19 December 22
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For 33 years, the retiring Vermont senator and a top aide have quietly but doggedly been working to bind the many wounds of a war that touched the lives of nearly every Vietnamese family. This is what public service is.
Leahy, who entered the Senate in 1975 and leaves it after 48 years in January 2023, is the body’s longest-serving sitting member. To most Americans, he is probably best known for his decades on the Senate Judiciary Committee and his opposition to the drive by conservative activists to transform the federal courts into an instrument of their ideological agenda. But I’d come to talk to him about something different, something that rarely if ever makes the cable news circuit: the war in Vietnam, the wounds it had left, and the part he had played in healing them. He’s never seen this as a partisan issue, just a matter of simple human decency, being one of those, like Joe Biden, who mourn a lost era of comity in the Senate, in which political adversaries could still reach with respect across the gulf of their disagreements. His work in Vietnam has always been underpinned by that vision, and I wanted to ask him whether, in our current divided state, he could imagine it continuing after his retirement from the Senate at the age of 82.
Vision alone doesn’t get you far in Washington. It has to be turned into legislation, and legislation into dollars and cents. In addition to his role on the Judiciary Committee, Leahy also chairs the Appropriations Committee, which is where the purse strings are untied, and, as he wrote in his recently published memoir, The Road Taken, “few people really ever sifted through the line items to understand what we were doing was actually making American foreign policy.” It’s also why you can’t talk about his work in Vietnam without also talking about his senior aide, Tim Rieser, who has been with him since 1985, and who will retire from his current role in January. Despite his bland-sounding job title—Democratic clerk for the Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations—Rieser has been the master of its arcane mechanics. “A dog with a bone,” Leahy calls him. Given a problem to solve, “He would not stop until every last drop of marrow and morsel of sinew had been licked clean.”
Since 1989, as the United States and Vietnam were taking their first baby steps toward reconciliation, Leahy and Rieser have channeled hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Vietnam, forcing the United States to take responsibility for what former Senate leader Mike Mansfield once called the “great outflow of devastation” from the war: the bodies broken by unexploded bombs; the lives blighted by exposure to Agent Orange; the ongoing threat from “hot spots” contaminated by dioxin, its toxic by-product; and now, at last, some long-overdue aid to help Vietnam recover and identify the remains of its war dead. In the process, they have built the scaffolding of a new relationship, in which bitter enemies, in one of the stranger twists of geopolitics, have been transformed into close working partners and military allies.
Leahy and Rieser have faced no small number of obstacles along the way. For many years, embittered American veterans and recalcitrant anti-Communists in Congress opposed any hint of reconciliation with Vietnam. Progress was often slowed by suspicions on the Vietnamese side and by cumbersome bureaucracies in both governments, and State Department and Pentagon lawyers remain wary to this day of any humanitarian effort that implies an admission of liability. But as Rieser often says, when you run into an obstacle, you redefine it as a problem to be solved, and that process starts with all parties identifying their common interest in finding a solution. There are always common interests; you just have to look for them.
On January 27, Vietnam will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords, which led, two months later, to the withdrawal of the last American combat troops. Yet the fighting was not over. The Saigon army fought on, entirely dependent on new infusions of military aid from the United States, and this in turn depended on the approval of the Senate.
Of all the “Watergate babies” elected in the 1974 midterms, Leahy, a 34-year-old state’s attorney for Chittenden County, Vermont, was one of the unlikeliest. Vermont, odd as it may seem given the state’s leftish politics today, had never elected a Democrat to the Senate, and its political establishment and leading newspapers were unswerving supporters of the war. Yet Leahy eked out an improbable victory. (Trailing in third place was an equally young civil rights activist, Bernie Sanders, running under the banner of the Liberty Union Party.)
Leahy had always opposed the war. In May 1970, he marched with protesters against Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia and the killing of four students at Kent State University in Ohio. Now, as the youngest member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he could do something more concrete to end the conflict. The 15-member committee faced a crucial vote on April 17, 1975, to consider President Gerald Ford’s request for $215 million in new military aid to “stabilize” the government of South Vietnam. Leahy described to me the pressure that was brought to bear on him—a personal call from the president, a hard-sell visit to his office by Henry Kissinger—but he stood firm. The committee rejected Ford’s request by a vote of eight to seven. Thirteen days later, the Saigon government collapsed.
The war left innumerable scars. Each had to be confronted in turn, and the United States, despite its defeat, had the power to dictate the sequence. For Americans, the nearest thing to a happy ending to a lost war was Operation Homecoming, the return of 591 prisoners freed under the Paris Agreement. But another 2,646 men were left behind, missing in action, and Washington made it clear that, until Vietnam cooperated in the “fullest possible accounting” of their fate, there could be no talk of any other issues, least of all the infinitely greater numbers on the Vietnamese side.
After a decade, however, it became clear that Washington’s hard line, with a punitive trade embargo, was doing nothing to bring the MIAs home. Vietnam, ravaged by the war and the failure of Soviet-style five-year economic plans, embarked on a program of reforms in 1986, desperate for foreign investment, and U.S. corporations were eager to get in on the act. With both sides now seeing a common interest in cooperation, joint U.S.-Vietnamese military teams began to scour remote airplane crash sites, which accounted for the majority of the MIAs.
The searches built a first measure of trust between the two countries, and the sequel to trust is reciprocity. For Leahy, the first glimmering of a plan came on a congressional visit to Central America in 1988, another Cold War battlefield where civilians once again were the collateral damage.
It’s a story he tells often. In a remote refugee camp near the Honduras-Nicaragua border, he encountered a skinny 10-year-old Miskito Indian boy limping around on a crude wooden crutch. He had lost a leg to a land mine. Who had planted it? The Contras? The Sandinistas? The Honduran military? To Leahy, the question was beside the point. All that mattered was to get kids like this some help. A young embassy official shook his head; there was no provision in the budget for prosthetics. But by now Leahy was a senior member of the Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, and crafting such provisions would turn out to be the particular talent of his recently appointed aide, Tim Rieser.
Rieser was a fellow Vermonter. He turned 18 in 1970, considered registering as a conscientious objector, but in the end avoided the draft by drawing a high lottery number. After law school, he spent a decade as a public defender until he joined Leahy’s team as a volunteer. In 1985, he came on board full-time as a staffer on the Judiciary Committee, dipping a toe into foreign policy issues like war and human rights in Central America. In 1989, his boss became chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee, and Rieser’s course was set.
Although the Patrick J. Leahy War Victims Fund, created in that year, would eventually direct humanitarian aid to more than 30 countries, it started with Vietnam. “What we did there was so outrageous,” Rieser said. “The Vietnamese did nothing to us, and we practically destroyed their country, lied about it, killed countless people, and nobody was ever held accountable. To be able to do something about it has been really fortunate for me.”
A lot of that “something” has depended on the close relationship between Leahy and Rieser and American veterans who returned to Vietnam with two simple questions: What do you need? and What can we do to help? The most prominent of the antiwar vets was Bobby Muller, a Marine who used a wheelchair after taking a bullet in the spine on the edge of the Demilitarized Zone that separated North and South Vietnam. He understood that, with emotions still raw in Congress and among many veterans, any gesture of goodwill had to be purely humanitarian, with no hint of sympathy for Vietnam’s Communist government, with which Washington still had no diplomatic relations.
Muller came to see him one day, Leahy said, leaning forward to imitate the Long Islander’s famously in-your-face style. “Senator, we gotta get rid of land mines! So he gave me 22 reasons why we should do that. I said, don’t worry, I’ve seen it, I’m all for it, so let’s put something together.” That marked the birth of the War Victims Fund, a practical way of aiding people like the kid in Honduras, replacing their crude crutches and makeshift artificial limbs with modern prosthetics, orthotics, and wheelchairs. “The State Department was reluctant,” Leahy said, “so I went down to see [President] George H.W. Bush, and he thought it was a pretty good idea.”
The first $1 million went to Muller’s Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, which created a prosthetics center at the Olof Palme Institute in Hanoi, the country’s best pediatric hospital, later expanding it to Bach Mai Hospital, which had been badly damaged during Nixon’s 1972 “Christmas bombing” campaign.
Leahy went to Vietnam for the first time in 1996, following the normalization of diplomatic relations. Giving his fellow senators a close-up view of the human consequences of the war would be a transformative experience, he believed. One member of the delegation was the former astronaut John Glenn. “Here I am, six foot plus, 200 pounds, and I’m lifting this little Vietnamese guy into his fuchsia-colored wheelchair, and he pulls me down and kisses me,” Leahy recalled. “And there’s John Glenn, a guy who orbited the earth and knew that his spacecraft could have burned up, a guy who never showed emotion, and there were tears in his eyes.”
But Leahy knew that the demand for artificial limbs and wheelchairs would continue unless the underlying cause of so many of the injuries was dealt with, and this was the next door to be unlocked. In 1992, he had successfully introduced a law banning the export of anti-personnel land mines, but his subsequent efforts to restrict the use and export of cluster munitions foundered. The argument is that cluster bombs are different, he said, because “unlike land mines, they are not intentionally designed to be triggered by the victim”—a distinction likely lost on those who were stepping on them. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese and Lao had lost limbs, eyes, and often their lives to cluster bombs, which were notorious for their frequent failure to detonate on impact. “I did include a prohibition on the export of cluster munitions with a failure rate of more than 1 percent,” he said, “but the Defense Department was always strongly opposed.” It was one of his greatest disappointments.
The most practical step was to clear the areas that were still contaminated, starting with Vietnam’s tiny Quang Tri province. The tonnage of bombs the United States dropped on Southeast Asia is hard to wrap one’s head around: It was three times greater than in all theaters in World War II. Quang Tri, immediately south of the DMZ, was the worst affected area. Roughly the size of Delaware, it was bombed more heavily than the whole of Germany. It suffered grievously during Hanoi’s two biggest military offensives—during Tet, the Lunar New Year, in 1968, and then again in 1972, when the People’s Army of Vietnam, or PAVN, launched a full-out assault across the DMZ, using tanks and heavy artillery, to which the United States responded with waves of B-52 strikes and naval shellfire.
