18 March 23
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Just look at what happened with the Ku Klux Klan.
They said the rioters were harmless tourists, they claimed the riot itself was an inside job by the FBI, they insisted that antifa was responsible, and they declared the violence to be justified or at least understandable. Some made several of these claims at once.
So when the Fox News host Tucker Carlson last week attempted to rewrite the history of January 6, using footage provided by the newly inaugurated Republican House majority, it was hardly surprising. Not only had similarly contradictory claims been in circulation since the day of the riot, but Carlson himself had aired propaganda making parallel claims two years ago.
In the short term, Carlson’s efforts may convince those loyal viewers who are predisposed to believe him, his now-documented dishonesty toward his own audience notwithstanding. But in the long run, January 6 is likely to be recalled as a violent if clownish attempt to end constitutional government, in large part thanks to the work done by the much maligned January 6 committee. And although the investigation was disparaged when first announced—the New York Times columnist David Brooks declared that the committee had “already blown it” before its first hearing—history suggests that the meticulous records collected by the committee will shape American memory of the event. By itself, the proper preservation of records showing just what happened and why vindicates the committee’s work, no matter what detractors may argue.
January 6 is not the first time congressional committees have taken on the responsibility of investigating acts of political violence aimed at democratic sovereignty. Most Americans now remember the first Ku Klux Klan, a white-supremacist paramilitary organization that terrorized Republicans and freedmen in the aftermath of the Civil War, as one of the villains of American history. But at the time, there was vigorous debate over whether the Klan even existed. Supporters of Klan violence argued that the entire organization was a fever dream of freedmen and Republicans, who were simply trying to justify a federal power grab in order to better persecute conservative white Southerners. Sound familiar?
As Elaine Frantz Parsons writes in Ku Klux: The Birth of the Klan During Reconstruction, part of the confusion arose as 19th-century Americans acclimated themselves to a novel news environment in which national affairs could be rapidly reported across the country. News consumers found themselves trying to differentiate between contradictory, partisan accounts of events and having to decide whom to believe.
“Northern Democratic papers, such as the New York World … took the position that the Klan did not exist. For the most part, Democratic politicians, North and South, did the same. Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware sarcastically commented on the floor of the Senate in the spring of 1870 that it was his dearest wish to see an actual Ku-Klux (that ‘convenient class’) before he died,” Parsons writes. “Ku-Klux skeptics imagined a vast conspiracy between the government and the press to construct the Ku-Klux wholesale.”
The first Klan was a decentralized terrorist organization whose goal was to restore the antebellum racial hierarchy. The majority of the white South at the time agreed with its goals, if not its methods. Democrats North and South understood that the political violence of groups like the Klan could discredit their efforts to restore white supremacy, and so they felt they needed to rationalize or deny that violence in order to win sympathy to their cause.
Conspiracism is not new to American politics. There were no deepfakes or altered screenshots in the 19th century, but neither was there high-quality video or photography. Then, just as now, people had to choose whom to trust, and some outlets were willing to lie to their readers in service to what they saw as a greater cause—my former colleague Matt Ford once described Klan denial as America’s first “‘fake news’ crisis.”
Reports of Klan malfeasance in Republican papers were sometimes wrong or exaggerated, and Democratic papers seized on these errors as proof that the Klan’s existence was fiction, even as they downplayed or justified the violence itself and even as the bodies of murdered freedmen piled up. “Democratic newspapers printed blanket denials of the existence of the Ku-Klux,” Parsons notes, “during and after its most active period of violence.” Sensational and bizarre details of Klan rituals and behavior were used to taunt those sincerely worried about Klan violence, as if they were simply gullible idiots willing to believe anything. Klan deniers “extended an invitation to those northerners who believed themselves to be too ‘intelligent to be imposed upon’ by fantastic stories and mysterious terrors.”
This rhetorical style is common among those who deny the significance of January 6. Because that day’s events cannot truly be contested, they find it simpler to mock those who are concerned about democracy as hopelessly naive or pathetically earnest, or to highlight the buffoonish behavior of some of the participants to claim that they were benign. But, of course, the first Klan was both buffoonish and deadly; there is nothing to say the two cannot coexist.
Klan denial was successful at changing the subject, at least in the short term. “The debate over the Ku-Klux never effectively silenced those who argued that the Klan did not exist at all,” Parsons writes. “Despite massive and productive public and private efforts to gather, circulate, and evaluate information about the Ku-Klux Klan and despite the federal government’s devoting attention and resources to the Klan as though it were a real threat, the national debate over the Ku-Klux failed to move beyond the simple question of whether the Ku-Klux existed.”
