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When the train went off the tracks near where I grew up, I couldn’t stop thinking about a story my family used to tell.
Echo Valley Farm, where Anderson lives with his wife and six of their children, is in Pennsylvania, about 4 miles east of where the train did derail. Which means that it is also 4 miles east of where the chemical tanks on board started leaking, and 4 miles east of where clouds of smoke from the eventual controlled burn of those chemicals floated away. On the Anderson farm, that burn meant the air was tinged with an acrid smell for over a week.
“What can you be thankful for?” Anderson said on a recent phone call, of the derailment. “Well, I’m just glad it wasn’t seven minutes later.”
Here is the thing about living right next-door to a chemical spill: It really doesn’t matter how safe officials promise the spilled chemicals are. It doesn’t really matter if you understand intellectually that a controlled burn is the best way to deal with the disaster. When you are the one whose air smells different because of the train cars full of chemicals being incinerated, it feels awful and unnecessary and stupid to be anywhere near it.
That feeling is amplified for Anderson, 58, who works on his farm full time these days, but was previously employed for decades as an air traffic controller. “I have a lot of experience in transportation, safety, risk management, and weather, which are all relevant to the situation in East Palestine,” he told me. That experience did not make him feel good about the chemical spill, or the controlled burn that followed.
The night of the train derailment on Feb. 3, Anderson was woken up around 11 p.m. by a phone call from a friend who had spoken with first responders at the crash site. His friend told him that the first responders were immediately worried about what kinds of chemicals were onboard the train, and what the ultimate damage to themselves—and the town—might be. “He called me because we were downwind of the site, so he was concerned for us,” Anderson said.
Anderson shook himself awake and “started checking on things,” including whether there were odors in the air. A weather doppler app on his phone indicated that the wind was taking smoke away from his house—but if the smoke was heading away from him, that meant it was potentially headed toward the home of friends who lived nearby with two young children. Once he confirmed his own children’s safety, Anderson called these neighbors to make sure they knew about the crash so they could decide whether or not to leave.
The rest of the weekend was a blur that centered on that one question—whether or not to leave. The Andersons spent the days reading the news, checking social media, refreshing their weather and wind radar apps constantly, watching the skies, and comparing notes with neighbors. Residents within 2 miles of the derailment were getting alerts on their phones telling them to evacuate, but the Andersons and many others over the county line in Pennsylvania spent the weekend hearing no official word on the incident from their elected representatives. The most up-to-date information seemed to be coming from word of mouth.
That Monday, everything snowballed. It became public that the train had been carrying carcinogenic chemicals; polyvinyl chloride, among others. An official, urgent 1-mile evacuation had been put in order; the Ohio National Guard had been deployed; a reporter had been arrested at a press conference with the governor after apparently trying to answer questions from other reporters about evacuation for surrounding residents; and there were warnings that a chemical leaking from the train—vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen used to make PVC plastic—could be explosive.
Train derailments are not uncommon in the area surrounding East Palestine—there have been nine train derailments in East Palestine since 1946. But “not uncommon” doesn’t exactly mean standard, either—a mushroom cloud of dense, acrid smoke that radiates out across miles and miles of farmland would make anyone frantic. The smoke had made many people’s tongues feel charred, Anderson said, as if they had burned them on hot coffee a week ago and they still hadn’t healed.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced at a Feb. 6 press conference that there would be a controlled burn of the vinyl chloride later that day, citing the possibility that it might otherwise detonate and release gas uninhibitedly—potentially catapulting shrapnel within a 2-mile radius. About 20 minutes later, the press conference was interrupted by an announcement by East Palestine’s fire chief that power to the press conference site and surrounding areas would be cut within 15 minutes in preparation for the controlled release. Needless to say, the entire event did little to quell the confusion and fear many locals were feeling.
Anderson was personally skeptical of the plans for the controlled burn. He kept busy around Echo Valley Farm that morning, and he couldn’t help but notice that the wind conditions that day were less than ideal: It was frigid and blustery following a dramatic drop in temperature in the early hours of the morning. This indicated to Anderson that there could be a temperature inversion, in which “heavy air density and cloud coverage could prohibit smoke from the burn from traveling upward,” he said. The smoke might “only reach a certain height in the atmosphere before it would be forced to come back down, and spread across the ground,” he said.
Around 4:30 p.m., the controlled burn began. Social media feeds began to fill up with photos of black smoke and clouded trees. Anderson, a true aviation nerd, took the small drone he uses around the farm to scope out what was going on. “The black cloud was right on the very western edge of my property, moving east,” he said, of the view from the drone. “I looked at that live on my phone and I was stunned. Like, oh God … what have they done.”
I grew up not far from East Palestine, Ohio. I ran cross-country as a kid, and was often in the area for meets, or I’d drive through to visit my grandparents in Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
Lebanon, where my father grew up, is just a few miles from Three Mile Island—America’s very first partial nuclear meltdown. Something about the way Anderson talked about the East Palestine derailment reminded me of stories my grandfather has told me about that day in 1979 when a cooling malfunction at the nuclear plant caused a release of some radioactive gas. So I called him to talk about it.
On March 28, 1979, my grandparents were out riding their bikes. They heard the news only once they got home, and so they immediately had to wonder if they’d been exposed to radiation. They lived right on the border of the initial evacuation zone, so even though they didn’t have to leave, my grandparents decided to relocate to the church camp they ran, which was about 100 miles west. It was springtime, my grandfather recalled, and the local high schools were trying to decide whether or not they should hold their junior and senior proms.
