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Peter Wehner | Marjorie Taylor Greene's Civil War
Peter Wehner, The Atlantic
Wehner writes: "It was only a matter of time before Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene - a peddler of far-right conspiracy theories, a speaker at white-nationalist rallies, a supporter of political violence, and an all-around unhinged individual - would renew her call for secession."
The congresswoman is too influential within the GOP—and too representative of its views—for her calls for secession to be dismissed.
It was only a matter of time before Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—a peddler of far-right conspiracy theories, a speaker at white-nationalist rallies, a supporter of political violence, and an all-around unhinged individual—would renew her call for secession.
On Presidents’ Day, Greene tweeted:
The temptation of many people, eager to move past America’s political freak show, will be to ignore her comments and dismiss her as an outcast, a fringe figure, deranged but isolated. The less said about her, the better.
That’s unwise.
Greene is not just a member of Congress, not just a member of its Committee on Homeland Security; she has become a confidante of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. He has “forged an ironclad bond” with Greene, according to The New York Times. She has “taken on an outsize role as a policy adviser to Mr. McCarthy.” He has in turn lavished praise on her.
“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy told the Times. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.” He’ll even stick together with those arguing for secession, apparently.
Greene is not alone in her views. She is giving voice to a widespread and growing sentiment in the Republican Party. Among Republicans in the South, for example, support for secession was 66 percent in June 2021, according to a Bright Line Watch/YouGov poll. (The poll found support for secession growing among every partisan group in the months following the January 6 riot at the Capitol.)
Last summer, thousands of Texas Republicans approved a platform that called on the state legislature to authorize a referendum on secession from the United States. And shortly after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Rush Limbaugh, one of the most dominant figures on the American right, said, “I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking, ‘What in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York?’”
Limbaugh, who died in early 2021, added that “a lot of bloggers have written extensively about how distant … and how much more separated our culture is becoming politically and that it can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way.” (Limbaugh said of secession, “I myself haven’t made up my mind.”)
The Republican Party, forged a century and a half ago in the fight against secession, now finds the move worth contemplating.
Civil War–like secession isn’t going to happen in the United States, at least not anytime soon. But all of the emotions that are attached to a desire for secession—seething resentment, existential fear, an unforgiving spirit, contempt and hatred for those who disagree with you—are stoked by the kind of rhetoric employed by Greene and those who see the world as she does. Such language will further destroy America’s political culture and could easily lead to extensive political violence.
Don’t expect a wave of Republican lawmakers and current and potential presidential candidates to get on the secession bandwagon. That is still too extreme for most of them, at least right now. But I doubt that many Republicans, aside from courageous figures such as Utah Governor Spencer Cox and Liz Cheney, the former chair of the House Republican Conference, will call Greene out. (Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan have shown integrity throughout the MAGA years as well.)
But by and large, if Republicans call Greene out, they will offer only gentle rebukes. Mostly, they’ll want to ignore her comments, change the topic, and try to redirect attention to Democrats. During the past half a dozen years, Republicans have perfected whataboutism.
What the rest of us learned during the Trump era is that a party led by craven men and women—some of them cynical, others true believers, almost all afraid to speak out—will end up normalizing the transgressive, unethical, and moronic.
Trump did horrifying things at the end of his presidency, including attempting a coup and inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol. The majority of Republicans tolerated what he did, to a degree that simply wouldn’t have happened at the beginning of his presidency. It took time for the corruption to fully take hold, for the party—lawmakers and the right-wing media complex—to fall completely into line. But fall in line they did. Trump may be losing his grip on the Republican Party, and that is a good thing, but his nihilistic imprint remains all over it.
MAGA Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene have added calls for secession to their corrosive lies about the 2020 presidential election. More incendiary and treacherous claims will follow. Greene and McCarthy—one crazed, the other cowardly—embody a large swath of the modern-day GOP. Any party that makes room for seditionists and secessionists is sick and dangerous.
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A board with an image of a Russian service member with a slogan reading 'Glory to the Heroes of Russia' in Moscow. (photo: Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters)
How a Former Caterer Created the Mercenary Army Fighting Putin's War in Ukraine
Dave Davis, NPR
Davis writes: "It's been one year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As the Russian military has struggled in the war, tens of thousands of mercenary soldiers, many of them convicts recruited from Russian prisons, have joined the fight."