It worked because of the half-truths people are willing to swallow in order to survive with their self-perceptions intact. Reconstruction-era Republicans used the persistence of racist violence in the South as a political weapon against their Democratic opponents. Klan denial helped Democrats rationalize reports of that violence away as a partisan conspiracy to strip them of their rights. They made themselves the true victims of the narrative, preserving their conception of their own benevolence and of the evil of their political opponents. “Part of the allure of misrepresentations,” Parsons notes, “is that they can help individuals or societies gloss over their own inconsistencies and develop more robust and appealing self-understandings.” When Republican Representative Andrew Clyde went from barricading doors in the Capitol against the January 6 mob to calling the attack a “normal tourist visit,” it wasn’t because he was having difficulty navigating a complex media environment.
Fashioning an “appealing self-understanding” would tempt Republicans in turn. Toward the end of Reconstruction, as the GOP shifted away from the defense of Black rights, news of violence against the emancipated became politically inconvenient. They, too, began to dismiss reports they preferred not to believe, those suggesting that the work of defending Black rights—a burden they no longer wished to bear—was yet unfinished.
In the long run, however, Klan denial became merely an interesting historical footnote. As incentives changed, so too did understandings. The same Democrats who once denied the Klan’s existence would eventually celebrate Klansmen as heroes of Lost Cause propaganda, applauding works like D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation. But that interpretation proved no more lasting.
The contemporary understanding of the Klan is not grounded in either Reconstruction-era denial or Jim Crow–style celebration. Instead, it has been shaped by the copious records collected by Congress and federal officials, and by contemporary newspaper reports of Klan violence. Historians used this material to craft scholarly works that left no doubt about the Klan’s existence, imperatives, or ideology—or its crimes. The Republican-run congressional committees that accumulated these records and testimony at the time may have been acting out of partisan self-interest, but our own historical understanding of that era remains indebted to their efforts. So it is with the January 6 committee, which was arguably more bipartisan.
For a time, at least, propaganda produced by right-wing media outlets will successfully fog the perceptions of January 6 among those who trust them. But the meticulous collection of records by the January 6 committee, and by the media outlets that painstakingly reconstructed the events of that day, will outlast the cheap parlor tricks of bullies, cowards, and charlatans, including those whose resources and willingness to lie seem bottomless. Even if they should prevail for a time, the truth will be there for those with clear sight to find it.
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A rally in Tel Aviv to protest the moves to overhaul the judicial system. (photo: Oded Balilty/AP)
Israel has a population of just over 9 million, so if organizers’ estimates are correct, about 5% of Israelis came out to voice their opposition to the proposed reforms.
Nearly half of the protesters – about 240,000 – gathered in Tel Aviv, the organizers said. In Jerusalem, several hundred demonstrators gathered in front of President Isaac Herzog’s house. They carried Israeli flags and chanted slogans including “Israel will not be a dictatorship.”
On Thursday, Herzog – whose role is largely ceremonial – urged the Netanyahu government to take the judicial overhaul legislation off the table.
Protesters and critics of Netanyahu’s plan say it would weaken the country’s courts and erode the judiciary’s ability to check the power of the country’s other branches of government.
The package of legislation would give Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, the power to overrule Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority. It would also give the government the power to nominate judges, which currently rests with a committee composed of judges, legal experts and politicians. It would remove power and independence from government ministries’ legal advisers, and take away the power of the courts to invalidate “unreasonable” government appointments, as the High Court did in January, forcing Netanyahu to fire Interior and Health Minister Aryeh Deri.
Critics accuse Netanyahu of pushing the legislation in order to get out of corruption trials he is currently facing. Netanyahu denies that, saying the trials are collapsing on their own, and that the changes are necessary after judicial overreach by unelected judges.
Israel does not have a written constitution, but a set of what are called Basic Laws.
“We are done being polite,” said Shikma Bressler, an Israeli protest leader. “If the laws being suggested will pass, Israel will no longer be a democracy.”
About two out of three (66%) Israelis believe the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down laws incompatible with Israel’s Basic Laws, and about the same proportion (63%) say they support the current system of nominating judges, according to a poll last month for the Israel Democracy Institute.
“The only thing this government cares about is crushing Israeli democracy,” opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid said.
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A man takes photos as a black plume rises over East Palestine, Ohio, as a result of a controlled detonation after a train derailment. (photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP)
EPA scientists assessed a dioxin cancer risks threshold in 2010, but a federal cleanup is only triggered at far higher levels
The EPA at the time proposed lowering the cleanup threshold to reflect the science around the highly toxic chemical, but the Obama administration killed the rules, and the higher federal action threshold remains in place.
Though the dioxin levels in East Palestine are below the federal action threshold and an EPA administrator last week told Congress the levels were “very low”, chemical experts, including former EPA officials, who reviewed the data for the Guardian called them “concerning”.
The levels found in two soil samples are also up to 14 times higher than dioxin soil limits in some states, and the numbers point to wider contamination, said Linda Birnbaum, a former head of the US National Toxicology Program and EPA scientist.
