16 February 23
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There is shockingly little debate about the assaults on democracy happening in Israel right now
In the US, there is shockingly little debate about this brazen assault on what the US political class unfailingly celebrates as “the only democracy in the Middle East”. It is particularly disappointing that Democrats seem to be holding back. They have every reason – moral and political – to oppose Netanyahu’s autocracy-in-the-making. If recent history holds any lessons, they might want to go as far as making aid to Israel conditional on the preservation of proper checks and balances in the country.
A crucial lesson aspiring autocrats have learned is that they should move fast and break things – completely ignoring time-honored conservative precepts about “prudence” inspired by Edmund Burke. When their critics catch up, facts on the ground are often irreversible. What buys them time is the strategy that Steve Bannon memorably described as “flooding the zone with shit”: confuse people, in this case by offering learned disquisitions as to why intended changes to the legal system are completely harmless.
Rightwing US and Israeli thinktanks are becoming ever more closely integrated; so plenty of intellectual defenders of the constitutional coup stand ready to convince American audiences that proposed changes have parallels in well-functioning democracies: executive involvement in judicial appointments exists in the US as well; the Canadian parliament can override court decisions. As the sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele has pointed out, the result is the creation of a “Frankenstate”: just like the monster was put together from “normal” human parts, an autocracy can be created by cleverly combining elements that are perfectly innocent in other countries.
Observers in the US might take too long to wake up to these tactics. They might also take too long to realize that the far right will vociferously reject all supposed “outside interference” while happily accepting financial help from the very same outsiders. Just think of what happened with the European Union and its two rogue member-state governments, Hungary and Poland. The leaders performed the arch-populist trick – all criticisms of their conduct was recoded as an attack by “liberal elites” on the nation as a whole. They also occasionally offered cosmetic legal changes to mollify the EU. In the end, however, the only somewhat effective measure was to threaten withholding subsidies from Brussels.
Of course, all analogies have flaws; for starters, the US and Israel are not part of a larger political and economic union like the EU. But the reasons why outside observers should not hold back are still ultimately similar: doing nothing is not neutral, because it lets down the millions who voted against the current Israeli government – it won the election by a mere 30,000 votes – and who hoped that friends of the country would precisely prove their friendship by calling for tough action.
It also hardly an illegitimate interference in internal affairs, if the very president of the country calls for delays and consensus-building before undertaking radical changes to the judicial system. President Isaac Herzog – whose role is largely ceremonial – also warned of “constitutional collapse” and a “violent collision”. The government has so far ignored him, charging ahead with the legislation.
In such a dire moment, Biden has only offered the most anodyne statement, reminding Netanyahu that both the US and Israel are “built on an independent judiciary”. Of course, there might be more going on behind the scenes, and talk of consequences could be more effective if no one has to lose face. Netanyahu himself may or may not actually believe all the talk of power-hungry judges having to be reined in (though why wouldn’t he, given the corruption charges against him); the real point is that he has brought racists convicted for incitement and all kinds of fanatics into his cabinet; they will probably not be impressed by subtle diplomacy. Someone like Silvio Berlusconi may also have found the far-right leaders he included in his governments distasteful (he also needed them to stay out of prison). Eventually, they eclipsed him, changing the political landscape permanently.
Perhaps Democrats are simply afraid of being called anti-Israel or even outright antisemites. After all, Republicans (whose own record of hardly veiled antisemitism – think Marjorie Taylor Greene, not to speak of Trump – is deplorable) have a well-rehearsed strategy ready; they have been trying and testing it on Representative Ilhan Omar for years.
Democrats might also fear that a discussion of the state of Israeli democracy cannot be cordoned off from how the occupation has undermined it. Yet Democrats are likely to face vicious attacks from the right no matter what they do or say.
Being a friend means that you must say something if your friend is harming themselves. That’s why Americans who celebrate the US friendship with Israel have a duty to speak up.
ALSO SEE: Moderna Drops 400% Vax Price Hike After Bernie Promised to Grill CEO
The senator plans to use a Senate committee to highlight what he calls a ‘morality crisis’ in the pharmaceutical industry
The hearing will make up a key piece of Sanders’s larger oversight agenda for the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that he chairs. The former presidential candidate hopes to use his perch on the panel to highlight what he calls the “greed” of large pharmaceutical companies in an effort to lower prescription drug prices.
Senate Democrats have signaled they will focus on corporate overreach with their expanded majority as House Republicans launch investigations on the other side of the Capitol into China, alleged abuses of the FBI, tech companies’ handling of a 2020 story about President Biden’s son Hunter, and other targets.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said shortly after the midterm elections last year that “corporate corruption and inequities” would be a major focus of oversight for his caucus, and other committees have already held hearings on alleged anticompetitive practices of Ticketmaster and abuses of the cryptocurrency industry.
