28 December 22
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German security researchers studying biometric capture devices popular with the U.S. military got more than they expected for $68 on eBay.
The device’s memory card held the names, nationalities, photographs, fingerprints and iris scans of 2,632 people.
Most people in the database, which was reviewed by The New York Times, were from Afghanistan and Iraq. Many were known terrorists and wanted individuals, but others appeared to be people who had worked with the U.S. government or simply been stopped at checkpoints. Metadata on the device, called a Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit, or SEEK II, revealed that it had last been used in the summer of 2012 near Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The device — a relic of the vast biometric collection system the Pentagon built in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — is a physical reminder that although the United States has moved on from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the tools built to fight them and the information they held live on in ways unintended by their creators.
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Authorities are encouraging residents to leave Kherson, which was liberated from Russian control in November. (photo: Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Russia Shells Maternity Hospital in Kherson
Thirteen-year-old Nika Selivanova made a heart shape with both her hands, waving goodbye to her best friend Inna who was pressed up against the glass partition that divided the entrance hall of Kherson's train station from the waiting area.
The girls didn't know when they might see each other again.
Nika's family was leaving Kherson, not sure of where they would end up eventually. For now, they were heading to the western city of Khmelnytskyi, hoping they would get some help there.
The past few days in Kherson had simply been too much for Nika's mother Elena.
"Before, they [Russian forces] shelled us seven to 10 times a day, now it's 70-80 times, all day long. It's too scary." Elena said. "I love Ukraine and my dear city. But we have to go."
Elena and her three daughters are among more than 400 people who have left Kherson since Christmas Day, after a sharp increase in the intensity of the bombardment of the city by the Russian military.
On Tuesday, a hospital maternity ward was shelled. No-one was hurt but it has further escalated fear among people.
Elena left by train, in an evacuation facilitated by the Ukrainian government.
Hundreds of people are leaving on their own, a queue of cars building up at the checkpoint leading out of Kherson, filled with terrified civilians.
Iryna Antonenko was in tears when we walked up to her car to speak to her.
'We can't take it anymore. The shelling is so intense. We stayed this whole time and thought it would pass and that we would be lucky. But a strike hit the house next to ours, and my father's home was also shelled," she said.
She planned to travel to Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine where she has family.
Just last month, there had been jubilant scenes in Kherson. Taken by Russian forces on the second day of the invasion, the city was liberated on 11 November.
Close to the spot where masses had gathered waving Ukrainian flags to celebrate being freed from Russian control, a mortar attack on Christmas Eve left eleven dead, and dozens injured.
Among the dead were a social worker, a butcher and a woman selling mobile Sim cards - ordinary people working at or visiting the city's central market.
That day, Kherson was hit by mortars 41 times, according to the Ukrainian government.
The Russians are firing from the left (east) bank of the Dnipro river, where they withdrew to; the waterway has become a de facto frontline in the south of Ukraine.
Kherson is a strategically important region, often called the gateway to Crimea. Many analysts say that Russia has now been forced into a defensive position here.
It's hard to see what it hopes to gain from the pounding of Kherson. In addition to mortar shells, we have also seen incendiary munitions being used - fiery sparks raining down on the city, intended to set fire to targets.
It's also unclear if the Ukrainian military is attempting to take back control of areas on the left bank of the river.
Here in the city, there's barely ever a break from the constant sound of mortar shell attacks.
Serhii Breshun, 56, was killed when he was asleep. His home collapsed on him after a shell hit it.
The day after he died, we met his mother, 82-year-old Tamara, who had come to search for his passport in the rubble. She needed the document to get his body released from the morgue.
"I must have had a sense that something would go wrong that day. Because I spoke to him [over the phone] and urged him to leave the house. He didn't and that was it. Our lives have been ruined," she wept.
We'd barely finished talking to her, and there were more loud explosions.
The elderly mother's lone pursuit to give her son a dignified farewell is a dangerous one, because no part of Kherson is safe.
Surviving here, whether out in a street or inside a home, is a matter of chance.
Thirty-nine-year-old Red Cross volunteer Viktoria Yaryshko was killed in a mortar shell explosion just outside the organisation's base in Kherson, a few feet away from safety.
Her mother Liudmyla Berezhna showed us the medal of honour Viktoria was given.
"I'm very happy she helped a lot of people. She was so kind. But it's also painful for me. I must recover and raise her two children. I tell them they should be proud of their mother because she is a hero," she said.
