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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 insulting 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 nation 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.
Aides to the Arizona senator were expected to get her groceries, fix her internet, and learn her very specific preferences for airline seats, according to an internal memo. (photo: Tom Williams/Roll Call)
Aides to the Arizona senator were expected to get her groceries, fix her internet, and learn her very specific preferences for airline seats, according to an internal memo.
These are just a few of the tasks, framed in a dizzying array of do’s and don’ts, that have fallen to the staffers for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), according to an internal memo obtained by The Daily Beast.
The 37-page memo is intended as a guide for aides who set the schedule for and personally staff Sinema during her workdays in Washington and Arizona. And while the document is mostly just revealing of Sinema’s exceptionally strong preferences about things like air travel—preferably not on Southwest Airlines, never book her a seat near a bathroom, and absolutely never a middle seat—Sinema’s standards appear to go right up to the line of what Senate ethics rules allow, if not over.
One section of the staffer guide explains that the senator’s executive assistant must contact Sinema at the beginning of the work week in Washington to “ask if she needs groceries,” and copy both the scheduler and chief of staff on the message to “make sure this is accomplished.” It specifies Sinema will reimburse the assistant through CashApp. The memo also dictates that if the internet in Sinema’s private apartment fails, the executive assistant “should call Verizon to schedule a repair” and ensure a staffer is present to let a technician inside the property.
The Senate ethics handbook states that “staff are compensated for the purpose of assisting Senators in their official legislative and representational duties, and not for the purpose of performing personal or other non-official activities for themselves or on behalf of others.”
Craig Holman, a congressional ethics expert with the nonprofit group Public Citizen, said Sinema’s apparent demands that staffers conduct personal tasks amount to a clear violation of Senate ethics rules, and would typically warrant a formal reprimand by the Senate Ethics Committee.
Sinema spokesperson Hannah Hurley told The Daily Beast that “the alleged information—sourced from anonymous quotes and a purported document I can’t verify—is not in line with official guidance from Sen. Sinema’s office and does not represent official policies of Sen. Sinema’s office.”
Hurley added that Sinema’s office “does not require staff to perform personal errands.”
The Daily Beast did not share the document itself with Sinema’s office, and is not printing it in its entirety over concerns that doing so may reveal who shared the memo. However, The Daily Beast was able to independently corroborate the veracity of the document, which is at least a couple of years old but could still reflect current policies.
The Daily Beast sent Sinema’s office a detailed list of claims and quotes sourced from the memo and intended for publication.
While the memo may not represent the most up-to-date scheduling practices for Sinema, the document reflects long-running guidelines as well as commitments of the senator’s that have remained consistent. Moreover, the memo is clear that, even if Sinema and her chief of staff never signed off on the document itself, both were to be alerted when the senator’s executive assistant had procured her groceries—or completed a number of other tasks.
Historically, Sinema has been far more averse to talking to press than her colleagues, though she has done a number of interviews recently following her departure from the Democratic Party and the passage of a same-sex marriage bill she helped to pass. Still, the scheduling memo offers a rare glimpse into how one of the Senate’s most inscrutable—and most scrutinized—members approaches her job and runs her office.
“Kyrsten works hard, but is protective of her personal time,” reads the very first paragraph of the document, which explains that Sinema has “time-consuming commitments outside of this job.” Those commitments seem to be a reference to her extensive schedule of training and competing in marathons and Ironman events—which are referenced numerous times in the memo—as well as her other job teaching classes at Arizona State University.
“Do not schedule anything, ever, outside of ‘regular’ work hours without first getting Kyrsten’s permission,” the document reads. “She will very, very rarely agree to work outside the regular hours, so only ask if it’s a big deal.”
The memo is clear that Sinema doesn’t start work before 8:45 a.m. and staffers should not schedule anything after 8 p.m. In fact, it specifies that the senator is “often not reachable” after 8 p.m. during the week, which would make her highly unusual among U.S. senators.
The document also makes clear that much of Sinema’s time outside of “regular hours” consists of exercising and training for athletic competition. “She wakes up very early to work out, and sleep is very important to her,” it says. The memo also specifies that on weekends, she “needs a later start to accommodate her training schedule,” which entails scheduling no work obligations earlier than 1 p.m.
Apparently, facilitating Sinema’s athletic schedule was a core duty for her official staff. The memo instructs aides to add Sinema’s races to her calendar and to “consult with her” on how much recovery time she will need afterward. “These activities are very important to her and should be protected,” it says.
Another section laid out in detail Sinema’s eating schedule. “Due to her very high level of activity, she is always hungry and needs to consume a lot of protein each day,” it reads, specifying that she has to eat between 12 and 12:30 p.m., 2 and 2:30 p.m., and 5 and 6:30 p.m. It states Sinema brings her own lunch and snack to work, but that she cannot be scheduled beyond 6:30 p.m. without staff “ensuring she has dinner.”
Sinema’s commitment to athletic pursuits also extended into regular hours. The memo explains that Sinema must be scheduled for two 45-minute physical therapy sessions during the week, even specifying that her work calls could be scheduled during those appointments. She also expected to be booked for a weekly hour-long massage, even if it were in the middle of the legislative workday, according to a former Sinema aide who spoke to The Daily Beast and was granted anonymity to describe the workings of the senator’s office.