In an interview, Sanders said that Moderna, whose only federally approved drug is the coronavirus vaccine that the company received nearly $2 billion in direct federal money to develop, is a “poster child” for the greed of the pharmaceutical industry. He plans to argue that CEO Stéphane Bancel, who Forbes estimates is worth more than $5 billion, and several other Moderna executives “profited” off the pandemic.
“We’re going to ask them, ‘Hey, you made billions of dollars in profit on a vaccine that was developed because of taxpayer support from the [National Institutes of Health], you’ve become a multibillionaire, and you think it’s appropriate to cost the federal government even more money by quadrupling prices?’” Sanders said. “And I hope, I really do hope, that these people will reconsider this outrageous decision and decide not to raise prices for the vaccine.”
Bancel told the Wall Street Journal last month he was considering quadrupling the price of Moderna’s vaccine to as much as $130 per dose once the federal government drains its stockpile and insurers and individuals are responsible for purchasing them on their own. Since the start of the pandemic, the federal government has purchased vaccines and provided them free, and Moderna sold its booster shots to the government for about $25 per dose.
On Wednesday, after its CEO agreed to appear in front of Sanders’s committee, Moderna announced a new “patient assistance program” to begin this May that will provide millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans the vaccine free of cost. “Everyone in the United States will have access to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine regardless of their ability to pay,” spokesman Chris Ridley said in a statement.
Moderna, which did not describe how the patient assistance program will work, also noted that patients who are insured will continue to receive the vaccine free through their insurance, regardless of price hikes.
The announcement takes some of the sting out of one of Sanders’s main critiques of Moderna — that uninsured Americans would find the shots their tax money helped fund unaffordable. But Sanders has also argued that the higher vaccine price for insurers — and Medicare and Medicaid — will further inflate medical costs, and that taxpayers will ultimately foot the bill. (Pfizer is also considering a similar price hike for its vaccine, but Sanders said its case is different because it did not receive the same federal investment into its research.)
Sanders, who chairs the committee for the first time this year, declined to say who else he wants to call before his committee, but claimed broadly that there is a “morality crisis” within the pharmaceutical industry and support across the political spectrum for putting pharma CEOs in the hot seat and tackling the issue of high prescription drug prices. He also mentioned concerns about how Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, are handling unionizing efforts at their companies — and left the door open to questioning them, as well.
“The pharmaceutical industry is enormously powerful politically,” he said. “There are 535 members of Congress and they’ve got 1,700 [lobbyists] including former leaders of the Democratic Party, leaders of the Republican Party. They’re all over the place. They’re swarming Capitol Hill.”
Sanders did not rule out compelling witnesses to appear before the committee via subpoena power in the future, which Senate Democrats gained when they won a 51st seat in November’s elections. A report created by his Democratic committee staff listed the pay of the CEOs of pharma companies including Pfizer, Eli Lilly, AbbVie, and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals — as well as five other Moderna investors and executives — as examples of “pharma pandemic profiteers.”
“We didn’t have to use subpoena power and he’s coming in voluntarily and I appreciate that,” Sanders said of Bancel, who is appearing on March 22. “But if people do not want to come in voluntarily and we want them, we will use subpoena power.”
Sanders said he believes Republicans will be supportive of his focus on pharmaceutical greed. But the ranking Republican on his committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, told The Washington Post this month that he wanted to hear more from Pfizer and Moderna before passing judgment on their decisions to hike prices.
“You obviously have a marginal cost. It’s easier to spread a marginal cost over billions of doses than it is over millions of doses,” Cassidy said. “And so what is their justification for all this? I just don't know that. … Give me more data before I render an opinion.”
Cassidy has said that drug affordability is important but that “we have to understand that there is a component of innovation driven by profit.”
There is also a possibility, which Sanders acknowledges, that other members of his committee may use the forum to sow doubts about the vaccine’s efficacy or safety.
But Sanders said he plans to use the hearing to tell a larger story about past scientific pioneers, including Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, and Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, and contrast their selfless decisions not to seek a patent or profit to Moderna and other drug companies.
“It’s a really profound moral issue,” he said.
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Ukrainian servicemen fire with a French self-propelled Caesar. (photo: Reuters)
Nato has little time to ramp up production before Moscow resolves the remaining inertia of its manufacturing base
In fact, Ukraine is not using excessive amounts of artillery shells compared with historical conflicts. These shortages are instead a stark demonstration of the hollowing-out of Nato since the end of the Cold War. Now, lifting munitions production cannot be done with an on-off switch – it will require several issues to be resolved concurrently.
The manufacture of artillery ammunition centres around five primary processes: the forging of shell cases; the production of explosive energetics; charge manufacture; fuse manufacture; and filling.
