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The FBI Used an Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes
“She dressed in a way that was sort of noticeable,” said Samantha Christiansen, a co-founder of the Chinook Center. But no one among the activists found that unusual or alarming; everyone has their own style. They accepted her into the community.
The pink-haired woman said her name was Chelsie. She also dropped regular hints about her chosen profession.
“She implied over the course of getting to know her that she was a sex worker,” said Jon Christiansen, Samantha’s husband and another co-founder of the Chinook Center.
“I think somebody else had told me that, and I just was like, ‘Oh, OK. That makes sense,’” said Autum Carter-Wallace, an activist in Colorado Springs. “I never questioned it.”
But Chelsie’s identity was as fake as her long pink hair. The young woman, whose real name is April Rogers, is a detective at the Colorado Springs Police Department. The FBI enlisted her to infiltrate and spy on racial justice groups during the summer of 2020.
The work of Rogers, or “Chelsie,” is a direct offshoot of the FBI’s summer of 2020 investigation in Denver, where Mickey Windecker, a paid FBI informant, drove a silver hearse, rose to a leadership role in the racial justice movement, and encouraged activists to become violent. Windecker provided information to the FBI about an activist who attended demonstrations in both Denver and Colorado Springs, prompting federal agents to launch a new investigation in the smaller Colorado city. I tell the story of Windecker and his FBI work, as well as the investigation in Colorado Springs, in “Alphabet Boys,” a 10-episode documentary podcast from Western Sound and iHeartPodcasts.
As the FBI’s Colorado Springs investigation reveals, Denver wasn’t the only city where federal agents infiltrated racial justice groups that summer. Working through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership with local police, the FBI assembled files on local activists using information secretly gathered by Rogers.
Once Rogers gained trust among the activists, she tried to set up at least two young men in gun-running conspiracies. Her tactics mirrored those of Windecker, who tried to entrap two Denver racial justice activists in crimes, including an FBI-engineered plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser that went nowhere.
To reveal what happened in Colorado Springs, I obtained search warrant applications, body-camera video from local police assisting the FBI investigation, and recordings of conversations involving federal agents; reviewed hundreds of pages of internal FBI records about Social Media Exploitation, a program federal agents used to monitor racial justice activists nationwide; and interviewed about a dozen activists who were targeted in the federal probe.
The FBI declined to be interviewed about the Colorado Springs investigation and refused to respond in writing to a list of questions. The Colorado Springs Police Department also declined to comment, referring all questions to the FBI.
For her part, April Rogers won’t say anything. When called as a witness in a state court hearing, she testified that the Justice Department instructed her not to answer questions about the FBI investigation. “I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers said under oath. The Colorado Springs Police Department declined to make her available for an interview.
This FBI investigation in Colorado Springs, 70 miles south of Denver, shows that federal law enforcement had embarked on a broad, and until now, secret strategy to spy on racial justice groups and try to entrap activists in crimes. “It’s disturbing, but not surprising, to learn the FBI’s reported targeting of racial justice activists in 2020 wasn’t limited to Denver,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told The Intercept. “It is a clear abuse of authority for the FBI to use undercover agents, informants, and local law enforcement to spy on and entrap people engaged in peaceful First Amendment-protected activities without any evidence of criminal activity or violent intent.”
The probe in Colorado Springs also raises questions about FBI priorities and the bureau’s perceptions of threats. As federal agents investigated political activists there, they also launched, and promptly dropped, an investigation of a man running a neo-Nazi website — a decision that would have deadly consequences.
“Nowhere Is Safe”
The murder of George Floyd sparked protests in Colorado Springs, as in cities across the nation in the summer of 2020. Activists there were angered not only by Floyd’s death, but also by the killing of a local man, De’Von Bailey, who was shot in the back by police officers in 2019.
On August 3, 2020, as racial justice demonstrations roiled the nation, Colorado Springs activists organized a protest outside the suburban home of Alan Van’t Land, one of the officers involved in Bailey’s death.
“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a murderer,” a demonstrator yelled into a bullhorn.
“Murderer!” the other demonstrators repeated.
“Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you an assassin,” the man with the bullhorn continued. “Alan Van’t Land, we are calling you a racist. Alan Van’t Land, you are a pig.”
“Pig!” the demonstrators chanted. “Pig!”
They blocked the road through the neighborhood, and the protest escalated. A driver trying to pass through got into a verbal altercation with Charles Johnson, a Black activist and college student. Following the argument, Johnson allegedly swatted the driver’s phone out of his hands.
Other demonstrators recorded the encounter, and that and other footage from the protest circulated among far-right social media accounts as examples of the apparent dangers of racial justice and antifascist activists. Michelle Malkin, a conspiracy theorist who lives in Colorado Springs, tweeted: “Nowhere is safe.”
Most of the protesters wore face masks due to the pandemic, making it difficult for police to identify them, but the FBI had a source on the inside: Rogers, the young detective who suggested that she was a sex worker named Chelsie. The day after the demonstration, Rogers contacted Jon Christiansen. She said she had a filing cabinet to donate.
“And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure. We need all kinds of stuff,’” Christiansen remembered telling her.
A couple of days later, Rogers dropped off the cabinet.
“This giant filing cabinet,” Christiansen told me, pointing to it inside the Chinook Center. “In retrospect, after the fact, we’re like, ‘Right, that looks like a filing cabinet that would be in a police station.’”
Rogers began volunteering regularly to help with administrative tasks. Several organizations used the Chinook Center as an office, including a local tenants’ union and a group that organized racial justice demonstrations, and Rogers had access to their membership records and email accounts. Christiansen didn’t know that Rogers, rifling through various files, was feeding information to the FBI.
For a year, Rogers went unnoticed as she spied on activists from the inside.
On July 31, 2021, the Chinook Center activists organized a housing rights rally to coincide with the city’s 150th-anniversary celebration. Rogers and other demonstrators marched down the city’s streets, many carrying “Rent Is Theft” signs and wearing red shirts that read “Housing Is a Human Right.”
The activists did not know that Colorado Springs police, working with the FBI, planned to arrest several of them that day.
“Boot to the Face”
Sitting in a police cruiser, Officer Scott Alamo waited for the protesters. His body camera recorded him talking to other officers in the car.
“Well, boys,” Alamo said. “We sit, we wait, we get paid.”
Alamo pulled out a report with pictures of the activists they intended to arrest. The report, which Alamo accidentally revealed on his body camera, appeared to be a product of an FBI program known as Social Media Exploitation, or SOMEX, which allows the FBI and local police to mine social media for information about individual Americans without warrants. The photos in the report weren’t mugshots; they were images from social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Internal records obtained by The Intercept last year revealed that the FBI and the Chicago Police Department used SOMEX to collect information about racial justice demonstrators in that city. Additional documents obtained by the national security-oriented transparency nonprofit Property of the People show that the FBI monitored social media activity, including Twitter posts and Facebook event pages, of racial justice activists in Washington, D.C., and Seattle. These internal documents also revealed that the FBI wanted to keep its social media activity secret. One document described the FBI’s need for new software solutions that could provide more invasive data mining of social media while maintaining “the lowest digital footprint.”