Sinema was said to be so committed to her workouts that, ahead of trips, she would make aides check if hotels’ swimming pools had the exact right dimensions for her training purposes—a task that could consume hours.
A section outlining how to book Sinema’s air travel, meanwhile, is a veritable minefield of opportunities for a junior staffer to get crosswise with the boss.
“KS does not like to fly,” the memo reads, using the senator’s initials. “It is your job to make her as comfortable as possible on each flight.”
Unsurprisingly, some staffers found these instructions—and Sinema’s zeal in ensuring they were followed to the letter—to not only be onerous but detrimental to the overall staff’s mission to serve constituents, craft policy, and communicate that work to Arizona.
“When I look back, it’s unbelievable the amount of time staffers spent just to accommodate her,” said the former aide.
Capitol Hill has no shortage of bosses with sky-high expectations for staff, or with expectations for the perks they are entitled to as a member of Congress. The Arizona senator is also not the only lawmaker whose very specific instructions to aides have been made public.
In 2017, Politico published an eight-page memo for aides to former Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN) that included almost comically elaborate and detailed instructions for staffing him, such as avoiding talking with him and refraining from “sudden acceleration” while driving him, as well as ensuring he always had a toothbrush, toothpaste, gum, and Kleenex on hand.
In recent years, other lawmakers, such as Rep. Alex Mooney (R-WV), have been subject to formal House Ethics Committee probes for, among other things, making official taxpayer-funded congressional staff conduct personal errands.
But the apparent level of time and effort from aides that went into ensuring that Sinema’s specific needs and preferences were met—on everything from when she eats to where she sits on a plane—makes her an outlier among members of Congress, especially those not in any position of leadership.
There is, for example, an entire section of the staffing memo devoted to explaining how to meet Sinema’s hydration needs:
“KS drinks A LOT of water. Make sure to always have a room temperature bottle of water for her, whether she is in the office, at call time, or in someone's car. When someone is picking KS up from the airport, they should ALWAYS have a bottle of water for her… It is your job to remind whoever is staffing KS to have water for her.”
On Capitol Hill, it is common to see even high-ranking lawmakers walk alone to and from their offices, or even stand in line alongside staffers for coffee or lunch. For many, flying in coach is a badge of honor—or political necessity. Occasionally spotting lawmakers doing their shopping at the neighborhood supermarkets is an amusing quirk of life in Washington.
But Sinema is not a typical senator—in many regards. In the last two years, her opposition to key aspects of the Democratic Party’s agenda have proved immensely frustrating to her colleagues. With her relationship to the party frayed—and facing a potentially daunting primary ahead of her 2024 re-election—Sinema announced this month that she would leave the Democratic Party and become an independent.
At the same time, Sinema’s last two years have been especially productive for a relatively junior senator. She was at the center of a bipartisan group that helped broker the $1 trillion infrastructure law and helped shepherd the first meaningful gun reform in decades through Congress. Along with Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Thom Tillis (R-NC), Sinema helped to get legislation codifying the right to same-sex marriage on President Biden’s desk last week.
“As her colleagues on both sides of the aisle will attest to, and her legislative track record makes clear, Senator Sinema is among the most hardworking and effective members of the U.S Senate,” said Hurley, Sinema’s spokesperson, in response to questions for this article.
The senator scrambles the common stereotype of a demanding Capitol Hill boss. She does not, for example, demand aides be accessible at all hours of the day and night, unlike some of her colleagues revealed to be particularly punishing bosses.
Instead, the memo paints a picture of a boss who expects the hours she does keep to be choreographed perfectly. “Kyrsten is very efficient and HATES wasting time,” it reads.
Sinema is described as so hyper-focused on the task at hand that staff need to constantly remind her exactly when to keep moving. “KS focuses wholly on whatever work she is doing at the moment (call time, meeting with constituent, etc) - it is your job to tell her when to transition to the next obligation,” it reads.
But her desire for to-the-minute efficiency for work obligations—compared to the time she set aside for other pursuits—leaves some questions about her priorities.
The document outlines that Sinema should keep all meetings with constituents in her D.C. office limited to a block on Wednesdays. Her former aide told The Daily Beast that Sinema would stack as many constituent meetings as possible, usually no longer than three minutes, into a half-hour period on Wednesdays.
That meant that Sinema likely spent more time during the work week in physical therapy appointments and massages than with constituents. The document also outlines that scheduling “coffee meetings with lobbyists and donors are fine” and to allot those 15 to 20 minutes—a comparatively lengthy stretch of time for a senator routinely scheduled down to the second.
The memo also describes Sinema’s intense fundraising activity, through both in-person events and making calls to donors. “Call time is incredibly important to KS,” it says, stating that Sinema asks for two to four hours of it on the schedule weekly. It also instructs staff to schedule fundraisers for Sinema in D.C. “within the regular work hours.” (“Kyrsten dislikes dinners because they run late and are expensive,” it explains.)
The need to dial for campaign dollars and press the flesh at D.C. receptions is a near-universal chore for members of Congress, and the amount of time Sinema spent fundraising is likely comparable to that of other senators.
But at home, Sinema has been criticized for skirting appearances with constituents while making time for donors and for the business community. In the last year, for instance, significant details about her attitude on key bills were revealed to press by Arizona business leaders who met with her privately.