“The levels are not screaming high, but we have confirmed that dioxins are in East Palestine’s soil,” she said. “The EPA must test the soil in the area more broadly.”
The data probably confirms fears that the controlled burn of vinyl chloride in the days after the train wreck in the town created dioxin and dispersed it throughout the area, experts say, though they stressed the new data is of limited value because only two soil samples were checked.
The train crash in East Palestine and its toxic aftermath has become a major issue in the US with locals and activists decrying a lack of action by both the government and the train operator, Norfolk Southern. The state of Ohio has now sued the rail giant over the derailment, calling it one of a “long string” of incidents involving the company.
Dioxins are a class of chemicals that are a byproduct produced when chlorine is burned, which is a common industrial process in making products like PVC.
The chemicals are highly persistent and can accumulate and stay for years in the environment or human bodies. Among other health issues, the compounds are linked to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, nervous system disorders and other serious health problems. Soil and food contamination are considered to be among the most common exposure routes.
After resisting calls for weeks to test for dioxins, the EPA on 3 March announced it would order Norfolk Southern to do so. Separately, Indiana last week commissioned testing of East Palestine soil because one of the state’s landfills is storing it. The testing was conducted by what Birnbaum characterized as a reputable laboratory.
The Indiana governor, Eric Holcomb, said the levels found in the soil “were not harmful”. Meanwhile, an EPA regional administrator, Debra Shore, during congressional testimony on 9 March characterized the dioxin levels found in Indiana as “very low” and “good news”.
But while the EPA can claim that the levels are “low” from a legal standpoint, the agency’s own science suggests they are not safe, and dioxin experts who spoke with the Guardian cast doubt on Shore’s and Holcomb’s assessments.
Regulators establish the toxicity of dioxins in a soil sample by calculating the “toxicity equivalence” of all dioxins in the soil compared with the most toxic dioxin compound, called 2,3,7,8 TCDD. East Palestine soil showed levels of “2,3,7,8 TCDD toxicity equivalence” of 700 parts per trillion (ppt). The level at which the EPA will initiate cleanup action in residential areas is 1,000 ppt.
However, the cleanup triggers are much lower in many states – 90 ppt in Michigan, and 50 ppt in California.
“So based on this, the concentrations are actually concerning,” said Carsten Prasse, an organic chemist at Johns Hopkins University and scientific adviser for SimpleLab. Federal cleanup standards of 1,000 ppt apply in Ohio.
Moreover, EPA scientists in 2010 put the cancer risk threshold for dioxins in residential soil at 3.7 ppt, and the agency recommended lowering the cleanup trigger to 72 ppt.
“When you run the numbers and do your best state-of-the-art risk calculations, that’s the number you get for the cancer risk,” said Stephen Lester, a toxicologist who has researched dioxins for 40 years and is science director for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. “That’s why dioxins are described as one of the most toxic chemicals ever created.”
The rules were ultimately killed ”for political reasons”, Lester said. Exposure to that level of dioxin is probably widespread, and making the change would create fallout that would be extremely difficult for the government to manage, he added.
“Instead of making adjustments for the high risk of these chemicals, they dropped it, they just walked away from it, and that’s the crazy part of this story,” Lester said. Now the EPA can legally claim the levels in East Palestine are safe, even if agency science has suggested it is not.
The EPA did not respond to specific questions from the Guardian, but in a statement the agency doubled down on its assessment.
“The available data, analyzed and validated by an independent laboratory, shows the waste from East Palestine that went to Indiana does not contain harmful levels of dioxins,” a spokesperson wrote.
Experts also cautioned that the levels may be safe for Indiana’s purpose – storing toxic waste in a landfill – and unsafe in the context of public exposure to the chemicals around the crash site.
It is also unclear where and at what depth the samples were collected, Prasse noted, all of which has implications for potential health risks in East Palestine. The chemicals would especially present a risk in dust and gardens, or for children playing outside, he added. Many homes are a matter of feet from the wreck site.
“My main concern is: is this reflective of the level in the area in East Palestine … and of the levels individuals who live near the rail are exposed to?” Prasse said. “I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable living there.”
Moreover, if the soil that Indiana tested had been shipped to the state in a truck or train car, then it was mixed with other soil and probably diluted, which could make the soil appear safer than it is, and would conceal hotspots on the ground, Birnbaum said.
She noted the results revealed a wide range of dioxins, which suggests the chemicals were created in the vinyl chloride burn. Though dioxins are often present throughout the environment at low levels, especially in industrial areas like East Palestine, background profiles are usually limited to fewer types of dioxin, Birnbaum said.
In 1980, the EPA forced the evacuation of Times Beach, Missouri, when dioxin levels exceeding 1,000 ppt were found in the soil after the chemicals were sprayed on the town’s roads to prevent the spread of dust.
Experts who have begun reviewing Norfolk Southern’s plan for testing for dioxins are already raising concerns about its design, and say the EPA may fear a repeat of Times Beach.