Viktoria had been living in the underground shelter of the Red Cross with her two children - 17-year-old Alyonushka and 12-year-old Sasha. They continue to live there, feeling comfort and protection amidst a group of volunteers who've become family.
'When someone so close dies, it is difficult. But if we give up and stop, then her death would have been in vain. We work to make sure people live. Everything else is secondary," said Dmitro Rakitskyi, Viktoria's friend and another volunteer.
But it's hard to do that knowing your own family could be in danger every minute.
When a few moments later, more bombs go off, Dmitro paces up and down trying to call his wife, tension visible on his face. He has two children.
"They don't want to leave. They worry about me, and I worry about them. That's how we live," he said.
"What makes me most angry is that they [Russian forces] always hit civilian infrastructure. Houses, apartment blocks, boiler rooms. It's impossible to understand the logic behind these attacks," Dmitro said.
"We almost never have power or water. It comes briefly sometimes and is gone again because of shelling. It's very scary at night. We still have gas though, and are able to stay warm," one resident, Larysa Revtova, said.
Tens of thousands of civilians are still living in Kherson, but at least twice this week the regional administration has urged them to leave.
It is a city haunted by relentless and indiscriminate attacks.
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With Republicans set to take over the House in January, Democratic lawmakers are throwing in the towel on efforts to end the political dark money era. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
With Republicans taking over the House in January, Democratic lawmakers have given up on efforts to end the political dark money era. Congress’s year-end omnibus spending bill will once again help dark money donors hide their identities from the public.
With Republicans set to take over the House in January, Democratic lawmakers are throwing in the towel on efforts to end the political dark money era. Provisions in the $1.7 trillion spending bill, which is often used as a vehicle to enact controversial measures because it funds critical government operations, will prohibit Biden administration officials from doing much, if anything, to regulate dark money groups on their own for the rest of Joe Biden’s first term.
Democrats’ surrender on dark money comes after several failed legislative efforts to compel politically active nonprofits to disclose their donors — and as dark money becomes increasingly enmeshed within our political system. Ever since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision allowed anonymous donations to flow into elections, both parties have become increasingly reliant on dark pools of cash to fund TV ad wars over presidential elections, congressional races, and even judicial confirmation campaigns. The situation allows ultrawealthy, mystery donors to exert unprecedented influence in Washington.
The dark money arms race recently culminated in a historic $1.6 billion donation raised by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo. As former president Donald Trump’s judicial adviser, Leo helped select three new Supreme Court justices, while his dark money network spent tens of millions boosting their confirmations. Leo’s network also funds politicians and nonprofits bringing and boosting precedent-setting cases before the high court, like the decision overturning federal protections for abortion rights.
Democratic lawmakers made several attempts during President Joe Biden’s first term to pass campaign finance reform bills targeting dark money groups — including as recently as this fall. The most recent effort failed due to the party’s refusal to eliminate or reform filibuster rules requiring sixty votes to advance most legislation in the Senate.
As a result, Democrats have now twice failed to utilize the only two governing trifectas they’ve had since the Citizens United decision to limit the impact of the ruling.
There are several provisions, or so-called riders, attached to the omnibus bill that are designed to protect dark money nonprofits that spend on politics.
One rider once again bars the Securities and Exchange Commission from spending any funds to establish or implement any rules requiring companies to disclose their donations to political groups and politically active nonprofits, as well as payments to lobbying groups.
GOP lawmakers have included this provision in government spending bills since 2015 — with Democrats repeatedly accepting the measure as the cost of keeping government operations funded.
Democrats pushed to do away with this ban in one of their failed campaign finance and democracy reform bills. A standalone measure has sat in committee since early 2021.
Another long-standing rider included in the omnibus bill prohibits the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from issuing any new regulations regarding whether “social welfare” nonprofits, commonly known as dark money groups, qualify for their tax exemptions.
Under IRS guidelines, dark money groups are not supposed to devote more than half of their expenditures toward politics. This rider means the IRS cannot even enforce its existing weak regulations on the matter.
A third rider bars officials in the executive office of the president from requesting a determination into whether a nonprofit qualifies for its tax exemption, except in cases involving matters of national security.
“These damaging dark money poison pills are a long-time cancer on our democracy, and unfortunately they have yet to be cured,” Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president at Public Citizen, told the Lever. “We will continue the fight to remove them and enable agencies to act to grapple with the secret money surge we have seen play out ever since the overreaching Citizens United decision came down 13 years ago.”