Like the earlier prosthetics program, the effort to make Quang Tri safe began with American private citizens. The first to arrive were members of a small group from Washington state, PeaceTrees, accompanied by a veteran of military intelligence, Chuck Searcy, who was running Muller’s program in Hanoi. By the time Bill Clinton vowed, during his November 2000 visit to Hanoi, “to work with Vietnam until every bomb and mine is cleaned up, no matter how long it takes,” several European and American demining groups had arrived in Quang Tri, and in 2001 Searcy, partnering with an energetic young provincial official, set up one of the best-known of them, Project RENEW.
The U.S. Air Force provided maps of every bombing raid it had carried out over the province, pinpointing the areas of greatest ongoing danger, and in 1996 the State Department offered the first official funding for demining equipment, a modest $3 million. Senior Vietnamese military officers were wary, but Searcy assured them that there were no strings attached. Since then, Washington has contributed almost half a billion dollars to operations to clear unexploded ordnance from Quang Tri, two adjacent provinces, and border areas of neighboring Laos. By 2022, the demining teams in Quang Tri had removed more than three-quarters of a million items, and the tiny province has become a global model for how countries ravaged by war can be made safe again.
What remained was the most intractable of all the legacies of the war: Agent Orange. Since the late 1960s, Vietnamese doctors had been documenting the high incidence of often grotesque birth defects in defoliated areas of the South and in the offspring of veterans returning home, who were also suffering from alarming rates of cancer. Yet it was impossible—and still is, despite decades of research—to prove cause and effect.
Even American vets had to fight for years before the government acknowledged, with the 1991 Agent Orange Act, that there might be an association between their service in Vietnam and a list of conditions that has steadily expanded to include common diseases like prostate cancer and Type 2 diabetes. The act was more the result of political pragmatism than hard science, combining the best available data with basic humanitarian decency and a good measure of guilt. The United States had treated its Vietnam veterans poorly, and they deserved, at the very least, the benefit of the doubt.
“After the V.A. started paying out benefits to American veterans, the double standard was obvious,” Leahy said. Vietnamese scientists were written off as crude propagandists and extortionists. Even after diplomatic relations were normalized in 1995, the subject was a political third rail. Ted Osius, who served as ambassador to Hanoi during the Obama administration, recalled going to a conference as late as 2002, when he was the State Department’s regional science officer for Southeast Asia, and being instructed not to use the wordsAgent Orange or dioxin in public.
One of the biggest challenges was the sheer scale of the defoliation campaign. Twenty million gallons of herbicides were sprayed on the former South Vietnam, and one-sixth of its land area might still be contaminated; as many as 4.8 million people might have been exposed; Vietnam had hundreds of thousands of cases of disabilities that might plausibly be connected to Agent Orange. How could you get a handle on a problem of that magnitude?
A joint team of Canadian and Vietnamese scientists gave the first answers with a report, issued early in 2000, on dioxin contamination in the A Luoi Valley, a heavily sprayed area on the border with Laos. This found that most of the dioxin in the environment had long since dissipated. The ongoing risk was confined to former U.S. military installations, such as the old Special Forces base in the valley, where the chemicals had been stored, loaded onto aircraft, and spilled. Once these “hot spots” were identified, cleaning them up became a manageable problem.
The report also showed conclusively how the dioxin in Agent Orange moved up through the food chain, especially via the fish that local villagers raised in ponds that had formed in old bomb craters. From there it migrated into the human body, its concentration steadily increasing in fatty tissue, to be transmitted to the next generation through breast milk.
The study changed the debate, yet it took several years to answer the questions it raised. Where were the hot spots? Funded by Charles Bailey, head of the Ford Foundation’s Hanoi office, the same Vietnamese-Canadian team determined that the worst contamination remained at the big air bases in Danang, in central Vietnam, and Bien Hoa, 20 miles from Saigon. Both were in densely populated urban areas, posing a clear and present danger to local residents.
Cleaning up these bases would be enormously expensive, but it was the kind of thing the United States did best: large-scale, technologically sophisticated, with the promise of eventually declaring mission accomplished. On his second trip to Vietnam, in 2014, Leahy went to Danang to symbolically light the giant oven, a squat ziggurat structure at one end of the runway, with a footprint the size of a football field, that would destroy the dioxin by superheating 90,000 cubic meters of contaminated soil and lake sediment.
This was a fine and honorable thing, a making right of past wrongs; yet for Leahy and Rieser there was a higher imperative—getting help directly to those whose disabilities and birth defects might be the result of dioxin exposure. Politically, this was a much bigger hurdle.
I talked about this in Hanoi one day with Madame Ton Nu Thi Ninh, one of Vietnam’s most experienced diplomats, who worked closely with Bailey for several years as an aid program for dioxin-related disabilities took shape. The resistance of American officials to any talk of “Agent Orange victims” had been infuriating, she said. “It was always more comfortable for the Americans to talk about the environment, but looking into the human impact—that was a much more difficult step. There are people with disabilities in all developing countries, they told me, and we help them everywhere, regardless of cause”—a phrase that State Department lawyers continue even now to insist on. “No, I told them, Vietnam is different. We never had disabilities like these before the American war. All you need to do is add just a few words—Agent Orange–impacted. Accept this at least for our civilians, if not for our veterans.”
As she said, much of the problem was a matter of language, and that was Tim Rieser’s stock in trade. In November 2006, President George W. Bush signed a joint statement with Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet that touched on America’s obligation to help Vietnam overcome all of the worst legacies of the war. Shortly after he left Hanoi, Rieser flew in, accompanied by Bobby Muller, and announced a new humanitarian aid program, to be administered by USAID. This would provide $3 million for “pilot programs for the remediation of Vietnam conflict–era chemical storage sites, and to address the health needs of nearby communities.”
Rieser and Bailey worked together over the next decade to progressively tweak this language, to make sure that the money went where the need was greatest. Finally, in 2016, Rieser came up with the magic formula: The aid, which had now inched up to $7 million a year, was for “health and disability programs for areas sprayed with Agent Orange and otherwise contaminated with dioxin, to assist individuals with severe upper or lower body mobility impairments and/or cognitive or developmental disabilities.”
Ironically, it was Agent Orange, the worst of all the legacies left by the misuse of U.S. military power in Vietnam, that turned out to be instrumental in forging a military partnership between former enemies. Both countries were now alarmed by China’s new projection of power in the South China Sea, and Bien Hoa was home to a squadron of fighter-bombers of the People’s Air Force. Danang was still used as a military base as well as a civilian airport. So cleaning up the bases would not only mean previously unimaginable levels of aid; it would also need buy-in from both the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense and the Pentagon.
This was no simple matter. The Vietnamese military was a uniquely powerful institution, often difficult to work with because of its complex internal bureaucracy and lack of transparency, with a surprising amount of autonomy vested in offices at the provincial level.
“How did you get around those problems?” I asked Leahy. Personal relationships, he said without hesitation. The key, he said, was his friendship with Senior Lt. Gen. Nguyen Chi Vinh, the vice minister of defense. Just as important as Vinh’s formal role, he was the son of one of Vietnam’s most celebrated war heroes, which gave him unusual prestige. “We hit it off right away,” Leahy said. “We would trade family pictures, and he’d always hold Marcelle’s hand. She became ‘Madame Leahy,’ and he started sending me personal notes addressed to ‘Uncle Leahy,’ which is the Vietnamese way of showing respect.”
“And don’t forget Thao,” Marcelle said. “Remember our scooter ride?”
She was referring to Thao Griffiths, a longtime friend of Gen. Vinh’s, who ran the Hanoi office of Muller’s Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation—the post Chuck Searcy had once held. Although it was painful, Marcelle said, to listen to Thao’s account of America’s wartime cruelties, the two women bonded, and neither of them was much inhibited by diplomatic protocol. One day, when Leahy was off at an official meeting, all suits and uniforms and speeches, they took off on Thao’s scooter for a three-hour street-level tour of Hanoi, stopping at the lakeside monument marking the spot where Navy Lt. Cmdr. John McCain had been shot down during a bombing raid.
President Obama had promised to clean up Bien Hoa, but McCain, who had done as much as anyone to foster postwar reconciliation, proved to be a surprisingly stubborn obstacle. Danang, where the cleanup was completed in 2017, had cost roughly $116 million, but the contaminated area at Bien Hoa was four to five times larger, and the cost of its remediation might exceed $1 billion. Gen. Vinh and Ted Osius, by this time the U.S. ambassador, settled on an initial U.S. commitment of $300 million, and Osius argued that this amount, which would have broken USAID’s budget, should be split 50-50 with the Department of Defense.
McCain, who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee, at first balked at the idea of the military funding of what he saw as essentially a humanitarian project, while Pentagon lawyers worried that it would open up the United States to claims from other combat zones. Osius pushed back, distraught, as the father of two young children himself, at the sight of kids playing in dioxin-contaminated mud when he went to see Bien Hoa for himself. “But [Secretary of State] Rex Tillerson told me to cease and desist,” he said. “He didn’t want to hear any more about it.”
Osius, unhappy with Trump-era policies, was summarily removed from his post in the summer of 2017 and resigned from the State Department shortly afterward. But Leahy and Rieser persisted. “We always wanted DoD to be involved,” Leahy said, “since they had caused the problem to begin with.” Osius gives Rieser much of the credit for breaking the logjam. “He was so stubborn,” he said. “I kept getting knocked down, but Tim just wouldn’t give up.” As Leahy said, his aide was the dog with the marrow bone.
In April 2019, Leahy traveled to Vietnam at the head of another congressional delegation, his third, for the inauguration of the Bien Hoa project. “When we put this trip together, I carefully picked workhorses, not show horses,” he told me, and the trip had the flavor of an audition for those who would pick up the baton when he retired. He insisted that the group should include Republicans, two of whom, Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rob Portman of Ohio, joined seven Democrats for the ribbon-cutting. Afterward, they drove into town for a banquet lunch, where they mingled with Vietnamese in wheelchairs, and the two governments signed an agreement on a new five-year commitment of aid, worth $65 million, which is now divided among eight provinces that were heavily sprayed with Agent Orange, with the hope, Rieser says, of adding two more.
Later, as Leahy describes in his memoir, a group of senators went to Easter Sunday Mass at Saigon’s historic nineteenth-century cathedral. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, told stories of his childhood in Saigon, where his father had been number two in the embassy after the signing of the Paris Accords. “Sheldon, I never knew that about you,” Portman said. Murkowski looked across at Leahy. “Why can’t the Senate be like this all the time?” she asked.
