuntarily, in psychiatric hospitals,” Ring said, which drew comparisons to concentration camps on Twitter.
Vakharia said sending people to far-off locations will likely make it harder for those who are overdosing to get medical attention. The appeal of these proposals is that people won’t have to come face to face with visible poverty, she said.
“A lot of this is because of out of sight, out of mind. Some people just don't understand how some people struggled and we don't want to see it.”
Leo Beletsky, a Northeastern University professor of law and health sciences who leads the Health in Justice Action Lab, said a lot of these “fringe ideas” have been previously discredited.
“First of all, they're ineffective. Second of all, there are human rights abuses and ethical issues and moral problems with these kinds of approaches.”
But he said they’re also an indictment of mainstream political leaders who have failed to get a grip on the overdose crisis by implementing more widespread treatment and harm reduction measures, including access to methadone and safe consumption sites.
He pointed to President Joe Biden’s administration backtracking on providing funding for crack pipes as one example. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, recently rejected the idea of using any of the $2 billion the state has received in opioid settlement money from pharmaceutical companies to fund safe injection sites after widespread condemnation from the right.
In Philadelphia, harm reductionists have been trying for years to open a safe injection site but they were sued by former U.S. Attorney William McSwain because the sites are federally illegal. The case has since escalated, with the Department of Justice asking for more time to come to a “possible amicable resolution to continue” earlier this month.
“The rhetoric goes, ‘Well, what we're doing isn't working like, the scientific and quote unquote humane approach, isn't working. We need something else,’” Beletsky said. “But we never tried it, really.”
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Artisanal mining is common in the DRC. (photo: AFP)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
President Biden has just wrapped up a three-day summit in Washington with leaders from 49 African nations. The U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit was held as the U.S. is trying to counter the growing influence of China and Russia in Africa. During the summit, President Biden pledged $55 billion to Africa over the next three years.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We plan to commit $55 billion in Africa. … That number represents a comprehensive commitment from the United States to invest in Africa’s people, Africa’s infrastructure, Africa’s agriculture, Africa’s health system, Africa’s security and more.
AMY GOODMAN: President Biden also announced that he and Vice President Kamala Harris will visit sub-Saharan Africa next year for the first time as president and vice president. He expressed support for the Africa Union to join the G20 and for Africa to have permanent representation on the U.N. Security Council.
Senegalese President Macky Sall, who is the current chair of the African Union, refused to rule out also working with Russia and China, but welcomed Biden’s pledges.
PRESIDENT MACKY SALL: We share the same spirit. We want to advance our common agenda with you and take our partnership to the next level in an inclusive approach, bringing together governments, the private sector, civil society and the African diaspora.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, we’re joined by Emira Woods. She is executive director of the Green Leadership Trust, a network of Black, Brown and Indigenous people on boards of environmental organizations and philanthropies. Emira Woods is also an ambassador for Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity, originally from Liberia.
Emira, thanks so much for joining us again on Democracy Now! Talk about the significance of this three-day summit, what surprised you, what came out of this, and the relationship between the United States and these African nations that were there, and those that were not invited.
EMIRA WOODS: Well, Amy, it’s always a joy to be with you. Thank you so much for having space for this conversation.
I would say, you know, the summit, it comes after four dismal years of the Trump administration, where the former president was literally calling African countries, you know, derogatory terms, “S—hole countries,” right? I mean, the just shocking abuse that came out of that administration. So, when you see a summit like this, yes, it’s very much a photo op, right? But it’s a photo op coming after this period, when, quite frankly, it’s being welcomed.
I think we have to then look beyond the photo op to recognize that, you know, Africa is still very much — whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican administration, it’s still very much seen in the lens of geopolitics, but also in the lens of this resource war, right? I think what we have — we have to pull back the lens. Historically, African resources have driven the global economy, whether it is, you know, the cola that goes into Coca-Cola or the uranium that was from Democratic Republic of the Congo that was used for the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There is a long history of Africa’s resources being used by the global economy, being used, quite frankly, to create the industrialization that we see in Europe, in the U.S. It is the resources of Africa that drove that industrialization. Yet Africa did not benefit.
And so, what we see is that a global economy that is deeply unjust almost marginalizes — continues to marginalize Africa and the African world and people of African descent all over the world. It is a deeply kind of racist, capitalist extractive system that has, quite frankly, destroyed the planet, leading to climate change, global warming, disasters all over the planet. And what you see is that people on whose land those resources lie continue to be rendered invisible. So, whether it is China or Russia or the United States, the story is the same: the extraction at the expense of communities, at the expense particularly of women, children and people who are desperately seeking a healthy, brighter future.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaking to the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit.