The staffing memo makes clear that Sinema keeps a robust travel schedule for fundraising, official business, and personal commitments. The section on how to book her airplane seats are among the document’s most elaborate:
“KS has Executive Platinum status on AMERICAN AIRLINES and sometimes receives an automatic upgrade to first class. Do not rely on this; in the event that she does not get upgraded, it is important that she have a seat she is comfortable with.
First choice: KS prefers an aisle seat as close to the front of the plane as possible, except that she DOES NOT want the bulkhead row. Those seats are smaller than regular seats and are crowded. She also doesn't want the seat next to/directly in front of the bathroom on planes where there's a bathroom in the middle of the plane. Look at the seat map for every flight you book, or ask the booking agent about the flight map if you're reserving over the phone.
KS generally prefers to be closer to the front in a window seat, than further back in an aisle. It saves her time getting off the plane earlier.
Next choice: if you can't get an aisle seat, get a window seat using the same guidelines as above. This shouldn't happen often, since you're booking most flights six weeks in advance.
Last resort: Do everything in your power not put her in a middle seat. If the circumstances are such that a middle seat is the ONLY option, make sure you email KS to let her know and also provide some information about other flights she might be able to take instead that have better seating options. Don't book so late that middle seats are all that's left.”
In at least one small respect, however, staffing Sinema isn’t so intense. "Call her Senator when referring to her to a third party,” the memo reads. “When speaking directly to her, call her Kyrsten."
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Charles P. Rettig during his confirmation hearing to become I.R.S. commissioner in 2018. In 2016, Mr. Rettig, then a tax lawyer, defended President Donald J. Trump's decision not to release his taxes. (photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick/The New York Times)
The revelation that the agency had not audited Donald J. Trump during his first two years in office despite a mandatory presidential audit program raised concerns about potential politicization.
Late Tuesday, a House committee revealed that the I.R.S. failed to audit Mr. Trump during his first two years in office despite a rule that states that “the individual tax returns for the president and the vice president are subject to mandatory review.” But its report left unclear whether that lapse reflected general dysfunction or whether Mr. Trump received special treatment.
The disclosure of routine audits of Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden during their time in office suggested that the agency’s treatment of Mr. Trump was an aberration.
“I’m absolutely flabbergasted,” said Nina E. Olson, the national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019. “It’s disturbing. You have a process where you’re auditing the president, you better be auditing the president.”
Reports issued by the Ways and Means Committee, which obtained Mr. Trump’s tax data last month after a yearslong legal battle, said the I.R.S. had initiated its first audit of one of his filings as president in April 2019, the same day that Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts and the committee’s chairman, had inquired about the matter.
The I.R.S. has yet to complete that audit, the report added, and the agency started auditing filings covering Mr. Trump’s income while president only after he left office. Even after the agency belatedly started looking, it assigned only a single agent to examine Mr. Trump’s returns, going up against a large team of lawyers and accountants who objected when the I.R.S. added two more people to help.
The committee’s discovery that the I.R.S. flouted its rules is bringing new scrutiny to concerns about potential politicization at the I.R.S. during the Trump administration and spurring calls for the inspector general that oversees the agency to investigate what went wrong. It has also raised questions about why the I.R.S. devoted so few resources to auditing Mr. Trump, who, as a business mogul, had far more complicated tax filings than any previous president.
Under Mr. Trump, the I.R.S. was run for most of 2017 by a commissioner appointed by Mr. Obama, John Koskinen, and — after about 11 months being overseen by an acting head, David J. Kautter — a successor appointed by Mr. Trump, Charles P. Rettig. None ensured that the agency followed its rules requiring presidential audits.
Mr. Rettig, who left in October, said in an email on Wednesday evening that he did not attempt to intervene in Mr. Trump’s audit.
“I am not aware of any taxpayer receiving special treatment at any time, before or during my term as commissioner,” he said. “Further, at no time did I make, nor am I aware that anyone else made, any decision to somehow limit resources available to conduct examinations under the mandatory examination process.”
He added: “I had no involvement in the process of selecting for examination or the conduct of an examination of any return regarding any taxpayer.”
Mr. Koskinen said that his only involvement in Mr. Trump’s tax returns was working to ensure that they were kept in a secure location.
“The good thing about being commissioner is that you never know who is being audited,” Mr. Koskinen said, adding that it would have been inappropriate to ask about the status of any examination.
Mr. Kautter did not respond to a request for comment.
The committee’s reports left many questions unanswered given that it had little time to act: While Mr. Neal had sought Mr. Trump’s tax records since 2019, Mr. Trump fought that request for nearly four years. The Ways and Means Committee only received access to the information last month, with Republicans set to take control of the House in January.
Spokespeople and associates of several other former presidents over the last three decades either did not respond on Wednesday to queries about whether those presidents had been audited every year they were in office or said they did not recall.
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, on Wednesday called the House panel’s findings a “blockbuster” that required further attention.
“The I.R.S. was asleep at the wheel, and the presidential audit program is broken,” he said. “There is no justification for the failure to conduct the required presidential audits until a congressional inquiry was made.”
The Internal Revenue Service has already been the subject of repeated controversy.
The New York Times reported this year that the I.R.S. had initiated particularly invasive audits of two of Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies, the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe. Mr. Trump also repeatedly told his chief of staff that he wanted his perceived rivals, including those two, to face tax investigations.