Leahy planned to lead one last delegation to Vietnam, just before the 2022 midterms. For the Vietnamese, it would be a red-carpet affair, a final celebratory lap of honor for the senator that would include the inauguration of a memorial peace park at Bien Hoa on a piece of land that had been successfully decontaminated.
But just nine days before the delegation was due to leave, Rieser emailed me to say that his boss had been hospitalized overnight after feeling unwell, and the trip was off. Since I’d intended to travel with them, I briefly thought of canceling my own plans, but it seemed important to go ahead, since Leahy and Rieser had pushed through a string of new projects in the past year that would put the capstone on their legacy. One of these was the first-ever aid package for presumed Agent Orange victims in Laos, after new revelations of the extent and consequences of the secret defoliation campaign in that country. Another designated funds from USAID to support the redesign of Vietnam’s War Remnants Museum, once known as the Exhibition House of American and Puppet Crimes and now one of Ho Chi Minh City’s main tourist attractions. The plan would include a permanent exhibit showing how the two countries had worked together to heal the worst wounds of the war.
But the most significant of all these new projects was a commitment—long overdue, in Leahy’s mind—to help Vietnam recover and identify its missing war dead. No one really knows how many there are, but one estimate, said Andrew Wells-Dang, senior expert on Vietnam at the United States Institute of Peace, is that 200,000 bodies were never recovered, with another 300,000 buried under headstones marked Chua Biet Ten—identity unknown. The joint searches for the much smaller number of American MIAs had been the first step in building trust between former enemies, and that story would at last be brought full circle.
The Wartime Accounting Initiative, as it’s known, is the product of an agreement signed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in Hanoi in August 2021. It’s a five-year, $15 million project that involves several American and Vietnamese organizations, as well as the International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague. It has many dimensions, including technical training, public education, and building people-to-people networks, but it boils down to two main priorities. The first, which falls primarily to Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, is to systematize the mass of data that might speed the search for the missing, which is now a matter of urgency as surviving witnesses die and human remains degrade. The second, administered by USAID, is to help Vietnam identify those remains, using state-of-the-art single nucleotide polymorphism or SNP-based genetic analysis, which produces unique matches, unlike the older mitochondrial DNA markers used by Vietnam up to now, which are common to all members of a matrilineal line. Each is a monumental undertaking.
Giang Nam Trinh, a lead researcher at the Ash Center, joined the team while doing her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University, which holds a vast trove of documentation on the war. The project had personal meaning for her, she said when we met in Hanoi: Her uncle was a frogman who disappeared in 1974, his body never recovered. Unable to bury her son with his ancestors, as custom and tradition demanded, Giang’s grandmother, like so many Vietnamese, constructed an empty “wind tomb” as a way of honoring him.
The Texas Tech collection includes the archive of the Army’s Combined Document Exploitation Center, some three million pages of declassified and digitized materials: after-action reports, command chronologies, daily journals, prisoner interrogations, defector interviews, intelligence analyses, aerial photographs, maps, and a multitude of ephemera like the diaries, letters, photographs, and other “souvenirs” picked up on the battlefield by American soldiers. Perhaps 10 percent of these documents, Giang said, might hold clues to burial sites, and in theory these could be correlated with Vietnam’s own records. But a new generation of digital technology, perhaps aided by artificial intelligence, would be needed, not least because current search tools can’t account for the multitude of diacritic accents in Vietnamese: The tonal variants on a simple word like ma, for example, may give it half a dozen different meanings.
Independent research by veterans promises to be an important part of a future open-source database. Bob Connor, who served at Bien Hoa as a sergeant in the Air Force police, told me that when the 1968 Tet Offensive began, he was on duty atop the tall guard tower at the base, giving him an unobstructed view as a large force of Vietcong stormed the eastern perimeter. Helicopters and fighter jets made short work of them with machine guns and napalm, and, when it was over, the bodies were shoveled into a mass grave.
Connor didn’t think much about the war after he came home, until one day in 2016 his granddaughter called to say she had to do a high school project about Vietnam. Did he have any suggestions? Out of curiosity, he logged on to Google Earth to see if looking at the layout of the base might trigger any memories. At that time, Google had a crowdsourcing feature called Panoramio, which allowed users to augment maps with their own images and messages, so Connor posted a note with his email address, saying that he had information about a mass grave.
To his astonishment, one thing led quickly to another: a message from a PAVN veteran, who put him in touch with a retired colonel, and a collaborative network was born. The grave site turned out to be just 20 yards from the location Connor had pinpointed. There were 150 bodies, of which 72 were identified and returned to their families for a proper burial. Other vets came forward with stories of more mass graves around Bien Hoa and the neighboring base at Long Binh, one of which, Connor said, contained 673 bodies. His best guess, he told me, was that the leads provided through this network might eventually help Vietnam locate as many as 8,000 of its fallen soldiers.
At his modest home in the western suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City, I met Dr. Tran Van Ban, a 78-year-old veteran of the PAVN. He grew up in the northern port city of Haiphong, enlisting with 28 other young men from his commune, literally signing his name in blood. They swore an oath to one another: Many of us will not return. If I should die, one of you must bring my body back to my mother.
In November 1967, they set out on the arduous six-month trek down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia, under constant U.S. bombing. After crossing into Vietnam, his battalion, part of the PAVN’s 268th Regiment, pressed on to the so-called Iron Triangle, a critical war zone that threatened the western approaches to Saigon. “We were facing elite American units,” Ban said. “The 25th Infantry Division, which they called Tropic Lightning, the Big Red One, and the Marines. They had three huge bases, each with its own airstrip. They had tanks, heavy artillery, helicopters, B-52s, ‘bunker buster’ bombs.”
The consequences were devastating. “My battalion had 653 men,” he said. “By the time of Liberation, 121 were still alive. Of those, 80 were affected by their exposure to Agent Orange, and 55 had children with birth defects. Of the 29 from my commune, four survived.” There were now 500 graves in the local martyrs’ cemetery, he said, but 300 of them were wind tombs.
Ban himself was left for dead on the battlefield, and his family didn’t know that he had survived, badly wounded, until he returned home after the war. Assigned to a clandestine field hospital, he was given the task of keeping casualty records. He drew dozens of detailed maps of burial sites and came up with the idea of writing the name of each dead fighter on a slip of paper, sealing it up in an empty medicine vial, and placing it in the corpse’s mouth for later identification. He lost all his records one day in an air raid, but, blessed with a near-photographic memory, he set about reconstructing everything from scratch.
When the war was over, he went to medical school and worked as a general practitioner until his retirement. But he always pursued a parallel mission, honoring the oath he and his comrades had sworn to one another. He compiled the full enlistment rosters of many communes in Haiphong and returned year after year to the old battlefields to search for graves. Although much of the landscape had changed beyond recognition, he looked for remembered landmarks: a water well that was still in the same place, traces of a coal fire that might once have been a field kitchen.
His maps turned out to be remarkably accurate. “I’ve recovered the remains of 14 of the 25 who died from my commune and returned them to their families,” he said, “so that leaves 11 I still have to find.” His reports to local authorities have located “maybe 50 or 60 percent of our other fallen friends.” He showed me a photograph of a common grave in the main martyrs’ cemetery in Ho Chi Minh City, where 25 of these soldiers are buried. But their bones were jumbled together and had never been submitted to DNA analysis. “People think I must have some kind of supernatural powers, or maybe I’m a psychic,” he said, “but I tell them, no, it’s all because of my heart, and having a good memory.”
I asked him what had happened to his records. He went into another room and came back with a stack of school exercise books, filled with field notes; photo albums with detailed captions; sheaves of hand-drawn maps. He knew that veterans in other areas were doing similar work, but he had no idea if anything like this huge personal archive existed anywhere else in Vietnam.
I asked if he’d heard about the new Wartime Accounting Initiative; this was precisely the kind of material they were looking for. He looked at me for a moment in apparent disbelief and then choked up. “Please tell them I would like to help,” he said when he eventually composed himself. “This is my sacred mission. These things haunt me, when I’m sleeping, when I’m eating, they are always in my mind.”
More than 1,000 of the American MIAs in Southeast Asia have now been recovered, and each of the 1,582 still missing has his own detailed dossier, regularly updated with full reports on every search mission and witness interview. The Vietnamese, for the most part, must rely on their own limited resources. I visited several families, including two who are now working with the Wartime Accounting Initiative, and in each case the search had taken them back to the singular devastation of Quang Tri province.
Losing a loved one and failing to recover the body bring a unique kind of prolonged grief, which both Americans and Vietnamese have coped with according to their own customs. In Vietnam, a body must be laid to rest with its ancestors, and there are elaborate mourning rituals to observe; otherwise, the dead risk becoming unquiet “wandering souls.” In the austere postwar years, the government discouraged these practices as outmoded superstitions, but they have proved stronger than party dogma. Many people seek the help of psychics, like a family I met in Hanoi, who credited them with tracking down their son in an unmarked grave in Quang Tri. Now the surviving brother wanted to exhume his remains for DNA analysis, but his 86-year-old father resisted. What if it turned out to be a case of mistaken identity?
Others have found comfort, however, in the certainty provided by DNA analysis. Nguyen Thi Chin lives in the small town of Thach That, west of Hanoi. Like so many Vietnamese homes, hers is dominated by an ornately carved family altar, with portraits of her late mother and her two lost brothers, fresh-faced teenagers, framed by oil lamps, large bowls of apples and persimmons, and blue-and-white porcelain vases crammed with burned-out incense sticks.
There were 10 siblings, Chin said, and much of their childhood was spent shuttling in and out of shelters their mother dug, since their village was close to an airfield that housed a battery of SAM missiles and was a prime target for U.S. bombing raids. She had only hazy memories of her brothers but recalled that De had beautiful handwriting, and that Chuong was known for his kindness and generosity.
News of De’s death came first, from a comrade in his unit in Quang Tri, saying he had died on a bright moonlit night, though official notification didn’t arrive until a year later. But even knowing where he’d died, the family had to scour the dozens of war cemeteries in the province, and it wasn’t until 2011 that they finally located the grave. The government chipped in the equivalent of about $80 to cover the costs of bringing the body home. Now it lay among the 200 or so graves in the Thach That district martyrs’ cemetery, and we went there so that Chin could burn incense, kneeling by the marble headstone that bears his name.