The first process – forging the cases – is simple and can be expanded through the repurposing of civilian forging capacity. But making the payload to go in them is far less easy. Firstly, there is the need to secure the relevant raw materials, which are in high demand on the international market and therefore expensive. Secondly, as the product is a high explosive, the factory must meet certain regulatory criteria. Thirdly, the product must have very high-quality control and conform to specified requirements.
The propellant charges, for example, must release energy at a rate that conforms to the tolerances of the system through which it will be fired and match the power upon which the range tables for the system are based. If the UK were producing 155mm rounds for its own artillery, this would be one problem, but Ukrainian forces use 17 artillery types of both Nato and Soviet legacy design, not all of which we have the technical specifications for.
Moreover, filling and cooling shells is a precise process. The high explosive must be heated, poured into the shell casing and then cooled at a specified rate so that it does not contain deformities, cavities or cracks. The facility for doing this must be protected from climatic variations. This, again, brings significant regulatory constraints.
Then we have the less-than-favourable economics of the enterprise. Shells are used in vast quantities during wartime and must be cheap. This means the manufacturer makes a small margin of return on each shell. Therefore, in peacetime, the incentive to produce is vastly reduced, since the state requires a small number of shells. Yes, stockpiling is an option, but shells have a shelf life of around 20 years so it can also be wasteful.
Some might say the answer is to have excess capacity. But this requires companies to keep factory facilities idle for decades, which comes with considerable overheads. Western producers cannot justify absorbing such a cost while facing cuts and being driven to compete for international contracts. Thus, munitions factories have been shrunk or closed.
Russia also requires vast amounts of ammunition. However, Putin has put his entire economy on a war footing. It is not subject to the same commercial constraints as Nato’s defence industry, and Russian producers are not constrained by concerns over industrial safety. Nato must strive to ramp up production before Moscow resolves the inefficiencies, corruption and inertia of its manufacturing base.
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This, admittedly, does not look good. (photo: National Transportation Safety Board)
ALSO SEE: What Do We Know About the Ohio Train Derailment and Toxic Chemical Leak?
It might not be an American Chernobyl, but it’s certainly a disaster on more than one level.
But some residents say they’re getting sick from lingering fumes, and the media environment surrounding the situation is getting heated. A reporter was dragged to the ground and arrested while trying to cover a briefing that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine was giving about the incident; leftist critics and Republicans alike are suggesting Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is to blame; Erin Brockovich is yelling at new Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance on Twitter; and online conspiracy theorists—including (deep sigh) a very famous one who represents Georgia in Congress—have caught hold of the story and begun to do what they do best. The word “Chernobyl” is getting thrown around. What’s going on?
What was this train and why did it catch on fire?
The train, operated by the Norfolk Southern company, was 153 cars long. At about 9 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 3, about 50 of its cars derailed, possibly because of a problem with an axle toward the front of the train. According to initial reports, 20 of the train’s cars were carrying hazardous materials, including four that contained the carcinogenic gas vinyl chloride, which is used to make the plastic known as PVC. The derailment caused a fire and at least one explosion. Some vinyl chloride was discharged immediately via an automatic “release device,” and more was discharged on Feb. 6 in a controlled burn to prevent a larger explosion. An estimated 1,500–2,000 local residents were evacuated, but were told they could return on Feb. 8.
Has anyone been hurt, killed, or made sick?
No one was injured during the derailment or while managing the subsequent fires, according to authorities, and an Environmental Protection Agency incident page has reported consistently that the agency’s air-quality monitoring has not detected the “volatile organic compounds” that were aboard the train in levels believed to be threatening to health. The EPA also says the agency has conducted nearly 400 in-home tests in conjunction with Norfolk Southern without observing any potentially harmful conditions. Residents in the area are reporting a strong chlorine-like smell, but the EPA’s page says some of the byproducts of the controlled burn can have a noticeable odor even at levels that are not dangerous.
On the other hand: Some residents say they’ve been feeling nauseous and getting headaches since returning home. Norfolk Southern has notified some households in the area that their well water may be at risk of contamination. The local TV station WKBN has reported that the EPA and outside experts are concerned that the company did not properly dispose of soil at the crash site. And fish are dying in area streams.
What’s the deal with the reporter who got arrested?
Correspondent Evan Lambert of NewsNation, the channel that used to be WGN, was pulled to the ground and arrested by police officers at a Feb. 8 press conference that DeWine was holding in a school gymnasium.
Is this evidence that government officials are trying to suppress coverage of the derailment?
It doesn’t appear to be. There were other members of the press at DeWine’s press conference, and Lambert wasn’t removed to keep DeWine from having to field questions. In fact, Lambert was on the opposite side of the gym from DeWine when he became involved in an argument with law enforcement officials who were upset that he was doing a live report while the governor was speaking. Lambert was told to leave when the argument escalated, then arrested when he declined to do so.