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Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a news conference after a meeting of the State Council on youth policy in Moscow, Russia, December 22, 2022. (photo: Sputnik/Sergey Guneev/Reuters)
Moscow’s response to the Western price cap is to stop supplying crude oil and oil products from February 1.
Moscow gave its long-awaited response to the price cap on Tuesday. It bans the supply of crude oil and oil products from February 1 for five months to nations that abide by the cap.
The presidential decree said the sales ban may be lifted in individual cases through a “special decision” by Putin.
The Group of Seven (G7) leading industrialised nations, the European Union and Australia agreed this month to a $60-per-barrel price cap on Russian seaborne crude oil effective from December 5.
The cap, which was introduced alongside an EU embargo on seaborne deliveries of Russian crude oil, aims to ensure Russia cannot bypass the embargo by selling its oil to third countries at high prices.
It also seeks to restrict Russia’s revenue while making sure Moscow keeps supplying the global market.
Russia has expressed confidence it would find new buyers and said the cap will not affect its military campaign in Ukraine.
Its presidential decree, however, appears to have had at least one immediate effect, an oil and gas analyst, Vyacheslav Mishchenko, told Al Jazeera.
“There is already a hike on crude oil prices in the market,” he said. “I think this is a direct impact of the decree.”
Russia is the world’s second largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia, and a significant disruption to its sales would have far-reaching consequences for global energy supplies.
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Nick Pickles, public policy director for Twitter, speaks during a full committee hearing on “Mass Violence, Extremism, and Digital Responsibility,” in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 18, 2019. (photo: Olivier DoulieryAFP/Getty Images)
Internal documents show Twitter whitelisted CENTCOM accounts that were then used to run its online influence campaign abroad.
Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.
The accounts in question started out openly affiliated with the U.S. government. But then the Pentagon appeared to shift tactics and began concealing its affiliation with some of these accounts — a move toward the type of intentional platform manipulation that Twitter has publicly opposed. Though Twitter executives maintained awareness of the accounts, they did not shut them down, but let them remain active for years. Some remain active.
The revelations are buried in the archives of Twitter’s emails and internal tools, to which The Intercept was granted access for a brief period last week alongside a handful of other writers and reporters. Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the billionaire started giving access to company documents, saying in a Twitter Space that “the general idea is to surface anything bad Twitter has done in the past.” The files, which included records generated under Musk’s ownership, provide unprecedented, if incomplete, insight into decision-making within a major social media company.
Twitter did not provide unfettered access to company information; rather, for three days last week, they allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive. I did not agree to any conditions governing the use of the documents, and I made efforts to authenticate and contextualize the documents through further reporting. The redactions in the embedded documents in this story were done by The Intercept to protect privacy, not Twitter.
The direct assistance Twitter provided to the Pentagon goes back at least five years.
On July 26, 2017, Nathaniel Kahler, at the time an official working with U.S. Central Command — also known as CENTCOM, a division of the Defense Department — emailed a Twitter representative with the company’s public policy team, with a request to approve the verification of one account and “whitelist” a list of Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.”
“We’ve got some accounts that are not indexing on hashtags — perhaps they were flagged as bots,” wrote Kahler. “A few of these had built a real following and we hope to salvage.” Kahler added that he was happy to provide more paperwork from his office or SOCOM, the acronym for the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Twitter at the time had built out an expanded abuse detection system aimed in part toward flagging malicious activity related to the Islamic State and other terror organizations operating in the Middle East. As an indirect consequence of these efforts, one former Twitter employee explained to The Intercept, accounts controlled by the military that were frequently engaging with extremist groups were being automatically flagged as spam. The former employee, who was involved with the whitelisting of CENTCOM accounts, spoke with The Intercept under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
In his email, Kahler sent a spreadsheet with 52 accounts. He asked for priority service for six of the accounts, including @yemencurrent, an account used to broadcast announcements about U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. Around the same time, @yemencurrent, which has since been deleted, had emphasized that U.S. drone strikes were “accurate” and killed terrorists, not civilians, and promoted the U.S. and Saudi-backed assault on Houthi rebels in that country.
Other accounts on the list were focused on promoting U.S.-supported militias in Syria and anti-Iran messages in Iraq. One account discussed legal issues in Kuwait. Though many accounts remained focused on one topic area, others moved from topic to topic. For instance, @dala2el, one of the CENTCOM accounts, shifted from messaging around drone strikes in Yemen in 2017 to Syrian government-focused communications this year.