The search for Chuong took much longer, and it fell mainly to Chin’s niece, Tra. She took on the task at the urging of her grandmother, who insisted that she refused to die until both her boys had come home. Somehow, Tra said, the old lady had heard of this mysterious new thing called mitochondrial DNA. “I only have two teeth left,” she said, “and I have to keep them so they can identify my son.”
Tra wrote to a military-sponsored TV show that aims to help families track down their missing and is now approaching its five hundredth episode. After 10 years without a response, she wrote again and was contacted by a veteran living in Germany, and the clues he offered took her on a long odyssey through the cemeteries of the far south, until at last she found Chuong in a coastal province near Saigon. Her grandmother’s last tooth proved to be a match. She died in her nineties, content in the knowledge that both her sons had returned home.
There are graveyards everywhere in Quang Tri. It’s home to the monumental Truong Son Martyrs Cemetery, which pays tribute to the estimated 33,000 fighters who died on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and each district and commune has its own martyrs’ cemetery, 72 in all. Row after row of the headstones say Chua Biet Ten.
A woman in her fifties, Le Thi Vinh, took me to the grave of her father, Le Xan, in Cam Thuy commune, just below the old DMZ. His younger brother had been drafted into the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN, but Xan insisted on taking his place. He was already married and had children, he argued, so if he died, there would be someone to burn incense at the grave. So he enlisted, and became a double agent, “eating government rice,” said Vinh’s brother, Le Trinh, “but worshipping Communist spirits.”
The family’s village was in a free-fire zone, and in 1968 it was wiped off the map. They were herded into a squalid resettlement camp in a nearby town, where they spent two years before moving back home to rebuild. But the 1972 offensive turned them into refugees again. Their mother hoisted her shoulder pole, stuffing rice and clothing into one basket and the four-year-old Vinh into the other, while her brother walked alongside, and they fled south. Along the way, they learned that their father had been captured and taken to the island prison of Phu Quoc, which was notorious for the variety of its torture techniques. He did not survive.
It took more than 40 years to bring home Le Xan’s remains, and the details of the siblings’ search were the stuff of an epic novel. But eventually, in 2017, they laid him to rest in Cam Thuy.
For all the pain they endured along the way, it was a story that at least brought closure, unlike so many others. Who was in all those countless rows of unmarked graves in Quang Tri? The province had been one enormous killing field, and there was nothing neat and tidy about the aftermath of a B-52 strike. Intermingled body parts were often shoveled indiscriminately into mass graves and hastily covered with lime. Thousands of southern soldiers had died in the same battles. Might they, too, be among that jumble of anonymous remains?
The Wartime Accounting Initiative will not answer that question. Honoring those who fought for the South is not something the government is ready to consider yet. The PAVN and Vietcong dead are liet sy, martyrs; the ARVN dead are still sometimes referred to with the wartime insult nguy (puppets). Reconsidering those terms would reopen too many old wounds, threatening the official narrative of the war. “Let things happen softly, with time, without big speeches,” Madame Ninh said during our conversation in Hanoi. She cited the example of the big ARVN war cemetery at Bien Hoa, which for decades was neglected, overgrown, its gates padlocked. Now, she said, after gentle urging from Ambassador Osius, it had been cleaned up, and families were free to visit and honor their loved ones, as long as no distinction was made between soldiers and civilians. As people often say, the Vietnamese have found it easier to reconcile with the Americans than with their own compatriots. And after all, one U.S. military officer with long experience in Southeast Asia reminded me, Americans have still not come fully to terms with the aftermath of their own Civil War.
Patrick Leahy is well aware that not all of the legacies of the war in Vietnam will be resolved in his lifetime. But he and Rieser, motivated by simple decency and a shrewd understanding of what Leahy calls the “quiet, behind-the-scenes beauty” of the appropriations process, have brought us a long way.
Finally helping the Vietnamese to recover their war dead seems to give both of them particular satisfaction. “It won’t involve nearly the amount of funding Bien Hoa did,” Leahy said. “But it may be the most important of all the war legacy initiatives, since there is not a family in Vietnam that didn’t lose loved ones, or know others who did.”
But in an age of corrosive partisanship, can his successors continue what he and Rieser have begun? I knew they had failed to enlist a single Republican for the delegation that had just been canceled, although perhaps the imminent midterms were a complicating factor. When I asked Leahy about the future, he answered by talking about the past and his memories, perhaps rose-tinted, of the Senate as it once was. His first congressional delegation was in 1975, he recalled, just two months after the fall of Saigon. There were dovish liberals and archconservatives on that trip to Moscow, but somehow they all got along. “You bring together people with different views, and they find they share common ground,” he said. After all, if you could find it with the Vietnamese, whose political system was so different from our own and offended so many of his convictions about civil liberties, could you really not find it with Republicans?
So did that mean he was optimistic about the future?
“Well, I’m hopeful,” he said, then paused. “Which I guess is a little step short of confident.”
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Donald J. Trump announced his third run for the presidency last month in Florida. (photo: Saul Martinez/NYT)
The House panel investigating the Capitol attack is set to release its report and may back criminal charges against the former president, while a separate committee could decide to release his tax returns.
On Monday, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters will hold what is almost certainly its final public meeting before it is disbanded when Republicans take over the majority in the new year.
The committee’s members are expected to debate criminal referrals to the Justice Department in connection with the riot and Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power, which culminated on Jan. 6 as the pro-Trump mob tried to thwart the certification of his successor’s 2020 electoral victory. The biggest topic is whether to recommend that Mr. Trump face criminal charges.
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Candidates in the 2022 election. (image: Getty Images/Politico)
More than 50 Democratic and Republican elected officials, campaign aides and consultants took POLITICO inside the first campaign after the Supreme Court's landmark ruling.
They were all white women, mostly in their 30s to 50s and without college degrees. Their home county, Macomb, had voted for President Barack Obama twice and President Donald Trump twice. In the upcoming gubernatorial race, they were undecided, frustrated by how Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer had handled the pandemic.
But when it came to the possibility of abortion being illegal, there was no equivocation: The women were stunned — and enraged.
It was the kind of conversation women everywhere were having with their mothers, sisters, daughters and friends. But behind a glass window in that conference room and tuning in over Zoom, a half-dozen consultants and staffers from Whitmer’s reelection campaign and the pro-abortion rights group EMILY’s List listened to likely the first Democratic focus group conducted in the wake of the report.
The moderator peppered the women with questions about the draft opinion and the possibility it would trigger a 1931 law outlawing nearly all abortions in Michigan. Then she turned to a recent comment from a Republican candidate that the Whitmer team had considered relatively tame, compared to other GOP reactions. Businessman Kevin Rinke had said that when it came to pregnancy, “There are choices that go into our lives, and there’s cause and effect, so people maybe need to consider their choices.”
The remark “elicited a lot of, ‘Fuck this guy and fuck all the guys out there who think they know better than women,’” said Molly Murphy, the Democratic pollster who moderated the discussion in early May. “This was not just about rape and incest and ‘no exceptions,’ which is obviously all very important, but it said so much more about control, about politicians who think they know better than these women — it added a layer to this that none of us were expecting.”
After the nearly two-hour session, Whitmer’s pollster Brian Stryker turned to campaign manager Preston Elliott and said: “That’s the best I’ve felt about this campaign’s position in a year.”
Days earlier, the 2022 election looked bleak, if not disastrous, for Democrats. President Joe Biden’s approval ratings hovered in the low 40s, gas prices were ticking up, and crime in big cities was high. And then there was the hard historical truth: Since World War II, presidents had lost an average of more than two dozen House seats and four Senate seats in midterm elections.
But in that focus group in Michigan — and, in the months ahead, dozens of others held by Democrats and Republicans across the country — campaign strategists kept making the same startling finding: Abortion hadn’t simply awakened Democratic voters. It was actually persuading swing voters. The memo, obtained by POLITICO, called it a “massive vulnerability for Republicans” — a conclusion bolded and underlined.
On Election Day, voters in critical states like Michigan and Pennsylvania ranked abortion — not inflation or crime — as the most important issue in the midterms, according to exit polls. The red wave never arrived. Instead, Democrats gained a seat in the Senate and Republicans, badly underperforming expectations, barely took back the House. Democrats also held onto a slew of governor’s mansions, from Wisconsin to Oregon, that otherwise may have slipped out of reach, and won control of four legislative chambers. Republicans failed to flip a single one.
How abortion shaped the 2022 midterms is, nevertheless, a mixed portrait of state-by-state results, where some Republican candidates prevailed even with staunch anti-abortion positions, such as in the governor’s races in Georgia and Florida, while Democrats in deep-blue New York suffered heavy losses. Yet, in many battleground and red-leaning states and districts, especially where Democrats spent millions to keep it at the forefront for voters, abortion access played an outsized role, reversing the party’s once abysmal outlook.
This account of how abortion affected the first election after the fall of Roe v. Wade is based on interviews with more than 50 elected officials, campaign aides and consultants from both parties.
The Supreme Court decision that ended a nearly half-century of federal abortion rights triggered a fierce backlash against the Republican Party from the suburbs of Philadelphia to the plains of Kansas. It mobilized the liberal base, enabled Democrats to effectively paint GOP candidates as too extreme among independents, and even turned off some Republican women — something that some party officials even saw happen within their own families.
And unlike the Republican Party’s other headaches this cycle — money woes, flawed candidates, and even Trump — Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization cannot be undone anytime soon. Democratic and Republican operatives said that means abortion is poised to play as big a role, if not bigger, in upcoming elections, triggering a dramatic shift in political strategy as liberal groups target more states for abortion-related ballot initiatives.
“Abortion access is a core value that hits you in your gut,” said Stephanie Schriock, the former president of EMILY’s List. “It is going to be a huge part of every election going forward until we get this right back.”
When abortion was an afterthought
At the start of the midterm election cycle, many Democrats feared abortion would be a dud — even those who believed Roe would likely be overturned.
When one top Democratic super PAC interviewed voters in battleground states in the winter of 2021, they were adamant that abortion rights were safe even after the Supreme Court declined to block a Texas law that would ban abortions after about six weeks.
“They didn’t really believe that Roe v. Wade was going anywhere,” said JB Poersch, president of Senate Majority PAC, the leading outside group for Senate Democrats.
