17 December 22
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Why is the U.S. choosing to celebrate its most murderous and merciless battles in Iraq?
Fallujah is where, just a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division opened fire on a crowd of civilian protesters and killed 17 of them; the U.S. military claimed that the first shots came from Iraqis, but there is no convincing evidence for that assertion and significant reporting to the contrary. Fallujah was a stronghold of the ousted dictator Saddam Hussein and for that reason, its residents fiercely opposed an unprovoked invasion that was, according to international law, flagrantly illegal.
Those killings were the prelude to a torrent of violence and destruction in 2004. The bloodshed that year included the deaths of more than 1,000 civilians; the point-blank murder of prisoners; and the torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, just 20 miles away. Fallujah’s punishment even extended beyond the brutal era of its U.S. occupation; in years after, there has been a spike in cancers, birth defects, and miscarriages, apparently due to America’s use of munitions with depleted uranium.
Instead of apologizing for what was done, the U.S. is choosing to celebrate it: The Pentagon announced this week that a $2.4 billion warship will be named the USS Fallujah. The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. David Berger, made clear that the military has decided to double down on its fairy tale of Fallujah as an American triumph. “Under extraordinary odds, the Marines prevailed against a determined enemy who enjoyed all the advantages of defending an urban area,” he said in a press release about the naming. “The battle of Fallujah is, and will remain, imprinted in the minds of all Marines and serves as a reminder to our nation, and its foes, why our Marines call themselves the world’s finest.”
The announcement noted that more than 100 U.S. and allied soldiers died in Fallujah but said nothing about the far larger toll of Iraqi civilians killed, the flattening of swathes of the city through extensive bombings, the apparent war crimes by U.S. forces, the health impacts on civilians that continue to this day — and the inconvenient fact that U.S. forces were unable to keep their hold on Fallujah for very long. For the Pentagon, it’s as if none of it mattered, or it didn’t happen.
While the whitewashing is generating little pushback in the U.S., it is eliciting protests from Iraq and elsewhere.
“The pain of defeat in Fallujah is haunting the U.S. military,” wrote Ahmed Mansour, an Al Jazeera journalist who reported from Fallujah during the fiercest fighting. “They want to turn the war crimes they committed there into a victory. … I was an eyewitness to the defeat of the Americans in the Battle of Fallujah.”
I reached out to Muntader al-Zaidi, an Iraqi human rights activist who famously threw his shoe at President George W. Bush during a 2008 press conference in Baghdad. “It is insolent to consider the killing of innocent people as a victory,” Zaidi said. “Do you want to boast about forces that kill and hunt innocent people? I hope this ship will always remind you of the shame of the invasion and the humiliation of the occupation.”
A statement from the Council on American-Islamic Relations got straight to the point: “There must be a better name for this ship — one that does not evoke horrific scenes from an illegal and unjust war.”
If you were an American in Iraq after the invasion, Fallujah was one of the most dangerous places you could visit. Based in Baghdad, I had to drive through Fallujah in an ordinary sedan in late 2003 to reach a nearby U.S. base where I had an embed. What I remember of that journey was the feeble disguise I donned (a red and white kaffiyeh over my brown hair); the way I slunk down in my seat as far as I could as we drove into the city; and the clenching in my gut as my car stopped in traffic and people could notice the Americans inside.
I was fortunate; nobody spotted me or the blond photographer I was working with. But a few months later a two-vehicle convoy of heavily armed contractors from Blackwater, a private security company, was ambushed by rebel fighters on the main street where I was briefly stuck. Four Americans were killed and their mutilated bodies were hung over a bridge on the Euphrates River. The killings — and particularly the ghastly images widely published in the U.S. media — prompted the Pentagon to launch a series of revenge attacks against the city. It was an egregious over-reaction, especially because the slain Americans were not soldiers, they were well-paid mercenaries who, as a general rule, were regarded by Iraqis and U.S. troops alike as reckless, ill-behaved, and unprofessional. One of the worst massacres of the entire American occupation would take place in 2007 in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where a convoy of Blackwater mercenaries opened fire on the cars around them and killed 17 civilians.
There were two battles of Fallujah in 2004. The first was a U.S. invasion in the spring that ended with a partial seizure of the city and its handover to Iraqi authorities who soon ceded control back to the rebels. More than 800 Iraqis were killed in that battle, with more than 600 of them being civilians, half of whom were women and children, according to Iraq Body Count. Later that year, the second battle began when the U.S. military returned with an even greater number of forces and retook the entire city block by block in fighting that stretched from November to December.