“We clearly experienced a very scary feeling about not knowing whether we were exposed, whether we should go away … and gradually we started hearing reports from the electric company that there was no reason to be fearful,” he recalled. “And there was terrible confusion, because we wondered, did these people even know what they were talking about? This had only ever happened once before, in [the Soviet Union], and as we know now, there were eventually terrible results from that environment. We knew it some then, too,” he recalled.
My grandfather said that he and my grandmother relied heavily on information they received directly from fellow residents of their towns and the surrounding area in those early days following the partial meltdown, prioritizing that even above official statements. Just like Anderson and his family had.
“Atomic energy was a hot potato for the government. If done right, we were told, atomic energy could do wonderful things for us,” he said. “So you had the government coming in to calm us down, and there was that feeling of, ‘Can we trust them? And do they even know what they are talking about—are they just trying to cover up a terrible thing?’ ”
“The fear was very alive,” he said. “You’re talking about the potential for long-term sickness, sickness that doesn’t hit you until a later age, and you experience those kinds of questions while asking yourself whether you should stay in your home.”
That was the fear everyone in East Palestine was living with this past February: The fear of uncertainty, of not being sure what, exactly, was leaking into the water, or burning in the air. Fish were dying in streams; some residents started reporting nausea and headaches. While residents were still trying to get direct answers on whether they should head out, the media and a political circus of sorts were coming in. Right-wing politicians, inflaming fears about an American Chernobyl, began making publicity stops in the region. Democratic politicians hit back by blaming the former Trump administration for having reduced rail safety regulations (though it doesn’t seem like these regulations would have made a difference in this specific case). Soon, there were competing narratives about neglect—who or what, exactly, was at fault for the potential catastrophe unfolding in this rural community.
All of this happened before there was enough clarity to offer a concrete, established narrative. And that is why the real story here isn’t one about media neglect—although many Ohioans feel plenty acquainted with that—but of distrust. So many people affected by this accident feel distrust toward the agencies in charge of dealing with the situation, toward the transportation companies responsible, and toward the national reporters who only seem to come around for close national elections and disasters, that it quickly felt almost impossible to communicate accurately.
The Environmental Protection Agency and top Ohio officials say that tests of the air and drinking water have not shown any contamination linked to the train derailment, despite some Ohio officials telling residents as recently as Feb. 14 not to drink the water (they noted the air was safe). The EPA has since begun removing contaminated waste from the area, setting off a national kerfuffle about where to transport the soil, if soil has to be removed from the actual derailment site itself. The United States Senate is also conducting an official investigation and hearing into the derailment and its greater underlying causes, but that timeline is surely not immediate.
The problem is that the official reports didn’t do much to reassure residents—who were, and remain, extremely worried about both short-term and long-term health effects. That was also the case after Three Mile Island. Eventually, “everything turned out fine” for residents, my grandfather said, but the threat of long-term sickness remained a quiet, constant companion in the back of their minds for years before they were sure of that. The road from Three Mile Island to my grandparents’ home in Lebanon is still checkered with dead trees that stand along the bend of the Susquehanna River. Cleanup for the meltdown eventually cost a total of $987 million.
I asked my grandfather how he imagined the residents of East Palestine must be feeling. He paused before saying that the feeling of being unable to make an informed decision, the threat of a potential disaster combined with overwhelming confusion, is paralyzing.
“The fear these people are feeling is real, in terms of not only that it’s happening, but that there might be some lasting damage or harm,” he said. “That’s a tough thing to live with—am I going to get sick later on? Am I going to get cancer? Is my kid going to get cancer?”
The trains were back to running within 24 hours of the crash, going along the north track because cars from the train that derailed were still sitting on the south track awaiting contamination testing. For residents who were used to barely noticing their passage, all of a sudden their presence became almost an obsession—a representation of a newfound, looming threat, and a constant reminder that their town was little more than a thoroughfare, even when it felt like it was in crisis.
So far, six class-action lawsuits have been filed representing residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area. Within a few days of the crash, Erin Brockovich was in town—by Friday afternoon, she’d been accused by Ohio State Police of no less than potentially igniting an act of domestic terrorism. On Feb. 28, Ohio Sens. J.D. Vance and Sherrod Brown sent a letter to the EPA demanding that the CDC begin health screenings.
Last week, the EPA ordered the train company that was deemed responsible for the derailment, Norfolk Southern, to—in addition to footing the bill for the overall cleanup—start testing for dioxin in the area. Dioxin is a highly carcinogenic and persistent chemical compound that is produced by burning vinyl chloride gas. Ted Schettler, science director at the environmental nonprofit Science and Environmental Health Network, told STAT news: “We know when polyvinyl chloride burns it creates dioxins. I’m certain from the view of that black smoke plume that it was a witch’s brew of chemicals on fire, and I’m quite certain dioxins would be among them.” It was the same moment that froze Anderson in place on Echo Valley Farm that day.
Anderson’s experience with the train derailment reminded me so much of my grandfather’s experience after Three Mile Island. Each of them felt that it was only logical to distrust the information they were receiving; both shared a deep-seated belief that when pressed, officials would put profits over people. I don’t know if these fears are tendencies specific to people who live in this part of the country—I just suspect that it is the case because I’m from there. And while everything worked out basically fine for my grandfather, I think it’s still a bit too soon to tell for Anderson and his family. When we last spoke, he was still circling around the question of whether they should try to relocate their farm. But how does one even do that? He’s not yet sure what they’ll do—right now, he’s focusing on getting the CDC and the EPA to come do more testing.