On the same day that CENTCOM sent its request, members of Twitter’s site integrity team went into an internal company system used for managing the reach of various users and applied a special exemption tag to the accounts, internal logs show.
One engineer, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that he had never seen this type of tag before, but upon close inspection, said that the effect of the “whitelist” tag essentially gave the accounts the privileges of Twitter verification without a visible blue check. Twitter verification would have bestowed a number of advantages, such as invulnerability to algorithmic bots that flag accounts for spam or abuse, as well as other strikes that lead to decreased visibility or suspension.
Kahler told Twitter that the accounts would all be “USG-attributed, Arabic-language accounts tweeting on relevant security issues.” That promise fell short, as many of the accounts subsequently deleted disclosures of affiliation with the U.S. government.
The Internet Archive does not preserve the full history of every account, but The Intercept identified several accounts that initially listed themselves as U.S. government accounts in their bios, but, after being whitelisted, shed any disclosure that they were affiliated with the military and posed as ordinary users.
This appears to align with a major report published in August by online security researchers affiliated with the Stanford Internet Observatory, which reported on thousands of accounts that they suspected to be part of a state-backed information operation, many of which used photorealistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence, a practice also known as “deep fakes.”
The researchers connected these accounts with a vast online ecosystem that included “fake news” websites, meme accounts on Telegram and Facebook, and online personalities that echoed Pentagon messages often without disclosure of affiliation with the U.S. military. Some of the accounts accuse Iran of “threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,” while others promoted allegations that Iran was harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.
The Stanford report did not definitively tie the sham accounts to CENTCOM or provide a complete list of Twitter accounts. But the emails obtained by The Intercept show that the creation of at least one of these accounts was directly affiliated with the Pentagon.
One of the accounts that Kahler asked to have whitelisted, @mktashif, was identified by the researchers as appearing to use a deep-fake photo to obscure its real identity. Initially, according to the Wayback Machine, @mktashif did disclose that it was a U.S. government account affiliated with CENTCOM, but at some point, this disclosure was deleted and the account’s photo was changed to the one Stanford identified as a deep fake.
The new Twitter bio claimed that the account was an unbiased source of opinion and information, and, roughly translated from Arabic, “dedicated to serving Iraqis and Arabs.” The account, before it was suspended earlier this year, routinely tweeted messages denouncing Iran and other U.S. adversaries, including Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Another CENTCOM account, @althughur, which posts anti-Iran and anti-ISIS content focused on an Iraqi audience, changed its Twitter bio from a CENTCOM affiliation to an Arabic phrase that simply reads “Euphrates pulse.”
The former Twitter employee told The Intercept that they were surprised to learn of the Defense Department’s shifting tactics. “It sounds like DOD was doing something shady and definitely not in line with what they had presented to us at the time,” they said.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s deeply concerning if the Pentagon is working to shape public opinion about our military’s role abroad and even worse if private companies are helping to conceal it,” said Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, a nonprofit that works toward diplomatic solutions to foreign conflicts.
“Congress and social media companies should investigate and take action to ensure that, at the very least, our citizens are fully informed when their tax money is being spent on putting a positive spin on our endless wars,” Sperling added.
For many years, Twitter has pledged to shut down all state-backed disinformation and propaganda efforts, never making an explicit exception for the U.S. In 2020, Twitter spokesperson Nick Pickles, in a testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, said that the company was taking aggressive efforts to shut down “coordinated platform manipulation efforts” attributed to government agencies.
“Combatting attempts to interfere in conversations on Twitter remains a top priority for the company, and we continue to invest heavily in our detection, disruption, and transparency efforts related to state-backed information operations. Our goal is to remove bad-faith actors and to advance public understanding of these critical topics,” said Pickles.
In 2018, for instance, Twitter announced the mass suspension of accounts tied to Russian government-linked propaganda efforts. Two years later, the company boasted of shutting down almost 1,000 accounts for association with the Thai military. But rules on platform manipulation, it appears, have not been applied to American military efforts.
The emails obtained by The Intercept show that not only did Twitter whitelist these accounts in 2017 explicitly at the behest of the military, but also that high-level officials at the company discussed the accounts as potentially problematic in the following years.
In the summer of 2020, officials from Facebook reportedly identified fake accounts attributed to CENTCOM’s influence operation on its platform and warned the Pentagon that if Silicon Valley could easily out these accounts as inauthentic, so could foreign adversaries, according to a September report in the Washington Post.