It's been one year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As the Russian military has struggled in the war, tens of thousands of mercenary soldiers, many of them convicts recruited from Russian prisons, have joined the fight.
Veteran foreign correspondent Shaun Walker has written about the company that recruits and fields the mercenaries, the Wagner Group, as well as the colorful past of its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin. He describes Prigozhin as a tough-talking ex-con who transformed himself, first into a powerful businessman and now a trusted warlord to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"[Prigozhin] spent his whole 20s pretty much in jail. He emerges just before his 30th birthday into this rapidly changing country [in] the very last death throes of the Soviet Union," Walker says. "He comes out of prison and he starts off selling hotdogs. ... But very quickly, he moves on to bigger things."
Among Prigozhin's many business ventures was a catering service that handled high-profile occasions for the Russian president. Eventually the catering contracts expanded to include military services. In 2014, Walker says, the nature of Prigozhin's business shifted when Putin decided to annex Crimea and invade Ukraine for the first time.
"The Kremlin is sort of looking for ways to disguise the fact that its troops are active in Ukraine [and] Prigozhin steps in," Walker says. "He offers to set up a kind of private military company, which will be able to do the Kremlin's work for it, but retain that kind of deniability. And then that moment, I think, is really the beginning of the Prigozhin we have today as the kind of warlord."
Walker reports that Prigozhin has become a wealthy man and an increasingly visible political actor within Russia, clashing publicly with Russian military leaders. With Putin's blessing, the Wagner Group has recruited inmates from Russian prisons to fight in the war in Ukraine — promising a pardon if they survive six months on the battlefield.
"The basic pitch is six months: It's going to be horrible. It's going to be very difficult. If you try to run away, we'll shoot you. If you don't give your everything, we will shoot you," Walker says. "But you go to the front, you put in your service ... after six months, you're free to go."
The Wagner Group forces have suffered high casualty rates in the war and have been accused of atrocities against civilians. The New York Times estimated that about 40,000 inmates have joined the Russian forces — roughly 10% of the country's prison population.
"It's just so out of the realms of fantasy that this former convict is going to fly around prisons in his helicopter and offer people salvation for fighting for him at the front, and then lead these battalions of prisoners to their almost certain death," Walker says. "It's so dystopian that it's really hard to believe. But yet it has happened."
Interview highlights
On how Prigozhin's criminal past enables him to connect to prisoners
He's a big guy. He's got a shaved head. He speaks in quite coarse language. It's clear that this is not a polished guy. This is not a particularly well-educated or cultured guy. ... Me and my colleague, when we were researching this article, we managed to get hold of a few prisoners who are still in prison and speak with them either by text message or in other ways, and ask them how they saw this guy, why people agreed to go, why, in that case, they didn't agree to go. And they all said to us, "We could see from this guy that he was one of us. We kind of respected him because he'd also been in prison." ... They all said, You could see that he was a former [inmate], the way he talked, the way he kind of gave his word that if they fought for him, he would give them their freedom. All of these people said, "We wouldn't trust a normal Russian official, but this guy had something about him that made us think he was one of us." ...
He's not sugarcoating this at all. He's not pretending that this is going to be pleasant or this is going to be a holiday. He's basically saying, look, you're probably going to die. It's going to be absolutely horrible. The fighting is incredibly intense. We're going to throw you right in at the front line. But if you survive this, I've got your back.
On Prigozhin's recruitment pitch to prisoners to come fight in the war
Even if you've got 20 years left on your sentence, if you come with [Wagner Group for] six months, you will be free. Rights advocates, lawyers say they have no idea on what basis he's able to make this offer. There's nothing in the Russian legal code, and there's been no amendments to suggest that it's possible to simply take people out of prisons and pardon them. But the first set of people have already done that six months and some of them have been freed. So it's clear that Prigozhin has the authority to do this.
On Prigozhin's goal of changing Russian society
What Prigozhin is trying to do is really redefine who makes up Russian society and the Russian nation. ... Part of Prigozhin's pitch really is that patriotic, real Russia is not the guys that go to Paris for the weekend. It's not the cosmopolitan elites. It's these prisoners. And if you want to get Freudian about it, he spent his 20s in prison himself. So there is part of this, I think that is about this guy saying to these people, even convicted of horrific crimes, you do your time at the front and you will get redemption and you will be released back into society and you will become part of society. And I guess in certain constituencies in Russia, that's something people find horrifying. And in other constituencies, it's something people find perhaps quite appealing.