As Alamo looked at the SOMEX report, he focused on a photo of Jon Christiansen taken from one of his social media profiles.
“Professor?” Alamo asked his colleagues in the car, referring to Christiansen’s position as a sociology professor at a local college. He continued flipping through the report. “Boot to the face,” Alamo announced gleefully. “It’s going to happen.”
And it did. More than a dozen cops stormed into the housing march looking for activists whose photos they’d seen, including Christiansen and Johnson, the man who’d gotten into the altercation at the demonstration a year earlier.
Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, an activist and Colorado-based staffer for Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet at the time, was walking her bike just beyond the melee. “And I see what I thought was a bunch of cops dog-piled on the entire crowd,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Holy shit, they’re coming for everybody, then? What the fuck?’ Just shell-shocked.”
As she turned around, Armendariz Unzueta saw a police officer dressed in riot gear charging toward her. Her fight-or-flight response kicked in. Another officer’s body camera captured the encounter.
“I just threw my bike down and was like, ‘Bitch, you’re coming for me?’” Armendariz Unzueta said. “That’s the honest truth.”
The bike’s bell gave off a short ring as it hit the concrete, landing between Armendariz Unzueta and the charging officer. The bike did not touch the officer, who sidestepped it and continued toward the crowd of demonstrators.
“I just reacted,” Armendariz Unzueta told me.
Armendariz Unzueta was wearing a bike helmet, oversized sunglasses, and a face mask, making her difficult to identify from the video. But police, working with the FBI, knew where to look — no warrant needed — for their most-wanted cyclist: social media.
“Sometimes You’ve Got to Laugh to Keep From Crying”
A Colorado Springs detective assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force started looking for the mysterious masked woman with the bicycle. Daniel Summey pulled up the social media accounts of known Chinook Center activists and then searched their friends lists. From there, Summey found Armendariz Unzueta’s accounts, including photos in which she wore the same shoes and helmet that could be seen in the police body-camera footage.
Summey wrote a search warrant application for Armendariz Unzueta’s home. In it, he observed that demonstrators at the housing march carried red flags. “The red flag is significant in that it is a radical political symbol, and designates the march … as revolutionary and radical in nature,” he wrote, basing his claim on this website about red flags, which notes that “the red flag has, predominantly, become a symbol of socialism and communism.”
Summey’s application suggested that the FBI was using political ideology as a basis for investigation, which is against the bureau’s stated policy. “We don’t investigate ideology,” the FBI’s Director Christopher Wray told a Senate committee in 2019.
Summey also attached pictures of Armendariz Unzueta from social media, including a nearly full-page photo of her in a bikini that had no relevance to the investigation.
“Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying,” Armendariz Unzueta told me when I asked her about it.
Police searched her home, took her bicycle and electronic devices, and charged her with attempted aggravated assault on a police officer — a second-degree felony.
“I Never Saw Any Grenades”
Rogers, meanwhile, began to invite young male activists to her apartment. In a recording I obtained, an FBI agent in Colorado Springs confirmed that meetings between Rogers and at least two activists occurred. Although the possibility of a sexual encounter appeared to be implicit in the invitations, the meetings took unexpected turns.
One of the activists lured to a meeting with Rogers described walking into the apartment. “And there’s two guys sitting there with her,” he said. The activist asked not to be identified because he feared that being publicly associated with an FBI investigation could cost him his job.
Rogers asked if he could find her an illegal gun to buy, the activist recalled. “I’m not going to sell one to you illegally,” the activist, a firearms enthusiast, told Rogers and her two companions. He then left.
Rogers invited over a second man, Gabriel Palcic, who was active in the tenants’ union that kept its paperwork at the Chinook Center. Like the first activist, Palcic entered the apartment to find two men with Rogers. They said their names were Mike and Omar. “Mike was missing his left leg from the knee down. Omar was kind of a Middle Eastern-looking guy with a big beard,” Palcic told me. “Both had tattoos. Both were very buff.”
Palcic said Mike and Omar claimed to be truckers who trafficked in illegal weapons. They told him they could get grenades, TNT, and AK-47s, and they asked if he wanted to buy anything.
Intrigued, Palcic met Mike and Omar several more times; during one encounter, they showed Palcic what they claimed was a fully automatic AK-47. “I never saw any grenades or TNT or any of that other shit they were talking about,” Palcic told me.
Palcic continued to hang around with Mike and Omar because they were generous, buying him meals, drinks, and cigars when they met. “There were a few times where they were obviously pumping drinks into me,” Palcic remembered. “‘Yeah, do you want another double shot of that 16-year Scotch?’”
But Palcic eventually told the two men he didn’t want any weapons and stopped returning their calls and text messages. Palcic has not been charged with a crime, according to publicly available court records.
Not long after, Armendariz Unzueta, the woman accused of assaulting a police officer with her bike, was granted access to the evidence in her case, which included police body-camera video from the day of the incident. Among the footage was the recording from Alamo’s body camera, which captured the officer flipping through the report filled with social media photos of activists.
Alamo’s body camera captured something else that day. In the recording, he mentioned that there were police officers secretly among the protesters at the housing march. He said there were two undercover cops and four plainclothes officers. He then looked at a photo on his phone.
“A picture of April, with her giant boobs,” Alamo said and laughed, apparently referring to one of the undercover officers in the crowd.
The activists at the Chinook Center watched the video. At the time, they didn’t know who April Rogers was. “There was a process of elimination,” Jon Christiansen said. “And then eventually we were able to triangulate that April Rogers was Chelsie.”
That’s when Rogers disappeared from the activist scene in Colorado Springs.
“Those Were, In Fact, Undercovers”
In the spring of 2022, while researching how the FBI’s 2020 investigation in Denver had expanded into Colorado Springs, I started contacting activists and gathering records there. At the same time, seemingly by coincidence, FBI agents took a renewed interest in the case, calling activists and knocking on doors. One of the activists they contacted was Autum Carter-Wallace. Her doorbell camera recorded agents coming to her home when she was away. One of the agents called her while outside her home.
“We came down to chat with you if you’re available,” the agent said in the voicemail. “I think it would be great to sit down with you and talk to you about some things that we are concerned about as it relates to things happening in the community.”
Carter-Wallace called the federal agent, who asked her about Palcic. She told the agent that she didn’t know him. The agent then told Carter-Wallace that the FBI had obtained video from a demonstration showing her standing next to Palcic.
“A protest with, like, a thousand people. I’m standing near one guy. You think I know him?” Carter-Wallace responded.
Agents also visited the home of one of the activists whom Rogers had tried to engage in an illegal firearms transaction. This activist agreed to meet with agents at the FBI’s office in Colorado Springs on the condition that he be allowed to record their conversation. The activist then provided me with a copy of that recording.
