In his most vile and disgusting lie to date, Donald Trump claims that he will stand up against Democrats who want to execute babies after they are born, despite no evidence of this occurring anywhere. Meidas contributor Troy breaks down the evolution of the lie that access to safe and legal abortion means that parents want to murder their children.
An NBC News poll finds that only 24% of Americans have a positive view of the MAGA movement
Harlan Crow did in fact have business in front of the Supreme Court despite Justice Clarence Thomas asserting otherwise. As questions of impropriety continue to mount, Donald Trump redoubles his support of Justice Thomas. Contributor Dina Sayegh Doll reacts.
USA Today just published a concise overview of the many criminal and civil trials and investigations bearing down on former president Donald Trump. The USA Today headline: "How many legal cases does Donald Trump face? 2 DOJ investigations, a Georgia grand jury, NY charges and a lawsuit." This video takes on the question of, what is the real reason our nation finds itself in this painful morass?
29 April 23
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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
In a heartfelt statement, the former television personality said that using the truth was “a problem I never thought I’d have. I always thought it was the kind of thing that happened to other people.”
Carlson said that he would remain at the facility, Alternatives Malibu, until he is “a hundred per cent truth-free.”
He also implored his fans not to judge him by the accurate statements that he made in his texts. “This is not who I am,” he said. “I’m going to beat this thing.”
In what some close associates of Carlson’s have taken as a hopeful sign, he has not checked into a rehab facility of any kind.
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Volodymyr Zelenskiy accused Amnesty in its original report of 'shift[ing] the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim.' (photo: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters)
Language was also said to be ‘ambiguous’ and ‘imprecise’, according to the New York Times
The report, issued last August, prompted widespread anger in Ukraine, leading to an apology from Amnesty and a promise of a review by external experts of what went wrong. Among those who condemned the report was Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who accused Amnesty of “shift[ing] the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim”.
Leaked to the New York Times, that unpublished review has concluded that the report was “written in language that was ambiguous, imprecise and in some respects legally questionable”, according to the newspaper.
In particular, the report’s authors were criticised for language that appeared to suggest “many or most of the civilian victims of the war died as a result of Ukraine’s decision to locate its forces in the vicinity of civilians” at a time when Russian forces were deliberately targeting civilians.
“This is particularly the case with the opening paragraphs, which could be read as implying – even though this was not AI’s intention – that, on a systemic or general level, Ukrainian forces were primarily or equally to blame for the death of civilians resulting from attacks by Russia.”
In the immediate aftermath of publication, the initial report was seized on by Russia, including the embassy in London, to claim that Ukrainian tactics were a “violation of international humanitarian law” at a time when Russian forces were being accused of serious war crimes.
The paper added, however, that sources had told it that Amnesty’s board had sat on the 18-page review for months amid suggestions there had been pressure to water down its conclusions.
At the centre of the controversy was Amnesty’s claim that by housing military personnel in civilian buildings and launching attacks from civilian areas, Ukraine had been in breach of international law on the protection of civilians.
The expert review was conducted by five experts including Emanuela-Chiara Gillard of the University of Oxford; Kevin Jon Heller of the University of Copenhagen; Eric Talbot Jensen of Brigham Young University; Marko Milanovic of the University of Reading; and Marco Sassòli of the University of Geneva.
Experts questioned whether the authors of the original report had correctly interpreted international law regarding Ukraine as a victim of aggression and whether there was evidence that Ukraine had put civilians in “harm’s way”.
The leaked report also disclosed that there had been significant unease within Amnesty before publication, not least over the issue of whether the government of Ukraine had been sufficiently engaged with.
“These reservations should have led to greater reflection and pause” before the organisation issued its statement, the review added.
Oksana Pokalchuk, the former head of Amnesty’s Ukraine office, who resigned over the report, said she believed the review should be made public as well as a promised internal review of relations inside the organisation on how decisions were made around the report.
“I want justice to be done and to be seen done,” she told the Guardian. “One of the things that was very important to me at the time was that we should be in communication with the Ukrainian government, formally or informally, to get information from them. This wasn’t done, and it caused a lot of damage.
“What I have also not seen so far in the reporting of this review is any discussion of the larger context of the war and how this report played in favour of Russian propaganda. We need to talk about who is the aggressor and who is the victim of this war.”