DEFENSE SECRETARY LLOYD AUSTIN: Regarding Russia and China, you know, the PRC, we’re witnessing the PRC expand its footprint in the — on the continent on a daily basis. And as they do that, they’re also expanding their economic influence. A troubling piece there is that they’re not always transparent in terms of what they’re doing, and that creates problems that will be eventually destabilizing, if they’re not already. In turning to Russia, we see Russia continuing to peddle cheap weapons. Some of that was mentioned before by one of our senior leaders here. And also we see Russia employing mercenaries across the continent, and that is destabilizing, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you, Emira Woods, can respond to this, I mean, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the difference between how China and Russia deal with Africa, and, I mean, the number of just U.S. military bases in Africa alone, and how Biden is trying to deal with countering Chinese, Russian influence?
EMIRA WOODS: So, let’s remember, Amy, that 90% of U.S. trade with Africa is in oil, gas and mining. It’s in the extractive resources. And it is in those areas where the resources lie that there has always been military interest. And this is from colonial days to the neocolonial days and regardless of the country — U.S., China, Russia. The military follows the companies — right? — the multinational corporations that are interested in extracting those resources. So, what you have had is an African continent where it is almost, you know, this geopolitical nightmare.
Pick one country. Somalia, let’s say. Right? Somalia, throughout the Cold War, went from the USSR to the U.S. almost trading — you know, trading their opportunities to dump weapons, particularly into Somalia, making Somalia incredibly ungovernable. We have to recognize that it is the interests in resources, whether it’s the uranium in the northern part of Somalia or the strategic positioning of Somalia in an area where the straits — where the global trade flows. It is the centrality of these countries that makes the global political battles more intense.
So, what you have had is the U.S. for the last 10 years expanding, actually, its military might in Africa, expanding the use of drones in places like Somalia, where you have seen untold deaths of civilians with the increased use of these drones. But, essentially, it’s the U.S. picking and choosing where to send and build military machineries that are then unleashed against the people. So, in the case of Somalia, it was the U.S. drones, but the U.S. also funneling weapons to Ethiopia for a ground war in Somalia and, again, militarizing a region that is already — what you see, the U.S. expanding its efforts to add to the conflict, to add to the chaos, in an interest to be able to have access and controlling those resources.
And you have a similar situation with increasing military expansion from China, increasing military expansion from Russia. And in each of those cases, it is both the uniformed officers, as well as the mercenaries, right? It is the U.S. military contractors, the increasing U.S. security and surveillance, whether it’s the Sahel or the Horn or throughout the continent. These relationships are being deepened.
And so, what you have is a real — a continued push by mostly fossil fuel-driven industries interested in the extraction. You have militaries then supporting those very narrowly defined, quote-unquote, “national interests.” And you have a continuation of relationships that are propping up those who are seeking to open up channels for the resources to flow.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to President of the Democratic Republic of Congo Félix Tshisekedi, who addressed the issue of climate change at the summit.
PRESIDENT FÉLIX TSHISEKEDI: [translated] Since we are gathered here to speak about fighting against climate change, if you will allow me, I would like to first speak with regret to let you know about the crisis that my country — that my country has lived through, the first few hours, through the floods and the deluge and rains, because of the climate crisis that has caused hundreds of deaths, as well as enormous material damages, that could have been avoided if the commitments of the polluting countries would have been held, would have been kept for the past few years. So, it is imperious. It is necessary.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s DRC President Tshisekedi. Emira, like Democracy Now!, you were in Sharm el-Sheikh at the U.N. climate summit in Egypt. If you can talk about the issue that was the subject of the summit — loss and damage — the U.S. pushing hard against it, don’t want the liability, even though it’s historically the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, but what it means for Africa?
EMIRA WOODS: Clearly, Amy, what we see around the world, but particularly in Africa, is that those who do not — did not contribute to the climate crisis are paying the heaviest cost. So it is Black, Brown, Indigenous people around the world that are bearing the cost, right? So, remember, when we talk about Africa, the resources were extracted to industrialize the European continent, to industrialize the U.S., and those resources were extracted at the expense of communities where those resources lie.