The agent on the recording confirmed the activist’s suspicions: that the two men with Rogers were undercover agents trying to entrap him in an illegal firearms transaction.
“You felt there was a gun-running conspiracy we were trying to throw at you, which those were, in fact, undercovers,” Brandon Kimble, the FBI agent, said during the recorded conversation. “However, they basically were in town to do a meeting with Gabe [Palcic] to sell him hand grenades.”
Last summer, after returning from a trip to England, Palcic was detained by agents at Denver International Airport. The agents provided him with copies of court-authorized search warrants that allowed for a tracking device to be installed on his truck and for his phone’s GPS data to be collected.
Palcic called me immediately after leaving the airport. “They basically recounted for me that they were looking into me, you know, because I inquired about acquiring weapons,” Palcic said. “And they said that, you know, they have recordings of all the conversations I had with the [undercovers] — which, obviously, you know?”
Palcic claimed that the agents told him the FBI was investigating the Chinook Center and the entire activist movement associated with the nonprofit.
“I Respectfully Decline to Answer”
In June 2022, I returned to Colorado Springs to attend a state criminal court hearing involving Charles Johnson, the activist arrested at the housing rights march. State prosecutors charged Johnson with theft, aggravated assault, and resisting arrest for his activities at various protests in the summer of 2020.
During the hearing, Johnson’s lawyer, Alison Blackwell, called Rogers to testify over prosecutors’ objections. Rogers entered the courtroom, this time wearing a long black wig and a black disposable face mask. A Justice Department lawyer, Timothy Jafek, sat at the prosecution table and spoke privately with Rogers before she took the witness stand.
The judge asked Rogers to take off her mask. She pulled it down to her chin.
“When you were marching in the housing march, were you doing that for the Colorado Springs Police Department?” Blackwell asked Rogers.
“I was, uh, under the authority of the FBI,” Rogers answered meekly. She looked over at the Justice Department lawyer, her body rigid.
“OK. And how many other FBI agents were in that march?” Blackwell asked.
“I respectfully decline to answer,” Rogers said, looking again at the Justice Department lawyer.
“Did you think my client was a terrorist threat at any point?”
“I respectfully decline to answer.”
“You can just say no,” Blackwell said, exasperated.
“I’ve been told to respond, ‘I respectfully decline to answer,’” Rogers admitted.
Sitting in the courtroom, some of the activists from the Chinook Center snickered as this absurdity played out. The Justice Department, which was not a party to the case and had no authority in that courtroom, silenced a local cop on the witness stand as a state judge looked on from the bench. Jafek declined to comment as he left the courtroom that day.
The following month, as part of a deal to avoid jail time, Johnson pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a highway for his role in a June 2020 racial justice protest.
Meanwhile, Armendariz Unzueta, whose criminal prosecution for pushing her bike down in a panic revealed the evidence that blew Rogers’s cover, is completing a deferred prosecution agreement. Under its terms, the felony charge against her will be dropped if she does 25 hours of community service and writes a letter of apology.
Shaun Walls, a Black activist who helped start the Chinook Center, said the FBI’s activity has had a chilling effect. “What they did has been effective,” Walls said. “People have become more cautious about what they’re doing, which is a shame because no one is doing anything illegal.”
“Something Went Boom”
A few months later, in November 2022, a Colorado man who ran a neo-Nazi website and had briefly been investigated by the FBI, at the same time federal agents were spying on the Chinook Center activists, committed a horrific crime.
Armed with AR-15-style rifle, Anderson Lee Aldrich killed five people and injured 25 others in a mass shooting at Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. An Army veteran at the club tackled Aldrich, preventing what would have otherwise been a much deadlier mass shooting. The attack made national news and drew comparisons to the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed and 53 wounded.
As with the killer in the Pulse attack, the FBI had previously investigated the Club Q shooter. In the summer of 2021, after family members reported that he was building a bomb in a basement and had threatened to kill them, FBI agents opened an investigation of Aldrich. They closed that inquiry less than a month later.
As the federal agents gave the future mass shooter a pass, the FBI, with the help of a pink-haired undercover cop, aggressively targeted local political activists seeking affordable housing and police accountability.
“We like to say our successes generally don’t make the news,” Kimble, the FBI agent who helped put together the failed gun-running stings against the Colorado Springs activists, said in the recorded conversation a few months before the Club Q shooting. “When we screw up, it’s because something went boom or there was a mass shooting.”
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Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT/Redux)
ALSO SEE: Trump Warns of 'Potential Death and Destruction' if He's Indicted
Dean emphasized that he did not know the facts, but commented on the possibility that another lawyer on a separate Trump case might have asked Bragg to hold back.
“The on and off nature of the Manhattan grand jury doesn’t to me suggest that the D.A., Bragg, has suddenly discovered he’s got a weak case,” Dean told CNN host John Berman.
“I think he’s got a grand jury who might not want more witnesses, and you know, there’s a remote possibility, John, that some other prosecutor contacted him and said ‘do you really have to go first?’
“He knows his isn’t the strongest, most presidential-type case that is going to be presented against Trump. And he might have been asked to delay, and drag his feet a little while, because some of these other cases might be ripe for action.
“I don’t know that as a fact. It just occurred to me the way this grand jury has been on-again, off-again,” concluded Dean, a former White House counsel who testified to Congress on the Watergate scandal that led to President Nixon’s resignation. He added that “prosecutors do have those kind of off-the-record conversations.”
Bragg is investigating Trump for potential financial crimes related to how the former president recorded 2016 hush money payments to two women who allege they had affairs with him. Trump denies having the affairs, but admitted that he paid the two women a combined $280,000 for their silence in the run-up to the 2016 election.
Trump reported payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels as salary to his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Prosecutors believe that the payments were actually campaign expenses.
Trump is facing four criminal investigations, one by Bragg in New York, two in Washington, D.C., regarding his involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s alleged illegal handling of classified documents, and one in Georgia investigating whether Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election there.
Trump announced last week that he believed that he would be arrested this past Tuesday on charges from Bragg’s probe. In Truth Social posts since, Trump has called for protests and violence if he is arrested, calling on his supporters to “take our nation back,” echoing rhetoric from the Jan. 6 insurrection.
On Friday, Trump said that his arrest would result in “potential death and destruction” in another late-night post railing against Bragg. Similarly, on Thursday Trump called for the removal of each official investigating him in the four probes.
Dean said that Trump’s social media comments have not helped his case, and that he expects the Manhattan grand jury to decide whether to bring charges next week.
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Russian troops inspect a street as part of the invasion of Ukraine. (photo: Alexander Ermochenko)
Former president also warns Moscow will use ‘absolutely any weapon’ if Kyiv attempts to retake Crimea
“They [the Ukrainian side] are preparing for an offensive, everyone knows that. Our general staff is calculating this and is preparing its own solutions,” Medvedev said in an interview with Russian media on Friday.