Despite the low odds of both being singled out, an inspector general’s report concluded that both had been randomly selected for the initial pools from which the agency drew to carry out the examinations. But it is unclear how the I.R.S. made final selections from those pools.
In 2019, Mr. Trump raised eyebrows by telling Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, to prioritize a confirmation vote for a longtime associate, Michael J. Desmond, as general counsel of the I.R.S. over the nomination of William P. Barr as attorney general. Mr. Desmond had advised a subsidiary of the Trump Organization and worked with two of its tax lawyers.
And in 2018, Mr. Trump appointed as commissioner Mr. Rettig, who had written a Forbes column in 2016 defending Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his taxes as a candidate and portrayed the I.R.S. as fully engaged in auditing very wealthy people.
“Teams of sophisticated tax advisers were likely engaged throughout Trump’s career to assure the absence of any ‘bombshell’ within the returns,” Mr. Rettig wrote. “His returns might actually be somewhat unremarkable but for the fact they are the returns of Donald Trump.”
In fact, the few glimpses of Mr. Trump’s taxes have shown much to talk about. The Trump Organization was convicted of a tax fraud scheme this month. The New York attorney general has sued Mr. Trump and three of his children, accusing them of fraudulently overvaluing his assets.
The Times gained access to years of his tax information and published a report in September 2020 that raised numerous questions about the legality of write-offs and deductions he had used to avoid paying any taxes most years. The article prompted the I.R.S. to consider looking at Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax returns, the committee report said.
The I.R.S. has had scant resources for years because Republicans have sought to cut its funding. The report highlighted the agency’s broader struggles in dealing with complicated tax returns filed by wealthy people and criticized its willingness to trust that returns filed by big accounting firms contained accurate information.
Congress has approved an $80 billion overhaul of the I.R.S. intended in part to hire more specialists capable of auditing high-income filers.
The committee released the reports after a party-line vote, exercising a rarely used power to obtain and make public any U.S. taxpayer’s private information.
Congress invoked it in 1974, when a committee released a report about President Richard M. Nixon’s taxes after a scandal about whether he was underpaying what he owed. That scandal led the I.R.S. in 1977 to create its rule mandating audits of presidents and vice presidents, ensuring that agency officials are not put in the awkward position of deciding whether to audit their boss.
The Ways and Means Committee again used that authority in 2014, when Republicans accused the I.R.S. of political discrimination because it used conservative terms like “tea party” when selecting groups to scrutinize for political activities that would make them ineligible to receive tax-deductible donations. But an inspector general determined that the agency had also used liberal terms, like “progressive” and “occupy,” for the same purpose.
Commissioners of the agency are political appointees of presidents. Mr. Koskinen — who had also run the agency several of the years that it was routinely auditing Mr. Obama — was not the only one to say he avoided involvement in presidential audits.
Charles O. Rossotti, who served as I.R.S. commissioner from 1997 to 2002, said that he was aware that presidents were audited as a matter of practice but that he played no role in the process.
“I kept away from that with a 10-foot pole,” Mr. Rossotti said.
The requirement that presidential returns be audited is included in the tax agency’s Internal Review Manual, which offers few details. A 2019 I.R.S. document accompanying the committee report said the examinations were conducted by experienced revenue agents.
“The I.R.S. is not aware of any reports of improper bias or partiality in the conduct of an officeholder’s examination in the more than 40-year history of the mandatory procedures,” it said.
The House committee report also documented an extraordinary lack of resources the I.R.S. dedicated to auditing Mr. Trump’s returns when it belatedly started doing so, initially assigning just one staff member to the matter despite the unusual complexity of his business entities and partnerships.
The committee cited internal I.R.S. memos stating that “it is not possible to obtain the resources available to examine all potential issues” raised by the more than 400 pass-through entities cited in Mr. Trump’s taxes.
“To do a thorough review of these returns, we would need a team much larger than the current team,” it said.
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A federal judge in Florida is strongly urging Donald Trump to reconsider his lawsuit against AG Letitia James, because it is headed the same way. (photo: Jorge Silva/Getty)
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Incoming congressman claimed his grandparents fled the Holocaust. Multiple genealogists said there was no proof of the claims. (photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
Santos, who has called himself “half Jewish” and a “Latino Jew” in media appearances, has claimed his maternal grandfather was originally from Ukraine and fled to Brazil to escape Nazism. In another telling, the New York Republican said his grandparents converted to Catholicism during the rise of Nazism in Belgium after fleeing Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. In another telling, he claimed his family changed their name to survive Nazism.
CNN spoke to multiple genealogists who said there was no proof of the claims. Santos’ misrepresentations of his family history were first reported by The Forward on Wednesday. Records from the Holocaust Museum and the International Center on Nazi Persecution, which contain records on Jewish refugees, also show no mention of Santos’ grandparents.
Megan Smolenyak, an author and professional genealogist who helped research Santos’ family tree at CNN’s request, said in email, “There’s no sign of Jewish and/or Ukrainian heritage and no indication of name changes along the way.”
The incoming Republican lawmaker has faced scrutiny over his resume since The New York Times revealed on Monday that Santos’ biography appeared to be partly fictional. CNN confirmed details of The New York Times reporting on Monday, including that he may have misrepresented parts of his resume about his college education and employment history.