Abortion rights had long been treated as an afterthought in Democratic campaigns. In House, Senate and governor’s races in 2018 and 2020, they mentioned the issue in only 2 percent of their campaign ads, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
“People were uncomfortable making ads about it,” said Martha McKenna, a strategist who held top positions at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and EMILY’s List. The abortion-related ads that did air were mostly produced by men, she said, and typically featured a middle-class white woman holding “a cup of tea, staring out her window at the rain, pondering her abortion,” which “could not be further from reality.”
The Virginia governor’s race in 2021 had also set off alarm bells in Democratic circles that even the looming end of abortion rights might not motivate their voters. Republican Glenn Youngkin, who identifies as “pro-life,” sustained millions of dollars in abortion-related attack ads from Democrat Terry McAuliffe and still won the race by 2 percentage points.
The reluctance to forcefully seize on abortion as an issue seeped into the early advice Democratic officials gave to candidates this election cycle. After the reversal of Roe, though, some Democrats made a big bet on abortion, anyway.
Overnight, a potent weapon
Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer knew abortion rights were in jeopardy, but the reality truly sunk in on a Friday night in September 2020 when news broke of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. Her phone lit up with messages from friends and colleagues “just stunned about what we were on the precipice of.”
To her daughters that night, Whitmer “walked [them] through what I thought could possibly happen with a Trump [Supreme Court] appointee,” she said in an interview, “and here we are.”
But preparations for how she might respond to a post-Roe world didn’t kick into high gear until a year later, after the Supreme Court declined to intervene in the Texas case. Whitmer’s campaign jumped on comments from their likely GOP opponents about the 1931 Michigan law that would be triggered if the high court struck down Roe.
Plans were already underway to take the issue to the November ballot by enshrining it in the state’s constitution. By April 2022, Whitmer filed a lawsuit challenging the nearly century-old law, asking her state’s Supreme Court to take up the case immediately.
About 600 miles east in Pennsylvania, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro was adopting a similar posture.
Then the attorney general, Shapiro had challenged anti-abortion laws in Texas, Mississippi and South Carolina. His first negative ad slammed Doug Mastriano, his Republican opponent, over his support for a no-exceptions abortion ban. And abortion was already a key part of Shapiro’s stump speech.
Despite all their preparations for the Dobbs ruling, they were still shocked when it dropped on June 24. Campaign offices, populated by young staffers, are often hives of chatter. But that morning it was eerily quiet at Whitmer headquarters. The only sound came from TV monitors showing women screaming or cheering outside the Supreme Court.
One Whitmer staffer confided that her mother had gone to the pharmacy to load up on Plan B, the morning-after contraceptive pill, for her and her sisters.
In Philadelphia, before leaving the office that evening, Shapiro’s campaign manager Dana Fritz penned a Slack message to the other women on staff: “It’s been a shitty day,” she wrote, but “just wanted to send y’all a note that we should go to bed tonight knowing we’ve got a real role to play in protecting so many other women.”
The campaign machinery of both parties kicked into gear. Tudor Dixon, the future Republican gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, called it a “day of celebration.” Mastriano cast it as a “triumph,” while trying to shift the focus to inflation and crime.
Meanwhile, a constellation of Democratic outside groups, from the Democratic Governors Association to labor unions, jumped in. They decided in a series of conference calls that they’d go after Mastriano over abortion, not his attendance at the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, as their first line of attack. Schriock said it “took some work” to get “everybody on board” with the strategy.
But it quickly became clear how potent a campaign issue abortion had become. Shapiro’s campaign launched a texting program to win over swing voters through abortion messaging, and it proved so successful that his campaign began aiming it toward voters less and less likely to back the Democrat. And it kept working.
“I heard about [abortion rights] everywhere I went,” Shapiro said in an interview, “including from people who are lifelong Republicans who would say to me, ‘I’ve never voted for a Democrat, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let that guy take away my right to make decisions over my own body, or my daughter’s right.’”
Attacks, counterattacks
Across the country, Democratic candidates and allies up and down the ticket were making the same calculation. In 2022, 27 percent of Democratic ads for the House, Senate and governorships talked about abortion, 13 times higher than the share of Democratic ads that mentioned it two years earlier. Republicans, on the other hand, largely avoided the topic: Only 5 percent of GOP ads mentioned abortion.
“If you would ask me a cycle ago, I’d probably say, ‘You talk about abortion in Philly. You probably don’t talk about it anywhere else,’” said Devan Barber, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s senior political adviser. “This past cycle we saw it resonate in broader parts of the state, in media markets where you may not expect.”
In total, Democrats sunk nearly $358 million into abortion-related ads in House, Senate and gubernatorial races, according to AdImpact. The spending ensured that abortion was front and center for voters in battleground states, even when the topic fell out of the news cycle, several Democratic operatives said. Republicans, in contrast, spent about $37 million on abortion-related ads.
“It used to be the stereotypical Western Pennsylvania [Democrat] was pro-life or tiptoed around being pro-choice,” said Rep.-elect Chris Deluzio, who won a Pittsburgh-based seat. “But as you saw with me, with [Sen.-elect John] Fetterman, with Shapiro, we were all strong on it and we all did well.”
He added, “You’re seeing Democrats around here be able to talk about it differently, and I think voters, whatever their political affiliation, [are] rejecting the extremism of Republicans on it.”
The disparity in spending on abortion-related ads meant that many Republican candidates didn’t offer counter-messaging to the attacks labeling them as outside the mainstream. In Pennsylvania’s Senate race, super PACs supporting Fetterman hammered Republican Mehmet Oz over abortion on TV. Oz’s campaign considered fighting back in an ad of their own, according to multiple people familiar with the talks.
But Oz’s team made the calculation that it was best not to give them oxygen.
The National Republican Congressional Campaign also advised candidates and campaign operatives “to ignore it,” said one consultant who works on House races. “That was their mantra.”
Instead, they urged members and candidates to pivot to the economy and crime. Many candidates followed the advice because “every time we’re talking about [abortion], we’re taking away our ability to talk about something else that’s advantageous,” said Jason Cabel Roe, a Michigan-based Republican consultant who worked on Tom Barrett’s unsuccessful bid to unseat Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.).
Some Republicans who did address abortion head-on still had trouble persuading voters. Colorado’s Joe O’Dea, who challenged Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, put his daughter on camera to explain to voters that her dad is “a different kind of Republican” who “supports a woman’s right to choose.” But his message was drowned out, Republican operatives said, by the lopsided spending advantage for Bennet. Ultimately, it wasn’t enough to pull O’Dea even within striking distance to Bennet, despite strong Republican turnout in the state.
“In these true swing states, if abortion rights are dramatically threatened, it’s going to be really hard to win as a Republican in this new normal,” said Zack Roday, a Republican consultant who advised O’Dea.
‘When you run away, you lose’
Even in late October, Democrats were divided over whether abortion would make a significant difference for them. Polls showed statewide races shifting toward Republicans. Some Democratic operatives said abortion and democracy weren’t moving many independent voters. Other party insiders fretted that the candidates they nominated in key races were coming up short.
No Senate race loomed larger than Pennsylvania’s. Fetterman had led Oz by a wide margin for much of the campaign. But by the time they met for their first and only debate on Oct. 25, the race had narrowed to a statistical tie.
Fetterman, who had suffered a stroke months earlier, was difficult to watch. He struggled to complete sentences and paused awkwardly — setting off panic in real time among Democrats.
But a response by Oz to a question about abortion gave Democrats the opening they needed to change the subject.
Some on Fetterman’s team went into the night thinking Oz would announce that he opposed Sen. Lindsey Graham’s proposed 15-week abortion ban in an effort to appeal to moderate voters. Instead, Oz said that “women, doctors, local political leaders” should have a say in abortion policy.
Barber, the DSCC’s senior political adviser, couldn’t believe it: “It’s like we scripted it for him. You could just feel we struck gold.” She jumped on a group chat with the Fetterman campaign. “I was like, ‘I know everyone’s really busy, and we’re all doing a lot of things, but I think we need to make an ad on this — literally right now,” she said.
The digital spot, which tied Oz to Mastriano, was out by the next morning. “And it honestly framed a lot of the post-debate coverage,” said Barber.
Oz’s campaign was pleased with how the debate went. But on the broader question of how abortion affected the race, people in Oz’s orbit think it played a role in his loss.
John Fredericks, a conservative radio host who campaigned for Oz, said the celebrity doctor was a “great, disciplined candidate.” But he said it was a mistake for Republicans to not fight back against Democrats’ abortion attacks on the airwaves.
In what was projected to be one of the closest Senate elections in the country, Fetterman defeated Oz by 5 percentage points, 51 to 46.
“When you run away, you lose every single time,” Fredericks said. “And that’s what the Republicans did.”
Democrats, however, came away from 2022 confident that Republicans will be on the defensive over abortion for many election cycles to come. After succeeding in all six of their state ballot referendum fights this year, progressive groups have sprouted in Ohio and South Dakota and are working to put ballot measures before voters. More are expected in Missouri, Oklahoma and Arizona.
“When we take this out of the hands of politicians we can get some exciting results,” said Rachel Sweet, who led the successful campaigns to defeat anti-abortion constitutional amendments in Kansas and Kentucky.
Not every state, however, allows for voters to change their state constitution via referendum. So state elections will play a key role in Democratic efforts. After their success this year, Democrats are already eyeing legislative races in Virginia and special elections in New Hampshire are coming in 2023.
In Michigan, Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow said that statehouse candidates who ran on protecting abortion rights saw a surge in fundraising, allowing them to hit the TV airwaves first. In addition to Whitmer’s win this fall, Democrats flipped both chambers there, and McMorrow is already talking to other state legislators about how “Michigan can be a playbook” for them.
In Pennsylvania, Shapiro’s commanding 15-point victory over Mastriano helped Democrats there win the majority of statehouse seats for the first time in years.
Sheryl Bartos, the wife of Oz campaign co-chair Jeff Bartos, was one of the Republican women who crossed party lines to back Shapiro. Her decision was motivated, in part, by Mastriano’s position on abortion.
“Moderates and independents in [Pennsylvania] are not going to support candidates who are pro-life with no exceptions,” she said.