“What you really need to know for the people in the area to be safe is where did the dioxins come from, where did the wind take it, where was it deposited and where is the area with heavy levels,” Birnbaum said.
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Oil pipelines stretch across the landscape outside Nuiqsut, Alaska, where ConocoPhillips operates the Alpine Field. (photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/WP)
The largest oil project under consideration in the country has become a top target for environmental groups and climate activists
For weeks, this Alaskan oil development more than 4,000 miles from the White House became central to the country’s debate over climate change.
It captivated activists and young people who united online to try to block it. For Alaskan leaders and some residents it was the most important federal decision facing their state, with many clamoring for it as an economic boon. Oil industry leaders said it was key to their future relationship with President Biden.
Here’s what you need to know about Willow.
Where is the Willow project taking place?
Willow is an oil reserve in Arctic Alaska controlled by the oil company ConocoPhillips. It’s on Alaska’s North Slope, less than 30 miles from the Arctic Ocean.
The region is in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, or NPR-A, the nation’s largest piece of public land. The region, about the size of Indiana, was first recognized by President Warren G. Harding in 1923 and designated specifically for oil and gas development by the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act in 1976. The law created special rules for oil and gas extraction and set aside some areas for “maximum protection” of the environment. Today it is one of the most promising regions in the U.S. for new oil, but is also a key habitat for polar bears as well as tens of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl.
The Willow project explained
Willow is now the biggest oil project under consideration in the country, according to consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. ConocoPhillips estimates its cost at $8 billion to $10 billion.
That has also made it a top priority for climate activists. They are pushing to reduce fossil-fuel consumption as a way to cut the emissions that cause climate change, and have tried to stop major investments like this as a way to push the world away from oil. This project is especially vulnerable to public intervention because it is on federal lands and requires federal permits to go forward — and Biden had promised to end new oil drilling on federal land.
ConocoPhillips has held leases to develop oil for the region since the late 1990s and discovered Willow with two exploratory wells drilled in 2016. After roughly five years of permitting and legal fights, the Biden administration approved the project to have as many as three drilling sites with up to 199 total wells. It shrunk the project from the five pads ConocoPhillips had originally proposed following recommendations from a government review to keep development out of a yellow-billed loon nesting site and caribou migration paths.
What is Willow going to do?
The Bureau of Land Management estimates that Willow could produce 576 million barrels of oil over 30 years.
Initial gravel mining and road construction work has already started for the development, which will have a total footprint of 499 acres, according to the administration’s final decision. For comparison, that is two and a half times the area the Washington Commanders recently acquired to build a new football stadium. Willow’s plan includes hundreds of miles of roads and pipelines, airstrips, a gravel mine, and a new processing facility in the middle of pristine Arctic tundra and wetland.
Burning Willow’s oil would also put into the atmosphere an estimated 239 million metric tons of carbon dioxide during the project’s 30-year lifetime — or the equivalent of driving 1.7 million gasoline-powered cars a year. That number assumes that, if the ConocoPhillips project didn’t go forward, no other oil producers would pick up the slack.
Under estimates from the Biden administration, even if Willow doesn’t get built, the United States and the rest of the world will still burn a large amount of fossil fuels. Cleaner options, the estimates said, would only account for roughly half of the energy demand Willow would have met.
Willow going forward would create about 70 million metric tons of additional CO2 from the project in U.S. emissions — and another 60 million tons internationally — equivalent to just 0.03 percent of U.S. emissions in 2021, according to the estimates.
What are the benefits and harms of the willow project?
Supporters say new oil from Alaska will help ensure the U.S. has a reliable, domestic supply of energy. That is important for limiting the country’s and its allies’ reliance on oil suppliers often run under authoritarian regimes and weak environmental regulation. Willow is also estimated to produce billions of dollars of economic activity and tax revenue in Alaska, where state leaders and many Alaska Natives say they need a boost to a flagging economy.
But access to oil like that could also help prolong the country’s reliance on fossil fuels, with no guarantee the technology will be in place to stop their contribution to climate change. Because the Biden administration approved it, the project may also undermine the president’s credibility in pushing other countries to develop cleaner alternatives instead of oil and natural gas. And many locals are less enthused about the oil revenue and more concerned the project may harm local animal populations that are key to the community, degrade the region’s air quality, and lead to spills, leaks and blowouts that can come with major oil development.
Why did Biden approve Willow despite his environmental pledges?
Activists aggressively protested Willow in part because Biden had made big promises to prioritize environmental protections, climate change and an end to drilling on public land. Administration officials said those were important issues that influenced the project, but not enough to stop it.
They said that instead they were limited by the law that governs NPR-A and the leases that ConocoPhillips has held since long before the Biden administration took office. The law gives a company with such leases the right to develop, and strong legal standing to fight the government if it tries to block that work. If rejected, ConocoPhillips could have sued, potentially won billions of dollars at taxpayer expense, and still been able to develop the project anyway, legal experts have said.