And so, what you have seen is incredible climate change, global warming. The repercussions, the impacts on those communities, on their health, on their opportunity to live healthy lives, is disastrous. So, we have seen increases in floods, increases in heat waves throughout the world. And it is these deeply racist, structural, global economic decisions that are creating an unjust trading system, creating still the expansion in fossil fuels — oil, gas and mining — destroying communities.
In the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it’s the best example. There are, in the rainforests of the DRC, peatlands, that are actually opportunities for nature-based solutions to the climate crisis. These were solutions that Indigenous people, community-based people, who know the land, have been putting forward. So, I think we’ve got to recognize, when we talk about climate change, those who have paid the heaviest price are also those who have solutions and must be in the decision-making. And we saw in Sharm el-Sheikh, it was the fossil fuel lobbyists that outnumbered almost all delegations there in Egypt. And I think we’ve got to begin to recognize that we will continue to have a path of destruction of the planet, unless we change the structural systems that oppress communities.
So, the solutions are there. When it comes to loss and damage, the solution has been really clear. There must be reparations — right? — justice, centering justice in our global economy, understanding that those who have paid the heaviest price have also borne the cost, and there should be opportunities where there is investment in a just transition for the future, in renewable energy that is community-based, in opportunities to actually bring forward innovative financing. Right? So, there’s a lot of discussion of special drawing rights from the World Bank and the IMF, to innovative — to find solutions that would actually move resources towards the just transition, towards a Global Green New Deal, not only for Africa but for the world. And I think we —
AMY GOODMAN: Emira, we only have — we only have a minute, and I wanted to quickly ask you — President Biden and Vice President Harris, their trip to sub-Saharan Africa will be the first since President Obama. I was wondering if, in a minute, you could reflect on Obama’s legacy in Africa, but particularly look at the 2011 attack on Libya and the effect that had on the continent.
EMIRA WOODS: Once again, we’ve got to look at the issues of fossil fuel industries and militarism. That was the case in Libya, whether it’s for the Obama administration or now for the Biden administration and future administrations. It is getting rid of the power of the fossil fuel industry that will put us on a path that not only protects the planet but protects communities.
So, when we look at the Obama administration, we have to think about the expansion of AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command, which was established, quite frankly, you know — and its first act was in Libya. And I think we’ve got to recognize that with the expansion of militaries, there will be continuous both political and economic chaos.
We have seen the implications of the crisis in Libya. The ouster of Gaddafi, under the Obama administration, has led to disastrous results not only for Libya, but for the entire region, particularly the neighboring countries, and even countries as far off as Mali, where coups were being organized by those who carried guns, supplied by the U.S. and Libya, across borders into other states.
So, we’ve got to stop the flow of militarism. We’ve got to understand the links of militarism to the fossil fuel crisis, to the climate crisis. We’ve got to begin to create other opportunities, where fossil fuel companies are taxed and we look at opportunities to actually cap the flow of these harmful fossil fuels into our global economy. And we’ve got to look at all of these opportunities to change global governance, so that those particularly Black, Brown and Indigenous people have the opportunity for what you said at the beginning of this show in Puerto Rico: self-determination. This is the cry across the planet, self-determination of peoples.
AMY GOODMAN: Emira Woods, I want to thank you so much for being with us, executive director of the Green Leadership Trust, also ambassador for Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity, originally from Liberia.
Coming up, we look at why the White House pressured Senator Sanders to withdraw a resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Cabral” by Senegal’s Orchestra Baobab, in honor of the Pan-Africanist revolutionary Amilcar Cabral.
"Acidification from carbon dioxide overload in the atmosphere is different than acid rain caused by sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from fossil fuel burning for electric power generation or manufacturing." (photo: Frank Gunn/AP)
Scientists say the atmospheric carbon overload responsible for global warming might also be making large lakes more acidic
Now, another danger: They — and other big lakes around the world — might be getting more acidic, which could make them less hospitable for some fish and plants.
Scientists are building a sensor network to spot Lake Huron water chemistry trends. It's a first step toward a hoped-for system that would track carbon dioxide and pH in all five Great Lakes over multiple years, said project co-leader Reagan Errera of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“If you change things chemically, you're going to change how things behave and work and that includes the food web,” said Errera, a research ecologist with NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“Does that mean your favorite fish might not be around any more? We don't know that, but we know things will change. Maybe where and when they spawn, where they're located, what they eat.”
Oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide that human activity pumps into the atmosphere — the primary cause of climate change. Acidification endangers coral reefs and other marine life.