A lawyer for Santos declined to comment to CNN.
“I’m very proud of my Jewish heritage,” Santos said in an appearance from late November 2022 with the Jewish News Syndicate. “I’m very proud of my grandparents’ story. My grandfather fleeing, Ukraine, fleeing Stalin’s persecution, going to Belgium, finding refuge there, marrying my grandmother, then fleeing Hitler going to Brazil. That’s a story of perseverance. I’m so proud. I mean, I wish I could have met my grandfather.”
In another interview from earlier this year, Santos claimed that his grandparents survived the Holocaust.
“My grandparents survived the Holocaust, so these regimes of socialism, Marxism, they don’t work, and they’re followed up by a lot of hurt, and we’re seeing that currently and what’s happening in Ukraine with the Russians,” Santos said in a May 2022 interview.
But family histories from the websites MyHeritage and Geneanet and a Dutch periodical from the town the family emigrated from show his maternal grandparents, Paolo and Rosalina Devolder, were both born in Brazil. Records on FamilySearch, first reported by The Forward, also show Santos’ great-grandfather as living in Brazil.
While it is possible that his maternal grandparents returned to Europe and then moved back to Brazil, there is no evidence to support this. And there is no evidence that the family were Jewish refugees fleeing Europe.
Additionally, Santos’ ties to Ukraine were only added to his campaign biography sometime between April 2022 and October 2022, according to the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. His bio now begins: “George’s grandparents fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII.”
When the Ukraine-Russia conflict began in February 2022, Santos told Fox News digital that his ties to Ukraine were “very vague” and said it would be “disingenuous” to claim his relatives were at risk. But he added that his family later changed their surname to survive.
“It’s just very vague and faint,” said Santos’ of his ties to the country. “We don’t carry the Ukrainian last name. For a lot of people who are descendants of World War II refugees or survivors of the Holocaust, a lot of names and paperwork were changed in name of survival.”
But records dispute this assertion. The Devolder surname has been used by his mother’s family for generations, and the family has not changed it, according to family trees reviewed by the genealogists CNN spoke to.
Santos’ mother died in 2016, but her Facebook posts include Catholic prayers and posts about the Virgin Mary on Easter with no posts indicating Jewish heritage.
In a different appearance, Santos said his mother’s grandfather’s family converted to Catholicism during the rise of Nazism, though he specified he was not trying to claim to Jewish heritage.
“My grandfather grew up Jewish. My grandfather, during the Soviet issues, escaped to Belgium,” said Santos. “And then that was a great move. Met my grandmother, married, and crazy enough, the Nazis became a thing. And that’s when he said, ‘Oh my God, this is all over again.’ They converted to Catholicism, had their kids, raised them Catholic. And I’m Catholic, but that’s pretty much little history of my family into Judaism.”
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Internal documents show Twitter whitelisted CENTCOM accounts that were then used to run its online influence campaign abroad. (photo: Reuters)
Internal documents show Twitter whitelisted CENTCOM accounts that were then used to run its online influence campaign abroad.
Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.
The accounts in question started out openly affiliated with the U.S. government. But then the Pentagon appeared to shift tactics and began concealing its affiliation with some of these accounts — a move toward the type of intentional platform manipulation that Twitter has publicly opposed. Though Twitter executives maintained awareness of the accounts, they did not shut them down, but let them remain active for years. Some remain active.
The revelations are buried in the archives of Twitter’s emails and internal tools, to which The Intercept was granted access for a brief period last week alongside a handful of other writers and reporters. Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the billionaire started giving access to company documents, saying in a Twitter Space that “the general idea is to surface anything bad Twitter has done in the past.” The files, which included records generated under Musk’s ownership, provide unprecedented, if incomplete, insight into decision-making within a major social media company.
Twitter did not provide unfettered access to company information; rather, for three days last week, they allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive. I did not agree to any conditions governing the use of the documents, and I made efforts to authenticate and contextualize the documents through further reporting. The redactions in the embedded documents in this story were done by The Intercept to protect privacy, not Twitter.
The direct assistance Twitter provided to the Pentagon goes back at least five years.
On July 26, 2017, Nathaniel Kahler, at the time an official working with U.S. Central Command — also known as CENTCOM, a division of the Defense Department — emailed a Twitter representative with the company’s public policy team, with a request to approve the verification of one account and “whitelist” a list of Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.”
“We’ve got some accounts that are not indexing on hashtags — perhaps they were flagged as bots,” wrote Kahler. “A few of these had built a real following and we hope to salvage.” Kahler added that he was happy to provide more paperwork from his office or SOCOM, the acronym for the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Twitter at the time had built out an expanded abuse detection system aimed in part toward flagging malicious activity related to the Islamic State and other terror organizations operating in the Middle East. As an indirect consequence of these efforts, one former Twitter employee explained to The Intercept, accounts controlled by the military that were frequently engaging with extremist groups were being automatically flagged as spam. The former employee, who was involved with the whitelisting of CENTCOM accounts, spoke with The Intercept under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
In his email, Kahler sent a spreadsheet with 52 accounts. He asked for priority service for six of the accounts, including @yemencurrent, an account used to broadcast announcements about U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. Around the same time, @yemencurrent, which has since been deleted, had emphasized that U.S. drone strikes were “accurate” and killed terrorists, not civilians, and promoted the U.S. and Saudi-backed assault on Houthi rebels in that country.