An Amnesty International spokesperson said: “Amnesty commissioned a panel of external experts in the field of international humanitarian law to conduct an independent review of the legal analysis in our 4 August press release.
“Amnesty staff reviewed a first draft of the panel’s report, and their comments were taken into account in the final version, to the extent the legal panel itself deemed appropriate.
“This is part of an ongoing internal learning process, and we welcome the full findings which will inform and improve our future work.”
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A doctor and patient. (photo: Rawpixel)
Some more people might get jobs. What about those who don’t?
The Lift, Save, Grow Act, the House GOP’s opening bid in the debt ceiling drama, would add work requirements to Medicaid — the health insurance program for low-income Americans — and expand those in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps”) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, often called “cash welfare”).
Requiring people to work to be eligible for social program benefits doesn’t save much money in the scheme of things; the Congressional Budget Office found it would save about $120 billion over 10 years, or 0.2 percent of the 10-year budget. But they could have a major impact on the low-income families that rely on these programs. The White House (hardly a disinterested party, but still) projects the Medicaid provisions could put 21 million people at risk of losing their health insurance. (Roughly 90 million Americans currently receive Medicaid benefits.)
Defenders of work requirements for social programs tend to point to evidence that they, well, “work” — that is, that when work requirements are in place, more benefit recipients wind up employed, which they argue is better than the unemployed passively receiving benefits.
One response from opponents is to dispute the evidence. Arkansas, the first state to introduce Medicaid work requirements in 2018, saw no increases in employment as a result, even as the share of the population without health insurance surged. As my colleagues Alvin Chang and Tara Golshan noted a few years ago, a review of several randomized experiments with work requirements for cash welfare found that while they boost employment noticeably early on, the effects fade quickly with time:
Let me make a slightly different argument. I think it’s plausible that work requirements modestly increase work in the short or even long term. But I think they are still a bad idea, because of the effects on the people for whom they do not “work.”
Work requirements inevitably leave in their wake a large group — maybe 20 percent, maybe 30 — who do not or cannot work after their implementation. Those people are then left without either wages or support from the government program that’s now kicked them out. Applied to food stamps and Medicaid, that means creating a group of people who have no cash income, no means of buying food, and no health insurance.
The prospect of abandoning a large group of Americans to that fate should trouble us greatly.
Who is left behind when you add work requirements?
Work requirements are not new. SNAP currently has work requirements for able-bodied adults age 18 to 49 without dependents. The Limit, Save, Grow Act would apply these requirements to people from age 50-55.
Medicaid currently has no work requirements (the Arkansas experiment was blocked by a court). The House bill would change that. Adults aged 19 to 55 without dependents would have to work, do community service, or engage in work training for at least 80 hours a month (about 18 hours a week) to receive Medicaid.
Let’s suppose these requirements, put together, would be startlingly effective at raising 50 to 55-year-olds’ work participation. Let’s say out of the population of adults that age, without dependents, receiving both SNAP and Medicaid, the share holding a job would go from 55 percent (the current level for childless people on Medicaid) to 70 percent. That would be an enormous effect in the context of past work requirements, a huge success.
My question is: What would happen to the 30 percent of people who didn’t find work (or a training program, or a community service opportunity)? If the work requirements were vigorously enforced (as they would have to be to generate the budgetary savings the GOP wants), these people would lose their monthly food benefit. They would no longer have health insurance if they got sick. And they would not have a job. They would have no source of cash income or government support whatsoever.
We don’t really have a recent precedent for so thoroughly abandoning a group of Americans. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill establishing strict work requirements on cash welfare — but he did so only because no such requirements were imposed on parents’ access to food stamps or Medicaid. He had vetoed two earlier GOP bills that attempted to limit those programs, later telling journalist Jason DeParle, “I thought there ought to be a national guarantee of health care and nutrition.” After welfare reform, the share of people with no income except for food stamps rose sharply.
What the House GOP is now proposing is to pull that safety net out from under the very poorest. If you are someone who can’t meet the new requirements in the world the House GOP is contemplating, you will not have a guarantee of health care and nutrition to fall back on. You will have nothing but private charity and desperate hope.
One sees a similar dynamic at work with disability insurance. The Social Security Disability Insurance program absolutely discourages people from working. There are excellent, rigorous studies proving this, and it annoys me when otherwise like-minded friends try, in defending the program, to pretend that this isn’t true. The reason to keep SSDI, and to not cut it, isn’t that it has zero effect on work. It’s that efforts to reform it and kick participants off will inevitably throw out people who will still be out of work, disabled, and now extremely poor.