Studies based on computer models suggest the same thing may be happening in big freshwater systems. But few programs are conducting long-term monitoring to find out — or to investigate the ecological ripple effects.
“This doesn't mean the waters are going to be unsafe to swim in. It's not like we're making super acid battery liquid,” said Galen McKinley, a Columbia University environmental sciences professor. “We're talking about long-term change in the environment that to humans would be imperceptible."
A 2018 study of four German reservoirs found their pH levels had declined — moving closer to acidity — three times faster in 35 years than in oceans since the Industrial Revolution.
Researchers say Great Lakes also could approach acidity around the same rate as in oceans by 2100. Data from the Lake Huron project will help determine if they're right.
Two sensors have been attached to a floating weather buoy at Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary near Alpena, Michigan. One measures carbon dioxide pressure in the water column and the other pH. Additionally, crews are collecting water samples at varying depths within the 4,300-square-mile (11,137-square-kilometer) area for chemical analysis.
Besides disrupting aquatic life and habitat, acidification could deteriorate hundreds of wooden shipwrecks believed resting on the bottom, said Stephanie Gandulla, the sanctuary's resource protection coordinator and a study co-leader.
Other monitoring stations and sampling sites are planned, Errera said. The goal is to take baseline measurements, then see how they change over time.
Data also is needed from lakes Erie, Michigan, Ontario and Superior, she said. All are part of the world's largest surface freshwater system but have distinct characteristics, including water chemistry, nutrients and other conditions needed for healthy biological communities.
Acidification from carbon dioxide overload in the atmosphere is different than acid rain caused by sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from fossil fuel burning for electric power generation or manufacturing.
While more potent, acid rain covers relatively small areas and can be reduced with scrubbing equipment, as the U.S. Clean Air Act requires. But the effect of carbon-related acidification is worldwide and potentially more damaging because there's no easy or quick fix.
"The only solution is a global solution," McKinley said. “Everyone cuts their emissions.”
Regardless of how well nations accomplish that, big lakes probably will continue acidifying as they absorb carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, plus carbon-laden water runoff from land, she said.
Less certain are effects on ecosystems, although initial studies have raised concerns.
Based on laboratory tests, scientists who documented soaring acidity in the German reservoirs found it can imperil a type of water flea by hampering defense from predators. The tiny crustaceans are an important food for amphibians and fish.
Scientists in Taiwan experimented with Chinese mitten crabs, an Asian delicacy but an invasive species elsewhere. Increasing water acidity in lab tanks to projected 2100 levels more than tripled their mortality rates, according to a report last year.
Other studies have found freshwater acidification harms development and growth of young pink salmon, also known as humpback salmon, an important commercial and sport fishing species in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.
But it's unknown how big such problems will get, said Emily Stanley, a University of Wisconsin freshwater ecology professor.
“I honestly don't see this as a thing that we as lake scientists should be freaking out about,” Stanley said. “There are so many other challenges facing lakes that are larger and more immediate,” such as invasive species and harmful algae.
Many lakes emit more carbon dioxide than they take in, she said. But other scientists say even those could acidify because their outflow will slow as atmospheric concentrations surge.
Either way, tracking lakes' carbon dioxide levels is a good idea because the compound is fundamental to processes including photosynthesis that algae and other aquatic plants use to make food, Stanley said.
A crucial question is the effect of CO2-related acidification on microscopic plants called phytoplankton, said Beth Stauffer, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette biologist studying the situation around river mouths where fresh and ocean waters meet.
Studies suggest some of the tiniest phytoplankton may thrive in acidic waters, while larger types — more nutritious for fish — fade.
“It's like walking into a buffet and instead of having the salad bar and roast turkey, you have just Skittles,” Stauffer said.
Of particular interest for the Great Lakes are quagga mussels, said Harvey Bootsma, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee lake scientist. The prolific invaders have elbowed aside other plankton eaters and fueled nuisance algae. Acidification could weaken quaggas' calcium carbonate shells, as it has with ocean mussels and clams.
But that's hardly a silver lining, Errera said. The same fate could befall native mussels that conservationists are struggling to protect.
The potential upheaval in freshwater ecosystems is one example among many of global warming's long reach, she said.
“Those greenhouse gases we're putting into the atmosphere have to go somewhere,” Errera said. “The oceans and large freshwater bodies are where they're going, and acidification happens as a result.”
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