DeWine subsequently said that he did not authorize Lambert’s arrest and doesn’t have a problem with reporters doing live shots at his events. The Ohio attorney general’s office took over investigation of the incident and, on Wednesday, dismissed the charges that had been filed against Lambert for trespassing and resisting arrest.
More broadly, it’s true that national publications and cable news channels were slow to begin covering the story. But as this Twitter thread from a news director at the Cleveland TV station WEWS points out, local outlets have reported extensively on the crash and its aftermath.
OK, so—why is everyone yelling? Is the national media the problem, then? Are they ignoring an environmental catastrophe? Shouldn’t an enormous black explosion/cloud of toxic gas be a bigger story?
Polemical populists on both the right and left are suggesting there’s something sinister about the lack of national coverage of the crash, with the gist being that the elite corporate media is ignoring or suppressing the story to protect the prerogatives of fellow elites (including, but not limited to, Pete Buttigieg, train company shareholders, and others). This, it is being argued, is being done because elites care more about each other than the rural working-class individuals in East Palestine who will bear the brunt of any environmental fallout from the disaster. (Vance made this argument on Tucker Carlson’s show on Tuesday. For the record, Erin Brockovich, who remains an environmental activist, criticized Vance for taking so long to address the crash publicly.)
Some have compared the derailment to ecological and public-health disasters like Chernobyl and Bhopal, and described the decision to burn off the vinyl chloride in ominous terms:
Vinyl chloride is not only flammable, but it's also a brain, lung, blood, and liver carcinogen. Authorities decided to burn hundreds of thousands of gallons of this chemical after a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio.
— Gen-Z for Change (@genzforchange) February 12, 2023
But it’s gotten almost no national news coverage… pic.twitter.com/5o9LOmagu1
It’s not clear what Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene means here, but she’s mad about it:
East Palestine, Ohio is undergoing an ecological disaster bc authorities blew up the train derailment cars carrying hazardous chemicals and press are being arrested for trying to tell the story.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) February 12, 2023
Oh but UFO’s!
What is going on?
pic.twitter.com/RULoF1oKJQ
The Chinese government has helpfully created a hashtag:
Apparently some in the US take a wandering civilian balloon as a big threat while the explosive train derailment and toxic chemical leak Not. #OhioChernobyl pic.twitter.com/uBEfG3HMXN
— Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) February 14, 2023
Concern about the situation is justified: Vinyl chloride and some of the other materials involved are, indeed, hazardous. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to see photos of a giant black burn-off cloud and wonder if residents in the area are safe. Recent environmental disasters in Flint, Michigan, and elsewhere have undermined public trust in elected officials’ declarations about safety. And the complete list of what the train was carrying wasn’t released for several days after the crash.
What’s lacking, though, is evidence of widespread harm or danger to humans. Death tolls at Chernobyl and Bhopal were massive and immediate, while the reason that drinking water in Flint did so much harm is that it wasn’t being adequately monitored. In this case, both state and federal environmental agencies were on hand immediately to test the surrounding air and water. They haven’t found any of the substances that were on the train in amounts that are known to present a health risk to humans. (The fish fatalities appear to be limited to the immediate area around the crash. This is, of course, bad, but spilled substances can become diluted to a point of negligibility the farther they travel.)
Fine, but is Mayor Pete at fault for the crash itself? I am hearing online, on the Internet and World Wide Web, that he should have reinstated Obama-era rules about braking equipment on trains carrying hazardous materials.
Several leftist publications and writers have circulated the charge that the Biden administration and other governmental entities—particularly Secretary Buttigieg, who once worked for the efficiency-obsessed McKinsey consulting company—have gone soft on corner-cutting railroad companies. These charges have centered on the administration’s choice not to push for the reinstatement of an Obama-era regulation that mandated updated electronic braking systems on certain trains carrying hazardous flammable materials. That rule was repealed during the Trump administration.
Other industry observers, though, say this criticism is misguided because the train that derailed was not carrying enough flammable cargo to have been covered by the rule. (DeWine made a similar observation on Tuesday.) The derailment also appears to have been caused by an overheated axle and/or wheel under one particular car—see this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report about video footage from elsewhere on the track which appears to show the problem—rather than a speed or braking issue. (The National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary statement about the crash mentions an overheated wheel bearing but not anything about brakes.)
Which is not to suggest that underregulation is not a concern. Railroad Workers United, a labor group, has issued a detailed statement blaming “Precision Scheduled Railroading”—a term for industry cost-cutting that also came up last December when there was nearly a nationwide worker strike—for the accident and its severity. The statement asserts that the derailed train wasn’t inspected properly “due to car inspectors being laid-off” and “time allowed per car inspection being dramatically reduced by the industry.” (Buttigieg may also have invited criticism by not making any public comment on the crash until this Monday.)