Going forward, hard decisions for the GOP
Five weeks after Election Day, on Dec. 12, two more groups of women convened in Phoenix to talk about how they voted.
They were a mix of unaffiliated, independent and Republican voters, all of whom either split their ticket between Democrats and Republicans, voted for a Libertarian candidate, or left at least one race blank on their ballot. Their home county, Maricopa, one of the fastest-growing in the country, voted Democratic in a presidential race in 2020 for the first time in decades.
The women were frustrated and embarrassed by the election. They described Trump as a “central and unwelcome figure,” while others largely viewed Biden as a non-factor who they didn’t blame for inflation or problems at the Southern border.
But when it came to abortion, it was personal: When the moderator asked if the women themselves or someone they knew had an unplanned pregnancy or abortion story, every single hand in the room shot up.
For them, it wasn’t just about a medical procedure. “It’s about control, controlling women and suppression of women,” said one independent voter.
“It’s a slippery slope,” said another, a Republican. “If they are demanding control here, where does it end?”
“Every single woman [who] has been in a relationship has experienced the ‘being late’ moment,” said Jessica Pacheco, an Arizona-based Republican strategist. “Every woman can relate to that, but it’s an intangible that’s hard to explain to men.”
The women were gathered by GOP strategists trying to sort through what happened in 2022. The focus groups, described in a memo obtained by POLITICO, were conducted by Republican pollster Nicole McCleskey — and they represent likely the first post-election data on how abortion shaped swing women voters’ decisions in a suburban county in a battleground state.
“Aside from Trump,” the memo stated, “abortion was THE central issue of the campaign.” What the women “considered extreme abortion positions,” plus Trump’s “influence,” it said, “took Republican candidates out of consideration for many of these women, including women who consider themselves pro-life.”
The document pointed to some success stories, like Republican Arizona state treasurer Kimberly Yee and Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell. But it was blunt in its assessment that GOP nominees Blake Masters for Senate and Kari Lake for governor were “the caricatures of extreme Republicans this election according to these women.”
Masters, who challenged Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), backtracked on his abortion position during the general election, scrubbing “I am 100% pro-life” from his campaign website. Lake, who lost to Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs, struggled to precisely define her position.
“Gone are the days where you can say, ‘I’m pro-life,’ ‘I’m pro-choice,’ and leave it at that. Because those labels are confusing, they mean different things to different people,” Pacheco said. “To win, you need to walk through your values and what the issue means to you.”
Without Roe, Republicans now face an array of existential questions heading into 2024: Do they unify around a national abortion ban, like Graham’s bill? Do anti-abortion activists push for even stricter restrictions federally? Or do they let candidates decide their own positions?
An open presidential primary could help define the contours of the party’s position. But some GOP operatives argue that it might be best to let this play out race-by-race, so candidates can adapt based on their personal beliefs and the values of their particular state or district.
Still others say Republicans need to turn the issue around on Democrats by arguing that abortion with few or no limits is the extreme position.
At the same time, Republicans acknowledge privately that there’s broad discomfort in taking on this issue, in part because it tackles deeply personal, often religious beliefs.
“I think some of my male colleagues didn’t and don’t see [abortion] as a major factor [in 2022], but I think when campaigns had women on their [campaign] teams, women at the table, I think those candidates handled and messaged the issue better,” said Amanda Iovino, a Republican pollster who worked on Youngkin’s 2021 campaign. She cited other successful anti-abortion rights candidates, including Rep.-elect Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) and Nevada’s Gov.-elect Joe Lombardo, as well as Youngkin.
“They got that it was going to be a factor, and they needed to figure out a way to respond,” she continued. “Abortion has always been an Achilles heel for Republicans talking to independent women. It’s really tricky … but with good candidates who are trained well, who know how to talk about this, I think we can still thread the needle.”
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Supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal march down JFK Blvd. past the Juanita Kidd Stout Center for Criminal Justice and City Hall, in Philadelphia, Friday, December 16, 2022. (photo: Jessica Griffin/Philadelphia Inquirer)
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.
Supporters of imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal are hailing a decision by a Philadelphia judge to order the Philly DA’s Office to share all of its files with Mumia Abu-Jamal’s defense team on the case. Judge Lucretia Clemons gave prosecutors and the defense 60 days to review the files, many of which Abu-Jamal’s team has never seen. The judge is then expected to rule on Mumia Abu-Jamal’s request for a new trial.
Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther, journalist, has been imprisoned for over 40 years. He was convicted in 1982 of the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. He spent much of his years on death row. But his supporters have long claimed prosecutors withheld key evidence and bribed or coerced witnesses to lie. Documents found in the District Attorney’s Office in 2019 show Mumia Abu-Jamal’s trial was tainted by judicial bias and police and prosecutorial misconduct. The judge’s surprise ruling came just days after a U.N. working group submitted an amicus brief urging the judge to grant Mumia Abu-Jamal a new trial.
To talk more about the case, we’re joined by Johanna Fernández, associate professor of history at City University of New York’s Baruch College, one of the coordinators of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home. She spoke Friday outside the courthouse.
JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ: There are documents that emerged recently, as early as January 2019, which clearly suggest that the main witnesses in this case were bribed. A letter by Robert Chobert, the star witness in the case, who said that he saw what happened, and he allegedly saw Mumia, he wrote a letter, with his handwriting, asking the lead prosecutor in the case, Joe McGill, “Where is my money?”
AMY GOODMAN: Johanna Fernández joins us now. She is also executive producer and writer of the film Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and the editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Professor Fernández, it’s great to have you back. So, why don’t you talk about the scene in the courtroom? We interviewed an Arkansas trial judge who was calling for Mumia Abu-Jamal to be released last week, and he was particularly talking about issues like the one you just mentioned outside the courthouse, the issue of bribery — if you could explain that? — and, once again, the judge himself in the original trial, Judge Sabo, referring to Mumia Abu-Jamal with the N-word.
JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ: Good morning, Amy, and thank you so very much for covering this issue.
That letter, handwritten by Robert Chobert, is really the smoking gun, if you will, in this case. It’s exculpatory evidence. At this hearing, the prosecutor argued, somehow, that it is pro forma, it is customary, to give witnesses money. But our attorneys corrected the record. They said, “Well, yes, you give witnesses money for missed work and for transportation. However, Robert Chobert was driven to work by police nightly. He was a cabdriver. And he was held in a hotel, and all of his expenses were paid. And he was cared for by the police during the trial. So, what money exactly was he being compensated for?” This is bribery. He would have said in the letter, “I was promised compensation for travel.” But that could not have been the case.
Another thing that was raised in the hearing by our attorneys is the significance of circumstantial evidence and inference. This was a man who was driving with two DWIs and who was driving without a license. He said that he was parked directly behind the police car, the car of Officer Faulkner, who was killed that night. But photographs show that he was not where he said he was, and a person who’s driving with two DWIs and a driver’s license that’s been canceled is not going to want to park anywhere near a police officer’s car. So, the record suggests that Robert Chobert was bribed for fingering Mumia.
AMY GOODMAN: And the judge, Judge Sabo, what he said, reportedly overheard by the stenographer in the original trial?
JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ: Terry Moore Carter was a stenographer at the time, working with a different judge. And her judge used the same courtroom that the lead judge in this case, Albert Sabo, used. And this was during a shift of cases. And Terry Moore Carter, the white stenographer, overheard the major judge in this case, Albert Sabo, say, quote, “I’m going to help them fry the [N-word],” referring to how he was going to instruct the jury in this case.
The amicus brief that was filed by the Working Group of Experts [on] People of African Descent said that it is the responsibility of the state to remediate decades, centuries of racism, that there was no time bar on this, and that it is the responsibility of this court to right this wrong. The only way to right this wrong is to release a man who was wrongfully on death row for 28-and-a-half years. A federal judge ruled that his death sentence was obtained unconstitutionally in 2010, and he was released to serve a life in prison without parole. You’d think that after 28-and-a-half years of wrongful sentence on death row, you’d get out of prison.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you tell me more about Cynthia White — she was another witness — and what apparently is in these boxes that were found in the DA’s Office, and the significance of the fact they were found, what, in 2019?
JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ: So, they were found in January 2019. And what we see is a string of documents wherein the lead prosecutor in the case, Joe McGill, is tracking what is happening to Cynthia White’s other cases. She was a sex worker and had over 36 violations pending against her. So, she was facing upwards of 20 years in prison. And he was consulting with other prosecutors, ensuring that before they made any decision in Cynthia White’s case, they consulted with him. So there was clearly some kind of bargain made between Cynthia White and the prosecutor, Joe McGill, that if she fingered Mumia, she would get off and would not have to serve time in prison.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Judge Wendell Griffen. We spoke to him last week. He is a Division 5 judge of the 6th Circuit in Arkansas. He spent more than 10 years as a judge in the state Court of Appeals. He’s retiring at the end of this year after almost a quarter of a century on the bench. This is what he had to say about why he’s become a prominent voice — another trial judge, just like the trial judge in Philadelphia, but he’s in Little Rock — why he’s become a prominent voice for a new trial and the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
JUDGE WENDELL GRIFFEN: So, we have to ask ourselves the question: Why is this journalist, why is this Black activist not free? And why is it so hard for a judge to say, “Hey, we’ve got the law that requires him to be free. I’m going to follow the law and declare him free”? And if the commonwealth wants to retry him, they can do so. If the commonwealth decides we can’t retry him because the evidence is no longer there, people have passed away, witnesses have forgotten information, then that is not Mumia’s fault. That is the fault of prosecutors, and Mumia should not be imprisoned because, A, he had a pretense of a trial in the first place, and, B, because, for some reasons, bloodlust or the desire to keep a Black activist journalist in prison means that we don’t want to do what’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: Again, that is sitting Arkansas trial Judge Wendell Griffen, speaking to us from Little Rock, Arkansas. The significance of this judge speaking out? And then I want to go back to the beginning, before we end, and what happened on Friday — what you expected to happen, what the judge had said would happen on Friday, but then what did happen.
JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ: Well, she had promised on October 26th that she would make a decision in this case on December 16th. And, in fact, she issued an intent to dismiss opinion on October 26th and said, “We will make a final decision on December 16th, because this case has gone on for too long.” But the facts of this case, she now understands, merit adjudication.