For most of my youth, a youth I have replayed this month as I think about all of these places I know that have been at the center of this story, my favorite Ohio landmark was the “Hell Is Real” sign. Every Ohioan worth their cents knows this sign—it even got a nice write-up by Reuters in 2007. (It was mentioned in relation to another fixture of that roadway, the Touchdown Jesus, though Touchdown Jesus was eventually struck by lightning, and is no longer with us.) The “Hell Is Real” sign is on private property but is publicly admired, and seems meant to provoke fear or godliness among interstate travelers. It has become a physical manifestation of an inside joke about being an Ohioan—the Ohio vs. the World mentality that predates Ohio’s much-memed reputation for being the no man’s land at the center of it all. Florida has “Florida Man”; Ohio has a gigantic road sign warning that a burning inferno awaits us all.
When I first started following this story, the best stuff was coming from TikTok. One of the viral videos that broke the news of the crash on Feb. 4 displayed a screenshot from a news report showing a state highway “Welcome to Ohio” sign standing in front of the raging inferno that was the derailed train. It felt like an appropriate meme to take the crown from “Hell Is Real.” Welcome to Ohio, look at this world on fire. It was just over that border from Dave Anderson’s Pennsylvania farm, after all.
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Women picketing outside Alaimo Dress Mfg, 1940. (photo: Kheel Center/Flickr)
March 8 marks International Women’s Day around the world, seeking to end gender discrimination, violence and abuse. We start the show by looking at the day’s roots in socialism, and what it means for the movement for reproductive justice in the United States. Our guest is Nancy Krieger, renowned professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and director of the Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender, and Health. She’s also co-founder and chair of the Spirit of 1848 Caucus in the American Public Health Association, which links social justice and public health. International Women’s Day has always been a struggle for “the conditions in which people can thrive,” says Krieger.
But we begin here in the United States, which ended the constitutional right to abortion last year. We begin with Nancy Krieger, renowned professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University School of Public Health, director of the Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender, and Health. She’s also co-founder and chair of the Spirit of 1848 Caucus in the American Public Health Association, which links social justice and public health. She gives the introduction each year to the school’s International Women’s Day event by laying out its radical history.
So, Professor Krieger, welcome to Democracy Now! And teach. Tell us about this day’s roots in socialism, and more.
NANCY KRIEGER: Thank you very much for having me. And it’s wonderful to be with you.
And, yes, International Women’s Day has a very long progressive history that’s often not well known. And we have been celebrating it now for over 11 years at the School of Public Health with the Women, Gender, and Health concentration to bring that history back to life so that people can make the connections.
So, the very first International — National Women’s Day that took place, actually, in 1909 in the U.S., it was on the last Sunday in February, and it was organized by American socialists tied to the labor organizing that was going on at that time and also the push for women’s suffrage. One year later, Clara Zetkin made a proposal for an International Women’s Day at the second-ever International Conference of Socialist Women, which was held in Copenhagen. And they made good on that promise in 1911, when there was the first European International Women’s Day that was held in Vienna. It was organized by socialist and communist women at the time. And it was held, importantly, on March 18th. This was to be in commemoration of the 40th anniversary then of the Paris Commune, which had started on March 18th in 1871, a radical experiment, among others, in democracy, and it was violently suppressed May 28th. And so they were remembering it 40 years later, just as we in 2023 would remember an event in 1983, which is obviously back to the Reagan presidency in the United States, among other things, not that far ago. And then, what happened is, that same year it was observed in other countries, including Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. And by 1917, March 8th became the official day for International Women’s Day.
And that date, March 8th, corresponded to February 22nd, which in the Gregorian calendar was equal to March 8th, which was the date of a huge demonstration in Russia against the tsar, led by women. It was about food and wages and rights. And that was a key demonstration that led to the overthrow of the Russian tsar. And also, the provisional government that came into power right thereafter immediately, among other things, enacted suffrage for women, which was actually three years before the United States. So, that’s when International Women’s Day really began to take off, and it became established as a holiday in what was then the Soviet Union in 1922.
And it was key hearing earlier in your broadcast about demonstrations in Spain. In 1936, there was an enormous International Women’s Day demonstration led by La Pasionaria, who was fighting for protecting the Spanish Republic against the fascist government at that time.
So, basically, until — from 1945, after the war, to '66, International Women's Day was pretty much observed only in communist countries and became, in effect, a kind of Mother’s Day. It sort of lost the radical edge that it had at the beginning. But it was rediscovered in 1967 by a group of women in Chicago in the Chicago Circle, which was a women’s liberation consciousness group. And they began to call for reviving the history of International Women’s Day. And it was eventually picked up in 1975 by the U.N. and became an internationally recognized day. So, here we are in 2011, it was the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, still a lot of the agenda unmet from what was demanded a hundred years prior. And now here we are today in 2023. It’s effectively its 112th anniversary.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Thank you so much, Professor Krieger, for that history. And even as many are not aware of its socialist origins, as you’ve pointed out, could you talk about how it’s been linked to other causes for social justice, not just here in the U.S. but also across the world, including, of course, as we were mentioning earlier, reproductive justice and rights?