A famous study measuring the effect of disability insurance found that in a group of applicants they examined, 52.2 percent of people denied benefits wound up working and earning at least $1,000 after two years; that compares to only 14.8 percent of people granted benefits who ended up working. That’s a big negative effect on employment.
But think about the 47.8 percent of rejected applicants who still were not working. They’re not getting any earnings, and they’re not getting any disability benefits. They’re just very, very poor. Don’t we owe them something? Would toughening up eligibility to force those who could be pressured to work to do so be worth impoverishing this other population, who wouldn’t work either way? Who perhaps couldn’t, physically, work either way?
Work is a good thing. But mercy is a good thing too. There has been a rough consensus, reflected in government policy, in the United States that poor people should not starve, whether or not they work. They should not die for lack of medical care. There should be a (patchwork, imperfect) safety net to prevent the absolute worst possible outcomes.
The moral case against work requirements isn’t that they don’t work, but that they can never work perfectly. There will always be people kicked off benefits who also do not or cannot work — and they will be without any economic resources at all in one of the richest nations the world has ever known.
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Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Reuters)
After her years-long effort to obstruct Medicare for All, Representative Nancy Pelosi has just received an award of honor from hospital lobbyists.
While the American Hospital Association (AHA) says it’s “dedicated to providing high-quality care to all patients,” the lobbying group actually serves the financial interests of its hospital chain members — which profit immensely from the country’s private insurance system.
“Throughout her career, Speaker Emerita Pelosi has been a friend to America’s hospitals and health systems,” said Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the AHA, in a press release announcing Pelosi’s award. “She is a champion for better health care, an advocate for patients, and she continues to work hard to expand opportunities for children, seniors, students, veterans, and the poor.”
The Lever was denied access to the award ceremony event at the AHA’s annual meeting at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Washington, DC, on Monday evening. When our researcher arrived at the event, an AHA staffer said he would connect him with a communications representative — but instead, a hotel manager then approached and threatened to have the researcher arrested if he did not leave, because he had not registered earlier for the event.
The AHA, which raised $129 million in 2021, is a powerful Washington lobbying operation that represents large hospital chains like CommonSpirit Health, Ascension, and Tenet Healthcare.
Hospitals are a key driver of exorbitant health care costs in the US. While hospitals often criticize the health insurance industry for wrongfully denying patients’ claims and creating financial barriers to care, hospital lobbyists work hand in hand with insurers to preserve our insurance-based health care system. That’s because private health insurers pay hospitals significantly more than they receive from the government-run Medicare program.
The AHA is part of a health care industry coalition made up of insurers, pharmaceutical firms, and hospital companies that spent $81 million from 2018–21 on a TV and lobbying campaign opposing Medicare for All, which would create a comprehensive, universal health care system and eliminate the need for private insurance. The coalition also fought more limited proposed reforms like a public health insurance plan and efforts to lower the Medicare eligibility age from sixty-five years.
When Pelosi spoke at the AHA’s annual meeting in 2019, the organization’s top lobbyist, Tom Nickels, predicted that Pelosi would work to block Medicare for All legislation supported by progressives, in order to protect moderate Democrats in swing districts.
“She’s trying to thread the needle here, and she understands the difficulty that Medicare for All will provide for her caucus and for some of her members who have to go get reelected,” Nickels said. “And my guess is she’s going to be pretty adept in making sure that nothing comes up that harms her members.”
He was right: in the four years that Pelosi was speaker again — the first two with a Republican Senate and president, followed by two years where Democrats had a governing trifecta — the House never held a vote on Medicare for All legislation.
House Democrats additionally never voted on any legislation to create a “public option” or a government-run health insurance plan, as the party and President Joe Biden had pledged they would do during the 2020 election, or on any bill to lower the Medicare age.
Instead, Democrats used the first two years of the Biden administration to put more Americans on private health insurance plans — further enriching health insurers. They did so by expanding subsidies available for individual marketplace plans plagued with high out-of-pocket costs and routine claim denials.
The AHA’s 2021 advocacy agenda included ensuring “the stability and affordability of the health insurance marketplaces by expanding eligibility for and the level of subsidies.” Last year, the group called for those subsidies to be permanently expanded.