And the prosecutor in this case said over and over again, “These issues have been litigated. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court litigated this issue. Why are you bringing this up now?” What the prosecution fails to understand is that new evidence has emerged, that that office has hidden for 41 years. That is the reason why these previous courts were unable to grant Mumia relief, not to mention the fact that the judges in this case have historically been funded by the Fraternal Order of Police, the same organization that has attempted to keep Mumia behind bars and the same organization that attempted to execute him and make sure that he was executed when he was on death row.
AMY GOODMAN: We just —
JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ: The fact —
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead.
JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ: The fact that a sitting judge has spoken out in this case is tremendous. It speaks to the validity of the new evidence, the new exculpatory evidence, in this case.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, we just have 30 seconds, but can you remind our viewers and listeners and readers why these boxes were discovered in 2019? What changed? Where were they?
JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ: Well, another judge, Leon Tucker, was hearing the issue of judicial bias in the case, that Ronald Castille was in fact funded by the Fraternal Order of Police and named him Man of the Year, the same judge that was hearing Mumia’s appeals. He should have recused himself.
In the process of that hearing, these new boxes emerged, and they were hidden in the underworld of the prosecutor’s office, six boxes with exculpatory evidence. The judge currently has asked us to look at all of the boxes, 32, maybe 200, but we have enough evidence here to clearly give Mumia at least an evidentiary hearing, a new trial or set him free.
AMY GOODMAN: Johanna Fernández, associate professor of history at CUNY’s Baruch College here in New York City, one of the coordinators of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home.
Coming up, we look at how Qatar and Morocco have been caught bribing members of the European Parliament in a scandal that’s rocked Brussels and put European Parliament members behind bars. Stay with us.
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Elon Musk looks down during a speech. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
Musk had said he would abide by the results of the unscientific poll, which began Sunday evening and concluded with 57.5% voting yes, 42.5% voting no.
More than 17 million votes were cast in the informal referendum on his chaotic leadership of Twitter, which has been marked by mass layoffs, the replatforming of suspended accounts that had violated Twitter’s rules, the suspension of journalists who cover him and whiplash policy changes made and reversed in real time.
Musk did not immediately react to the outcome of the vote.
Hours before launching the poll, Musk was publicly criticized even by some former supporters in the tech industry for a controversial new policy that had banned links to certain other social media platforms. The policy was deleted less than 24 hours after its introduction. Musk also said that “going forward,” he would poll Twitter’s users to let them decide on policy changes.
The unusual turn of events highlights how Musk has seemingly abandoned a more careful deliberation process in favor of operating by his own whims. Musk, who has a history of erratic behavior and controversial remarks, has recently engaged in an apparent one-way feud with Apple, spread a conspiracy theory about the violent attack on Paul Pelosi, and made at least one decision about who to allow on Twitter based on his own feelings.
Musk’s rhetoric and changes to the platform have created more uncertainty around advertisers, who make up the vast majority of Twitter’s business. Since Musk completed his Twitter takeover in October, a number of brands have paused advertising on the platform. Musk has frequently stated that Twitter’s finances are dire. Twitter is on pace to lose $4 billion a year after the advertiser exodus, estimates Dan Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities.
Replying to a tweet Sunday, in which MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman said he would take the CEO job, Musk hinted he hasn’t been completely happy with his new gig.
“You must like pain a lot,” Musk tweeted, noting the company “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May.”
The poll inspired other volunteers, as well. The rapper Snoop Dogg created his own Twitter poll Sunday evening, asking: “Should I run Twitter?” As of early Monday morning, it had 1.3 million votes with over 80% of respondents saying yes.
Yet Musk denied that he has a new CEO in mind.
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted. “The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive.”
Musk has sold billions of dollars worth of Tesla stock, most likely to pay for his purchase of Twitter. That has sent Tesla’s stock sinking 11% over the past month. But Tesla shares were up 5% in premarket trading after the poll results were revealed.
“This has been a black eye moment for Musk and been a major overhang on Tesla’s stock which continues to suffer in a brutal way since the Twitter soap opera began with brand deterioration related to Musk a real issue,” Ives said in a note to clients Monday.
With or without the CEO title, however, Musk will almost certainly continue to control the company’s direction.
After taking over Twitter, Musk dissolved the company’s board and its C-Suite emptied out. As the sole board director and owner of the company, Musk can appoint the next CEO – and also tell that person what to do in the role.
In place of Twitter’s former leadership, Musk tapped venture capitalists and friends to work with him as he weighed a number of significant changes to the company. The list includes investor Jason Calacanis, Craft Ventures partner David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner focused on crypto and Twitter’s former consumer teams lead.
Some of those individuals could now be on the shortlist to take over as CEO if Musk makes good on his promise and steps down.
Shortly after Musk posted his latest poll, Calacanis posted a poll of his own asking who should become Twitter’s next CEO: himself, Sacks, or Calacanis and Sacks together as co-CEOs.
As of this publication, a fourth option was winning by a wide margin: “Other.”
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Afghan men—among millions facing starvation—in a line in January for a monthly food ration in an area south of Kabul. (photo: Scott Peterson/Getty Images)
In September, the U.S. created a foundation that was supposed to unfreeze Afghanistan’s foreign assets. Yet, interviews with trustees reveal that, in three months, no funds have been disbursed—or concrete plans made—to help the Afghan people.
Without access to these funds — alongside a lattice of sanctions, a decline in humanitarian aid and harsh political turmoil under Taliban rule — Afghanistan has been led into an economic collapse with a dramatic uptick in poverty; 6 million Afghans are facing the immediate risk of starvation. According to calculations from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a left-leaning think tank, U.S. sanctions on Afghanistan (including the freezing of these central bank assets) could kill more people than 20 years of U.S. war and occupation.
In September, the Biden administration placed half of the U.S.-controlled assets into a private foundation, trusteed by just four people, “to be used for the benefit of the people of Afghanistan while keeping them out of the hands of the Taliban and other malign actors,” according to a joint statement from the departments of Treasury and State.
But interviews with two of those four trustees reveal that no funds have yet been disbursed to help the Afghan people and there are no policies in place to do so immediately. One trustee underscored that it is unlikely the foundation will be a vehicle to quickly return the assets to Afghanistan’s central bank while the Taliban is maintaining oppressive rule.
This lack of progress raises concerns that the Biden administration is on course to worsen the rapidly spiraling humanitarian crisis. “Who pays the price,” asks Basir Bita, an Afghan activist who works with the Afghan refugee community in Canada and who has family in Afghanistan, “for the U.S. freezing the funds? The public. The people who live in Afghanistan.”
Creation of a foundation
The United States froze the Afghan central bank’s assets amid public outcry over the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Biden administration depicted the move as a refusal to legitimize Taliban rule.
Yet, according to Andrés Arauz, a senior research fellow at the CEPR, “The reality is that central banks don’t just hold government money — they also and mostly hold commercial banks’ money. They are not only banks of governments; they are also banks of banks. It was important for the working of Afghanistan’s financial system, and therefore its economy, that their banks have access to money that was seized by the United States.”
The freezing of the assets plunged Afghanistan into a liquidity crisis, in which people are unable to access their cash and perform essential transactions. Alongside the liquidity crisis is hyper-inflation, which has worsened the acute and widespread problem of hunger. Between June 2021 and July 2022, the price of wheat flour in Afghanistan skyrocketed 68% and cooking oil jumped 55%, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Seventy percent of homes are “unable to meet basic food and non-food needs,” the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies warned in June. Reports have emerged of Afghans selling their daughters, and their kidneys, in an effort to survive hunger and rising debt.
Citing the deepening catastrophe, some activists and lawmakers have been calling for the Biden administration to take a less collectively punitive approach and return the assets to Afghanistan’s central bank. In January, the New York Times editorial board published an op-ed warning against a policy of letting the Afghan central bank fall apart, titled, “Let Innocent Afghans Have Their Money.”
In the midst of all of this, in February, the Biden administration issued an executive order to set aside $3.5 billion of the U.S.-held central bank assets for victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001 (though lawyers and lobbyists stand to profit handsomely). This move was widely criticized by United Nations experts and some 9/11 families for its disastrous humanitarian consequences for Afghans.
On September 14, the U.S. departments of Treasury and State announced the other half of the U.S.-controlled reserves of the Afghan central bank — another $3.5 billion — would be placed under the control of a Swiss foundation called the Afghan Fund. The Afghan Fund would “maintain its account” with the Bank for International Settlements, which is a global financial institution, based in Switzerland, that provides banking services for central banks.
According to a statement from the Bank for International Settlements, its role “is limited to providing banking services” and it plays no part in the decision-making of the Afghan Fund.
In the short term, the Afghan Fund’s board of trustees “will have the ability to authorize targeted disbursements to promote monetary and macroeconomic stability and benefit the Afghan people,” according to the joint statement from Treasury and State. The foundation could, for example, use the assets to pay for “critical imports like electricity,” or to pay for “Afghanistan’s arrears at international financial institutions to preserve their eligibility for financial support.” The Afghan Fund’s long-term goal is to return the funds to the Afghan central bank, but only if key assessments and “counter-terrorism” controls are implemented, the statement indicates.
Some activists and members of the U.S. Congress cautiously supported the creation of the Afghan Fund, hoping it marked a step toward the United States unfreezing the assets. “The fund has the potential to create a vital pathway to a functioning financial system, returning desperately needed assets to Afghanistan that could alleviate major price spikes of food and other essentials,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote in a September 15 statement.
The press coverage surrounding the Afghan Fund intimated a major unlocking of the assets could be just around the corner. “Setting up the new fund will enable the funds to flow quickly,” Kylie Atwood wrote for CNN.
But now, three months later, no money has been distributed and two of the Afghan Fund’s trustees say there is no immediate plan to return assets to the Afghan central bank.
Four trustees
The Afghan Fund has four trustees who make its decisions. Of the two born in Afghanistan, the first is Anwar-ul-Haq Ahady, former head of the Afghan central bank and Afghanistan’s former minister of finance. The second is Shah Mehrabi, a professor at Montgomery College in Maryland, who also serves on the Afghan central bank’s Supreme Council.
Mehrabi and Ahady each confirmed to Workday Magazine and In These Times that, in the three months since it was created, the Afghan Fund has not disbursed any funds — neither directly to the Afghan central bank, nor to meet any immediate needs for economic stabilization — and has no immediate plans to make significant disbursements to the central bank.