NANCY KRIEGER: So, International Women’s Day has its roots in saying that women and their families, however they are defined, however the women are defined, should have the ability to thrive, to engage productively in the world, to live joyful lives. And that means having children or not, as makes sense, and having the opportunities for those children to thrive. So it’s always been tied to demands around reproductive justice, as you’ve just mentioned, around labor rights, and about good jobs and about access to education and about safe and sustainable communities and more. So, it’s inseparable from all the other demands.
And that’s what was always the original spirit, when you think about who was stepping out, asking and demanding for political enfranchisement, to be able to have their lives and their views represented in government and pass laws and legislation and policies that protect people’s right to thrive, and is crucially important, right now very much so through the framework of reproductive justice, which was first articulated before U.N. conferences back 20-odd years ago, particularly by Black feminist organizations and leaders in this country. It was linking, again, not just simply reproductive choice but reproductive justice, to be able to have the conditions in which people can thrive, and that means for the children that they have, and it also means if they choose not to have children.
So these are very connected struggles, and it can’t be unlinked from other struggles for health justice, whether about environmental, climate justice, you name it. They come together. They’re embodied by people, and they’re embodied very much through what we see in the maternal and reproductive health data that you see, that are wildly different across different social groups, racialized groups, economic groups, in the U.S. and throughout the world, between and within countries.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Krieger, could you talk about what’s happened, in particular, as we mark this day in 2023, what the impact of the pandemic has been on exacerbating inequities with respect to women, not just in terms of health but also in the workplace, as a result of what happened during the pandemic?
NANCY KRIEGER: Certainly. The COVID pandemic effectively ripped the Band-Aid off, as it were, to reveal wide inequities that were already known by those paying attention to them and, above all, those living and experiencing them. And these inequities were violently shown during the first, particularly, year of the pandemic, before there was access to any vaccine and while there was new work going quickly underway to try to figure out how to reduce mortality amongst those who were affected.
And so, what happened was that the first peoples that were worst — most likely to die — particularly I can speak to the U.S. data — were people that were both the frontline workers, people that were deemed, quote-unquote, “essential,” that had to show up at work but were ultimately treated as expendable, predominantly low-income workers of color, and, of those, many in caring occupations, which are disproportionately by people who are considered to be women. And so you saw much higher mortality there, plus also high mortality amongst people that were in congregate homes, elderly homes, nursing homes, which were understaffed, with workers who were overworked, again predominantly low-income of color and again predominantly women in those occupations, and then they and people in those nursing homes at high rates.
So you saw big inequities in the COVID mortality. And really, back then, it was through excess deaths, understanding them, because there wasn’t good COVID testing for everyone. And that’s still true now. Not all COVID deaths are actually accurately recorded. And there are differentials by racialized group and economic group in getting good data to understand the impact of the inequities in who was lost. And then, obviously, it’s not just about the loss of the individuals who died; it’s all the people and their families and networks, to understand — you have to understand the ripple effects that this has put through, understand the impacts, what it means on the kids who have been orphaned, what it means when there are no caregivers for elderly if their children have died. So, the toll continues.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Krieger, you’re a renowned professor of social epidemiology. I think the world came to understand how to pronounce the word “epidemiologist” over these last three years. And so, if you can talk about reproductive healthcare? Now, we just had in our headlines today five women suing Texas after they were denied abortions, even as their pregnancy posed serious risks to their health and were not viable, one woman describing how no Texas OB-GYN would perform an abortion, which meant she went into sepsis, which meant she may not be able to have another child, when that’s all she wanted. We’re going to also talk about the ban on abortion in El Salvador. If you can talk about reproductive rights, the attack on it, and why this year you’re celebrating a birthing center in Roxbury?
NANCY KRIEGER: Sure. So, reproductive justice encompasses reproductive rights and goes beyond that, but reproductive rights are very essential. And that means the capacity to access the appropriate medical care for what one’s reproductive needs are. Those can be needs that involve in vitro fertilization. They can be needs that involve not having children and getting access to appropriate contraception. They can be needs that involve actually terminating a pregnancy, including abortion. These are all actual normal healthcare procedures. They’re necessary for people’s health, period. And that affects the health of everyone who’s around people, because people can be very worried about loved ones when they can’t get the healthcare that they absolutely need.
So, these fights are there, and they’re tied fundamentally to issues around the fights around gender ideology. Gender ideology has been castigated by people that are conservative, right-wing, often from a religious fundamentalist standpoint, that somehow decree that there’s no such thing as gender, there’s only sex. And then, at the same time, they want to have people having babies, but they don’t want them to have abortions, but they actually are also not tied to understanding that reproductive autonomy actually is a crucial part of whether one has children or not.
So, these are the attacks that are underway. It’s a global phenomenon. It’s playing out particularly in the U.S. in legislatures, particularly those that have seen a predominance of conservative politicians voted in. And that’s also partly courtesy of all kinds of gerrymandering that’s been going on. So it can’t be seen as an expression of the, quote-unquote, “people’s will,” because actually popular public opinion really supports, in many states, all the states, rights for reproductive choice, rights for reproductive justice. And that’s also shown in terms of the recent attempts to — of legislatures to rule out and have popular referenda, say, “No, actually, we should be still protecting reproductive rights.”