Other factors may have also played a role. Biden had been heavily lobbied by Alaskan officials on the issue as long as he has been president, and needs two of them — the moderate Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Rep. Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) — to get his appointees and agenda through a narrowly divided Congress. He has also promised voters he would fight high oil and gasoline prices, and has acknowledged in recent months oil still likely has a place in the economy far into the future. His biggest climate policies so far have focused more on building out and encouraging consumers to adopt cleaner energy than they have on limiting fossil-fuel production.
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A relative of an Iraqi prisoner reacts to photos of prisoner abuse and torture by U.S. forces outside the prison in Baghdad, Iraq, on May 8, 2004. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
“Miraculously, they still believe in the U.S. justice system and still want to tell their story to a U.S. jury.”
Tens of thousands of Iraqis in the early years of the war would pass through interrogation and detention sites where CIA agents, military intelligence, military police, private contractors, special operation, and ordinary soldiers inflicted abuse that no longer gets cloaked by euphemisms: It was torture.
The photos released from Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 — showing humiliated, naked men leashed like dogs, electrocuted, beaten, piled in pyramids, with smiling military service members laughing and giving a thumbs-up over their bodies — gave the first public glimpse into a secret sprawling torture apparatus from Afghanistan to Cuba.
When the scandal broke, though, senior officials painted Abu Ghraib as a singular incident, the work of “a few bad apples.” President George W. Bush told the press, “We do not torture.” Even when word of the CIA’s secret prison network came to light, Bush and his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, continued to double down on their Geneva convention violations.
As is the American playbook, those in the highest seats of power, who played dumb while making torture a matter of policy, evaded any accountability. No criminal court indictments, no personal or professional repercussions, no travel restrictions, and no sanctions would flow up the chain of command. Mostly low-ranking soldiers at Abu Ghraib, Camp Nama, and beyond bore the brunt of blame. Eleven U.S. soldiers faced criminal convictions for torture at Abu Ghraib and a few more faced disciplinary actions — all the “justice” for Iraqi torture victims that the American military could muster.
“If the U.S. is truly ever interested in rectifying the horrific violence that it unleashed on Iraq, it could start by apologizing to and compensating the survivors of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison,” Maha Hilal, the director of the Muslim Counterpublics Lab and author of “Innocent Until Proven Muslim,” told The Intercept. “Until it does, U.S. gestures towards justice in any capacity will remain symbolic and disingenuous.”
Defense contractors, complicit and involved directly with interrogations and torture, walked away unscathed. The only payout so far in a civil suit was made by a firm that provided translation services at the prison; the company paid out a $5 million settlement with hundreds of Iraqis represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights in a historic case. Now, 20 years later, CCR has another ongoing lawsuit against CACI — the security firm that the four former Abu Ghraib detainees on the suit accuse of directing their torture — in a bid to bridge “the accountability gap” between U.S. military members and private contractors. (CACI denies the allegations.)
“Like all legal cases, this is just one tiny piece of the horrors of the invasion and the occupation which displaced and killed many thousands of Iraqis,” Baher Azmy, legal director of the CCR, told The Intercept. “High-level Bush administration officials have not been held accountable for the lies and the murderous violence that they subjected the Iraqi people to. So, this is just one small part of the legal story.”
After 15 years of litigation, no trial date has been set for the ongoing case against CACI; Azmy said CACI has delayed the trial with a series of failed attempts to get the case dismissed. “But our clients are still here,” he said. “Miraculously, they still believe in the U.S. justice system and still want to tell their story to a U.S. jury.”
Most of the men detained across Iraq following the invasion were innocent, according to a Red Cross investigation. Military intelligence officers estimated, to the International Committee of the Red Cross, that 70 to 90 percent of the “persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq” had actually been arrested by mistake.
“I believe that achieving justice begins with revealing all the details about the torture and acknowledging them on the part of the United States, then giving reparations to the survivors who were tortured unjustly, for no reason,” Salah Hasan, a plaintiff in the CCR suit who survived Abu Ghraib, told The Intercept on the eve of the Iraq War’s anniversary.
A producer for the news channel Al Jazeera, Hasan was arrested in November 2003 and taken through various detention sites under U.S. custody, hooded and bound, before landing, with another Al Jazeera journalist, at Abu Ghraib. There, Hasan was stripped naked, kept standing and hooded, and restrained for endless hours. Over almost two months, he reported being kicked, beaten, deprived of food, and locked naked, in complete isolation for most of his imprisonment.
“Many years have passed since I got out of Abu Ghraib prison and today, and tomorrow, as yesterday, the name Abu Ghraib still raises many things in the soul: horror, fear, and anxiety,” Hasan said. “Even now, my children ask me about the details, but I can’t tell them for two reasons: The first is that the story is painful for me and the second is that I don’t want my children to suffer because of me.”