Medvedev, who is deputy chair of Putin’s powerful security council, further warned that Moscow was ready to use “absolutely any weapon” if Ukraine attempted to retake the Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
Medvedev’s latest apparent threat to use nuclear weapons came amid growing acknowledgment in Moscow that its forces may soon find themselves on the defensive in Ukraine as its own winter offensive appears to be slowing down.
In a video interview released on his social media channels Thursday, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner group’s head, warned that Ukraine was planning to surround the private military’s forces in Bakhmut and push forward toward the Black Sea in the partially occupied Zaporizhzhia region.
He claimed Ukraine had concentrated more than 80,000 soldiers around the eastern Ukrainian-held city.
The Russian army, aided by the Wagner, has been throwing thousands of soldiers into battle for more than two months in its attempt to take Bakhmut and the surrounding area.
Western officials have for a long time warned that Bakhmut was on the brink of falling to Russia. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, however, said his troops would continue defending Bakhmut, which has emerged as a potent symbol of Ukrainian resistance.
Boosted by the influx of modern western weapons, Ukrainian commanders have started to raise the prospect of an unlikely turnaround in the largely ravaged city.
Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s land forces, said on his Telegram channel on Thursday that “[Russians] are losing significant forces [in Bakhmut] and are running out of energy”.
Russia has lost up to 30,000 soldiers in Bakhmut, including many former convicts recruited from prisons by Wagner, according to western officials.
“Very soon, we will take advantage of this opportunity, as we did in the past near Kyiv, Kharkiv, Balakliia and Kupyansk,” Syrskyi said, referring to previous successful Ukrainian attacks.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is yet to comment on Ukraine’s predicted counteroffensive.
He has largely refrained from commenting on military developments on the ground.
But inside Russia, some loud pro-war commentators have renewed their attacks on the military leadership over its inability to achieve tangible military successes as the war enters its 14th month.
Igor Strelkov, a Russian ultra-nationalist and former intelligence officer, this week issued his harshest criticism of the Russian president to date, lambasting him for not modernising the army and calling him a “wet towel”.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich, shut up. Just shut up, keep quiet,” Strelkov said in a video tirade this week directly aimed at the president. “Then we won’t have to be ashamed that there is such a president in our country.”
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A rally in Tel Aviv to protest the moves to overhaul the judicial system. (photo: Oded Balilty/AP)
ALSO SEE: Israel's Attorney General Calls Netanyahu's Actions on Judiciary Illegal
At least 75 people held across country on ‘day of disruption’ as Knesset approves law designed to protect Netanyahu
The legislation, designed to protect the position of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was approved early on Thursday, after a heated all-night debate, by 61 votes to 47 – the minimum majority required.
On Thursday evening, Netanyahu made a televised address in which he called for unity, pledging to protect civil rights and democracy.
“We can’t let any disagreement, however fierce, endanger our joint future,” he said. “To avoid a rift in the people, each side must take seriously the claims and concerns of the other.
“Until now, my hands were bound. Now, I am getting involved,” he said, referring to a now obsolete decision by the attorney general’s office banning him from involvement in the judicial overhaul on the grounds of potential conflict of interest given his corruption trial.
The prime minister’s remarks came at the end of a dramatic day in Israel, during which the societal, constitutional and political crises the judicial overhaul has triggered were clearly on show.
According to the first part of the proposals passed on Thursday, Israel’s attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, is in effect no longer capable of declaring Netanyahu unfit for office, even if she believes he is attempting to use the judicial overhaul to overturn his criminal charges. The prime minister denies all the allegations against him.
Israel’s newly elected government, made up of far-right and religious parties, introduced the amendment in February after the Baharav-Miara decision barring him from engaging with the judicial reform, fearing the attorney general might go on to declare Netanyahu “incapacitated”.
Commenting on the passing of the “incapacitation bill”, the opposition chairperson, Yair Lapid, said: “Like thieves in the night, the coalition has now ratified a contemptible and corrupt personal piece of legislation against a ludicrous rumour.”
Speculation that Netanyahu might be announcing a pause in the legislative process in his Thursday evening address was quickly put to rest after the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, was summoned beforehand to the prime minister’s private residence in Jerusalem and dissuaded from making a public statement calling on the government to freeze the overhaul.
While Israeli media have reported that Netanyahu – taken aback by the scale of the opposition to the plans – is open to compromise, he appears to be hostage to his coalition’s junior far-right partners, who have threatened to bring down the government if their demands are not met.
The two architects of the changes – the Likud party’s justice minister, Yariv Levin, and the extremist Simcha Rothman, who chairs the Knesset’s law and justice committee – have pledged to pass the most important elements of the far-reaching proposals before the Knesset breaks up next week for the Passover holiday.
Among the other plans for the judiciary are bills that would give politicians control over appointments to Israel’s supreme court and severely curtail its ability to overturn laws. Its supporters say the changes are needed to rein in what they see as a leftwing bias in the decisions of the court, which serves an outsized role in a country with no formal constitution or second legislative chamber.
Critics, however, have raised fears of democratic backsliding, with significant pressure coming from the hi-tech sector, the military and Israel’s US allies. Palestinian citizens of Israel, who face systemic discrimination, as well as those living under military rule in the occupied territories, have long questioned Israel’s democratic character.
Demonstrations against the proposals began in early January in central Tel Aviv, evolving into the biggest protest movement in the country’s history. Gatherings drawing hundreds of thousands of people have taken place in every Israeli city, as well as outside the Knesset and politicians’ homes in Jerusalem.
Several additional “days of disruption” have blocked major motorways and resulted in clashes in which Israeli police have used mounted officers, stun grenades and water cannon to disperse demonstrators.
The protests appear to be growing more intense. On Thursday, at least 75 people across the country were arrested, including 18 who police said sprayed red paint and blocked an entrance to a police station in southern Tel Aviv, and one person who allegedly used a flagpole to hit Avi Dichter, a minister and senior member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, in an incident near Ben Gurion airport.
Only one in four voters support the judicial overhaul in its current form, according to recent polling by Israel’s Channel 12. Several previous attempts at delay, negotiation and compromise brokered by the figurehead president, Isaac Herzog, have been declared unworkable by the government.
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David Valentine's research team at UC Santa Barbara kick-started new efforts to study the legacy of DDT dumping in the deep ocean. (photo: Austin Straub/LA Times)
Now, scientists have discovered that much of the DDT — which had been dumped largely in the 1940s and ’50s — never broke down. The chemical remains in its most potent form in startlingly high concentrations, spread across a wide swath of seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco.
“We still see original DDT on the seafloor from 50, 60, 70 years ago, which tells us that it’s not breaking down the way that [we] once thought it should,” said UC Santa Barbara scientist David Valentine, who shared these preliminary findings Thursday during a research update with more than 90 people working on the issue. “And what we’re seeing now is that there is DDT that has ended up all over the place, not just within this tight little circle on a map that we referred to as Dumpsite Two.”