AMY GOODMAN: Well, as we —
NANCY KRIEGER: So, what we do at our school — just to say quickly — is we’ve had this International Women’s Day celebration. And this year what we wanted to do was have the featured speaker, Nashira Baril, who’s been key to organizing what’s going to be opening as Boston’s first neighborhood birthing center, geared to women who have traditionally been excluded and marginalized by healthcare systems. It’s going to open in Nubian Square in Roxbury. And we wanted to have something where it both represents the struggle, the radical history of reproductive justice and fighting for it, but also because it’s about joy, and it’s about bringing people into the world, bringing new little ones into the world, in a context that’s caring, welcoming and inclusive, and that that’s part of the reproductive justice fight, too.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Professor Krieger, I know every International Women’s Day, wherever you are, you sing “Bread and Roses.” And as we wrap up this segment, we’re about to play that for our music break. Can you talk about its radical roots? What is “Bread and Roses”?
NANCY KRIEGER: Yeah, so, we close our ceremony that we have every year here with that song, because it comes, actually, from very close to Harvard. It was in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It was the big strike that was held by immigrant groups, with over 28 different languages being spoken. The International Workers of the World were involved, the Wobblies. The Songbook was there. It gave rise to the song “Bread and Roses,” which is about what the women were in fact fighting for. And that song itself comes from, actually, a letter that was written to Mother Jones, who was a legendary organizer, before she died, which was saying, about fighting for bread and roses, it’s both. And then, the person who was writing, a radical reporter at the time, covering the Lawrence march, said that “Beware the movement that generates its own songs,” because songs do carry the spirit of the people, and that’s what “Bread and Roses” was about. And that’s why we try to teach it to people every year.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us. And, of course, as Emma Goldman says it, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Nancy Krieger, renowned professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University’s School of Public Health, director of the Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender, and Health.
Next, “Bread and Roses.”
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Bread and Roses,” performed by the Twin Cities Labor Chorus.
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Police and protesters on 23 September 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky. (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
US attorney general says investigation shows police engaged in racist and unlawful conduct including use of excessive force
Garland said Louisville police had shown a pattern of using excessive force, especially against Black residents.
The investigation found “unlawful racial disparities” in Louisville law enforcement.
Garland said the city and its police force had agreed to work with the federal government “to address the problems that we have identified”.
Taylor, 26 and an emergency medical technician studying to become a nurse, was roused from sleep by police who came through the door of her apartment using a battering ram in March 2020.
Thinking it was a home invasion, Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a gun once. Police opened fire, killing Taylor.
The no-knock warrant had been approved as part of a narcotics investigation. No drugs were found at the home.
Taylor became a prominent figure whose death was protested as part of the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrations in 2020 and beyond over police brutality and systemic racism.
A grand jury declined to charge officers over the killing. Civil rights charges were brought against four officers. The city agreed to pay $2m to settle suits brought by Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker.
More details soon…
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In this Jan. 6, 2021 file photo, insurrections loyal to President Donald Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
“This would be like hitting the delete-key on all of DOJ's work on these investigations,” a source tells Rolling Stone
Since last summer, the former president has been telling some of those close to him that the pardons would be for higher-level people and could come early in his time in office, effectively wiping away a multi-year effort to hold powerful people and their cohorts legally accountable for their actions during and after Trump’s first term.
“This would be like hitting the delete-key on all of [the] DOJ’s work on these investigations — and be an opening shot in his next war on the ‘Deep State,’” says one of the sources, adding it would be part of Trump “cleaning house” at the start of his second term.
“The idea was that he can just pardon everybody [if] he’s president again … That he can do it ‘fast’ and early on in his [new] term,” the source continues. “He was not talking about the [Jan. 6 rioters and] prisoners, it was about people working on post-election activities and on the documents. All the different ‘witch hunts.’”
The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to relay private conversations. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
The Justice Department is conducting two main probes into Trump and his allies. The first is into the twice-impeached former president’s activities surrounding the 2020 election, in which he stoked doubts and spread lies about the results and fueled a “stop the steal” movement that culminated in the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. That inquiry also likely extends to Trump’s efforts to overturn the race in court, probing whether his legal team broke the law in their efforts to get courts to reverse the decision, or whether Trump himself broke the law while pressuring election officials to tip the contest in his favor.
The second probe involves sensitive documents found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound in Florida, as the feds look at whether Trump and others engaged in criminal activity by taking certain materials out of the federal chain of custody and into his private residence. In the latter investigation, Trump’s critics have accused him of engaging in obstruction by attempting to thwart the federal inquiry.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend, Trump told a Newsmax correspondent that he will not leave the 2024 presidential race if he gets criminally charged, claiming an indictment would “enhance” his poll numbers among GOP voters. (To be fair, he might have a point.)
The proposal for early-term pardons for high-level officials adds a new layer to Trump’s broadcasted plans to shield his team from legal accountability. At a Jan. 2022 rally, he teased potential pardons for Jan. 6 rioters. “If I run, and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly,” Trump said then in a speech outside Houston. (Trump recently contributed audio for a group of incarcerated Jan. 6 prisoners for a recording called “Justice for All.”)
Not everyone in the Trump orbit is impressed with his idea for issuing rapid pardons should he return to the Oval Office. Nor are many of the senior veterans of his administration, including those who helped defend him and his White House against the feds.
Under the Constitution, “it’s undeniable that, if elected yet again (heaven forbid), [Trump] can issue all these possible pardons related to the efforts to cling to power and even the Mar-a-Lago classified documents. That would, of course, be a travesty,” Ty Cobb, a former top Trump White House lawyer during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, says in an interview. “And it underscores yet again my firm anxiety about our current democracy … because the man is a complete narcissist and inherently evil.”