The RWU statement also says that the train’s length and the order in which its cars were placed contributed to the violence of the collision. Trains have been getting longer in recent years. (Longer trains mean the same amount of material can be hauled with less manpower.) And arranging cars such that heavier cargo is toward the front of the train, which helps avoid a whiplash effect in the event of derailments, means downtime in which the cargo isn’t moving.
Incidentally, where is East Palestine?
South of Youngstown along the Pennsylvania–Ohio border, and not far from Pittsburgh and West Virginia.
Isn’t this the area of the country in which a mysterious train derailment occurs in the 2011 J.J. Abrams movie Super 8?
Yes.
Isn’t it also the area of the country in which an “airborne toxic event” occurs because of a train crash in the Don DeLillo novel White Noise and its recent Netflix film adaptation?
The town in which White Noise takes place is fictional and is not depicted as being in any particular state. But as CNN notes, the novel does describes a rural, Rust Belt–like environment not far from a city that seems to be based on Pittsburgh—and at least one East Palestine family participated as extras in a nearby shoot for the Netflix movie in 2021.
Would you say that this life-art-life ouroboros is an example of the postmodern condition in which distressing “real life” circumstances are made even more upsetting by the “unreal” feeling of finding oneself in a situation more typically experienced vicariously via news or entertainment—as if one has been inserted into a movie or news broadcast, except that it lasts forever and cannot be “turned off” or otherwise escaped?
I would, and so would Maryville University English professor Jesse Kavadlo, who spoke to CNN:
“The terrible spill now is, of course, a coincidence. But it plays in our minds like life imitating art, which was imitating life, and on and on, because, as DeLillo suggests in ‘White Noise’ as well, we have unfortunately become too acquainted with the mediated language and enactment of disaster,” Kavadlo said.
Indeed, as much as we would like to ding Kavadlo for saying the words “the mediated language and enactment of disaster” to a cable news channel, he’s pretty much hit the nail on the head. East Palestine, in our fractured times, has become not just a disaster for the environment and for locals, but also a disaster as a news event: Not only can no one agree on who’s at fault, they can’t even agree on who’s at fault for not raising the question of who’s at fault more quickly.
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Ben Crump speaks at a news conference in April in New York City. On Monday, the civil rights attorney called on the Justice Department to launch an investigation into inmate deaths at the Harris County Jail in Houston. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty)
"These investigations will be fair, thorough, and impartial, and will proceed independently of any state investigations involving incidents at the jail," the FBI Houston tweeted in a statement on Monday. "To preserve the integrity and capabilities of the investigations, no details of the ongoing process will be publicly shared."
The move from the FBI comes after weeks of public calls for an explanation into why dozens of inmates have died while being held at the jail. At least 21 inmates died while in custody at the Texas jail in 2021, according to county records. Another 28 inmates died last year, and another four have died in the first couple months of 2023, according to attorneys Ben Crump and Paul Grinke, who are representing some of the victims' family members.
The FBI said it will be investigating the death of two inmates: Jaquaree Simmons, who died in February 2021, and Jacoby Pillow, who died in January 2023.
"I look forward to learning the FBI's findings, because we must all know the full truth if we are to improve our operation and make the jail as safe as possible for everyone entrusted into our care," Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said in a statement.
Jail staff committed "multiple policy violations" in the events that led to Simmons' death, according to an internal investigation from the Harris County Sheriff's Office, which resulted in the firing of 11 employees, and suspension of six others, according to the statement. A detention officer was charged with manslaughter.
Pillow, who was in the process of being released on bail, was found unresponsive in his jail cell and later taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences has not released an official cause of death for Pillow, whose death is also being investigated by the Houston Police Department.
Another inmate, Kevin Smith Jr., and his uncle, both died while in custody at the jail, according to the attorneys.
The FBI's investigation also comes days after family members of Pillow and Smith, along with Crump and Grinke, asked the Justice Department for an investigation.
"It is appalling that you would have 32 detainees die in the Harris County jail in a 14-month period," Crump said at a news conference in Houston on Monday. "I mean, nobody really would believe it unless you had these bodies that showed you it was really happening."
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Tal Hanan and his colleagues met reporters at an office in Modi’in, about 20 miles outside Tel Aviv. (photo: Haaretz/TheMarker/Radio France)
The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym “Jorge”, and appears to have been working under the radar in elections in various countries for more than two decades.
He is being unmasked by an international consortium of journalists. Hanan and his unit, which uses the codename “Team Jorge”, have been exposed by undercover footage and documents leaked to the Guardian.
Hanan did not respond to detailed questions about Team Jorge’s activities and methods but said: “I deny any wrongdoing.”
The investigation reveals extraordinary details about how disinformation is being weaponised by Team Jorge, which runs a private service offering to covertly meddle in elections without a trace. The group also works for corporate clients.
Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion. He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe.
One of Team Jorge’s key services is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims. It controls a vast army of thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Some avatars even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets and Airbnb accounts.
The consortium of journalists that investigated Team Jorge includes reporters from 30 outlets including Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País. The project, part of a wider investigation into the disinformation industry, has been coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.
The undercover footage was filmed by three reporters, who approached Team Jorge posing as prospective clients.
In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team spoke of how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts. They boasted of planting material in legitimate news outlets, which are then amplified by the Aims bot-management software.
Much of their strategy appeared to revolve around disrupting or sabotaging rival campaigns: the team even claimed to have sent a sex toy delivered via Amazon to the home of a politician, with the aim of giving his wife the false impression he was having an affair.
The methods and techniques described by Team Jorge raise new challenges for big tech platforms, which have for years struggled to prevent nefarious actors spreading falsehoods or breaching the security on their platforms. Evidence of a global private market in disinformation aimed at elections will also ring alarm bells for democracies around the world.
The Team Jorge revelations could cause embarrassment for Israel, which has come under growing diplomatic pressure in recent years over its export of cyber-weaponry that undermines democracy and human rights.
Hanan appears to have run at least some of his disinformation operations through an Israeli company, Demoman International, which is registered on a website run by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to promote defence exports. The Israeli MoD did not respond to requests for comment.
The undercover footage
Given their expertise in subterfuge, it is perhaps surprising that Hanan and his colleagues allowed themselves to be exposed by undercover reporters. Journalists using conventional methods have struggled to shed light on the disinformation industry, which is at pains to avoid detection.
The secretly filmed meetings, which took place between July and December 2022, therefore provide a rare window into the mechanics of disinformation for hire.
Three journalists – from Radio France, Haaretz and TheMarker – approached Team Jorge pretending to be consultants working on behalf of a politically unstable African country that wanted help delaying an election.
The encounters with Hanan and his colleagues took place via video calls and an in-person meeting in Team Jorge’s base, an unmarked office in an industrial park in Modi’in, 20 miles outside Tel Aviv.
Hanan described his team as “graduates of government agencies”, with expertise in finance, social media and campaigns, as well as “psychological warfare”, operating from six offices around the world. Four of Hanan’s colleagues attended the meetings, including his brother, Zohar Hanan, who was described as the chief executive of the group.
In his initial pitch to the potential clients, Hanan claimed: “We are now involved in one election in Africa … We have a team in Greece and a team in [the] Emirates … You follow the leads. [We have completed] 33 presidential-level campaigns, 27 of which were successful.” Later, he said he was involved in two “major projects” in the US but claimed not to engage directly in US politics.
It was not possible to verify all of Team Jorge’s claims in the undercover meetings, and Hanan may have been embellishing them in order to secure a lucrative deal with prospective clients. For example, it appears Hanan may have inflated his fees when discussing the cost of his services.
Team Jorge told the reporters they would accept payments in a variety of currencies, including cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, or cash. He said he would charge between €6m and €15m for interference in elections.
However, emails leaked to the Guardian show Hanan quoting more modest fees. One suggests that in 2015 he asked for $160,000 from the now defunct British consultancy Cambridge Analytica for involvement in an eight-week campaign in a Latin American country.
In 2017 Hanan again pitched to work for Cambridge Analytica, this time in Kenya, but was rejected by the consultancy, which said “$400,000-$600,000 per month, and substantially more for crisis response” was more than its clients would pay.
There is no evidence that either of those campaigns went ahead. Other leaked documents, however, reveal that when Team Jorge worked covertly on the Nigerian presidential race in 2015 it did so alongside Cambridge Analytica.
Alexander Nix, who was the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, declined to comment in detail but added: “Your purported understanding is disputed.”
Team Jorge also sent Nix’s political consultancy a video showcasing an early iteration of the social media disinformation software it now markets as Aims. Hanan said in an email that the tool, which enabled users to create up to 5,000 bots to deliver “mass messages” and “propaganda”, had been used in 17 elections.
“It’s our own developed Semi-Auto Avatar creation and network deployment system,” he said, adding that it could be used in any language and was being sold as a service, although the software could be bought “if the price is right”.
Team Jorge’s bot-management software appears to have grown significantly by 2022, according to what Hanan told the undercover reporters. He said it controlled a multinational army of more than 30,000 avatars, complete with digital backstories that stretch back years.
Demonstrating the Aims interface, Hanan scrolled through dozens of avatars, and showed how fake profiles could be created in an instant, using tabs to choose nationality and gender and then matching profile pictures to names.
“This is Spanish, Russian, you see Asians, Muslims. Let’s make a candidate together,” he told the undercover reporters, before settling on one image of a white woman. “Sophia Wilde, I like the name. British. Already she has email, date birth, everything.”