Other accounts on the list were focused on promoting U.S.-supported militias in Syria and anti-Iran messages in Iraq. One account discussed legal issues in Kuwait. Though many accounts remained focused on one topic area, others moved from topic to topic. For instance, @dala2el, one of the CENTCOM accounts, shifted from messaging around drone strikes in Yemen in 2017 to Syrian government-focused communications this year.
On the same day that CENTCOM sent its request, members of Twitter’s site integrity team went into an internal company system used for managing the reach of various users and applied a special exemption tag to the accounts, internal logs show.
One engineer, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that he had never seen this type of tag before, but upon close inspection, said that the effect of the “whitelist” tag essentially gave the accounts the privileges of Twitter verification without a visible blue check. Twitter verification would have bestowed a number of advantages, such as invulnerability to algorithmic bots that flag accounts for spam or abuse, as well as other strikes that lead to decreased visibility or suspension.
Kahler told Twitter that the accounts would all be “USG-attributed, Arabic-language accounts tweeting on relevant security issues.” That promise fell short, as many of the accounts subsequently deleted disclosures of affiliation with the U.S. government.
The Internet Archive does not preserve the full history of every account, but The Intercept identified several accounts that initially listed themselves as U.S. government accounts in their bios, but, after being whitelisted, shed any disclosure that they were affiliated with the military and posed as ordinary users.
This appears to align with a major report published in August by online security researchers affiliated with the Stanford Internet Observatory, which reported on thousands of accounts that they suspected to be part of a state-backed information operation, many of which used photorealistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence, a practice also known as “deep fakes.”
The researchers connected these accounts with a vast online ecosystem that included “fake news” websites, meme accounts on Telegram and Facebook, and online personalities that echoed Pentagon messages often without disclosure of affiliation with the U.S. military. Some of the accounts accuse Iran of “threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,” while others promoted allegations that Iran was harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.
The Stanford report did not definitively tie the sham accounts to CENTCOM or provide a complete list of Twitter accounts. But the emails obtained by The Intercept show that the creation of at least one of these accounts was directly affiliated with the Pentagon.
One of the accounts that Kahler asked to have whitelisted, @mktashif, was identified by the researchers as appearing to use a deep-fake photo to obscure its real identity. Initially, according to the Wayback Machine, @mktashif did disclose that it was a U.S. government account affiliated with CENTCOM, but at some point, this disclosure was deleted and the account’s photo was changed to the one Stanford identified as a deep fake.
The new Twitter bio claimed that the account was an unbiased source of opinion and information, and, roughly translated from Arabic, “dedicated to serving Iraqis and Arabs.” The account, before it was suspended earlier this year, routinely tweeted messages denouncing Iran and other U.S. adversaries, including Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Another CENTCOM account, @althughur, which posts anti-Iran and anti-ISIS content focused on an Iraqi audience, changed its Twitter bio from a CENTCOM affiliation to an Arabic phrase that simply reads “Euphrates pulse.”
The former Twitter employee told The Intercept that they were surprised to learn of the Defense Department’s shifting tactics. “It sounds like DOD was doing something shady and definitely not in line with what they had presented to us at the time,” they said.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s deeply concerning if the Pentagon is working to shape public opinion about our military’s role abroad and even worse if private companies are helping to conceal it,” said Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, a nonprofit that works toward diplomatic solutions to foreign conflicts.
“Congress and social media companies should investigate and take action to ensure that, at the very least, our citizens are fully informed when their tax money is being spent on putting a positive spin on our endless wars,” Sperling added.
For many years, Twitter has pledged to shut down all state-backed disinformation and propaganda efforts, never making an explicit exception for the U.S. In 2020, Twitter spokesperson Nick Pickles, in a testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, said that the company was taking aggressive efforts to shut down “coordinated platform manipulation efforts” attributed to government agencies.
“Combatting attempts to interfere in conversations on Twitter remains a top priority for the company, and we continue to invest heavily in our detection, disruption, and transparency efforts related to state-backed information operations. Our goal is to remove bad-faith actors and to advance public understanding of these critical topics,” said Pickles.
In 2018, for instance, Twitter announced the mass suspension of accounts tied to Russian government-linked propaganda efforts. Two years later, the company boasted of shutting down almost 1,000 accounts for association with the Thai military. But rules on platform manipulation, it appears, have not been applied to American military efforts.
The emails obtained by The Intercept show that not only did Twitter whitelist these accounts in 2017 explicitly at the behest of the military, but also that high-level officials at the company discussed the accounts as potentially problematic in the following years.
In the summer of 2020, officials from Facebook reportedly identified fake accounts attributed to CENTCOM’s influence operation on its platform and warned the Pentagon that if Silicon Valley could easily out these accounts as inauthentic, so could foreign adversaries, according to a September report in the Washington Post.
Twitter emails show that during that time in 2020, Facebook and Twitter executives were invited by the Pentagon’s top attorneys to attend classified briefings in a sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as a SCIF, used for highly sensitive meetings.
“Facebook have had a series of 1:1 conversations between their senior legal leadership and DOD’s [general counsel] re: inauthentic activity,” wrote Yoel Roth, then the head of trust and safety at Twitter. “Per FB,” continued Roth, “DOD have indicated a strong desire to work with us to remove the activity — but are now refusing to discuss additional details or steps outside of a classified conversation.”