Others are skeptical Trump would stick his neck out for his allies. “Trump could have done all of this before he left office originally, but was too concerned about the second impeachment and his own reelection campaign when he knew he was leaving office, so he left advisers, lawyers, and Jan. 6 defendants on the field,” says one person close to Trump. “Why trust he’s going to do something now when, if it’s politically expedient for him, he didn’t before? He demands loyalty, but doesn’t provide it reciprocally to his own team.”
The question of pardons is not limited to Trump’s cronies and supporters: During his presidency, he repeatedly mused about pardoning himself — and alleging he had the authority to do so.
Brian Kalt, a Michigan State University law school professor who has written extensively on presidential pardons, says it’s unclear whether Trump would be allowed to pardon himself. “The bottom line is that nobody knows for sure, and anyone who says he definitely can or definitely cannot is lying,” Kalt tells Rolling Stone. “When people ask me if the president can pardon himself, my answer is: ‘He can try.’ “
Among other arguments, Kalt says that the U.S. legal system has a general principle of forbidding people from being the judge in their own case, and while a pardon isn’t the same thing as judging a case, he thinks the norm would hold. But he noted a court could find the opposite, as the Constitution grants the president the right to issue pardons, and it does not contain a carve-out forbidding a president from pardoning him or herself.
Trump is no stranger to politically connected pardons. With months left before leaving office, the former president dished out clemency to a host of allies. That included one for Paul Manafort, chairman of his 2016 campaign, who was serving a 47-month sentence for eight felony convictions. He also gave a full pardon to Roger Stone, who’d tried to thwart the federal investigation into ties between Trump and Russia and was convicted of eight felonies. And then there’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who’d been charged with defrauding donors out of more than $1 million in a phony scheme to build Trump’s border wall. Hours before leaving office, in one of his final acts as president, Trump granted him a full pardon.
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Image shows a face being detected outside a subway. (photo: ACLU)
Newly unearthed papers show federal agencies testing facial recognition tools in subway cameras, street corners, and other public spaces.
The goal of the project, code-named “Janus” after the Roman god with two opposing faces, was to develop highly advanced facial scanning tech capable of scanning people’s faces across a vast swath of public places, from subway cars and street corners to hospitals and schools. In some cases, researchers believed the advanced tech could detect targets from up to 1,000 meters away.
Experts speaking with Gizmodo said the advanced surveillance capabilities outlined in the documents potentially pose “truly unprecedented threats” to personal privacy and civil liberties, especially given the U.S.’s lack of any meaningful federal privacy protections. If implemented as documented, the Janus program’s blanket of cameras would resemble surveillance systems already in place in China, which the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies have publicly denounced.
“The government is opening Pandora’s box on a terrifying technical capability, which can enable pervasive tracking of anyone or everyone in a way never before possible in a free society,” ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project Deputy Director Nathan Freed Wessler told Gizmodo. “Lawmakers need to close the door on government abuse of this technology now, before it is too late.”
What is the Janus Program?
The documents, first reported on by The Washington Post, provide new insights into the nearly decade-old surveillance research program funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, (IARPA), a U.S intelligence group modeled after DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and development unit. The Janus program dates back to 2014, when it was launched with the stated goal of “radically expanding the scenarios in which automated face recognition can establish identity.”
IARPA researchers cited in the documents said they were interested in dramatically improving the quality of facial recognition systems and allowing, “scaling to support millions of subjects.” The documents reveal the researchers were interested in creating scanning tech capable of quickly detecting faces from partially obstructed angles from a distance of more than half a mile away. One of the documents says image data was collected from a camera on a “small fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle” flown over a marketplace. The researchers’ vision of the technology as deceived in the documents paints a picture eerily similar to the type of always-on, high-powered, public surveillance system currently in use in China and Russia.
FBI agents and academics working on the project appeared acutely aware of the power and surveillance potential of modern devices increasingly entrenching themselves deeper in people’s lives. One FBI scientist, according to the Post report, referred to cell phones and social media as some of the “biggest enablers of better face recognition.”
Speaking with Gizmodo, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn said all forms of facial recognition pose privacy issues but said the scope of government surveillance capabilities explored by the Janus program raises “profound concerns.”
“This system would pose truly unprecedented threats,” Fox Cahn said. “With wide-area facial recognition systems, intelligence agencies could track our movements across entire cities with a small number of cameras.”
Federal agents, according to one of the academic researchers working on the project speaking with the Post, tried to draw distinctions between surveillance capabilities they intended to use domestically and those they wanted to deploy in other parts of the world. However, as debates over NSA surveillance tools unearthed by whistleblower Edward Snowden show, those once-clear lines become incredibly opaque once a powerful technology is deployed.
“The question always in the back of my mind was: What does the intelligence community really want to do with this stuff?” Erik Learned-Mille, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst involved with the research said in an interview with the Post.
The DoD and FBI did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Janus officially ended in 2020, however, as the Post notes, its work was included in a web-based face search tool called Horus provided to the DoD’s Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office. Meg Foster, a Justice Fellow at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology told Gizmodo the fact the program has ended provides little comfort.