At the first meeting of the Afghan Fund trustees in Geneva on November 21, “potential disbursement issues were addressed but no policy and procedures or options were elaborated or finalized,” Mehrabi explains. There is another meeting scheduled for January, he says, but “release of these funds to the central bank most likely will not occur in January.” Ahady confirmed the Afghan Fund has not yet reached agreement on a policy to disburse funds.
According to Mehrabi and Ahady, among the trustees at the November 21 meeting was Andrew Baukol, the U.S. Treasury’s acting undersecretary for international affairs, who replaced Scott Miller, U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, as a trustee. (The U.S. Embassy in Switzerland confirmed that Miller had been replaced, and “the U.S. representative is now based at Treasury.”) The swap-in of Baukol, who has also worked in the CIA and the U.S. office of the International Monetary Fund, suggests a larger role for the Treasury Department.
The fourth trustee is Alexandra Baumann, a Swiss foreign ministry official.
For any decision to go through, it must have the unanimous backing of the foundation’s four trustees, Ahady explains. Given the Treasury Department’s representation, “If the U.S. government disagrees, no decision will be made,” he says.
Mehrabi’s position on the board was a win for advocates of unfreezing the Afghan central bank funds, as he is an outspoken proponent of unlocking the assets and restoring them to the central bank. Mehrabi explains over WhatsApp that he would like to see a “limited, monitored release” of funds to the Afghan central bank, ranging from $80 million to $100 million per month, “depending on the demand and stabilization of currency and stable prices.” (He has previously called for $150 million a month.)
Mehrabi’s proposal is relatively moderate compared with others who have issued less qualified calls to fully unfreeze the Afghan central bank assets and revive the institution. But for those who are anxious to welcome any amount of disbursement to Afghanistan’s central bank, Mehrabi stands out for supporting the direct flow of funds.
When asked whether other trustees agree the funds should be returned to the Afghan central bank, Mehrabi replies, “The issue of disbursement has not been fully discussed yet and finalized.”
A Treasury Department readout from the November 21 meeting says the trustees of the Afghan Fund agreed on operational matters, like “hiring an external auditor” and “developing compliance controls and foundational corporate governance documents.” But the readout contains no mention of what will happen with the actual assets.
When asked about the prospect of unlocking the assets for the Afghan central bank, Mehrabi explains: “The U.S. government’s position has been not to release funds to the central bank unless capacity building and AML/CFT issues [anti-money laundering and counter-financing control measures] are resolved. How long will this take? There is an immediate need to tackle higher prices that people are suffering from, and lack of funds has prevented businesses from paying for imports. If funds are not released soon, the suffering of Afghans will continue.”
Ahady says over the phone that, due to the position of the United States, the Afghan Fund will be unlikely to return any significant portion of the assets to the Afghan central bank while the Taliban “is declining U.S. requests for more inclusive government and women’s rights.”
Some funds may be disbursed for key items that circumvent the central bank in the public interest, Ahady says, such as printing new bank notes or passports. But the primary purpose of the Afghan Fund “is really to keep this money so that, one day, when the situation becomes normal, this is the capital of the Afghan central bank. So at least the central bank will have capital to work with. So the main idea is not so much disbursement, unless it’s strictly needed, but to manage the fund that’s under sanction.”
Ahady declined to comment on whether he supports this orientation to the frozen assets.
Such an approach would differ from the standards laid out in the joint statement from the departments of Treasury and State, which highlights three conditions for unfreezing the assets: that the central bank “demonstrates its independence from political influence and interference”; “demonstrates it has instituted adequate anti-money laundering and countering-the-financing-of-terrorism (AML/CFT) controls”; and “completes a third-party needs assessment and onboards a reputable third-party monitor.”
According to Cavan Kharrazian, a progressive foreign policy advocate for Demand Progress, any delay will most greatly harm those who are already vulnerable and oppressed under Taliban rule. “For the foreseeable future, the Taliban will be in charge of the government of Afghanistan,” Kharrazian says. “While they have a deplorable human rights record, especially towards women, there is also a severe economic and humanitarian crisis in the country that needs immediate attention. This crisis affects the most vulnerable segments of society the worst.”
Kharrazian adds: “The U.S. just spent 20 years and trillions of dollars attempting to eradicate and replace the Taliban and its oppressive rule. It didn’t work. But the U.S. does have the ability to facilitate the unfreezing of funds that can benefit millions of people facing humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan.”
Afghan activist Bita implores that “the funds need to be released right now, because people are struggling. So many people lost their lives, so many people sold their kids on the streets, so many forced their daughters to marry a man because of the economic situation. So it has to be right now.”
Arauz, from the CEPR, says it would be a profound mistake on the part of the United States to withhold assets from the Afghan central bank in order to punish the Taliban. “The central bank funds are not government funds,” he emphasizes. “They are commingled with commercial banks’ funds, which ultimately belong to depositors, which are human beings and businesses. It would not be returning the funds to the Taliban — it would be returning funds to the commercial system and depositors of the Afghan economy.”
The clock is ticking and activists warn that each day without the unfreezing of the funds brings more hardship for Afghans. “When the fund was created, every major humanitarian institution, the United Nations, etc., were already pretty clear that the whole country faced a giant humanitarian crisis that needed to be addressed as soon as possible,” Kharrazian says. “There was already a sense of urgency.
“They’ve waited three months to deliberate over sending small portions over what should have been fully unfrozen funds. If it was urgent in September, it’s especially urgent now, with winter arriving.”
Ahady’s position is that unlocking the Afghan central bank assets would not be a magic wand. He says that “the objective of sanctions is to make things difficult, and have these sanctions contributed to the slowdown of economic activities in Afghanistan? Yes.” But, he contends, a number of factors are to blame, including dependency on foreign assistance, the imposition of sanctions, and poor economic management. “I think that, even if the U.S. government were to release this fund, this is not going to solve Afghanistan’s economic problems,” he says. “It might help a little bit. Just a little bit.”
Afghan Fund trustee Baumann did not respond to a request for an interview, but she has emphasized caution in previous statements to the press. “The [Afghan central bank], in its current form, is not a fit place for this money,” she said in an October article from SWI swiss in fo .ch, a media service of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation. “We do not have any guarantee that if the money goes back right now that it will be effectively used for the benefit of the Afghan people.”
The U.S. Treasury Department also did not return a request for comment.
With no clear timetable for disbursing funds, Erik Sperling, executive director of advocacy organization Just Foreign Policy, expresses frustration. “Given U.S. Treasury’s continued veto and dominance over the Swiss Fund,” he says, “U.S. officials like Janet Yellen, Adewale O. Adeyemo and, ultimately, President Biden are responsible for destroying [the Afghan] economy and knowingly plunging tens of millions of Afghans into crisis.”
According to Bita, “The way the U.S. government has taken hostage of the funds — that is one way of dehumanizing the people of Afghanistan.”
“With this money,” Bita adds, “you could save the lives of so many people.”
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A North Atlantic right whale in Cape Cod Bay, off the coast of Plymouth, Mass., in 2018. (photo: Michael Dwyer/AP)
Many nature-based solutions to fighting climate change have focused on the ability of trees and wetlands to capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide. But in a paper published Thursday in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, a group of biologists explores the idea that whales can influence the amount of carbon in the air and in the ocean, potentially contributing to the overall reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
“Understanding the role of whales in the carbon cycle is a dynamic and emerging field that may benefit both marine conservation and climate-change strategies,” wrote the authors, led by Heidi Pearson, a biologist from the University of Alaska Southeast.
The ocean is by far the world’s largest carbon sink, having absorbed about 40 percent of all carbon dioxide emitted from the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.
Marine biologists recently discovered that whales, particularly great whales, also play an important role in capturing carbon from the atmosphere. They can weigh up to 28 tons and live over 100 years, the researchers wrote, and their size and long lives mean they accumulate more carbon in their bodies than other small animals. When they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking carbon out of the atmosphere for centuries.
“Whales consume up to 4 percent of their massive body weight in krill and photosynthetic plankton every day. For the blue whale, this equates to nearly 8,000 pounds,” the scientists wrote. “When they finish digesting their food, their excrement is rich in important nutrients that help these krill and plankton flourish, aiding in increased photosynthesis and carbon storage from the atmosphere.”
A 2019 report published by the International Monetary Fund estimated that a great whale sequesters 33 tons of carbon dioxide each year on average, while a tree absorbs only up to 48 pounds a year — a figure the report’s authors used to suggest that conservationists could be better off saving whales than planting trees.
The new paper explores how a recovery in whale populations to pre-whaling levels — between 4 million and 5 million, from slightly more than 1.3 million in 2019, according to the IMF report — could increase the animals’ ability to act as a carbon sink. (Commercial hunting, the main reason whales’ numbers have dwindled, has decreased their populations by 81 percent, the researchers said.)
Among a number of whale species, the amount of carbon that was being sequestered “jumps up by one or two orders of magnitude” with a recovery in the whale population, said Stephen Wing, a co-author of the paper and a marine science professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
The numbers are “relatively small” considering the scope of the global climate challenge, “but relative to the promises that some nations make on reducing CO2 emissions, they’re relatively large,” he added.
“We’re kind of hind casting and saying the recovery could achieve pre-whaling numbers because the system has previously sustained that number of whales,” Wing said.
Whales, along with a number of ocean animals, are vulnerable to climate change, as rising temperatures drive them into new habitats. They rank among the world’s most endangered marine mammals, including the North Atlantic right whale, only about 340 of which remain.
Whales are still being killed in startlingly high numbers, years after commercial whaling was banned, in waters brimming with ships that strike them and ropes that entangle them. Offshore wind turbines — part of President Biden’s clean energy agenda — are also poised to encroach on their habitat as the administration tries to balance tackling global warming with protecting wildlife.
“Whale recovery has the potential for long-term self-sustained enhancement of the ocean carbon sink,” the authors wrote. “The full carbon dioxide reduction role of great whales (and other organisms) will only be realized through robust conservation and management interventions that directly promote population increases.”
The authors were cautious on the math behind including whale carbon in any wider climate-change mitigation strategies just yet, however, as there are still many scientific unknowns. They argued that recent studies valuing the carbon contribution of a single blue whale at $1.4 million “are based on assumptions beyond our understanding of whale ecology and biological oceanography.”
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