Hanan was coy when asked where the photos for his avatars came from. However, the Guardian and its partners have discovered several instances in which images have been harvested from the social media accounts of real people. The photo of “Sophia Wilde”, for instance, appears to have been stolen from a Russian social media account belonging to a woman who lives in Leeds.
The Guardian and its reporting partners tracked Aims-linked bot activity across the internet. It was behind fake social media campaigns, mostly involving commercial disputes, in about 20 countries including the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Senegal, India and the United Arab Emirates.
This week Meta, the owner of Facebook, took down Aims-linked bots on its platform after reporters shared a sample of the fake accounts with the company. On Tuesday, a Meta spokesperson connected the Aims bots to others that were linked in 2019 to another, now-defunct Israeli firm which it banned from the platform.
“This latest activity is an attempt by some of the same individuals to come back and we removed them for violating our policies,” the spokesperson said. “The group’s latest activity appears to have centred around running fake petitions on the internet or seeding fabricated stories in mainstream media outlets.”
In addition to Aims, Hanan told reporters about his “blogger machine” – an automated system for creating websites that the Aims-controlled social media profiles could then use to spread fake news stories across the internet. “After you’ve created credibility, what do you do? Then you can manipulate,” he said.
‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’
No less alarming were Hanan’s demonstrations of his team’s hacking capabilities, in which he showed the reporters how he could penetrate Telegram and Gmail accounts. In one case, he brought up on screen the Gmail account of a man described as the “assistant of an important guy” in the general election in Kenya, which was days away.
“Today if someone has a Gmail, it means they have much more than just email,” Hanan said as he clicked through the target’s emails, draft folders, contacts and drives. He then showed how he claimed to be able to access accounts on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app.
One of the Telegram accounts he claimed to penetrate belonged to a person in Indonesia, while the other two appeared to belong to Kenyans involved in the ongoing general election, and close to the then candidate William Ruto, who ended up winning the presidency.
“I know in some countries they believe Telegram is safe. I will show you how safe it is,” he said, before showing a screen in which he appeared to scroll through the Telegram contacts of one Kenyan strategist who was working for Ruto at the time.
Hanan then demonstrated how access to Telegram could be manipulated to sow mischief.
Typing the words “hello how are you dear”, Hanan appeared to send a message from the Kenyan strategist’s account to one of their contacts. “I’m not just watching,” Hanan boasted, before explaining how manipulating the messaging app to send messages could be used to create chaos in a rival’s election campaign.
“One of the biggest thing is to put sticks between the right people, you understand,” he said. “And I can write him what I think about his wife, or what I think about his last speech, or I can tell him that I promised him to be my next chief of staff, OK?”
Hanan then showed how – once the message had been read – he could “delete” it to cover his tracks. But when Hanan repeated that trick, hacking into the Telegram account of the second close adviser to Ruto, he made a mistake.
After sending an innocuous Telegram message consisting only of the number “11” to one of the hacking victim’s contacts, he failed to properly delete it.
A reporter in the consortium was later able to track down the recipient of that message and was granted permission to check the person’s phone. The “11” message was still visible on their Telegram account, providing evidence that Team Jorge’s infiltration of the account was genuine.
Hanan suggested to the undercover reporters that some of his hacking methods exploited vulnerabilities in the global signalling telecoms system, SS7, which for decades has been regarded by experts as a weak spot in the telecoms network.
Google, which runs the Gmail service, declined to comment. Telegram said “the problem of SS7 vulnerabilities” was widely known and “not unique to Telegram”. They added: “Accounts on any massively popular social media network or messaging app can be vulnerable to hacking or impersonation unless users follow security recommendations and take proper precautions to keep their accounts secure.”
Hanan did not respond to detailed requests for comment, claiming that he needed “approval” from an unspecified authority before doing so. However, he added: “To be clear, I deny any wrongdoing.”
Zohar Hanan, his brother and business partner, added: “I have been working all my life according to the law!”
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Independent analysis finds major flaws with 24 companies’ “net-zero” promises. (photo: Getty)
Independent analysis finds major flaws with 24 companies’ “net-zero” promises.
Climate commitments from 24 of the world’s largest self-proclaimed green companies are “misleading” and “wholly insufficient” to keep global temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), according to a searing report released Monday by the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch, two European environmental organizations. These two dozen companies have pledged to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, but their cumulative commitments cover only 36 percent of their total greenhouse gas emissions — in large part due to their reliance on spurious carbon offsets or their failure to address huge swaths of the emissions from their supply chains. For 17 of the companies, the authors highlighted an “inadequacy or complete lack” of actual plans to substantiate their net-zero pledges.