On the little training the Wagner Group mercenary soldiers get
Perhaps a couple of weeks [of training]. All of the reports we've had of the way that the convicts are used by the Wagner Group is that they're not used on sort of difficult strategic operations or anything particularly targeted and careful. They're really used as cannon fodder. Talking to Ukrainians who have been on the other side of the lines and kind of watched the Wagner troops approach them, they've said the same thing: that it's really strength in numbers. It's a bit of a disregard, really, for human life. And for those who have not fancied it and have decided that they want to either defect or don't want to advance, we've had numerous credible reports that there's been executions of their own people as kind of punishment for disobeying orders and to keep everybody else in line and forcing them to to sort of surge forward in these pretty grim, almost suicidal movements forward. ...
We've had very different figures of how many have been captured or killed or wounded. But Ukraine has claimed that more than two-thirds of [the Wagner troops] have been either killed, captured or wounded. And we can definitely see, just from the number of fresh graves in the Wagner cemetery in southern Russia, that they certainly have been taking huge casualties.
On the dangers of investigating Prigozhin
People who look into Prigozhin's activities tend to have rather worrying, sinister things happen to them. Soon after, one of the journalists [from Russia's Novaya Gazeta newspaper] who did one of the biggest investigations into Prigozhin had a severed ram's head delivered to his newsroom and a funeral wreath delivered to his home address. So it's kind of a bit of a sort of mafia touch.
[Alexei Navalny's] team did a series of investigations into Prigozhin and into how he was winning these government contracts, back in 2015, 2016. And the main investigator on these was a woman called Lyubov Sobol, who is one of Navalny's top aides. And not long after one of these investigations came out, her husband was just arriving home to their apartment when [an] unknown assailant appeared, stabbed him in the leg with a syringe and ran off, and he then collapsed. I was talking to Lyubov about this recently when we were preparing this article about Prigozhin. Now she is convinced that, of course, this attack was linked to her investigation and they managed to rush her husband to [the] hospital. He got very quick medical attention. She said that the doctors told her that if it had been a bit longer, he may not have survived. It was a very strong animal tranquilizer that had been injected into his leg. ... So, yes, some pretty sinister things can happen to you if you cross Yevgeny Prigozhin, let's put it that way.
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Fox News headquarters in New York in 2018. (photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)
'Incredibly Damning:' Fox News Documents Stun Some Legal Experts
Paul Farhi, Jeremy Barr and Sarah Ellison, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The disclosure of emails and texts in which Fox News executives and personalities disparaged the same election conspiracies being floated on their shows has greatly increased the chances that a defamation case against the network will succeed, legal experts say."
The disclosure of behind-the-scenes emails and texts greatly increased the chances that Dominion will win its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, experts say.
The disclosure of emails and texts in which Fox News executives and personalities disparaged the same election conspiracies being floated on their shows has greatly increased the chances that a defamation case against the network will succeed, legal experts say.
Dominion Voting Systems included dozens of messages sent internally by Fox co-founder Rupert Murdoch and on-air stars such as Tucker Carlson in a brief made public last week in support of the voting technology company’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against the network. Dominion claims it was damaged in the months after the 2020 election after Fox repeatedly aired false statements that it was part of a conspiracy to fraudulently elect Joe Biden.
Dominion said the emails and texts show that Fox’s hosts and executives knew the claims being peddled by then-president Donald Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell weren’t true — some employees privately described them as “ludicrous” and “mind blowingly nuts”— but Fox kept airing them to keep its audience from changing channels.
If so, the messages could amount to powerful body of evidence against Fox, according to First Amendment experts, because they meet a critical and difficult-to-meet standard in such cases.
“You just don’t often get smoking-gun evidence of a news organization saying internally, ‘We know this is patently false, but let’s forge ahead with it,’” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah professor who specializes in media law.
Under New York Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court ruling that has guided libel and defamation claims for nearly 60 years, a plaintiff like Dominion must show that a defendant like Fox published false statements with “actual malice” — meaning that it was done “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
Based on the messages revealed last week, “I think that Dominion both will and should prevail,” said Laurence Tribe, a former Harvard law professor. “If anything, the landmark this case is likely to establish will help show that New York Times v. Sullivan” is not an impossible legal hurdle to clear, as some critics have claimed.