Stacia Cardille, then an attorney with Twitter, noted in an email to her colleagues that the Pentagon may want to retroactively classify its social media activities “to obfuscate their activity in this space, and that this may represent an overclassification to avoid embarrassment.”
Jim Baker, then the deputy general counsel of Twitter, in the same thread, wrote that the Pentagon appeared to have used “poor tradecraft” in setting up various Twitter accounts, sought to potentially cover its tracks, and was likely seeking a strategy for avoiding public knowledge that the accounts are “linked to each other or to DoD or the USG.” Baker speculated that in the meeting the “DoD might want to give us a timetable for shutting them down in a more prolonged way that will not compromise any ongoing operations or reveal their connections to DoD.”
What was discussed at the classified meetings — which ultimately did take place, according to the Post — was not included in the Twitter emails provided to The Intercept, but many of the fake accounts remained active for at least another year. Some of the accounts on the CENTCOM list remain active even now — like this one, which includes affiliation with CENTCOM, and this one, which does not — while many were swept off the platform in a mass suspension on May 16.
In a separate email sent in May 2020, Lisa Roman, then a vice president of the company in charge of global public policy, emailed William S. Castle, a Pentagon attorney, along with Roth, with an additional list of Defense Department Twitter accounts. “The first tab lists those accounts previously provided to us and the second, associated accounts that Twitter has discovered,” wrote Roman. It’s not clear from this single email what Roman is requesting – she references a phone call preceding the email — but she notes that the second tab of accounts — the ones that had not been explicitly provided to Twitter by the Pentagon — “may violate our Rules.” The attachment included a batch of accounts tweeting in Russian and Arabic about human rights violations committed by ISIS. Many accounts in both tabs were not openly identified as affiliated with the U.S. government.
Twitter executives remained aware of the Defense Department’s special status. This past January, a Twitter executive recirculated the CENTCOM list of Twitter accounts originally whitelisted in 2017. The email simply read “FYI” and was directed to several Twitter officials, including Patrick Conlon, a former Defense Department intelligence analyst then working on the site integrity unit as Twitter’s global threat intelligence lead. Internal records also showed that the accounts that remained from Kahler’s original list are still whitelisted.
Following the mass suspension of many of the accounts this past May, Twitter’s team worked to limit blowback from its involvement in the campaign.
Shortly before publication of the Washington Post story in September, Katie Rosborough, then a communications specialist at Twitter, wrote to alert Twitter lawyers and lobbyists about the upcoming piece. “It’s a story that’s mostly focused on DoD and Facebook; however, there will be a couple lines that reference us alongside Facebook in that we reached out to them [DoD] for a meeting. We don’t think they’ll tie it to anything Mudge-related or name any Twitter employees. We declined to comment,” she wrote. (Mudge is a reference to Peiter Zatko, a Twitter whistleblower who filed a complaint with federal authorities in July, alleging lax security measures and penetration of the company by foreign agents.)
After the Washington Post’s story published, the Twitter team congratulated one another because the story minimized Twitter’s role in the CENTCOM psyop campaign. Instead, the story largely revolved around the Pentagon’s decision to begin a review of its clandestine psychological operations on social media.
“Thanks for doing all that you could to manage this one,” wrote Rebecca Hahn, another former Twitter communications official. “It didn’t seem to get too much traction beyond verge, cnn and wapo editors promoting.”
CENTCOM did not initially provide comment to The Intercept. Following publication of this story, CENTCOM’s media desk referred The Intercept to Brigadier Gen. Pat Ryder’s comments in a September briefing, in which he said that the Pentagon had requested “a review of Department of Defense military information support activities, which is simply meant to be an opportunity for us to assess the current work that’s being done in this arena, and really shouldn’t be interpreted as anything beyond that.”
The U.S. military and intelligence community have long pursued a strategy of fabricated online personas and third parties to amplify certain narratives in foreign countries, the idea being that an authentic-looking Persian-language news portal or a local Afghan woman would have greater organic influence than an official Pentagon press release.
Military online propaganda efforts have largely been governed by a 2006 memorandum. The memo notes that the Defense Department’s internet activities should “openly acknowledge U.S. involvement” except in cases when a “Combatant Commander believes that it will not be possible due to operational considerations.” This method of nondisclosure, the memo states, is only authorized for operations in the “Global War on Terrorism, or when specified in other Secretary of Defense execute orders.”
In 2019, lawmakers passed a measure known as Section 1631, a reference to a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, further legally affirming clandestine psychological operations by the military in a bid to counter online disinformation campaigns by Russia, China, and other foreign adversaries.
In 2008, the U.S. Special Operations Command opened a request for a service to provide “web-based influence products and tools in support of strategic and long-term U.S. Government goals and objectives.” The contract referred to the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, an effort to create online news sites designed to win hearts and minds in the battle to counter Russian influence in Central Asia and global Islamic terrorism. The contract was initially carried out by General Dynamics Information Technology, a subsidiary of the defense contractor General Dynamics, in connection with CENTCOM communication offices in the Washington, D.C., area and in Tampa, Florida.
A program known as “WebOps,” run by a defense contractor known as Colsa Corp., was used to create fictitious online identities designed to counter online recruitment efforts by ISIS and other terrorist networks.