These revelations confirm some of the science community’s deepest concerns — and further complicate efforts to understand DDT’s toxic and insidious legacy in California. Public calls for action have intensified since The Times reported in 2020 that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, banned in 1972, is still haunting the marine environment today. Significant amounts of DDT-related compounds continue to accumulate in California condors and local dolphin populations, and a recent study linked the presence of this once-popular pesticide to an aggressive cancer in sea lions.
With a $5.6-million research boost from Congress, at the urging of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), numerous federal, state and local agencies have since joined with scientists and environmental nonprofits to figure out the extent of the contamination lurking 3,000 feet underwater. (An additional $5.2 million, overseen by California and USC Sea Grant, will be distributed this summer to kick off 18 more months of research.)
The findings so far have been one stunning development after another. A preliminary sonar-mapping effort led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography identified at least 70,000 debris-like objects on the seafloor.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, after combing through thousands of pages of old records, discovered that other toxic chemicals — as well as millions of tons of oil drilling waste — had also been dumped decades ago by other companies in more than a dozen areas off the Southern California coast.
“When the DDT was disposed, it is highly likely that other materials — either from the tanks on the barges, or barrels being pushed over the side of the barges — would have been disposed at the same time,” said John Lyons, acting deputy director of the EPA’s Region 9 Superfund Division. He noted that the new science being shared this week is critical to answering one of the agency’s most burning questions: “Is the contamination moving? And is it moving in a way that threatens the marine environment or human health?”
In recent months, Valentine, whose research team had first brought this decades-old issue back into the public consciousness, has been mapping and collecting samples of the seafloor between the Los Angeles coast and Catalina.
Analysis of the sediment so far shows that the most concentrated layer of DDT is only about 6 centimeters deep — raising questions about just how easily these still-potent chemicals could be remobilized.
“Trawls, cable lays could reintroduce this stuff back up to the surface,” Valentine said. “And animals feeding — if a whale goes down and burrows on the seafloor, that could kick stuff up.”
On a chilly winter morning in between storms, Valentine and a team of students boarded the RV/Yellowfin and set out to collect more seafloor samples along key points of a hot-spot map that they’ve been piecing together.
As his students sliced and cataloged each layer of mud, they gasped in wonder at the tiny worms, snails and sea stars that lived so deep under the sea. They squinted at each tube that came out of the water and laughed apprehensively when asked about all the chemicals they were possibly holding in their hands.
“The goal is to collect as much mud as possible so that we don’t have to come back out every time we have a question,” Valentine explained as the ship’s mechanical pulley churned for the eighth time that day. “We are starting to build a really exceptional data set … that will help us understand the time history of how things were transported, how they were transformed, and what their ultimate fate is.”
Other scientists have also been chipping away at the many pieces to this deep-ocean puzzle.
Thursday’s research updates included plans for the next Scripps mapping expedition, which will scan the seafloor with advanced sonar technology and take hundreds of thousands of photos. Microbiologists shared their latest studies into whether deep-sea microbes could possibly help biodegrade some of the contamination, and chemical oceanographers discussed the many ways they’ve been trying to identify “fingerprints” that could help determine where the DDT is coming from — and how and if it’s moving.
Biological oceanographers, marine ecologists and fisheries scientists also started to connect some dots on the various organisms they’ve found living in the contaminated sediment, as well as the midwater species that could potentially move the chemicals from deeper waters up closer to the surface.
All of them noted that there were uncomfortably high concentrations of DDT and DDT-related compounds in the samples they studied. Even the “control” samples they tried to collect — as a way to compare what a normal sediment or fish sample farther away from the dumping area might look like — ended up riddled with DDT.
“This suggests to us, very preliminarily, that there’s some connection potentially — there’s connectivity in these deep food webs across the basins and across the system,” said Lihini Aluwihare, a marine chemist at Scripps.
On top of all this research, the EPA has been developing its own sampling plan, in collaboration with a number of state and federal agencies, to get a grasp of the many other chemicals that had been dumped into the ocean. The hope, officials said, is that the groundbreaking science now underway on the deep-ocean DDT dumping will ultimately inform how future investigations of other offshore dump sites — whether along the Southern California coast or elsewhere in the country — could be conducted.
Mark Gold, an environmental scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council who has worked on the DDT problem since the 1990s, said that as he listened to the latest research discoveries, he couldn’t help but think that “our nation’s ocean dumpsites all have horrible contamination problems. And yet they are unmonitored.”
There are also more shallow areas off the Palos Verdes coast and at the mouth of the Dominguez Channel that have been known DDT hot spots for decades. Figuring out how to clean up those contaminated areas in an underwater environment has been its own complicated saga.
For Katherine Pease at Heal the Bay, an environmental group that has been making sure the public remains engaged on this issue in substantive ways, these latest revelations have been eye-opening.
This is, after all, what it truly means to live with a “forever” chemical. After all these decades, scientists are still uncovering new and unsettling surprises about the full extent of the contamination.
“We’re still grappling with this legacy of treating the ocean as a dumping ground,” said Pease, Heal the Bay’s science and policy director. “And the public — whether they’re folks that like to fish ... or people who like to swim and visit the ocean — we all need to understand the history that went on, as well as the impacts. And partly that’s to learn ... to make sure that we’re able to protect our public health, but also to think about how we are treating the ocean now, as well as into the future.”
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U.S.-backed soldiers patrol a street in El Salvador during the height of the country's Civil War. (photo: CMD)
Over the past two centuries, US imperial interventions have had a devastating impact on the peoples of Latin America. Those interventions have also played a crucial role in US domestic politics, enabling new power blocs to cohere and develop their strategies.
According to Grandin, Latin America has consistently been the place where the United States has developed its strategies for dominance on the world stage while enabling specific power blocs to cohere within the domestic political system. Washington either orchestrated or provided key support for dozens of successful regime-change efforts in Latin American states. US intervention has been so frequent that it has become normalized and almost invisible.
Grandin sat down with Daniel Denvir, host of Jacobin podcast The Dig, in June 2021 to discuss the arguments of Empire’s Workshop. You can listen to the conversation here. The following excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.
Daniel Denvir
How has the long history of US intervention in Latin America shaped the development of American empire?
Greg Grandin
Over the course of two centuries, Latin America has been a workshop for the United States in a number of ways. First of all, it was able to try out different things in the region — not just new military tactics but also legal precedents to justify military intervention. It was the place where the United States first projected its power.
When we think about Latin America today, we see it as starting on the US-Mexico border that was drawn on the map after the war in the 1840s. But Latin America had previously extended much further north, covering the space between the Mississippi River and the Pacific. Before Mexico gained its independence, that territory had been part of the Spanish Empire.