On Monday, Pelosi received the AHA’s 2023 award of honor, which it gives to “individuals or organizations in recognition of exemplary contributions to the health and well-being of our nation through leadership on major health policy or social initiatives.”
The organization praised Pelosi for her role in passing the Affordable Care Act, the Democrats’ 2010 health care law, as well as passing a limited drug reform measure that the party passed last year allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices on a handful of drugs for the first time.
According to an AHA blog post, “Pelosi championed the work of AHA members during her speech. She also recognized Wendell Primus, her former senior health policy advisor, who received the AHA Honorary Life Membership Award.”
Primus, who recently retired, opposed Medicare for All as a senior health care adviser for Pelosi. Earlier this month, he told the Washington Post that the concept is “too expensive” and “could never pass.”
In February, Primus received an award for “outstanding government service” from the American Medical Association, a doctors lobby.
The three-day AHA event featured speeches from several Washington lawmakers from both parties, including Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Todd Young (R-IN). Reps. Larry Buschon (R-IN), Madeleine Dean (D-PA), and Adrian Smith (R-NE) were there, too.
Then, there was the entertainment — the journalists, pundits, and political operatives who often get paid tens of thousands of dollars or more to speak at industry events like these.
Karl Rove, the longtime GOP strategist and top aide to former president George W. Bush, and David Axelrod, a CNN commentator who served as a senior advisor to former president Barack Obama, spoke during a luncheon for AHA’s political action committee.
While the Lever was blocked from attending AHA’s awards ceremony, the conference featured several prominent representatives of corporate media.
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, cofounders of the news site Axios, spoke at AHA’s luncheon for “government relations officers,” meaning lobbyists. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart moderated AHA’s leadership awards luncheon.
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Rep. Zooey Zephyr was censured after opposing a bill restricting medical care for transgender youth. (photo: Reuters)
The Republican-controlled Montana House of Representatives voted Wednesday to censure the state’s first and only openly transgender lawmaker, Zooey Zephyr, banning her from the House floor and forbidding her from speaking, a week after Zephyr delivered a searing condemnation of a bill that would ban gender-affirming healthcare for youth. Zephyr will only be able to cast votes remotely for the remainder of the legislative session. We speak to Zephyr about the spate of anti-trans bills that target trans youth across the country and how “far-right” legislatures like Montana’s are attempting to “silence those who are holding them accountable.”
REP. ZOOEY ZEPHYR: If you disallow the use of the medical care that is accepted by every major medical association, if you disallow that care and don’t allow people to have access to that, the only therapy left is either, A, meaningless or, B, conversion therapy, which is torture. … If you are forcing a trans child to go through puberty when they are trans, that is tantamount to torture. And this body should be ashamed. And if you vote yes on this amendment and yes on this bill … if you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.
AMY GOODMAN: After this speech, Republican lawmakers in Montana moved to censure Zooey Zephyr. Ahead of the vote to ban her from the House floor, she addressed her fellow lawmakers again.
REP. ZOOEY ZEPHYR: Today I rise in defense of those constituents, of my community and of democracy itself. Last week, I spoke on the governor’s amendments to Senate Bill 99, which banned gender-affirming care. This was a bill that was targeting the LGBTQ community in Montana. This Legislature has systematically attacked that community. We have seen bills targeting our art forms, our books, our history and our healthcare. And I rose up in defense of my community that day, speaking to harms that these bills bring and that I have firsthand experience knowing about. I have had friends who have taken their lives because of these bills. I have fielded calls from families in Montana, including one family whose trans teenager attempted to take her life while watching a hearing on one of the anti-trans bills. …
So, when I rose up and said there is blood on your hands, I was not being hyperbolic. I was speaking to the real consequences of the votes that we, as legislators, take in this body. And when the speaker asks me to apologize on behalf of decorum, what he is really asking me to do is be silent when my community is facing bills that get us killed. He is asking me to be complicit in this Legislature’s eradication of our community. And I refuse to do so, and I will always refuse to do so.
AMY GOODMAN: That was state Representative Zooey Zephyr, Montana’s first and only openly transgender lawmaker. The Republican-led Montana Legislature has voted to ban her from the House floor and has forbid her from speaking there.