“While it’s true that the Supreme Court [in Sullivan] has set a high bar for plaintiffs, a high bar doesn’t mean no bar,” said Sonja R. West, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Georgia law school “What we’re seeing in this case looks an awful lot like the exception that proves the rule. The First Amendment often protects speakers who make innocent or even negligent mistakes, but this does not mean they can knowingly tell lies that damage the reputation of others.”
In fact, Fox has cited the ruling in its defense, arguing that its reporting and commentary on Dominion were legitimate newsgathering activities that Sullivan was designed to protect.
Fox said in a statement that Dominion has used “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law,” In the network’s own brief seeking summary judgment, Fox’s lawyers argued: “It is plain as day that any reasonable viewer would understand that Fox News was covering and commenting on allegations about Dominion, not reporting that the allegations were true.”
Fox’s attempt to defend itself with Sullivan notably clashes with efforts by some prominent conservatives to undo the ruling. Trump has said numerous times it should be easier for people to claim libel against the news media. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has backed state legislation to do just that. Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch have also suggested the Sullivan standard should be revisited.
The “actual malice” standard makes it hard to win defamation lawsuits because of the difficulty in demonstrating a reporter or publisher‘s state of mind before publication. It places the burden on the plaintiff to prove that the reporter was not simply just wrong, but knew it and proceeded regardless.
Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox has already progressed further than many defamation suits, said Charles Harder, an attorney who has represented Trump and his wife Melania in libel cases. He said judges often dismiss such suits before the start of discovery — the process of collecting of internal documents by the plaintiff that resulted in Fox texts and emails being made public last week. Dominion’s representatives spent months obtaining the emails and text messages and conducting depositions with the Fox hosts and executives who were cited in the brief disclosed last week.
“The key here is that Dominion was allowed to take discovery and obtain the internal communications at Fox,” said Harder, who also represented professional wrestler Hulk Hogan in an invasion-of-privacy action that resulted in a $140 million verdict against Gawker Media in 2016. “Too many plaintiffs, likely with meritorious cases, have their cases dismissed early and are denied the opportunity to obtain evidence to prove their claims.”
Unless Fox can persuade Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis to dismiss the case or strikes a settlement agreement with Dominion, it will probably have to face a jury. That could prove perilous, said Harder.
“In my experience, juries have no sympathy for media companies that knowingly cause harm to others,” he said.
Last year a jury in Connecticut in October ordered Alex Jones to pay $965 million to the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, whom he had repeatedly lied about on his shows. Amid a jury trial in 2017, Disney-owned ABC News paid a beef producer more than $177 million to settle allegations that it had slandered the company by describing one of its meat products as “pink slime” on-air.
Fox has questioned Dominion’s claim to $1.6 billion in damages, arguing that the figure is many times greater than Dominion’s net worth. “The record confirms that Dominion has not suffered any economic harm at all,” Fox wrote in a brief. “Its financials are better than ever.”
Yet some legal scholars are stunned by the behind-the-scenes statements collected by Dominion, and how blatantly Fox’s insiders expressed doubts about what their company was putting on the air.
“Those of us who study these sorts of defamation claims against the media are much more accustomed to cases that have a variety of pieces of circumstantial evidence of reckless disregard for the truth,” Andersen Jones said. “This filing is different.”
She noted that the internal messages show key figures at Fox casting aspersions on Fox’s own decisions. They also show an unusually clear timeline and motivation, she said, noting that Fox continued to broadcast allegedly defamatory statements even after Dominion had alerted the network that the claims were false. There’s also evidence that Fox executives decided to keep broadcasting the false statements because they feared losing viewers if they didn’t.
“We just don’t have examples of major media cases with this kind of evidentiary record,” she said.
West put it even more starkly.
The messages, she said, are “incredibly damning.”
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An overreliance on consultants is to blame for public sector debacles like the rollout of Healthcare.gov. (photo: John Taggart/The New York Times)
The Real Reason It Costs So Much to Build New Subways in America
Henry Grabar, Slate
Grabar writes: "Despite constant crowing from bloggers, newspaper investigations, Elon Musk starting his own tunnel company, and a scathing federal report, there has been no real effort to address spiraling transit costs, either from Washington or local authorities - even as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law starts distributing $105 billion to intercity rail and public transit."