Consequences
More photographs of Abu Ghraib were eventually released more than a decade after the scandal first became public. An American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit forced the Pentagon to hand over more evidence of the abuses suffered by Iraqis; the additional 198 photos, selected to be released, were “the most innocuous of the 2,000 that were being withheld,” the ACLU wrote.
Censorship of this sort — to cover up American crimes, in this case specifically of torture — has played out time and time again. Just as we don’t have the full picture of what happened in Iraq, we also have never seen the full report of the Senate investigation into CIA torture. The ACLU National Security Project slammed the Pentagon for the continued suppression of evidence:
To justify its withholdings, the government cites a general fear that exposing the misconduct of government personnel may incite others to violence against Americans and U.S. interests. The problem with this argument is that it gives terrorists the power to determine what Americans can know about their own government. No democracy has ever been strengthened by suppressing evidence of its own crimes.
What the U.S. government can get away with is still influenced by the continuously set precedents of torture without justice.
“Though the Obama administration’s policy was to look forward,” Yumna Rizvi, a policy analyst for the Center for Victims of Torture, told The Intercept, “the reality is that the lack of accountability has created an inability to move forward and essentially paralyzed the U.S. on many issues, including those related to the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo detention facility.”
“The legacy of the torture program is one that continues to haunt,” she said. “We’re seeing this currently with the Pentagon’s effort to block evidence of Russian war crimes with the ICC” — International Criminal Court — “because it may open doors for the ICC to prosecute Americans. The U.S. cannot move in the world like it once did; it cannot espouse the principles of human rights, justice, and accountability.”
Reflecting on the 20-year anniversary of the invasion of his country, Hasan explained that he has seen his everything — the law, health, education, politics, and people — change for the worst since the invasion. Torture in Iraqi prisons is an endless story that continues until today, he said.
“The United States of America should reconsider its policies, and at the very least, clean up the mess left behind,” he said. “The U.S. must admit that it deceived the Iraqi people. But it is clear this is not in its consideration at all.”
The CCR-led fight for a modicum of justice from private contractors in Abu Ghraib may finally head to trial this year, Azmy hopes. Hasan, and the other former prisoners, have been waiting 15 years for a chance to testify before a U.S. court. “I have found it my duty not to keep silent about crimes of human rights violations,” he told me. “If justice is achieved, it will be a step along the way to correcting mistakes — I hope that other steps will then follow.”
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"They pepper sprayed the children," one migrant recalls. (photo: BBC)
Hundreds of migrants tried to rush into the United States from Mexico on Sunday.
The group of mostly Venezuelan nationals attempted to cross a bridge connecting Ciudad Juarez with El Paso, Texas.
The migrants broke through Mexican security, but were stopped by barbed wire and US border agents in riot gear.
"We all ran, and they put a fence with barbed wire around us," said Jackson Solis, a 23-year-old Venezuelan who went to the bridge on Sunday. "They threw tear gas at us."
Videos posted on social media showed the crowd, which included several children, attempting to cross the bridge before retreating back to the Mexican side.
The incident prompted criticism from Republican leaders. Texas Senator John Cornyn accused Biden of failing to work with congressional leaders to stem the flow of migrants.
"I think part of the president's policies are attracting more illegal immigration and what the Border Patrol calls 'pull factors', in other words, the perception that there are no consequences associated with coming here outside of legal immigration channels," he told Fox News.
In a statement, US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) said that the group posed "a potential threat to make a mass entry".
A record total of 2.76 million migrants were stopped from entering the United States in the year ending September 2022. The high levels continued until January, when there was a sharp drop, according to the latest available figures.
Some migrants in Sunday's crowd claimed frustration with a new US government app meant to streamline the asylum application process. Others told reporters they heard a rumour that they would be let into the United States, supposedly because of a "day of the migrant" celebration.
Earlier this year the Biden administration rolled out a smartphone app called CBP One, which is supposed to allow asylum seekers to book appointments in advance of their arrival at the border.
Several migrants' rights organisations recently told the BBC that users face lack of appointments, geolocation failures and other glitches.
One security feature of the app requires applicants to send a photo every time they log on, but the groups say people with darker skin frequently have their photos rejected.
An asylum seeker told Reuters on Sunday she had been stuck at the border for a month while struggling to use the app.
"Please, we just want to get in so we can help our families," 18-year-old Camila Paz said.
The US Department of Homeland Security says recent app updates will improve the system.
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Communities living alongside rivers can be at particular risk of mercury exposure, studies show, due to bioaccumulation and biomagnification of methylmercury in the fish species they eat. (photo: Mongabay)
The Tapajós Basin has been plagued by illegal mining and mercury pollution for decades. That’s why the researchers at Pará Federal University (UFPA) started working with villagers to raise awareness of the dangers of mercury and help manage their exposure, principally by reducing their consumption of potentially contaminated fish. The researchers used learning sessions and local radio to share information about the health risks associated with mercury. Participants in the project also helped to spread the word among other community members. Similar interventions have also proved successful in the past as a short-term solution to address mercury exposure.