The region also served as a workshop for the United States in terms of forging coalitions during moments of political realignment, from Andrew Jackson to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Latin America was the unacknowledged linchpin for those coalitions. It was the place where different constituencies came together and developed a sense of themselves as a class or as a bloc of classes.
Some political scientists argue that the United States has largely managed to contain social conflict within its party system — apart from the Civil War, of course. That system has evolved over time, with major realignments that bring to power new political coalitions made up of various constituencies through one of the two parties that are governing at the time. I find that argument interesting, and it explains a lot, but its advocates don’t look at the role of foreign policy.
We have to remember that the United States is an exceptional nation. No other country in the world has had the same opportunities for almost limitless expansion, beginning with the territorial drive toward the west and south. This gave rise to the idea that domestic social problems could be resolved by continuous outward growth. Latin America was indispensable for that.
Daniel Denvir
What kind of ugly legal precedents did the United States set in Latin America?
Greg Grandin
In 1854, for example, a US gunboat destroyed Greytown in Nicaragua — leveled it to the ground. That was part of a competitive struggle with Britain over an international trade route. The US courts upheld the legitimacy of the bombardment as a presidential prerogative. There was an accumulation of precedents like that, often worked out quietly in low-level courts, that are still being cited in our own time.
During the war in Mexico, the United States had a small standing army, so it relied on volunteers. Any state could raise a volunteer force and it would be under the army’s nominal command. Those volunteers committed terrible atrocities: rape, destruction of churches, desecration of cemeteries. Things got to be so bad that General Winfield Scott asked Congress for the authority to set up military courts to judge the perpetrators.
This meant that Scott had extraordinary power to set up those tribunals in another country that was being administered by the US army. The US government then cited that precedent after 9/11 as a justification for holding enemy combatants in Guantanamo. The accretion of precedents like that gave the executive a freer hand when it came to foreign policy.
Daniel Denvir
What made FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policy such a radical departure from the prior history of US intervention in Latin America?
Greg Grandin
It was a radical revision of international law in general, which was based on the idea of conquest and the right of great powers to send troops in to protect their interests against any perceived threats.
From the nineteenth century, a cohort of jurists, statesman, and political theorists in Latin America argued that you could remake international law in the Americas so that it was based on a presumption of solidarity and mutual interests. From that perspective, the immediate priority was to induce the United States to abandon its claimed right to intervene in the affairs of Latin American countries whenever it wanted to. US officials resisted this agenda for a long time.
However, by the 1930s, the US had the experience of being bogged down in unwinnable counterinsurgencies in countries like Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It was governing Cuba as a neo-colony via the Platt Amendment, which Washington had inserted into the Cuban Constitution.
That amendment gave the United States the right to intervene whenever it wanted, which it did several times. By 1939, it was clear that this approach was doing nothing to consolidate US power in Latin America and was in fact radicalizing the hemisphere and generating antagonism toward the United States.
When Roosevelt gave his inaugural address as president, in 1933, it was overwhelmingly focused on domestic policy, with just one paragraph on foreign affairs. He introduced the idea of a “good neighbor” approach in that paragraph, not specifically in relation to Latin America but as a general approach toward the rest of the world.
There weren’t many places where FDR could put that vision into effect. Militarists were on the march in Asia and fascists were gathering strength in Europe. Even US allies in Europe were tightening their grip over their colonies. The Roosevelt administration turned to Latin America, and Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, went to Montevideo for the seventh Pan-American Conference in November 1933.
Hull was a Jacksonian Democrat from Tennessee who had fought in the Spanish-American War in 1898. He was accompanied by Ernest Gruening, an editor at the Nation who was a staunch anti-imperialist. Gruening urged Hull to accept the principle of nonintervention. At the conference, Hull conceded to the Latin Americans on a host of issues. Most importantly, he said that the United States would recognize the absolute sovereignty of Latin American states in their domestic and foreign affairs.
Roosevelt withdrew all US forces from the region and abrogated the Platt Amendment in Cuba. He began to tolerate a significant degree of economic nationalism in countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Bolivia. All of this created enormous goodwill and allowed Hull to sign a series of bilateral free-trade agreements.
That in turn helped the United States to climb out of the Great Depression and get ready for World War II. This process of opening up Latin American markets also enabled Roosevelt to build ties with a modernizing corporate bloc around pharmaceuticals, energy, and electronics that became the business ballast of the New Deal coalition.
Daniel Denvir
What role did the Mexican Revolution and its legacies play in the development of the Good Neighbor policy?
Greg Grandin
The Mexican Revolution was the first revolt against US capital in what became known as the Third World. It resulted in the passage of the first social democratic constitution in the world, which established rights to education, social security, pensions, and so on. The role of the state in the Mexican economy greatly expanded, with more control over natural resources.
For a long time, US governments were completely opposed to the Mexican Constitution’s definition of social property and its very robust understanding of eminent domain that gave the state authority to nationalize resources. But Roosevelt went along with it because he had no choice. He needed Mexico during the Depression and as an ally in WWII, so he didn’t oppose the nationalization of Standard Oil’s Mexican holdings and other US economic assets.
Mexico also became an inspiration for some of the more radical elements within the New Deal coalition. Rexford Tugwell and the Sharecroppers’ Union went to Mexico because they wanted to see what real agrarian reform looked like. They began suggesting that Roosevelt might follow a similar approach in the United States, although that was never going to happen.
Daniel Denvir
FDR’s Good Neighbor policy didn’t last very long after his death, did it?
Greg Grandin
Immediately after the victory of the Allies in WWII, there was a lot of hope for the expansion of social democracy. There was also a widespread belief that you could promote development by breaking the power of the landed class, which extracted wealth through monopoly control of land and labor. If that monopoly was broken, you would increase the purchasing power of peasants who could then buy locally made products, strengthening the progressive industrial bourgeoisie.
However, the wider geopolitical shifts in the late 1940s, with the beginning of the Cold War, broke that link between democracy and development in the eyes of US planners. They established a new equation between development and order. The US was no longer encouraging democratization or the unionization of workers.
Latin America never had its own version of the Marshall Plan. In Europe, industrializing elites had access to massive amounts of public capital and didn’t feel it was necessary to suppress the trade unions or the noncommunist left in order to develop. In Latin America, on the other hand, they were told to obtain the money from private capital and loans. In that context, the priority was to repress organized labor and all the demands for social reform. There was no structural space for social democratic parties or even Christian democratic reformers.
Guatemala’s revolution in 1944 was a perfect example of the continent-wide democratic spring that I’ve been talking about. Jacobo Árbenz was elected in 1950 with a mandate to extend the ideals of political democracy into the social realm. That meant trying to assert the role of the state sector in the countryside, where the United Fruit Company ran its plantations like feudal estates. Árbenz passed an agrarian reform law that expropriated United Fruit land on the basis of the company’s own valuation for tax purposes.