During the second battle, freelance journalist Kevin Sites, on assignment for NBC News, followed a squad of Marines into a mosque that contained a handful of injured Iraqi fighters who were disarmed and lying on the ground. Sites was filming and a Marine’s voice can be heard on the video saying, “He’s fucking faking he’s dead. He’s faking he’s fucking dead.” One of the Marines then fires his assault weapon into an Iraqi lying on the ground, after which a voice says, “Well, he’s dead now.” A military investigation subsequently determined that “the actions of the Marine in question were consistent with the established rules of engagement, the law of armed conflict, and the Marine’s inherent right of self-defense.”
After the second battle, more than 700 bodies were recovered from the rubble, and 550 of them were women and children, according to the director of Fallujah’s hospital, who at the time said his count was partial because areas of the city remained unreachable for civilian rescuers. This toll made the second battle even more deadly for civilians than the first one. “It was really distressing picking up dead bodies from destroyed homes, especially children,” said Dr. Rafa’ah al-Iyssaue, in an article published in January 2005 by IRIN News, a United Nations-funded media outlet that specialized in humanitarian issues. “It is the most depressing situation I have ever been in since the war started.”
History is inscribed in multiple ways, not just in books, movies, speeches, articles, and statues, but even on the transoms of warships. The U.S. military obviously wants to foment a historical narrative that acknowledges only the bravery of its soldiers rather than their crimes or their civilian victims. And yes, there was bravery by U.S. troops in Fallujah, so it’s not a total lie; they attacked an entrenched enemy, they fought hard, they protected each other, most of them didn’t commit war crimes, and some of them paid the price with their own blood. But that’s true for pretty much any army in any war; it could be said of some German soldiers in World War II (hello “Das Boot”).
But it’s a lie if all you do is look at individual acts of bravery rather than the totality of what happened in a battle or war. I honestly can’t fathom how or why the Pentagon officials who decide such matters settled on “Fallujah” as the best name for this yet-to-be-constructed ship. Are they unaware of what happened? Are they aware but hoping to smother the truth? Are they counting on us to not care enough to say, “Excuse me, this is bullshit,” or do they want to remind the rest of the world at every port call that the U.S. is capable of destroying any city it chooses at any time of its choosing — a kind of floating “suck on this”? It could be any of that or all of that, who knows. The fog of war lingers long after the last bullets.
This isn’t a done deal. The ship won’t be completed for at least several years, and names have been changed before christening and after entering service. While the names are designated by the Navy, it’s done under the authority of the president, so let the lobbying and protesting at the White House begin. Maybe there’s a chance of succeeding; President Joe Biden stood up to the generals who wanted to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan forever, so perhaps he’ll tell them to get lost on this one too.
If you step back from the narrow question of whether this ship should be named after Fallujah or Fresno, the larger truth is that it should not be built at all. The United States spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined. It’s a sickness that weakens the country by fueling the militarization of domestic policing while depriving Americans of the support they need for essentials like good schools and decent health care.
So if you want to do the right thing for our soldiers and their dependents and their heirs, don’t name this ship the Fallujah, don’t build this ship, and don’t invade a country that has not attacked us. It shouldn’t be this hard.
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The aftermath of an airstrike in Yemen. (photo: Hani Mohammed/AP)
Despite its lofty rhetoric about sovereignty and human rights, the Biden administration has been working overtime to kill a congressional attempt from Bernie Sanders to end US support for the Saudi war on Yemen.
Then it all unraveled. Joe Biden’s White House began whipping behind the scenes to kill the measure, telling lawmakers that its passage would jeopardize what it cast as the administration’s successful diplomatic efforts in the conflict, and threatening to veto whatever passed, according to talking points first reported by the Intercept and shared with Jacobin. Senator Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, quickly came out as a “no” vote, with his counterpart, Senator Dianne Feinstein, another Democrat, soon following suit. Late on Tuesday, Sanders withdrew the resolution, saying he would instead work with the White House to negotiate new language that everyone could agree on, and promising to reintroduce it if he and the administration couldn’t come to an acceptable agreement.
Though Sanders put on a brave front, casting the decision as his willing choice to work with the White House for a happy compromise, reporting from Capitol Hill appears to tell a different story. Several sources told Politico that it soon turned out Sanders didn’t, in fact, have the votes he thought he had to pass the measure, meaning he likely chose to withdraw it rather than risk a defeat that would foreclose on any future action.
Just like that, a measure that twice passed a GOP-controlled Senate — and even went all the way to the president’s desk once, under divided government — couldn’t even clear one chamber of Congress under a Democratic trifecta, and under a president who had expressly vowed to end US support for the war.