Twitter emails show that during that time in 2020, Facebook and Twitter executives were invited by the Pentagon’s top attorneys to attend classified briefings in a sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as a SCIF, used for highly sensitive meetings.
“Facebook have had a series of 1:1 conversations between their senior legal leadership and DOD’s [general counsel] re: inauthentic activity,” wrote Yoel Roth, then the head of trust and safety at Twitter. “Per FB,” continued Roth, “DOD have indicated a strong desire to work with us to remove the activity — but are now refusing to discuss additional details or steps outside of a classified conversation.”
Stacia Cardille, then an attorney with Twitter, noted in an email to her colleagues that the Pentagon may want to retroactively classify its social media activities “to obfuscate their activity in this space, and that this may represent an overclassification to avoid embarrassment.”
Jim Baker, then the deputy general counsel of Twitter, in the same thread, wrote that the Pentagon appeared to have used “poor tradecraft” in setting up various Twitter accounts, sought to potentially cover its tracks, and was likely seeking a strategy for avoiding public knowledge that the accounts are “linked to each other or to DoD or the USG.” Baker speculated that in the meeting the “DoD might want to give us a timetable for shutting them down in a more prolonged way that will not compromise any ongoing operations or reveal their connections to DoD.”
What was discussed at the classified meetings — which ultimately did take place, according to the Post — was not included in the Twitter emails provided to The Intercept, but many of the fake accounts remained active for at least another year. Some of the accounts on the CENTCOM list remain active even now — like this one, which includes affiliation with CENTCOM, and this one, which does not — while many were swept off the platform in a mass suspension on May 16.
In a separate email sent in May 2020, Lisa Roman, then a vice president of the company in charge of global public policy, emailed William S. Castle, a Pentagon attorney, along with Roth, with an additional list of Defense Department Twitter accounts. “The first tab lists those accounts previously provided to us and the second, associated accounts that Twitter has discovered,” wrote Roman. It’s not clear from this single email what Roman is requesting – she references a phone call preceding the email — but she notes that the second tab of accounts — the ones that had not been explicitly provided to Twitter by the Pentagon — “may violate our Rules.” The attachment included a batch of accounts tweeting in Russian and Arabic about human rights violations committed by ISIS. Many accounts in both tabs were not openly identified as affiliated with the U.S. government.
Twitter executives remained aware of the Defense Department’s special status. This past January, a Twitter executive recirculated the CENTCOM list of Twitter accounts originally whitelisted in 2017. The email simply read “FYI” and was directed to several Twitter officials, including Patrick Conlon, a former Defense Department intelligence analyst then working on the site integrity unit as Twitter’s global threat intelligence lead. Internal records also showed that the accounts that remained from Kahler’s original list are still whitelisted.
Following the mass suspension of many of the accounts this past May, Twitter’s team worked to limit blowback from its involvement in the campaign.
Shortly before publication of the Washington Post story in September, Katie Rosborough, then a communications specialist at Twitter, wrote to alert Twitter lawyers and lobbyists about the upcoming piece. “It’s a story that’s mostly focused on DoD and Facebook; however, there will be a couple lines that reference us alongside Facebook in that we reached out to them [DoD] for a meeting. We don’t think they’ll tie it to anything Mudge-related or name any Twitter employees. We declined to comment,” she wrote. (Mudge is a reference to Peiter Zatko, a Twitter whistleblower who filed a complaint with federal authorities in July, alleging lax security measures and penetration of the company by foreign agents.)
After the Washington Post’s story published, the Twitter team congratulated one another because the story minimized Twitter’s role in the CENTCOM psyop campaign. Instead, the story largely revolved around the Pentagon’s decision to begin a review of its clandestine psychological operations on social media.
“Thanks for doing all that you could to manage this one,” wrote Rebecca Hahn, another former Twitter communications official. “It didn’t seem to get too much traction beyond verge, cnn and wapo editors promoting.”
CENTCOM did not initially provide comment to The Intercept. Following publication of this story, CENTCOM’s media desk referred The Intercept to Brigadier Gen. Pat Ryder’s comments in a September briefing, in which he said that the Pentagon had requested “a review of Department of Defense military information support activities, which is simply meant to be an opportunity for us to assess the current work that’s being done in this arena, and really shouldn’t be interpreted as anything beyond that.”