The CIA put an operation to overthrow Árbenz into play. It drew on all the advances in psychological warfare and techniques to disseminate misinformation. The main goal was to promote the idea that there was an internal opposition to Árbenz when there wasn’t. They created a mercenary force of disgruntled military people in Honduras and let the Guatemalan national army know that if the mercenaries failed, the United States would intervene directly.
In seeking to isolate Guatemala, the United States didn’t formally break with multilateralism. It got the Organization of American States to sanction Guatemala on the pretext that it was threatened by external communist aggression. Árbenz was enormously popular, and so was the land reform, but the coup was successful, and it was followed by decades of brutal repression.
Daniel Denvir
How did the events in Guatemala influence the revolution in Cuba later in the decade?
Greg Grandin
When Guatemala’s democratic revolution began, left-wingers — including those of the Communist Party — still looked toward the United States as a potential model for development and still thought they could work with the progressive bourgeoisie. The land reform policies were designed to strengthen the progressive bourgeoisie. They still thought they could create national class coalitions to bring about social democratic reforms.
By 1959, five years after the coup against Árbenz, the Cuban revolutionary leaders had a much more radical vision of economic justice. Fidel Castro was also much better prepared for what the United States was going to do in response. They beat back the Bay of Pigs Invasion, which led to a wave of radicalization throughout the hemisphere and gave Castro legendary status as someone who could beat the US Goliath, unlike Árbenz.
Daniel Denvir
The Kennedy administration supported counterinsurgencies in Latin America but also launched the Alliance for Progress, which promised billions of dollars in development aid to assist with reform and break up extreme concentrations of power. Were there contradictory forces or power blocs at work within the US government that gave rise to these policies?
Greg Grandin
The idea of the United States as a liberalizing and revolutionary agent in the world is deeply ingrained within the country’s self-conception. John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign was predicated on restoring a sense of purpose, part of which involved embracing that revolutionary rhetoric.
It was also specifically in response to Castro and the inspiration that his revolution offered to the rest of the hemisphere. Kennedy famously said that we were going to complete the revolution of the Americas. At the same time, however, the United States was committed to strengthening the internal security capacities of states like those in Latin America.
The Alliance for Progress did promote attempts at land reform in Chile and even, to some extent, in Guatemala and El Salvador. But it also strengthened the security services in Latin American countries by professionalizing them and getting them to work in a coordinated manner by sharing and acting on information.
As political polarization grew during the 1960s and ’70s, with many on the Left deciding to follow the Cuban path of insurgency, you saw a radicalization of the Right and the rise of death squads. There was a first round of coups in the 1960s in countries such as El Salvador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil, followed by a second round in the 1970s. The second round was concentrated especially in the Southern Cone and the Andes: Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina.
The coups of the first round were designed to counter the influence of Cuba or any potential sympathy for Cuba and begin strengthening the repressive capacities of those states under the rubric of a national security doctrine. But they set off a cycle of radicalization and repression, with insurgencies in a number of countries. The second round was the culmination of that cycle, with full-fledged death-squad states coming to power.
The second round of coups took the strengthening of national security agencies to an international level through Operation Condor. That was the period when we saw the worst forms of violence, with disappearances and massacres. By the end of the 1970s, South America was locked down, with one country after another ruled by US-backed right-wing dictatorships. The axis of conflict then shifted to the Central American region.
Daniel Denvir
Going back a little from that point, why did Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger find the Chilean government of Salvador Allende so threatening?
Greg Grandin
This was taking place in the wider context of détente with the Soviet Union. The United States was trying to extricate itself from Vietnam. That partly involved recognizing the idea of the world being divided into spheres of influence for the two superpowers. Chile was firmly within the US sphere of influence, so Allende’s government was a challenge to that.
The idea of a country like Chile voting a self-described Marxist into power was also threatening because it was harder to discredit. Castro had used authoritarian methods to save the Cuban Revolution because he wanted to avoid the fate of Árbenz. But it was harder to discredit someone who was democratically elected, like Allende.
In addition, this was a model that might not be confined to Chile or Latin America. The United States was worried about what was happening in Western Europe, with the increase in support for the Italian Communist Party, and the revolution in Portugal. The overthrow of Allende was a warning to the European communists that while the United States might accept them as junior partners in a center-left alliance, they would never be accepted as the major party in a European government.
Chile was an interesting case because its appeal went in different directions. On the one hand, it was a key player in the Third World, with discussions around the idea of a new international economic order. On the other hand, it had a deep resonance for the Eurocommunists who were distancing themselves from the Soviet Union and wanted to work within the established political structures of Western Europe.
The advocates of a new international economic order wanted to establish a basic price floor for fourteen commodities. They also wanted to socialize intellectual property rights and technology in order to help the Third World develop and create value-added industry. Neoliberalism, of course, did precisely the opposite, promoting a race to the bottom in commodity prices while entrenching intellectual property rights and rolling back nationalization.
Daniel Denvir
What role did a reinvigorated form of imperialism in Central America play in the rise of Ronald Reagan and the New Right during the last years of the Cold War?
Greg Grandin
Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, famously said that Central America was the most important place in the world at that time. Commentators had a hard time understanding what she meant by that. Was it really more important than Europe or the Middle East, for example?
But in a way, Central America was so important for the Reagan administration precisely because of its insignificance. It did not have any resources that the United States could not do without and there were no nuclear weapons there. It was squarely within the US backyard. Reagan could give movement conservatives a free hand with little fear of the consequences.
Neoconservatives like Kirkpatrick argued that the United States had to retake the Third World. Central America was the first place for them to do that, with a rhetoric of moralized militarism. There was a bloc of secular neoconservatives like Kirkpatrick and Elliott Abrams with the “theocons” of the religious right who were mobilized to support anti-communism in Central America.
The Reaganite alliance came together around the wars in Central America. There were mercenaries working with the Contras in Nicaragua and evangelicals supplying them with humanitarian aid who saw it as a military crusade. It led to a thickening of the relations between different parts of the alliance.
Once the Republicans returned to power under Reagan, the militarists and counterinsurgency theorists who had failed in Vietnam saw El Salvador as a chance to get it right. They spent money on civic action and land reform, but none of that worked. At the end of the day, the United States and its Salvadoran allies fought the FMLN [Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front] guerrillas to a standstill through the massive use of violence — torture, killings, and disappearances on a grand scale.
The idea of “winning hearts and minds” is a form of self-delusion on the part of counterinsurgency theorists. Pure repression is what ultimately wins the day. The language of state-building and winning hearts and minds just allows them to convince themselves that what they’re doing is noble.
Daniel Denvir
How did the Reagan administration target domestic opponents and critical journalists who were challenging its dirty war in Central America?
Greg Grandin
In 1983, the Reagan administration set up the Office of Public Diplomacy. This was in direct violation of the National Security Act, which prohibited the use of propaganda and disinformation on the US public. It was staffed by psyops operatives from the Department of Defense and used Republican-aligned advertising firms from Madison Avenue to run polls and focus groups so they could find out what language would play well with public opinion.