“While Janus may have ended, these documents demonstrate that the prevailing approach to surveillance technology is to put the cart before the horse, and given the growing number of wrongful arrests stemming from face recognition, we know that the most vulnerable among us will experience the consequences first and hardest,” Foster said
The documents were unearthed come in response to a Freedom of Informaiton Act lawsuit the ACLU filed against the FBI. The most recent documents reportedly date back to 2019 when the ACLU sued the government for their release
Facial recognition tech ‘ripe for abuse’
U.S. Facial recognition has absolutely exploded in recent years, with the tech being used to scan faces at sports stadiums and concert venus to airport terminals and iPhone lock screens. As of 2021, according to a Government Accountability Office audit, at least 20 federal agencies use facial recognition, though it’s unclear if those uses have any connection to the more powerful tools described in the ACLU documents.
Still, prolific as the tech may be, the vision outlined in the IARPA docs appears to describe something very different: a powerful, pervasive, and public surveillance apparatus with a wide net potentially capable of implicating everyday people simply trying to catch a subway to work or walk home. Foster warned a system with those capabilities deployed in U.S. cities risks creating a “perpetual lineup in which we are all suspects.”
“The Janus program is a deeply alarming confirmation of what privacy and civil rights advocates have long warned—that facial recognition technology is absolutely ripe for abuse,” Foster added.
States and cities show growing divide over facial recognition
The FBI and DoD’s attempts to move the goalpost on American surveillance systems counterintuitively come during a time of heightened scrutiny on the technology, particularly amongst local governors. To date, at least 16 municipalities, including San Francisco Boston, and Oakland already passed laws and ordinances on facial recognition use by law enforcement or in the public. Private tech giants Like Amazon and Microsoft have banned police use of facial their facial recognition tech, though loopholes may exist for some federal agencies.
States and cities may continue to move the needle on biometric privacy protections, but the same can’t be said for the federal government which still lacks any meaningful privacy protections. Fox Cahn, of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said the Janus revelation provides even more urgent incentives to pass some sort of federal forms.
“This sort of surveillance is not only creepy but unconstitutional, amounting to the type of persistent location tracking the Supreme Court has struck down with other technologies,” he said. “But we shouldn’t wait years for this type of tracking to be struck down as well. We need to enact comprehensive facial recognition bans today.”
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Alexei Moskalev, 53, and his 12-year-old daughter, Masha, caught the attention of local law enforcement last April when Masha drew an anti-war picture in her sixth grade photography class in the town of Yefremov, south of Moscow. (photo: OVD-Info)
In Russia, Children Opposing the Ukraine War Are Being Targeted
Niko Vorobyov, Al Jazeera
Vorobyov writes: "Last April, 12-year-old Masha Moskalyova was asked to draw a picture for art class showing support for Russia's 'special operation' in Ukraine."
A 12-year-old was punished over her anti-war artwork, the latest sign of a growing crackdown against young people.
Instead, she drew a mother and a child standing in the path of missiles with the captions “no to war” and “glory to Ukraine”.
The following day, her father Alexey Moskalyev, who was raising her alone in the town of Yefremov, in the Tula region, about 200km (125 miles) south of Moscow, was called to her school.
Both father and daughter were taken away in police cars.
Alexey was interrogated by local officers, who found disparaging comments he had made online about the Russian military, comparing them with rapists.
In court, Alexey was fined 32,000 rubles ($420) for discrediting the armed forces.
The next day, Federal Security Service (FSB) agents paid a visit to Masha’s school, accused her father of poor parenting and said Masha should be taken away. After that, Masha was too scared to attend class.
Alexey was ultimately arrested and Masha was taken into care – a sign of how far the Russian authorities are going to suppress criticism of the war in Ukraine.
On December 30, 2022, five police cars and a fire truck had parked outside their home.
Alexey told Russian human rights group OVD-Info he did not want to let them in without a warrant, but he opened the door when they began barging it down.
The police and FSB ransacked the apartment, allegedly taking the family’s life savings, mobile phones, laptops and Masha’s anti-war drawing.
At the time of writing, Russian authorities – including the Investigative Committee for the Tula Region – had not responded to a request for comment.
Alexey claimed that his head was slammed against a wall and that he was locked in a room with the national anthem on full blast. He was then charged again for discrediting the army; he now faces up to three years in jail.
Last week, Alexey was held for two days in a pre-trial detention centre while Masha, now 13, has been taken to a children’s shelter.
According to his lawyer Vladimir Biliyenko, Alexey has since been released and is under house arrest.
“Alexey is under house arrest, he is only allowed contact with me and the investigators,” Biliyenko told Al Jazeera by phone.
“Masha is in a shelter. We’re working to have her returned and the house arrest lifted. We’ve filed a complaint to the prosecutor general and the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation. If the father receives a prison sentence, the daughter will be sent to a children’s home.
“The charge carries a maximum of three years so it’s not that severe, and an actual term of imprisonment is relatively rare. But this is a political case, so it could go either way.”
Biliyenko did not comment on Alexey’s alleged mistreatment while in custody.
Svetlana Davydova, head of Yefremov’s commission for juvenile affairs, told Russian state media outlet RBC, that the Moskalyevs had been put on a list of “families in socially dangerous situations”, and that she had filed a lawsuit to deprive Alexey and Masha’s mother, who lives in a different city, of their rights as parents.
Masha is currently stuck at the children’s centre, which has told local media she would not be released.
“It’s common for the entire family to be dragged into persecution, even if only one member is ‘guilty’ in the regime’s eyes – especially if that someone’s a minor,” Dan Storyev, managing editor of OVD-Info English, told Al Jazeera.