The U.S. military and intelligence community have long pursued a strategy of fabricated online personas and third parties to amplify certain narratives in foreign countries, the idea being that an authentic-looking Persian-language news portal or a local Afghan woman would have greater organic influence than an official Pentagon press release.
Military online propaganda efforts have largely been governed by a 2006 memorandum. The memo notes that the Defense Department’s internet activities should “openly acknowledge U.S. involvement” except in cases when a “Combatant Commander believes that it will not be possible due to operational considerations.” This method of nondisclosure, the memo states, is only authorized for operations in the “Global War on Terrorism, or when specified in other Secretary of Defense execute orders.”
In 2019, lawmakers passed a measure known as Section 1631, a reference to a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, further legally affirming clandestine psychological operations by the military in a bid to counter online disinformation campaigns by Russia, China, and other foreign adversaries.
In 2008, the U.S. Special Operations Command opened a request for a service to provide “web-based influence products and tools in support of strategic and long-term U.S. Government goals and objectives.” The contract referred to the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, an effort to create online news sites designed to win hearts and minds in the battle to counter Russian influence in Central Asia and global Islamic terrorism. The contract was initially carried out by General Dynamics Information Technology, a subsidiary of the defense contractor General Dynamics, in connection with CENTCOM communication offices in the Washington, D.C., area and in Tampa, Florida.
A program known as “WebOps,” run by a defense contractor known as Colsa Corp., was used to create fictitious online identities designed to counter online recruitment efforts by ISIS and other terrorist networks.
The Intercept spoke to a former employee of a contractor — on the condition of anonymity for legal protection — engaged in these online propaganda networks for the Trans-Regional Web Initiative. He described a loose newsroom-style operation, employing former journalists, operating out of a generic suburban office building.
“Generally what happens, at the time when I was there, CENTCOM will develop a list of messaging points that they want us to focus on,” said the contractor. “Basically, they would, we want you to focus on say, counterterrorism and a general framework that we want to talk about.”
From there, he said, supervisors would help craft content that was distributed through a network of CENTCOM-controlled websites and social media accounts. As the contractors created content to support narratives from military command, they were instructed to tag each content item with a specific military objective. Generally, the contractor said, the news items he created were technically factual but always crafted in a way that closely reflected the Pentagon’s goals.
“We had some pressure from CENTCOM to push stories,” he added, while noting that he worked at the sites years ago, before the transition to more covert operations. At the time, “we weren’t doing any of that black-hat stuff.”
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Russian asylum seekers warm up by a fire at the U.S.-Mexico border fence near Somerton, Ariz., on Monday. (photo: Rebecca Noble/AFP/Getty Images)
The 5-4 order is a victory for Republican-led states that urged the Supreme Court to step in and block a lower court opinion that ordered the termination of the authority. The Biden administration has said it was prepared for the authority to end and had put in place precautions to guard against confusion at the border and any potential surge of migrants.
In its order, the court also agreed to take up the states’ appeal this term. The court said it would hear arguments on the case during its argument session that begins in February 2023.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan said they’d deny the application, but they did not explain their thinking. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch also dissented and explained his thinking in an order joined by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Gorsuch said he does “not discount the States’ concerns” about border security. But Gorsuch noted that Title 42 was put in place to combat Covid-19, and “the current border crisis is not a Covid crisis.”
“Courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency,” Gorsuch wrote.
Since March 2020, Title 42 has allowed US border agents to immediately turn away migrants who have crossed the southern border in the name of Covid-19 prevention.
Immigrant advocates and public health experts have long denounced use of the public health authority along the US southern border, arguing it was an inappropriate pretext for barring migrants from entering the United States. In nearly three years, the authority has been used over 2 million times to turn migrants away, according to US Customs and Border Protection.
At the border, migrants have been waiting in encampments in Mexico for months, anticipating the end of the authority so they can make their claim of asylum in the US. Immigrant advocates have tried to disseminate updates and information to migrants, but desperation has grown, especially as temperatures drop.
El Paso, Texas, has been at the center of the crisis as thousands of migrants have crossed that region of the border. The city opened government-run shelters at its convention center, hotels and several unused schools to care for migrants, though some have still had to sleep on the streets in cold temperatures.
The Department of Homeland Security has been putting in place a plan for the end of the authority that includes surging resources to the border, targeting smugglers and working with international partners.