Of 34 participants whose hair samples were tested in consecutive years during the project, more than half showed reduced exposure to mercury. Though a small sample, the researchers say it indicates that such knowledge-sharing initiatives can be effective to reduce exposure.
“We need to provide knowledge to local communities about the mercury problem,” Gabriella Arrifano, a visiting professor at UFPA who worked on the project, told Mongabay by phone. The accumulation of mercury in organisms higher up the food chain, known as biomagnification, means carnivorous fish have much higher concentrations of mercury than other species. So “by eating those with less mercury, we can try to make an equilibrium with the amount of exposure,” Arrifano said.
Indigenous and riverine communities are struggling with mercury contamination in parts of the Brazilian Amazon. Exposure can have harmful and toxic effects on the nervous, digestive and immune systems, lungs, kidneys, skin and eyes. The metal is in the top 10 list of chemicals of major public health concern, according to the World Health Organization. The substance also plays a major role in the recent health crisis in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory.
Established in 1992 and covering an area larger than Portugal, the Yanomami territory is home to some 30,000 Indigenous people, who in recent years have suffered waves of violence, disease and malnutrition linked to illegal mining. Under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, from 2019 to 2022, more than 20,000 illegal miners are thought to have invaded the territory. Mining in Indigenous lands is forbidden in Brazil under any circumstances, yet Bolsonaro was vocal in his support for opening up these lands to mining and other extractive activities. As a member of Congress, he’d tried repeatedly to overturn the demarcation of the Yanomami territory.
Past studies in Indigenous villages have established a connection between gold mining activities and mercury exposure, a scenario that has played out across the Amazon for decades. The highest incidences of mercury exposure among Indigenous peoples are found in areas where gold mining occurs.
After Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became president at the start of 2023, his administration acted to expel the illegal miners from the Yanomami land. Many already fled, but the mercury they used will remain in the soil, rivers, fish and animals.
Experts say it’s no easy task to clean an area contaminated by mercury. But Luis Fernandez, executive director of the Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation (CINCIA), said he agrees that the kind of approach taken by the UFPA researchers in their Tapajós project is necessary to support Amazonian communities who are highly dependent on fish and thus at elevated risk for mercury exposure. “That requires education, awareness raising, and finding culturally appropriate ways to suggest changing diets to basically decouple people from the pollution in the environment,” Fernandez told Mongabay by phone.
It’s just one of a suite of possible solutions to manage mercury pollution left from gold mining activities, experts say. In the absence of a quick fix, surveillance of the problem, management, and support for communities most at risk are all urgently needed.
A ‘tricky’ problem
Often used in small-scale or “artisanal” mining activities to separate gold from other materials, mercury’s release into remote areas reverberates throughout the forest ecosystem, with impacts potentially greater than often assumed. Globally, a report by the U.N. estimates more than 2,000 metric tons of mercury are used in gold mining. The metal pollutes rivers, contaminates fish, harms the health of Indigenous people, and threatens wildlife to an extent that’s not yet fully understood.
According to Brazil’s Ministry of Environment, gold mining releases between 11 and 161 metric tons of mercury annually, but these figures date from 2016 and haven’t been updated to reflect the surge in illegal mining during the Bolsonaro years.
The proliferation of mercury comes despite Brazil being a signatory to the Minamata Convention, an international treaty designed to protect human health and the environment from mercury pollution. The convention states that countries must “take steps to reduce, and where feasible eliminate, the use of mercury and mercury compounds in, and the emissions and releases to the environment of mercury” from artisanal mining.
It also provides guidance on managing sites contaminated by mercury due to small-scale illegal gold mining, underlining that the issue is “challenging to manage and remediate.” Management efforts include assessing the site, removing mercury pools, developing engagement programs with local communities, and taking steps to decontaminate soil and sediment, where feasible due to costs.
In remote and difficult-to-access areas, technology used to address industrial-scale pollution “may therefore need to be adapted to permit smaller, modular, transportable and environmentally sound technologies to be brought to the contaminated site to treat the contaminated materials,” it says.
Biomonitoring as a first step allows for an assessment of the scale of the contamination and identification of key hotspots of risk, according to Arrifano and Maria Elena Crespo-López, head of the molecular pharmacology lab at UFPA. They add there also needs to be professional medical assistance for people living in high-risk areas.
“The problem of mercury [in the Amazon] is really tricky, so things that have been done previously in other countries are difficult to apply here,” Arrifano said. “We need to find tailored solutions for the Amazon and first of all we need to know how big the problem is.”
Fixing mercury with nature?