Well, Zooey Zephyr is refusing to stay silent and joins us now from Montana’s capital, Helena, Montana.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, state Representative Zooey Zephyr. You represent Missoula, a place that’s very close to my heart. My first college roommate was from Missoula. Her dad was the bandleader at Hellgate High. Talk about what happened on the House floor and your response to the censure, saying you cannot speak in the House of Representatives from the floor.
REP. ZOOEY ZEPHYR: What we saw in the vote to censure me was inherently undemocratic. When the speaker had been refusing to recognize me for my comments on Senate Bill 99, he was taking away the voice of the Montanans who elected me to speak on their behalf. And when those community members showed up in protest and said, “Let her speak! Let her speak!” and he gaveled them down, he was continuing that process of silencing the people who sent me there to represent them.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what this anti-trans bill is, why you so fiercely objected to it.
REP. ZOOEY ZEPHYR: The bill we were looking at bans gender-affirming care for trans youth in the state of Montana. And that begins with something as simple as social transitioning. That’s what the earliest form of gender-affirming care is, which is letting someone grow their hair out or cut it short, to go by a different name, etc. And this bill banned the use of state property for advocating for anything like that. As you get older, it looks like going on puberty blockers. Again, and this healthcare is done slowly, carefully, in conjunction with the child, the parent, endocrinologists, health practitioners, following best practices by every major medical association. And so, when you’re looking at bills that take that necessary care away, what you’re looking at is things that make the conditions for trans people impossible in our state.
AMY GOODMAN: The motion to censure you was introduced by the Montana House Majority Leader Representative Sue Vinton, a Republican from Billings, Montana. This is what she said about you Wednesday ahead of the vote.
MAJORITY LEADER SUE VINTON: Every member of a legislature is presumed to be the equal of each member, and each has rights that must be respected. The rights of the minority and the majority both must be protected. Freedom in this body involves obedience to all the rules of this body, including the rules of decorum. … Monday, this body witnessed one of its members participating in conduct that disrupted and disturbed the orderly proceedings of this body. This member did not accede to the order of the speaker to come to order and, finally, to clear the floor, and instead encouraged the continuation of the disruption of this body.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to Vinton’s comments?
REP. ZOOEY ZEPHYR: So, when we talk about every member being equal to one another, it’s important to note the way that they are applying the rules of decorum unequally. We have had legislators who have screamed in their closing. We have legislators who insinuated that my very existence is somehow sexualizing children. And we objected in the moment, and then we moved on. Decorum rules weren’t used. There were hearings where we begged the Republican chairs not to allow harmful, discriminatory language, and they said, “A lot of people have a lot of opinions. We’ll carry on.” So what you’re seeing here is a Republican-controlled legislature using a tool like decorum as a way to silence those who are holding them accountable for the very real harm that their bills bring.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, just to understand what’s happening to you right now, you were sitting in a hallway trying to work Thursday — you had been banned from the House floor — and they tried to kick you out of the hallway, as well? Can you talk about the Montana Freedom Caucus, which called for your immediate censure, who also deliberately misgendered you in a statement they wrote?
REP. ZOOEY ZEPHYR: So, much like the unequal and hypocritical ways decorum has been enforced, I’m not surprised that the Freedom Caucus would misgender me in the same moment that they call for civility in discourse. It’s a caucus that calls for limited government, while simultaneously using government to take away necessary and life-saving healthcare for people in my community.
And I sat down Thursday. I walked in, and I said, “I want to be as close to the People’s House as I can be, so I can speak to legislators, so that even despite the fact that my voice and the voice of my constituents isn’t allowed on the floor, I can do everything in my power to make sure their voice is heard.”
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about your decision, state Representative Zephyr, to run for office, and the significance with you being the only, the first transgender lawmaker in Montana.
REP. ZOOEY ZEPHYR: So, I testified last session, in 2021, and as I was testifying on a trans sports ban, I saw that the people listening on the panels didn’t seem to want to hear. And then I watched votes on anti-trans legislation pass by a single vote. And I thought, “I need to be in that room.” You need representation in that room if you’re ever going to be able to move the needle. And so, I was happy to run, go through my community, where I’ve lived and walked through and spend all of my time, and they were gracious enough to elect me. And I’m happy to serve in Montana alongside Representative SJ Howell, who’s the first — the state’s first nonbinary representative.
AMY GOODMAN: So, tell us about the other anti-trans and bills targeting the LGBTQ community that are going through the Montana Legislature, and then talk about where the governor stands.