“We will continue to manage the border, but we do so within the constraints of a decades-old immigration system that everyone agrees is broken. We need Congress to pass the comprehensive immigration reform legislation President Biden proposed the day he took office,” the department said in a statement.
The White House said it would comply with the order.
“Today’s order gives Republicans in Congress plenty of time to move past political finger-pointing and join their Democratic colleagues in solving the challenge at our border by passing the comprehensive reform measures and delivering the additional funds for border security that President Biden has requested,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
Asked to respond to the ruling, President Joe Biden told reporters his administration will enforce the Trump-era immigration restriction, even if he thinks it’s past time to revoke it.
“The court is not going to decide until June apparently, and in the meantime we have to enforce it – but I think it’s overdue,” Biden told reporters on the White House South Lawn.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar acknowledged to the Supreme Court last week that returning to traditional protocols along the border will pose a challenge, but said there’s no longer a basis to keep the Covid-era rules in place.
“The government in no way seeks to minimize the seriousness of that problem. But the solution to that immigration problem cannot be to extend indefinitely a public-health measure that all now acknowledge has outlived its public-health justification,” Prelogar wrote in a filing with the Supreme Court.
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, who are representing families subject to Title 42, had in arguments underscored the dangers faced by asylum seekers subject to the authority and sent back to Mexico.
Lee Gelernt, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the case, told CNN in a statement that they are “deeply disappointed” by the ruling, but will continue to fight to end the policy.
“We are deeply disappointed for all the desperate asylum seekers who will continue to suffer because of Title 42, but we will continue fighting to eventually end the policy,” Gelernt said.
Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, called the order “procedurally bizarre.”
“This order is procedurally bizarre, in that it agrees to a request to freeze a district court ruling by states that weren’t even parties to that decision solely to decide whether they should have been allowed to intervene and defend that ruling on appeal,” Vladeck said. “Title 42 aside, that has enormous potential consequences for the ability of states going forward to fight to keep the current president from rescinding policies of her predecessors.”
The GOP-led states had argued that they’d be harmed by the lifting of the authority because of the influx of migrants entering the United States.
“The border crisis that Respondents bizarrely and eagerly seek to cause would also inflict enormous harms to the States,” a filing, submitted last Wednesday, reads.
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A container of waste is excavated from an underground storage trench at the Hanford Site. (photo: Department of Energy)
Today Hanford — home to 56 million gallons of nuclear waste, leaking storage tanks, and contaminated soil — is an environmental disaster and a catastrophe-in-waiting.
It’s “the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen and, arguably, the most contaminated place on the entire planet,” writes journalist Joshua Frank in the new book, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America.
It’s also shrouded in secrecy.
Frank has worked to change that, beginning with a series of blockbuster investigations published in Seattle Weekly a decade ago. Atomic Days offers an even fuller picture of the ecological threats posed by Hanford and its failed remediation.
The Revelator spoke with him about the environmental consequences, the botched cleanup operation, and what comes next.
Why is the most polluted place in the country so little known?
We have to understand what it was born out of, which was the Manhattan Project. There were three locations picked — Los Alamos [N.M.], Oak Ridge [Tenn.] and Hanford — to build the nuclear program.
Hanford was picked to produce plutonium and it ran for four decades, from World War II through the Cold War in the late 80s. For decades people that lived in and around Hanford didn’t know what was really going on there. It was run as a covert military operation. Even now, it’s still very much run like a covert operation because of the dangers that exist with the potential for an attack on one of the nuclear waste tanks.
It wasn’t even until the 80s that we started learning more about a lot of the stuff that had happened during its operation as far as leaks go, near accidents, intentional releases of radioactive material to test wind patterns, or potential biological weapons.
To this day a lot of stuff is still under wraps. The government still isn’t letting us in to understand the full totality of what the Hanford project has been for the Northwest.
What are the known environmental dangers?
There are 177 underground tanks that hold 56 million gallons of nuclear waste. We know that 67 of those tanks have leaked in the past into the groundwater that feeds the Columbia River.
We know that during its operation in the 50s and 60s the government was monitoring the water in the Columbia River, and even at the mouth of the Columbia they were finding radioactive fish. So we know that there have been leaks that made it to the river.
Right now, we know that there are two tanks currently leaking. The Washington Department of Ecology and the U.S. Department of Energy know about these leaks, but they can’t do anything about them because there’s no other place to safely put the waste.
Their answer right now is to throw tarps over these tanks so that when it rains it’s not pushing that radioactivity into the groundwater.