Not Over Yet
While disappointed, those involved in the effort to end US backing for the war told Jacobin they don’t view the resolution’s current failure as the last word. Though activists were let down by the lack of communication from Sanders’s office and what felt like a last-minute push, they nevertheless view this as a critical next step in a yearslong campaign that will most likely come to a head in the next Congress.
“There’s good reason to believe that the next push to get a floor vote on it is going to have a lot more momentum behind it,” says Cavan Kharrazian of Demand Progress.
Those involved say even the threat to hold the vote has had an impact, maybe most notably in putting the relatively forgotten war back on the national agenda. Biden’s February 2021 executive order used careful language to give the impression of ending US support while in reality keeping it going, a framing swallowed by many press outlets, all but banishing the issue from political discussion as a result. By whipping to kill Sanders’s resolution this week, the White House has, in effect, tacitly but publicly admitted its backing of the Saudi-led campaign has not really ended, and that the issue wasn’t solved by the president’s pen.
In the process of the flurry of lobbying and advocacy in the run-up to the vote, lawmakers who haven’t thought about the war since the start of last year have been forced to put the matter at top of their minds and develop a stance on it. Sources say they got word from numerous senators that they intended to vote for the resolution, and they point to the public support it got from Republican senators Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, as well as Democratic senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism. While not a cosponsor, Murphy is an influential liberal voice on foreign policy who made a floor speech before the vote and later appeared on MSNBC calling for the end of US support.
“I think this process is only going to strengthen our hand here,” says Hassan El-Tayyab, the Friends Committee on National Legislation’s legislative director for Middle East policy.
While getting it through the next, divided Congress will be tougher, sources told Jacobin, it will still be possible. Antiwar groups have had success persuading Republicans on the matter and getting GOP sign-on for the effort, with ten Republicans cosponsoring the House version of the resolution. And, there are a host of right-leaning, anti-interventionist groups ready to ramp up the pressure next time.
The resolution has another important effect, they say. While it’s true Saudi Arabia has paused its bombing campaign since April — part of the White House’s justification for opposing the bill — this could restart any time, especially since the fragile truce between the warring parties expired two months ago.
“This sends a huge message to Saudi Arabia,” Kharrazian says. “Even though there was no vote, if Saudi Arabia wasn’t thinking about the risk of restarting their bombing campaign, they’ve seen now that Sanders is ready to pull the trigger.”
A renewed Saudi-led air offensive, especially with the war back in US headlines, is exactly the kind of thing that could generate enough outrage to activate a bipartisan coalition that really will cut off US support next time. While far from guaranteed, it’s enough of a risk that the Saudis will have to tread carefully in the weeks and months ahead.
Upside Down
There’s a lot to say about all of this.
For one, it’s notable that the two earliest Senate voices out of the gate in favor of continuing US support for the Saudi-led war — and which were key to torpedoing the measure’s chances on the Senate floor — were not only Democrats, but Democrats from deep-blue California. Worse, it’s well-known at this point that one of those senators, Dianne Feinstein, suffers from debilitating memory loss, suggesting that it wasn’t the senator herself — who has been fiercely critical of US complicity in the war and vigorously supported this measure in the past — but her unelected staffers who decided to attach her name and that of the Californians she represents to backing this war.
Another thing is the mind-bending levels of hypocrisy involved here, in a city that virtually runs on the stuff. Like most of the world, politicians in Washington have been rightly disgusted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and however one feels about the US policy toward the war, it’s fair to say they’ve moved heaven and earth to punish Moscow for it — from diplomatic isolation and official condemnation at the United Nations, to unprecedented levels of military support and far-reaching sanctions that have had painful effects on the rest of the world.
Not that anything similar has been contemplated against Saudi Arabia in the eight long years this war has lasted, but none of these measures nor the unintended consequences they entail are even required here. All that’s needed to help bring to a close the Saudis’ war — which has killed more than 377,000 people, put millions at risk of starvation, and sent diseases like cholera, polio, and diphtheria tearing through the population like wildfire — is to end US involvement, since Washington’s support is integral to the Saudi-led coalition’s ability to keep fighting, from arms sales and providing maintenance and spare parts for fighter jets, to assistance we’re not even aware of.
This is why a variety of experts — including a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the Arab Center Washington DC’s executive director, and a former US diplomat to Yemen who joined the hawkish Atlantic Council — have all said the war couldn’t go for much longer if the United States pulled its support. It’s why CIA veteran Bruce Riedel, who has also worked for the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and NATO, said in 2016 that “if the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told [former Saudi leader] King Salman that this war has to end, it would end tomorrow.” It’s why Senator Murphy said on the Senate floor this week that “if we stopped servicing those planes, it would be hard, potentially impossible for the Saudis to continue that war.”