If anyone reported a negative story about the US-backed regime in El Salvador, the response wasn’t necessarily to try and disprove it but rather to throw enough mud in the water so that nobody could form a clear opinion about what had happened. At the same time, they wanted to raise the cost for journalists of reporting on stories like that.
One reporter noted that if she wanted to do a story about the Salvadoran Army or the Contras, she would have to spend so much time fact-checking that it wasn’t worth it. She would be attacked straight away, and if she got any details of the story wrong, it would be a career killer.
Daniel Denvir
We tend to think about the US religious right in terms of domestic cultural issues like abortion and gay rights. But you argue that foreign policy was a key strand in its history.
Greg Grandin
Evangelical conservatives were deeply hostile to the emergence of liberation theology, which criticized the social system upheld by US militarism on religious grounds, arguing that the profit motive was an amoral mechanism that destroyed human solidarity. The religious right insisted that the free market wasn’t amoral — it reflected God’s grace.
This overlapped with the effort of secular conservatives to present the market as a place of creativity and fulfillment. A focus on opposing liberation theology brought these two forms of conservativism together. The projection of Reaganism was to rehabilitate the capitalist market and US power in moral terms.
Daniel Denvir
The Reagan-backed Contra force in Nicaragua is best remembered today because of the Iran-Contra scandal. The Democrats treated Iran-Contra as a question of domestic process: the Reagan administration had broken the law by sending aid to the Contras after Congress barred it from doing so, using money generated from secret missile sales to Iran. Why did they refuse to confront Reagan’s militarism on more fundamental terms?
Although there was still a substantial peace caucus within the Democratic Party, the Democratic establishment essentially went along with the assumption that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were a problem that had to be contained and it was the right of the United States to do that.
There’s a great video that you can watch on YouTube of Senator George Mitchell lecturing Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. It’s seven minutes long and North doesn’t say a word. He’s sitting there with his chest full of medals, his rock-hard jaw, and his short haircut. But right off the bat, Mitchell basically concedes that the Sandinistas were a problem and ways had to be found to deal with them. It’s an example of how you can win an argument without saying a word.
If you watch that video, you will see a New Deal establishment that is so exhausted, it can talk and talk without actually saying anything, while the ascendant Reagan coalition is so confident, it doesn’t have to speak at all. Because they largely shared the assumptions of Cold War anti-communism when it came to Nicaragua, the Democrats never went after Reagan on the substance of his policy rather than the procedural aspects.
Iran-Contra wasn’t a scandal; it was the coming-out party of the New Right. If you want to understand the New Right, there’s no better place to look than Iran-Contra in all its different aspects. When Dick Cheney wrote the House minority report, he put forward a theory of executive power that was considered outrageous in 1987 but would later be rehabilitated after 9/11 under George W. Bush as common sense.
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The Xcel Energy plant in Monticello, Minnesota. (photo: KSTP)
Repairs are set to begin to fix the leaking of radioactive water from the facility this week, after a larger leak was discovered in November but only made public this month.
While Xcel Energy said in a news release Thursday that there is "no risk to the public or the environment" with the latest incident at the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant, the city said it would test the municipal water supply out of precaution.
"The safety of Monticello's residents has been and continues to be our number one priority," Mayor Lloyd Hilgart said in a statement Friday. "We are glad Xcel Energy was closely monitoring the situation and decided to shut down the plant to make permanent repairs immediately to address the recurring issue of water containing tritium leaking from" the plant.
The company added that the leak of water containing tritium, a mildly radioactive form of hydrogen, is "fully contained on-site and has not been detected beyond the facility or in any local drinking water." This second leak involved hundreds of gallons of radioactive water, according to the utility company, far less than the 400,000 gallons in the leak discovered in late November.
But some Monticello residents surrounding the plant — located 38 miles northwest of Minneapolis and upstream of the Mississippi River — say they have concerns about what a recurring leak presents and the delay in finding out about the initial spill.
"I think the general public needs to be informed more about this," said Megan Sanborn, 31, who lives 6 miles upstream from the nuclear plant.
"My children go to school 2 miles downstream from the power plant," she added. "If the water levels were safe the entire time like they were saying, then where was the transparency?"
Xcel Energy notified the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the state on Nov. 22, on the same day it confirmed the leak, as a "non-emergency report" with "no impact on the health and safety of the public or plant personnel." It said the origin of the leak was found about a month later from a broken pipe between two buildings, and that a temporary solution was devised to contain the water and reroute it back to the plant for reuse.
In late February, the city was informed about the leak. But it wasn't until March 16 when state officials told the public and Xcel Energy announced it had been taking steps to contain and manage the leak over the past four months.
"After the company told the state, it was a hush-hush situation," Sanborn said. "No one from the state let residents know we had a nuclear leak, and when we don't have the ability to overcome a potential impact because no one told us, that's a big concern for residents."
Xcel Energy said it has been monitoring to ensure the underground plume of tritium remains within the property and doesn’t contaminate local drinking water or the nearby Mississippi River, which every winter draws hundreds of trumpeter swans lured by the warm water discharged by the nuclear plant.
Tritium is naturally occurring in the environment but is also a result of the production of electricity at nuclear power plants, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which says it is "one of the least dangerous radionuclides because it emits very weak radiation and leaves the body relatively quick."
In addition, it says "tritium radiation does not travel very far in air and cannot penetrate the skin."
Tritium spills do happen occasionally but are typically contained within a nuclear site, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
State officials said they waited to inform the public because they wanted to understand the full scope of the leak and Xcel Energy had not immediately identified the source.
In a previous statement, Xcel Energy said it also understands the "importance of quickly informing the communities we serve if a situation poses an immediate threat to health and safety," but that "in this case, there was no such threat."
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, which monitors environmental quality, said Thursday it is "encouraged" that Xcel Energy is taking immediate steps to repair the new leak and that it will continue to monitor groundwater samples for tritium.
"Should an imminent risk arise, we will inform the public promptly," the agency said in a statement, adding that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has regulatory oversight of the plant's operations, should "share ongoing public communications on the leak and on mitigation efforts to help residents best understand the situation."
Xcel Energy said it doesn’t expect its customers’ electric service to be affected. Initially, the company said it had planned to permanently repair the broken pipe during a regularly scheduled refueling outage in mid-April, but the new leakage prompted it to move up the plan.
The incident comes as Xcel Energy is in the midst of seeking an operating license renewal for Monticello. The license is set to expire in September 2030.
At a town hall meeting over the license Wednesday, before the latest leak was known publicly, Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials sought to allay residents' fears.
"There is no reason to have concern for their safety over this," said Valerie Myers, a commission physicist and inspector, according to NBC affiliate KARE in Minneapolis.
"If we tried to do public notifications on everything nuclear because everything seems scary right for nuclear, we would be just bombarding everybody," she added.
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