During its operation, there were also hundreds of billions of gallons of chemicals and other radioactive waste that were just dumped into the soil.
There’s also the potential for an explosion to happen in one of these tanks. One whistleblower I spoke to, Donald Alexander, is a retired Department of Energy scientist who worked at Hanford for a really long time. What he was most concerned about was a hydrogen explosion — pressure building up in the tanks that would release radioactivity throughout the Northwest.
A similar accident happened at a Soviet facility called Mayak in 1957. The Soviets didn’t let the public know what had happened because it was a covert production site for plutonium.
The CIA found out about it a few years after the fact. But by then the damage had been done. Hundreds of square miles were eviscerated and communities were completely destroyed. The long-term impacts are still being felt there because radiation lasts millennia.
Donald Alexander was part of the delegation that went out there and looked at the impacts and the damage that happened. He came back really concerned that something similar could happen at Hanford.
He’s concerned that the longer the waste sits in storage tanks, the more the risk increases.
What has the cleanup process been like?
The big thing right now is trying to get all this waste vitrified, which is turning it into glass so it can be stored safely and permanently. The government thought that could be done in four years, but that was 30 years ago now.
I would argue, when it comes to vitrification, they’ve made almost no progress. So far, we’ve spent $40 billion to build a huge facility that doesn’t even work yet. A couple of the whistleblowers who I talked to tell me that they don’t think it’ll ever work.
I hope they’re wrong, but it seems to be so far that they’re right.
Bechtel is the big contractor for this “vit plant,” as they call it. But they have a really bad track record and are well known for reaping the spoils of U.S. military ventures all over the globe.
In October they had a test facility up and running that was going to do a run of vitrification for low-level radioactive waste. They basically had a ribbon cutting for this big machine and it ran for a week, then overheated, and they had to shut it down.
So even their test run for vitrification didn’t work.
Bechtel is a privately owned corporation and we’re spending billions of dollars paying this company to not get the job done. It’s a big mess.
Are the people who live nearby concerned?
Richland is the town that’s closest to Hanford, and it’s basically a government town — it always has been. Richland was born out of the Manhattan Project. It used to be full of nuclear engineers and physicists [helping build weapons], and now it’s full of nuclear engineers and physicists who are working on the cleanup.
It’s interesting going to Richland because they still celebrate the atomic age. There isn’t any real talk about how polluted the place is, and there’s no mention of what the bomb did to the Japanese.
But there are also other communities nearby that have been deeply involved in trying to remediate the site. The Yakama Nation has been very active, as well as other organizations, like Columbia Riverkeeper in Hood River and Hanford Challenge up in Seattle.
What could help? Are there elected officials or others watchdogging this?
When it comes to elected officials on both sides of the aisle, they’re in lockstep that we need to keep the money flowing for the cleanup, but they’re not calling for more accountability.
As far as agencies go, I would say the Washington Department of Ecology is by far the most involved and is very critical of the operation, but they’re just a state agency. They don’t have a ton of power.
The Department of Energy, I have been told over and over again, is just completely understaffed and underfunded. They don’t have the personnel and expertise to manage [the Hanford cleanup], which is frightening really.
I would argue it’s going to take more ingenuity and more expertise to clean it up than it took to develop the bomb in the first place. I think we should be putting our best people on this. I think that ultimately, in a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to privately contract this stuff out. The government’s not capable of doing it themselves, but they certainly are capable of overseeing it properly.
I’d like to see more accountability. I’d like to see some congressional hearings. At a very basic level, I think everybody can contact their congressperson and ask them if they know about it and where they stand.
Has writing this book changed your thoughts about nuclear power?
I went into the book being a critic of nuclear power, but coming out of the book, I was way more than just a critic. The big problem in relation to the Hanford project is nuclear waste. And it’s the same with nuclear power. In a nuclear reactor, you’re going to have plutonium and other byproducts of the process. Plutonium, for instance, lasts 250,000 years. Every nuclear reactor produces this stuff. And we don’t have an answer for where to put it.
Nuclear power is also very expensive. It’s very slow to roll out. So as far as climate change goes, it’s just not going to happen fast enough. And then there’s a myth that it’s carbon neutral. It’s not. Uranium, which is integral to the nuclear process, is mined and to extract uranium from uranium ore, it’s very carbon intensive.
There’s a lot of reasons to oppose nuclear power. But nuclear waste, to me, is the one that really sticks out.
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