The war in Yemen is not only one where the United States is unambiguously on the wrong side, helping a repressive monarchy wage war on impoverished neighboring civilians and carry out a range of stomach-churning atrocities while doing so. It’s also one that makes a mockery of US rhetoric about democracy, sovereignty, and human rights, undermining future efforts to hold other states accountable for their own, similar crimes.
Such hypocrisy may not raise an eyebrow in Washington, but it does in the rest of the world, as we’ve seen with the developing world’s response to the Russian invasion. States have been unwilling to follow the West and take the risks that diplomatic and economic isolation of Russia would entail for them, partly because they view the principles and “rules-based international order” that are meant to be at stake in that conflict as being selectively and opportunistically invoked by powerful states, with Yemen being a prime example. As Murphy said on the Senate floor, ongoing US support makes the United States “morally weaker, because for us to be a participant in any way, shape, or form in a war with this kind of misery, it really shapes the way that people think about us in the region and around the world.”
Incredibly, even as the administration remains divided over seeking a diplomatic route to deescalating the war in Ukraine — and even as the idea has been effectively made taboo within significant swathes of US discourse — the White House is citing the importance of diplomacy to argue against ending its backing of an aggressor state in this war. It’s warped logic — ending US support would most likely enhance diplomacy here, since it would incentivize the Saudis to look for a peaceful way out — but it’s also untrue. As former UN special envoy to Yemen Jamal Benomar told the Intercept, “There’s been no diplomatic progress whatsoever . . . So an all-out war can resume at any time.”
Some have actually turned to attacking antiwar activists as the real problem. Center for International Policy fellow Kate Kizer told Politico that “what they’re doing is undermining support for activism,” while Huffington Post foreign affairs reporter Akbar Shahid Ahmed accused activists of reducing “what could have been a productive conversation” into “DC power plays” by backing the resolution.
Yet in 2018, Kizer herself called US backing for the Saudi war “unquestioned executive overreach” while praising Sanders’s identical push for a war powers resolution as “a bold action” from Congress that meant “upholding its constitutional role as the sole body that can declare war.” Just six months ago, when the truce was still actually in place, she called it “a means to . . . pressure both the administration, as well as the Saudi and Emirati monarchies, to seek a final diplomatic resolution to the intervention and broader war.”
When asked about this contradiction, Kizer, pointing to this Twitter thread, said that the Saudis’ pause in bombing and the Houthis’ expansion of war aims and disinterest in negotiations mean that it’s “no longer the coalition who needs to be pushed to the peace table to end the war,” but the Houthis. Kizer also says that the Senate’s earlier stripping of House-passed bans on US support via spare parts and maintenance in multiple National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAAs) means a war powers resolution “is not the tool to use to actually hold these monarchies accountable.” (Though the Senate also stripped such House-passed provisions from NDAAs during the years Kizer backed a war powers resolution, and in any case, this is a little like saying Trump’s veto of the resolution is a reason not to try to pass it again).
Flip this around and it’s hard to imagine, quite rightly, any of these arguments being taken seriously if they came from foreign officials trying to justify their support for Russia, whose brutal bombing campaign on Ukrainian infrastructure has similarly been read ― by the US special advisor to the commander of Ukraine’s forces no less ― as a way to push an unwilling Ukrainian side to the negotiating table. In that case, US voices would likely and correctly respond that any complicity in a terrible war killing and maiming civilians is wrong, period, and should end as soon as possible, as we can see from the fierce criticism Iran has faced for doing far less to aid Moscow’s war effort than Washington has done to help the Saudis.
Yet for some reason, US journalists, politicians, and thinkers seem unwilling to apply that same simple moral calculus to their own government’s actions.
The Fight Continues
As Matt Duss, a progressive foreign policy voice and former Sanders advisor, told the Post last year, “one of the best ways to create moments [of change in Congress] is to force a vote,” since it “creates an opportunity for education and discussion.”
The good news is that this is still very much on the table. But what it will need is grassroots pressure of the kind that groups like Demand Progress seek to facilitate, not just on Sanders — to preclude him from acquiescing to an inadequate deal with the White House — but on Democratic lawmakers, to defy their president and do the right thing, and on Biden himself, to make clear there will be a political cost to vetoing any resolution that clears Congress. Despite what you may have heard, the fight to end the war in Yemen isn’t lost, so be ready to act.
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Trump supporters stand on a Capitol Police armored vehicle as others take over the steps of the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
Doug Jensen, one of the first people to breach the Capitol building, was known as the rioter who chased a police officer.
When a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol, Doug Jensen, 43, was directly involved in one of the day's most dramatic moments. Jensen, the tenth person to breach the Capitol Building led a crowd chasing U.S. Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman officer up a set of stairs and into a corridor just outside the Senate chambers. The man, clad in a distinctive black QAnon hoodie, screamed at the officer to arrest then Vice President Mike Pence and “do their jobs.”