Research from a protected area in Peru and published last year shows that mercury released from gold mining becomes fixed in forests, with substantial “accumulation in soils, biomass, and resident songbirds.”
“Mercury is a legacy contaminant, which means that once it’s entered into any ecosystem, it’s going to take centuries to go away,” said Jacqueline Gerson, a watershed biogeochemist at Michigan State University and first author of the paper. She said that in the United States, historical gold mining has left a mercury problem that lingers to this day. Importantly, however, the amount of methylation — the conversion of elemental mercury into the highly toxic methylmercury — is “much lower” in forests than in aquatic systems, Gerson said.
“One of the important lessons from this paper was that we need to be protecting these forests to prevent that mercury from entering the aquatic ecosystem,” she said. “In an ideal world, you protect those forests, but also move mining further away from these conservation areas — that have a huge amount of biodiversity, or Indigenous communities living in them — to begin with.”
Researchers say conserving tropical forests is potentially both a way to help tackle the mercury problem — due to their capacity to act as a sink — and avoid remobilizing fixed mercury, which can contribute to the existing burden.
“What our work is sort of pointing to is that there’s also links between forest and ecosystem conservation and the mercury problem,” Aryeh Feinberg, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Mongabay by phone.
Feinberg has carried out research on the capacity of the Amazon to act as a sink of atmospheric mercury; more studies are needed to better understand these connections, he said. “At least from the information that we have, there’s quite substantial pollution which is released during deforestation that has been overlooked by policy so far,” he said.
Mercury in the Amazon is thus part of a “complicated system,” Fernandez said, as it also occurs naturally in some parts of the Amazon forest and soils. Deforestation for agriculture, the construction of hydroelectric dams, and soil erosion can also act as additional drivers of heightened mercury pollution, by potentially mobilizing mercury that can then end up in waterways, where it then transforms into methylmercury.
This complex picture doesn’t diminish the massive impact of gold mining, Fernandez said, but it can influence potential solutions. Experts note that reforestation, though complicated in remote areas, is a potential solution to help manage mercury pollution.
It can be done to remediate mining areas, but is intensive and “extremely expensive to do it at scale,” Fernandez said. Alongside a careful selection of the appropriate tree species, his organization, CINCIA, uses biochar — a “highly stable form of charcoal” — soaked in fertilizers and with added microorganisms to help recovery in highly disturbed areas where the soil has been degraded.
“We see the recovery rate [of trees] using a ring of biochar that has these nutrients and these microorganisms really gives them the chance,” Fernandez said. “Otherwise, you’re going to have very low survivorship in some cases.”
Reforestation is important to recover the health of forests and local people, according to Jailson Bittencourt de Andrade, vice president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and coordinator of a working group on mercury contamination. But the mercury contamination will remain in the soil, sediment and rivers for a “very long time”, he told Mongabay by phone. “So, it’s a complex problem, it’s a multitask problem that should be attacked in a concerted way … it’s a policy problem, a health problem, and a nutrition problem.”
Ending mercury use in gold mining
Stopping the pollution at the source is one of the best approaches, experts say. Expanding mercury-free mining and increasing the use of tools such as retorts, which enable miners to capture some of the mercury used and allow it to be reused rather than dispersed into the environment, are needed. Innovative capture technologies that could reduce mercury pollution are also under development.
Earlier this year, a natural filtration system developed by Scottish company SEM World won an award from Conservation X Labs, which runs a competition seeking solutions to mercury use in mining. The winning solution helps treat contaminated effluent created during the mining process using local products, thereby reducing mercury pollution and recovering leftover metals, thus providing an economic incentive for its use.
“What we do is treat the water in the tailing ponds,” Leigh Cassidy, lead scientist at SEM World, told Mongabay by phone. In testing in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, the system effectively removed 90% of the mercury in ponds, she said. “We’re focused on remediation rather than prevention. The only way to prevent it is for miners to use something other than mercury.”
For Fernandez, whose organization partnered with the Conservation X Labs for the competition, it highlights the role such technology can play in finding solutions. “It shows that there needs to be a lot of innovation, a lot of creativity in this space to solve these really intractable problems,” he said.
Amid calls for bans on the use of mercury in mining, experts say tackling illegal gold mining in protected lands is also fundamental to managing the problem.
“The main solution is to control the entry of illegal mercury into the country and stop illegal gold mining in the Amazon,” Andrade said. “The Brazilian Constitution is clear on prohibiting mining on Indigenous lands. The first step is the action of the federal government to stop and mitigate the quantity of mercury that comes into the environment.”
That, however, requires enforcement, formalization of Indigenous lands, and support for miners themselves, researchers say. Simply removing miners from these areas without addressing the factors driving the practice is likely to be ineffective in the long-term,according to UFPA’s Crespo-López. “We need to provide economic alternatives for people living in the Amazon,” she said. “There is huge potential for ecotourism or sustainable industry.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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