The Intercept spoke to a former employee of a contractor — on the condition of anonymity for legal protection — engaged in these online propaganda networks for the Trans-Regional Web Initiative. He described a loose newsroom-style operation, employing former journalists, operating out of a generic suburban office building.
“Generally what happens, at the time when I was there, CENTCOM will develop a list of messaging points that they want us to focus on,” said the contractor. “Basically, they would, we want you to focus on say, counterterrorism and a general framework that we want to talk about.”
From there, he said, supervisors would help craft content that was distributed through a network of CENTCOM-controlled websites and social media accounts. As the contractors created content to support narratives from military command, they were instructed to tag each content item with a specific military objective. Generally, the contractor said, the news items he created were technically factual but always crafted in a way that closely reflected the Pentagon’s goals.
“We had some pressure from CENTCOM to push stories,” he added, while noting that he worked at the sites years ago, before the transition to more covert operations. At the time, “we weren’t doing any of that black-hat stuff.”
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The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is seen on March 17. Japan on Thursday adopted a new policy promoting greater use of nuclear energy to ensure a stable power supply amid global fuel shortages and reduce carbon emissions. (photo: Shohei Miyano/AP)
In the face of global fuel shortages, rising prices and pressure to reduce carbon emissions, Japan's leaders have begun to turn back toward nuclear energy, but the announcement was their clearest commitment yet after keeping mum on delicate topics like the possibility of building new reactors.
Under the new policy, Japan will maximize the use of existing reactors by restarting as many of them as possible and prolonging the operating life of aging ones beyond a 60-year limit. The government also pledged to develop next-generation reactors.
In 2011, a powerful earthquake and the ensuing tsunami caused multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant — a disaster that supercharged anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan and at one point led the government to promise to phase out the energy by around 2030. But since then, the government has recommitted to the technology, including setting a target for nuclear to make up 20-22% of the country's energy mix by the end of the decade.
Still, restart approvals for idled nuclear reactors have come slowly since the Fukushima disaster, which led to stricter safety standards. Utility companies have applied for restarts at 27 reactors in the past decade. Seventeen have passed safety checks and only 10 have resumed operation.
According the paper laying out the new policy, nuclear power serves "an important role as a carbon-free baseload energy source in achieving supply stability and carbon neutrality" and pledged to "sustain use of nuclear power into the future." Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said he planned to get the Cabinet to approve the policy and submit necessary bills to Parliament.
As part of the new policy, the Economy and Industry Ministry has drafted a plan to allow extensions every 10 years for reactors after 30 years of operation while also permitting utilities to subtract offline periods in calculating reactors' operational life.
The plan was endorsed on Wednesday by the Nuclear Regulation Authority, Japan's nuclear watchdog. New safety inspection rules still need to be put into law and approved by Parliament.
The regulation authority's commissioner, Shinichi Yamanaka, told a news conference the new safety rules requiring operational permits every decade after 30 years will be safer than a current one-time 20-year extension option for 40-year-old reactors. But experts cast some doubt on that.
Some experts question extending the lifespan of older reactors
Takeo Kikkawa, an economics professor at the International University of Japan and an expert on energy, said utility operators under the new policy could keep using old equipment instead of investing in new technology or renewables.
"Naturally, we should aim for newer technology and use it safely. Therefore, extending reactors' lifespans is an undesirable move," Kikkawa recently told a talk show.
Most nuclear reactors in Japan are more than 30 years old. Four reactors that have operated for more than 40 years have received permission to operate, and one is currently online.
Under the new policy, Japan will also push for the development and construction of "next-generation innovative reactors" to replace about 20 reactors now set for decommissioning.
Kenichi Oshima, a Ryukoku University professor of environmental economy and energy policy, said some of what the government calls "innovative" reactors are not so different from existing technology and that prospects for nuclear fusion and other next-generation reactors are largely uncertain and not achievable anytime soon.
Thursday's adoption of the new policy comes less than four months after Kishida launched the "GX (Green Transformation) Implementation Council" of outside experts and ministers to "consider all options" to compile a new policy that addresses global fuel shortages amid Russia's war on Ukraine and seeks to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
Japan's nuclear energy goals may be out of reach
Nuclear energy accounts for less than 7% of Japan's energy supply, and achieving the government's goal of raising that share to 20-22% by 2030 will require about 27 reactors, from the current 10 — a target some say is not achievable. The new policy also does not help address imminent supply shortages because reactors cannot be restarted quickly enough.
While public opinion on nuclear energy has softened since Fukushima, opponents still argue atomic power is not flexible and not even cheaper than renewables when final waste management and necessary safety measures are considered — and that it can cause immeasurable damage in an accident.
Ruiko Muto, a survivor of the Fukushima disaster, called the new policy "extremely disappointing." She added: "The Fukushima disaster is not over yet and the government seems to have already forgotten what happened."
The regulation authority came under fire Wednesday after revelations by a civil group that a few of its experts had discussed details with industry ministry officials before the watchdog was officially asked to consider a rule change for aging reactors, despite their compulsory independence.
Prime Minister Kishida also said Thursday that the government will do more to find candidate sites for a final repository for high-level nuclear waste that Japan does not yet have. Preliminary studies have begun in two small towns in Hokkaido, angering some residents.
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