REP. ZOOEY ZEPHYR: So, we’re seeing an array of bills targeting the LGBTQ community, and particularly the trans community. We’ve seen books that are trying — or, we’ve seen bills that are trying to ban our books under the guise of obscenity laws. We’ve seen bills that are trying to ban our art forms under the anti-drag laws. We’ve seen bills that tell students they’re allowed to misgender people. We’ve seen bills that say trans people don’t get healthcare, and even if they have access to healthcare, medical practitioners who don’t want to provide it can just ignore you for any reason.
And these bills, again, as I mentioned, began with the sports bans. And so we’re seeing the moment people got a foot in the door, saying, “Oh, trans equality has limitations” — they put an asterisk on that — soon as that got in, they started escalating the attacks, which is what we’re seeing in Montana and across the country, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: And Governor Gianforte, whose own son, David, is nonbinary, who’s lobbied his dad to reject the series of bills attacking the trans community?
REP. ZOOEY ZEPHYR: You know, I have not had direct contact with the Governor’s Office on these bills. I have spoke to folks in his staff about these bills and how they’re harmful policy, how they hurt our community, and how, quite frankly, communities in Montana do not want this.
And so, one of the things it’s important to remember is that trans people, we live lives full of joy. We walk through and are a part of our communities. And so, whether you’re working a day job in an office or you’re the governor of the state of Montana, you are never far from someone who is trans or nonbinary and worthy of love.
AMY GOODMAN: And let me ask you about what happened in Nebraska, Democratic state Senator Megan Hunt facing a so-called conflict of interest investigation after a right-wing lawmaker complained she didn’t officially disclose that she had a transgender child before voting against a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors. She is saying that the probe is “harassment.”
REP. ZOOEY ZEPHYR: I think that, much like Tennessee, much like here, much like Representative Mauree Turner in Oklahoma, what you’re seeing is far-right legislatures are passing policies, are bringing policies forward, that are incredibly harmful, get marginalized communities hurt and killed. And those communities and the people that care about those communities are beginning to rise up and say, “This isn’t acceptable. This isn’t something we can stand for.” And we’re holding them accountable to the real harm that these bills do.
And obviously, the attacks on Senator Hunt are harassment. You wouldn’t expect every time a bill on public education came up, someone to disclose that their child went to a public school. This is targeting in a way much like decorum was used against me. They are looking for processes and procedures in the rulebook that they can use to justify silencing and targeting someone for standing up for vulnerable communities.
AMY GOODMAN: Montana state Representative Zooey Zephyr, we are going to break and then come back, and we’re going to invite Justin Jones into this conversation. I am wondering if they decided to simply ban you from the floor — that’s not hardly “simply,” but — and not expel you entirely, precisely of what happened to the Justins in Tennessee, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson of Memphis and Nashville, because they were reinstated by their communities. We’ll be back with Democratic Montana state Representative Zooey Zephyr in a moment, will be joined by Tennessee state Representative Justin Jones. Stay with us.
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A candlelight vigil for Jamal Khashoggi. (photo: Anadolu Agency)
According to the Washington Post, which cited newly-released documents that it obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the NSA’s former head, Keith Alexander had secured consulting deals with foreign governments which amounted to $2 million after leaving office.
While the majority of that amount was paid by the Japanese government in a $1.3 million contract to provide advice on cyber issues, his consultancy firm struck a $700,000 contract with Saudi Arabia’s government to advise the Kingdom on cyber-security.
The revelations build on records that the paper previously obtained and reported on last year, which show that Alexander’s consulting firm – IronNet Cybersecurity – signed a contract with Riyadh in July 2018 to develop the Prince Mohammed bin Salman College of Cyber Security, named after the controversial Saudi Crown Prince who is reported to have ordered the killing of journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, in Istanbul’s Saudi consulate only months later, despite his denial of any involvement.
As federal law requires retired service members to obtain government permission before they can accept any compensation from foreign powers – due to concern that the payments could compromise their allegiance to Washington – the US State Department approved Alexander’s request to serve on the College’s board of advisers in January 2019, three months after Khashoggi’s assassination.
The freshly-released records are primarily a result of last year’s investigation, which found that over 500 retired US military personnel – many of whom were generals and admirals – had accepted employment from foreign nations, mostly as contractors for governments infamous for human rights abuses and political repression.