Companies are engaging in an “aggressive communications campaign” to state that they will be net-zero, said Gilles Dufrasne, Carbon Market Watch’s lead on global carbon markets, during a media briefing last week. “But that is simply not what they’re pledging. … I would categorize that as greenwashing.”
The report authors looked at climate commitments from some of the largest international companies that are part of the Race to Zero campaign, a global initiative that commits institutions to a credible pathway toward limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C. The researchers identified eight of the world’s highest-polluting sectors, including automotives, electronics, and fashion retail, and selected three companies from each sector. These companies are outspoken about their decarbonization commitments, which in some cases they have prominently advertised.
Overall, the report paints a bleak picture of corporate climate responsibility. It found 15 of the 24 companies’ climate pledges to be of “low or very low integrity,” eight to be of “moderate integrity,” and zero to be of “high integrity,” based on a range of factors like their commitment to long-term emissions reduction. Several pledges, including ones from Amazon and American Airlines, rely on misleading carbon credits linked to forests that are unlikely to sequester carbon for more than a few years. Others, like a 2040 carbon neutrality pledge from the French grocery giant Carrefour, simply omit so-called scope 3 emissions — the emissions from the products companies sell to customers. These emissions may represent more than 90 percent of a company’s climate pollution (98 percent, in Carrefour’s case).
Companies in some of the most polluting sectors — like the car company Volkswagen and the meat behemoth JBS — had no credible plans to change their business models or diversify away from activities that are inherently emissions-intensive. Others, including PepsiCo and Nestlé, have built hype around a practice called “insetting,” which involves offsetting emissions that originate within their supply chains. (For example, a company could close one of its factories and claim this cancels out the emissions from another one.) The NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch said this is an “illegitimate” concept, and even more poorly regulated than most offsets.
Just one company — Maersk, the maritime freight giant — had a pledge deemed to be of “reasonable integrity,” as it was one of the only ones whose net-zero target covered 90 percent or more of its overall emissions footprint. Pledges from fast fashion company H…M, the automaker Stellantis, and the cement and concrete manufacturer Holcim also covered 90 percent or more of their carbon emissions, but those pledges performed more poorly on transparency or reliability.
Thirteen of the companies named in the report responded to Grist’s requests for comment. H…M, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen said they welcomed the report for recognizing their sustainability initiatives and, along with Amazon, Ahold Delhaize, Foxconn, Samsung, and Thyssenkrupp, reaffirmed their previously stated carbon neutrality targets. Carrefour and Walmart disagreed with the report’s methodology and said it mischaracterized their emissions goals. Maersk responded to criticisms about its use of biofuels, saying it sees them as a transition fuel until alternatives are available at scale, and said its emissions targets are aligned with guidance from third-party verification organizations. Microsoft and Stellantis declined to comment.
Thomas Day, an expert on carbon markets and corporate climate action for the NewClimate Institute and a coauthor of the analysis, emphasized the importance of scrutinizing companies’ short-term emissions pledges, many of which have been “inappropriately” certified by third-party organizations. Almost all of the 24 companies analyzed by the NewClimate Institute have emissions reduction targets for 2030, and 16 of these have been certified by the Science-Based Targets Initiative, or SBTi — a widely respected certification body whose stamp of approval lends legitimacy to private sector climate commitments — but their pledges only a cover a median of about 15 percent of their total climate pollution between 2019 and 2030. This is in contrast to the global emissions reductions of 43 and 48 percent, respectively, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is necessary in that time frame to keep temperatures from rising past 1.5 degrees C.
“These companies may be members of voluntary initiatives, but nearly all companies making these pledges are making them in response to consumer and investor pressure,” Day said. “They’re making the case to regulators that they do not need to be regulated.”
In response to Grist’s request for comment, SBTi linked to a seven-page technical statement explaining some differences between the way it evaluates companies’ net-zero pledges and the report’s methodology, including different definitions of carbon offsets.
Eduardo Posada, an analyst for the NewClimate Institute, said the report made clear the need for greater clarity and enforcement of existing consumer protection laws, as well as new rules to keep up with the rapidly-evolving world of corporate greenwashing. As with food that’s certified “organic,” he said, decarbonization claims should be required to meet a list of criteria to prove they’re more than just empty words. The European Union is currently considering a crackdown on greenwashing, and federal agencies in the U.S. are in the process of tightening regulations on emissions disclosures and misleading environmental marketing claims.
Posada endorsed a wholesale ban on terms like “carbon neutral” and “net-zero” in advertisements, since they open the door to ambiguity and questionable carbon offsets. “The terminology is misleading in itself” and is likely to be misunderstood by the public, he told Grist. “‘Zero’ is OK because it means total or near-total decarbonization, but the ‘net’ is where all the tricks go into. Companies can do many things inside of that ‘net’ word.”
“We believe it would be more constructive, more helpful if companies actually committed to reductions instead of these slogans,” he added.
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