Images of the stand-off and Jensen at the front of the crowd quickly made him one of the faces of the riot, alongside folks like the QAnon Shaman.
The Iowa man was forced to leave the Capitol building after the initial break-in but, undeterred, reentered the grounds and had to be forcibly removed a second time. Unbeknownst to most, he was armed with a knife during his time on the hill.
Authorities conducted a massive effort to identify and arrest those who breached the Capitol grounds that day and have charged almost 1,000 people so far. Jensen, being one of the most prominent faces to emerge from that day, was quickly identified and arrested two days after the riots.
Jenson was found guilty of assaulting a law enforcement officer, obstructing an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted building with a dangerous weapon, and disorderly conduct with a dangerous weapon in September.
According to USA Today, before the sentence was announced Jensen said "I can't change my past, I can just look to the future."
In a 72-page sentencing memo, prosecutors described a man with a history of domestic violence, emboldened by the size of the mob told his fellow rioters, in reference to Officer Goodman, “he’s one person, we’re thousands.”
“Jensen was not only determined to arrest Vice President Pence on January 6, but he also wanted the Capitol Police to ‘surrender the building’ to the rioters,” it reads. “In other words, his goal was not just to disrupt the certification of the electoral college vote, but to actually occupy the building. He was not there to protest; he was there to wrest control.”
Following the events in D.C., Jensen celebrated his newfound fame calling himself a “hero” and “repeatedly expressed pride for having achieved his goal of becoming the ‘poster boy for January 6.” Prosecutors asked for a five-year sentence whereas his attorneys asked for two.
Jensen partially blamed his actions on the QAnon conspiracy–which purports Donald Trump is waging a secretive war against a pedophilic cabal that runs the world behind the scenes. In his trial, his attorney even dubbed him a “walking advertisement for QAnon.” Jensen himself said that he had been deceived by lies leading up to the riots and regretted what he did on that fateful day.
Jensen also received 36 months of supervised release and $2,000 of restitution.
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Leonard Leo outside the Supreme Court during the confirmation hearing for Justice Neil Gorsuch. (photo: Mark Peterson/Redux)
Newly obtained records show how Leonard Leo, an architect of the right-wing takeover of the courts, has been funding groups pushing to change elections and anti-discrimination laws.
The documents detail how Leo, who helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative majority as an adviser to President Donald Trump, has used a sprawling network of opaque nonprofits to fund groups advocating for ending affirmative action, rolling back anti-discrimination protections and allowing state legislatures unreviewable oversight of federal elections.
The records also show that the Leo-aligned nonprofits paid millions of dollars to for-profit entities connected to Leo.
Leo and one of his top associates did not respond to requests for comment.
The money flowed mostly through so-called dark money groups, which don’t have to disclose their donors. They are required to reveal the recipients of their spending in their annual tax returns, which are released to the public, but often those are also dark money groups or other entities that have minimal disclosure rules.
As ProPublica and The Lever detailed in August, Leo was gifted a $1.6 billion fortune last year by a reclusive manufacturing magnate, Barre Seid. The newly revealed tax documents cover last year, just as Leo was in the process of receiving that enormous donation.
The Supreme Court case involving a Colorado-based website designer who refuses to work for same-sex couples provides a window into Leo’s strategy.
At least six groups funded by Leo’s network have filed briefs supporting the suit, which seeks to overturn Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. The Ethics and Public Policy Center, which records show received $1.9 million from Leo’s network, submitted a brief supporting the web designer. So did Concerned Women for America, which has received at least $565,000 over the past two years from the Leo network, as well as an organization called the Becket Fund, which got $550,000 from a Leo group.
Leo’s network has also been the top funder of the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which spends money to elect GOP attorneys general and serves as a policy hub for the state officials. Twenty Republican attorneys general have also filed a brief in support of the case. One Leo group donated $6.5 million to RAGA during the 2022 election cycle, according to the association’s federal filings.
The largest donation by Leo’s network was $71 million given to DonorsTrust, a so-called donor-advised fund that pools money from numerous funders and gives it out to largely conservative and libertarian groups. Past reports have described DonorsTrust as a “dark-money ATM” of the conservative movement.
Another case that Leo groups have sought to influence is Moore v. Harper, which could have sweeping implications for American democracy. The question posed in the case is whether the Constitution affords state legislatures the power to create rules for federal elections without state court oversight or intervention.