In October last year, a 10-year-old Moscow schoolgirl was detained when her classmates’ parents complained that her profile picture in a class group chat was “Saint Javelin”, a meme which has become a wartime symbol of Ukrainian resistance – the Virgin Mary cloaked in yellow and blue, holding a big gun.
Later, the girl and her mother were questioned and their home was searched, but in the end, no charges were made.
In another case in eastern Siberia, the 16-year-old son of anti-war protester Natalia Filonova was sent to a remote orphanage 300km (186 miles) from home, while she was detained for participating in a rally and allegedly assaulting two police officers with a ballpoint pen.
“We’re currently seeing a worrisome trend of minors being persecuted by the regime, along with their families,” Storyev continued. “The regime’s goal is to inspire fear, so they threaten families with separation, claiming that parents aren’t raising the kids right – as was the case with Alexey [Moskalyev].”
Storyev listed other instances where under-18s have fallen afoul of the authorities after expressing anti-war positions.
He said that in Moscow, police stopped at a boy’s home and turned off the electricity after he expressed his position on Ukraine. Two high schoolers were harassed by the public for refusing to stand during the Russian national anthem and playing the Ukrainian anthem instead. In Yekaterinburg, another child was publicly scolded for writing a letter to a soldier, urging him not to kill and to come home. And a 16-year-old was fined for saying if he was conscripted, he would fight for Ukraine, Storyev said.
“According to our data, at least 544 minors were detained in anti-war protests in the past year, and seven minors are currently criminally prosecuted for their anti-war positions,” he said. “In particular, minors are targeted for sharing posts or comments about anti-war rallies, spreading leaflets against mobilisation and war, holding solo demonstrations, expressing anti-war views during school events, demonstrating [an] anti-war piece of clothing, and making anti-war inscriptions.”
Storyev also mentioned there have been instances where young teenagers were arrested for more direct action, such as sabotaging railways and burning down military conscription offices.
Meanwhile, authorities try to win the younger generation over to their way of thinking, with classes to instil patriotism and an extracurricular “important conversations” programme, examining recent events from the perspective of the Kremlin.
“The regime is trying to squeeze children into a heavily militarised culture,” said Storyev. “The attempts to do so have been going on long before the war — the state sponsors cadet schools and cadet classes within regular schools. [Masha] went to such a school with cadet classes,” he said.
“Through the attacks on schools, children and parents, the Kremlin aims to obliterate and terrify Russian civil society, but despite everything, Russian activists — among them children and parents — continue to stand up against the war, even at a horrible cost.”
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A whale swims in the Gulf of Mexico near oil drilling platforms. (photo: Nicolette Nye/Bureau of Ocean Energy Management)
The lawsuit, filed in Washington, DC federal court, seeks to prevent the auction of approximately 13,600 blocks on 73.3 million acres by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), a press release from BOEM said. The lease sale, mandated by last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), is scheduled for March 29, 2023.
“Our climate can’t afford more oil and gas leasing,” Oceans Program Litigation Director and senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity Kristen Monsell told Sierra Magazine, the magazine of the Sierra Club. “We need to be rapidly transitioning toward renewable, sustainable energy, not opening up more of our ocean waters to oil and gas drilling.”
The sale would be the first in the Gulf of Mexico since 2021, Reuters reported. The IRA included auctions for drilling rights on federal lands despite President Joe Biden’s pledge to end them.
The environmental groups suing the administration argued that just because the IRA has a provision that Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Lease Sale 259 must be conducted by March 31, 2023, doesn’t mean the government can skirt additional legal mandates that call for an analysis of the sale’s potential impacts.
The groups said the sale doesn’t sufficiently consider the ways in which the oil and gas drilling could affect the stability of the climate and the critically endangered unique Gulf species Rice’s whale, whose population consists of only 51 individuals, Sierra Magazine said.
The environmental groups also said BOEM had “arbitrarily dismissed” the harm to vulnerable communities that would result from the processing of fossil fuels by petrochemical plants and onshore refineries in the area, reported Reuters.
According to the BOEM press release, BOEM published a final supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the sale in January, and there are stipulations in the sale terms of the lease for mitigating potential harm to protected species.
“The EIS said, essentially, ‘Oh, there’s already a lot of oil infrastructure there. So this additional lease is not going to cause any additional harm,’” said Monsell, as Sierra Magazine reported. “It’s a slap in the face to those communities who are getting sick and dying because of toxic pollution from the fossil fuel industry. It’s also unlawful.”
As many as a billion barrels of oil are expected to be produced as a result of the lease sale, as well as 4.4 trillion cubic feet of fossil gas.
Monsell said the oil and gas sale was consented to in order to get West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s vote for the IRA.
“It’s infuriating to see Democrats playing politics with our climate and our ocean environment,” Monsell said, as reported by Sierra Magazine.
The Gulf lease sale has delayed the first wind energy auction in the Gulf by six months, frustrating advocates of renewable energy. Almost 700,000 acres were scheduled to be auctioned in December of last year in order to build wind turbines to produce electricity for three million homes.
“There will be oil and gas production from existing leases for the next few decades, even if we had stopped leasing today,” George Torgun, a senior attorney with the Oceans Program at Earthjustice, told Sierra Magazine. “And yet we’re continuing to pull these lease sales even in the face of our climate crisis.”
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