After long concealing information regarding those foreign contracts and jobs, the US government was legally required to release the records when the Washington Post won a two-year legal battle with the State Department and the various sectors of the armed forces.
As a retired army general and the former head of the largest US intelligence agency, Alexander is reported to have received the most foreign compensation of any retired US service member since 2012, and is among 22 retired generals and admirals who managed to secure consulting contracts and other work from Saudi Arabia over the past decade, largely as advisers to the Saudi Defence Ministry, led by bin Salman until last year.
Such contracts were not limited to Saudi Arabia, but also included the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has reportedly hired more retired American service members than any other country in the world, as 280 were shown to have secured jobs as military contractors and consultants for the small Gulf power since 2015.
The paper also reported that the Pentagon overwhelmingly automatically approves foreign employment requests by retired service members, with around 95 per cent of more than 500 applications submitted between 2015 and 2021 having been granted.
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The rocket lifted off in the early morning hours Thursday from its facility in Boca Chica, Texas. (photo: Reuters)
The most powerful rocket ever built destroyed its launchpad and sent a plume of concrete dust and rubble into the air
The shattering force of last Thursday’s launch in south Texas sent a cloud of pulverized concrete raining over a small town nearby, federal regulators said, raising fresh questions about the environmental impact of ramped-up launch operations at the site.
The blastoff from the SpaceX facility, adjacent to a national wildlife refuge near Boca Chica Beach, also hurled large chunks of concrete and metal thousands of feet away and ignited a 3.5-acre (1.4-hectare) fire on nearby grounds, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Damage to the launchpad, the floor of which was largely demolished during liftoff, was visible in photos of the aftermath. No one was hurt, and no dead birds or wildlife were found on lands owned or managed by the refuge, the agency said.
The rocket itself tumbled out of control and blew up in midair a few minutes into its flight.
Environmentalists seized on the report as evidence that a more in-depth study of potential hazards to public safety and wildlife should be conducted before further Starship launches are conducted at Boca Chica.
“They contemplated debris from these launches, but not part of the launchpad itself being blown out miles away and scattered across the landscape,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “What happened is not what they anticipated.”
Nasa is counting on Starship as a major component of its Artemis program, aimed at returning astronauts to the moon in the next few years as a stepping stone to eventual human exploration of Mars.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Fish and Wildlife Service findings.
The 20 April launch was days after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted SpaceX a license to launch the Starship via its Super Heavy rocket booster. The uncrewed test flight was the first for the combined two-stage vehicle.
Despite the outcome, SpaceX hailed the aborted mission as a qualified success. The company said it was satisfied in getting Starship off the ground in its maiden test flight, the launch a valuable source of data for further development of the spacecraft.
The report by the Fish and Wildlife Service, part of the US interior department, was the first account from government regulators on the extent of collateral damage from the launch, apart from the aerial explosion of the Starship itself.
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of SpaceX, said on Friday that the California-based company now plans to install a water-cooling system and steel foundation for the next launch of the rocket, the most powerful ever built.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last week said it had opened a “mishap” investigation, as required by law, effectively grounding the rocket ship until SpaceX determines a root cause for any failures and takes corrective action.
Concrete dust cloud
On the ground, the force of roughly 30 rocket engines firing at full power pummeled the launchpad at liftoff, carving a crater several feet deep into the ground.
A resulting plume of concrete dust drifted as far as 6.5 miles (10.5km) to the north-west, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Pulverized material fell over tidal flats in the area and on Port Isabel, a town near the state’s far south-eastern tip, said agency spokesperson Aubry Buzek.
An environmental assessment that the agency approved last year for the recently expanded Starbase facility envisions blastoff debris remaining within a 700-acre (approximately 1 sq mile or 283 hectares) zone around the launchpad.
Concrete chunks and metal shrapnel flung thousands of feet from the launchpad would likely have landed in critical habitat for the piping plover, a shorebird on the endangered species list, Margolis said.
Before the FAA granted the license, environmentalists had pressed for a more extensive environmental impact study. Margolis said the launch mishap proved the original environmental analysis was inadequate.
Reopening the SpaceX facility to a full-scale environmental review would set back Starship development, complicating Nasa’s Artemis timeline, as well as the anticipated use of the spacecraft for Pentagon and commercial missions.
Musk suggested last week that SpaceX could have planned upgrades to the launch site ready for installation before the next launch attempt in one to two months.
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