The Honest Elections Project, an initiative within another key Leo organization, the 85 Fund, has backed the plaintiff’s case with an amicus brief. The tax documents show that the 85 Fund also donated $400,000 in 2020 to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an Indianapolis-based conservative legal group that filed a supportive brief in the case.
Thirteen Republican attorneys general filed a brief backing the suit as well.
The Supreme Court is also hearing two cases this term brought by the conservative group Students for Fair Admissions that are challenging universities’ affirmative action policies. The group received $250,000 from the 85 Fund in 2020, the tax records show, more than a third of the total it raised that year.
Speech First, which the records show received $700,000 in 2020-21 from the 85 Fund, filed briefs backing Students for Fair Admissions in both cases. Republican attorneys general, backed by Leo’s network, submitted briefs, too.
The other theme to emerge from the new tax records is the large amount of expenditures going to for-profit entities run by or connected to Leo. The 85 Fund’s largest outside vendor for 2021 was CRC Advisors, a for-profit consulting firm chaired by Leo. The 85 Fund paid CRC Advisors $22 million last year, tax records show.
The largest outside vendor to the Concord Fund, another hub in Leo’s network, was also CRC Advisors, which received nearly $8 million over the course of a year. Concord also paid $500,000 to BH Group, another for-profit firm led by Leo.
There is no prohibition on nonprofits sending business to companies they have connections to, but any deals must be made at a fair market value.
The companies did not immediately respond to questions about the payments.
Brian Bukle having lunch at a local cafe in Perris, CA. (photo: Apollo Victoria/Survival Media Agency)
The Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus and the ACLU Foundation of Northern California in late 2021 filed a lawsuit against ICE over Bukle’s wrongful arrest. Months before the lawsuit was filed, a government report had found the need for ICE to better train its officers to verify people’s citizenship.
Bukle is a resident of Corona in Riverside County.
Bukle, who was 62 at the time the lawsuit was filed, spent 36 days at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Facility in Bakersfield in the midst of a COVID-19 outbreak before the government acknowledged his U.S. citizenship. According to the lawsuit, an immigration judge later threw out his deportation case.
Bukle said he doesn’t want anyone else to experience what he went through.
“Cases like mine are important because it helps agencies like ICE realize that what they are doing is completely wrong and helps others who are harmed by ICE know that there are people out there who care about their rights and will fight alongside them,” Bukle told The Bee in a statement through a communications person. An ICE spokesperson late on Tuesday said the agency doesn’t “comment on ongoing or pending litigation and outcomes.”
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials transferred Bukle into ICE’s custody in mid-2020 when two G4S Secure Solutions guards arrived to pick him up. The same civil rights organizations in early 2021 also sued ICE over what they described as an “illegal practice” of using private security guards to arrest people.
Under a settlement this summer, ICE was banned from using private contractors to arrest immigrants.
Minju Cho, a staff attorney at ACLU of Northern California, said Bukle’s lawsuit “exposed how ICE continually violates people’s civil rights,” and how it works closely with the California prison system.
“We are pleased that Mr. Bukle prevailed in his claims against ICE, but we are mindful that no amount of money can give someone back the time they lost while wrongfully detained,” Cho told The Bee in a statement. “No amount of money can undo the trauma that a person experiences in immigration detention.
” Bukle’s case, Cho said, also shows “how ICE transfers amplify racism within the criminal legal system and immigration system.” Bukle is a Black immigrant from the British Virgin Islands and derived U.S. citizenship from both of his naturalized parents.
“We know that Black immigrants like Mr. Bukle are significantly more likely to be targeted for deportation: in the U.S., 7% of noncitizens are Black, but they make up 20% of those facing deportation after interactions with the criminal legal system, according to Black Alliance for Just Immigration,” Cho said.
Bukle said he’s now trying to heal and rebuild his life. He hopes the settlement will provide some support for him and his family to move on.
“This is about making sure no one else is unjustly denied their basic rights and separated from their families just because of where they were born,” he said.
Ultimately, Cho said, the double punishment of immigrants and refugees must end.
“In a national movement for immigrant justice, Mr. Bukle’s courage has inspired many people to organize together and call on their elected leaders to uphold our values of justice and equality,” she said.
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Smoke rises at the scene of an airstrike in Mekele, the capital of the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. (photo: AP)
Two Ethiopian researchers and a Kenyan constitutional rights group are behind the legal action, which was filed this week in a High Court in Nairobi, Kenya. The city houses Facebook's East African content moderation hub, which opened in 2019.
The hub was too little, too late for the region, the lawsuit says. Facebook treated users in African countries differently than those in Western countries, fostering a "culture of disregard for human rights" that ultimately led to the murder of one of the plaintiffs' fathers, the suit alleges.
The plaintiffs are seeking a $1.6 billion victims' fund and a bigger and better-supported moderation team.
They're also asking the court to deliver what would be a legal first: forced changes to Facebook's algorithm, which has long been blamed for not doing enough to limit the reach of incendiary content.
A spokesperson for Meta said the company has "strict rules" about what's allowed on its platforms and is continuing to develop its capabilities to catch violating content.
"Hate speech and incitement to violence are against these rules, and we invest heavily in teams and technology to help us find and remove this content," the spokesperson said in a statement shared with NPR.
"Feedback from local civil society organizations and international institutions guides our safety and integrity work in Ethiopia. We employ staff with local knowledge and expertise," the spokesperson said.
The lawsuit cites language as one key factor in the company's inadequate moderation. Of the 85 languages spoken in Ethiopia, only three were covered by Facebook's content moderation practices, the lawsuit says.
The Meta spokesperson declined to say how many moderation staff worked in the African hub, which serves a collective population of over 500 million.
Another lawsuit filed in Kenya this year alleges that the hub created an exploitative and unsafe work environment, exposing moderators to high volumes of traumatic content and paying less than promised.
One plaintiff says Facebook is directly responsible for his father's murder
Abrham Meareg Amare, one of the plaintiffs, holds Facebook's algorithm and poor moderation directly responsible for the death of his father, Meareg Amare Abrha.
Court filings say that in October 2021, militants followed Meareg home from work, shot him in the back and leg, and left him to bleed.
Meareg, a well-respected chemistry professor according to the lawsuit, was targeted after Facebook posts spread his name, photo and false allegations that he was associated with a deadly rebel group because of his ethnicity as a Tigrayan, the country's minority demographic.
"I knew it was a death sentence for my father the moment I saw it," Abrham said in an interview with NPR.
"Facebook is a big gun in Ethiopia. [...] People use Facebook as a reliable source of information because they don't have trust in state media. Something posted on Facebook is considered a magic bullet — a valid thing."
Like Abrham, Meareg's friends and neighbors also warned him of the posts, but the professor chose to return from an overseas trip and was killed within weeks, his son said.
In an affidavit, Abrham says he asked Facebook multiple times to remove posts about his father — both before and after his death. Some posts still remained up as of this week.
In addition to restitution from the victim's fund, he's seeking a public apology from Facebook to him and other victims.
"To Facebook, it's as if we're idiots; we're subhuman. [...] Our family doesn't matter if they're making profits," he said.
An Ethiopian national, Abrham is currently living in the U.S. and seeking asylum, he says. Reporting violent posts to Facebook is still a daily ritual.
The other plaintiff is Fisseha Tekle, an Ethiopian legal adviser at Amnesty International whose work — reports into his country's violence — made him a target for online abuse, according to court filings.
Amnesty International, which is one of seven human rights organizations named in the case as legal support for the plaintiffs, said in a statement that Tekle now lives in Kenya out of fears for his family's safety.
Ethiopia's civil war has led to death and displacement
Fighting between the Ethiopian government and militant groups started in the northern Tigray region in November 2020. The conflict has claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 people and displaced millions more.
Researchers say media has played a key role in polarizing the country. Three of the country's biggest outlets — ESAT, OMN and Tigrai TV — are divided along ethnic lines.
In a 2021 statement, Facebook said Ethiopia was on its list of countries "at the highest risk for conflict" but it was especially challenging to moderate given the number of languages spoken in the country.
"Between May and October 2021, we took action on more than 92,000 pieces of content in Ethiopia on Facebook and Instagram for violations of our Community Standards prohibiting hate speech, about 98% of which was detected before it was reported by people to us," the company said at the time.
Facebook also said that less than 10% of Ethiopia's population uses the platform — a low proportion relative to other countries, driven primarily by poor internet access.
Ethiopia has one of the lowest internet use rates in the world, with only 24% of residents logging on regularly, according to 2020 data from The World Bank.
Mercy Mutemi, the lawyer representing the two individual plaintiffs, says that Big Tech has been rapidly, but unethically, expanding in Africa.
"Not investing adequately in the African market has already caused Africans to die from unsafe systems," she said in a statement shared with NPR by Foxglove, a nonprofit supporting the plaintiffs.
"We know that a better Facebook is possible — because we have seen how preferentially they treat other markets," Mutemi said.
"African Facebook users deserve better. More importantly, Africans deserve to be protected from the havoc caused by underinvesting in protection of human rights."
Meta's oversight board previously recommended a human rights assessment in Ethiopia
Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, reported nearly $40 billion in profits last year.
The lawsuit says that Facebook's earnings are partially tied to how long users stay on the platform, which leaves the company with little incentive to remove eye-catching violent content. Years of internal and external studies suggest that Facebook's algorithm, the platform's engagement engine, spurs extremist beliefs.
In 2018, the United Nations said that Facebook played a key role in fueling violence in Myanmar.
In 2021, leaked documents revealed Facebook did the same in India, its largest market, even as employees spoke out.
The new lawsuit draws a parallel between Meta's allegedly hands-off role in the Ethiopian conflict and its responsive one in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. For the latter, Facebook implemented a crisis plan to promptly mute inflammatory content. The plaintiffs say that crisis plan could be replicated for conflicts in Africa.
Abrham told NPR that demands like these constitute straightforward ways to treat everyone with dignity, which should be a chief goal of a platform that claims to value human connection.
He said Facebook should start by publicly acknowledging its role in generating hate crimes and disinformation.
"There are hundreds of stories, thousands of people who've lost their loved ones because of Facebook," he said.
"After all that they've lost, there is still life. There is a family which is in distress, which has been victimized by arrogant and irresponsible treatment.
"We need to act now or never."
READ MORE 
Nearly 14,000 barrels of oil known as diluted bitumen spilled in north-central Kansas. (photo: U.S. EPA)
It's all about the kind of oil that gets spilled.
In early December, nearly 14,000 barrels of oil known as diluted bitumen spilled in north-central Kansas, three hours outside of Kansas City, Kansas. The cleanup is still underway, with at least 4,000 barrels now cleared from a waterway known as Mill Creek. But as time goes on, environmentalists and infrastructure experts worry about the oil that will be more difficult to clean.
According to TC Energy ,the Canadian operator of the Keystone Pipeline responsible for the spill, other sections of the pipeline have been restarted at reduced pressure. At the time of the spill, the pipeline was operating at 80 percent of the maximum recommended rate, which is allowed under a 2007 permit granted to the pipeline company by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA. Normally, crude oil pipelines can’t operate above 72 percent of this rate. To be granted the exception, TC Energy had to “construct the pipeline using higher-grade steel,” according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Diluted bitumen, or dilbit, is a natural oil sand found in sand deposits. It’s composed of sand, water, and bitumen, a sticky, black petroleum. According to an Inside Climate News analysis, dilbit is the heaviest of the crude oils used today and 50 to 70 percent of its composition is likely to sink in water, compared to the less than 10 percent of most crude oils. The oil inside the Keystone Pipeline is transported from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada — the globe’s third largest petroleum reserve — to refineries in the Midwest and the Gulf Coast. The leak occurred on a section of the Keystone Pipeline completed in 2011.
“It is troubling to see so many failures and so much oil spilled from any pipeline, but it is especially troubling from such a relatively new pipeline,” Bill Caram, executive director of the nonprofit pipeline watchdog group Pipeline Safety Trust, said in a statement.
According to a report from the National Academy of Sciences, dilbit is harder to clean, coats and adheres to landscapes and animals more than other crude oils, and has a smaller window of opportunity for proper cleanup. This study was commissioned by Congress after the infamous 2010 Kalamazoo, Michigan oil spill, where nearly 42,000 barrels of dilbit spilled into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River from an Enbridge-operated pipeline. This oil spill, which took four years and billions of dollars to clean up while also prompting the evacuation of hundreds of homes, was the worst tar sands oil spill in the nation’s history.
So far, 71 fish and four mammals have been confirmed killed in the Kansas oil spill, with one beaver saved by rescue crews, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. After the initial spill, TC Energy created two dams to prevent any continued spread and has since been working to remove the tar sands oil from surface water. According to the EPA, no drinking water wells were affected by the spill, but the federal agency and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment have urged people and animals to avoid the contaminated creek.
“We continue to prioritize the safety of people and the environment,” TC Energy said in a statement. “We are working with wildlife assessment crews including state and federal wildlife trustees and have trained professional responders onsite to identify any impacts to wildlife.”
The company has previously paid over $300,000 in fines related to damage caused by the Keystone Pipeline.
The Keystone Pipeline, and its now-defunct offshoot Keystone XL, have sparked battles from local communities and Indigenous people in the nation’s prairie lands since its inception. In 2011, then-Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman urged the federal government to stop the expansion of the pipeline through his state to protect water. When the Keystone XL segment was announced, federal and local law enforcement began to strategize about how to stop Indigenous protests in Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska “by any means.”
The ruptured Kansas segment of the pipeline remains closed during the cleanup process. In a statement, TC Energy said it continues to work with the PHMSA to determine the cause of the ruptured line. President Joseph Biden recently released 2 million barrels of oil from the nation’s strategic reserve to various refineries in hopes of preventing “potential supply disruptions” caused by the spill.
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