The real reason it costs so damn much to build new subways in America.
For the past decade, as the cost of building American mass transit has soared to world records, advocates have found themselves in a bind. Should they draw attention to the problem, fighting for top-to-bottom reform now so that future investments don’t make the mistakes of the past? Or should they stay quiet, because such an effort would be politically ugly and further cement the American double standard by which transit spending is endlessly scrutinized but highway widening rolls on, no matter how many times state transportation departments fudge their numbers?
So far, the country is going down the second path. Despite constant crowing from bloggers, newspaper investigations, Elon Musk starting his own tunnel company, and a scathing federal report, there has been no real effort to address spiraling transit costs, either from Washington or local authorities—even as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law starts distributing $105 billion to intercity rail and public transit. When I asked the CEO of Amtrak in 2021 about why the company’s train tunnel beneath the Hudson River would cost $11 billion—many times more than similar projects in peer countries—he disputed the premise of the question: “I don’t know that that’s an astronomical number.”
A mammoth report from New York University’s Transit Costs Project makes a good case that the numbers are indeed astronomical, and there’s something we can do about it. Not just because bringing American transit construction into line with international best practices will make it possible for America to build big again—but also because what’s true for transit is true for the moribund public sector in general, and transit might be an object lesson.
According to authors Eric Goldwyn, Alon Levy, Elif Ensari, and Marco Chitti, there’s a lot going wrong with American transit projects—more on this in a moment—but many of the problems can be traced to a larger philosophy: outsourcing government expertise to a retainer of consultants. “What I’ve heard from consultants, which is surprising because they make so much money off this stuff, is, ‘Agencies don’t know what they want, and we have to figure it out,’ ” Goldwyn said.
For example, when the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority got to work on the Green Line Extension, the agency only had a half-dozen full-time employees managing the largest capital project the MBTA had ever undertaken. On New York’s Second Avenue subway, the most expensive mile of subway ever built, consultant contracts were more than 20 percent of construction costs—more than double what’s standard in France or Italy. By 2011, the MTA had trimmed its in-house capital projects management group of 1,600 full-time employees (circa 1990) to just 124, tasked with steering $20 billion in investment.
Perhaps the most notorious case in this business is the debacle of the California High-Speed Rail project, which in its early years had a tiny full-time staff managing hundreds of millions of dollars in consulting contracts. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has tried to right the balance more recently: “I’m getting rid of a lot of consultants,” he said in 2018. “How did we get away with this?”
There are certainly advantages to hiring highly specialized experts who can come in, complete a task, and go on their way. Subway construction is not a regular government function in most of the United States, so you can see why small agencies are reluctant to staff up—especially since federal funding is unreliable. But that excuse does not apply to organizations in cities like Seattle or Los Angeles with multi-decade pipelines and voter approval to spend tens of billions of dollars.
There’s another, bigger drawback to being so reliant on outside help. The second megaproject is easier than the first, and resurrecting lost expertise is always challenging. (Just ask the French, who are struggling to complete the country’s first new nuclear reactors in decades—everyone who worked on its admired ’70s nuclear program is long gone.) When it comes to building mass transit, America is a bit out of shape. Unfortunately, it’s not getting into shape. The report specifies (italics mine):
“With Phase 1 [of the Second Avenue Subway] complete, knowledge and lessons learned from Phase 1 have been retained by the consultant teams, and many of the most experienced managers from Phase 1 who learned by doing have left the agency, some have retired and others now work in the private sector. An agency staffer at another large North American agency we spoke to about its reliance on consultants explained that at her agency, it was the consultants who knew everything about past projects rather than agency staff.”
In any case, the benefits of hired guns apparently do not justify the evisceration of public-sector expertise. “Consultant teams need a client who knows what it wants and is technically competent enough to direct the consultants,” the Transit Costs Project concludes. Most U.S. transit agencies are too hollowed out to fit the bill. Even at the MTA, the nation’s biggest and busiest transit agency, engineering consultants like WSP, Aecom, and Arup function as a “security blanket” to handle endless studies, basic problems, and even core design guidelines.
“They studied everything,” Goldwyn said. “Whether or not the agency was well-equipped to absorb that information, I don’t have a good answer. Who’s in charge of capital construction at transit agencies? Many of these people have never delivered a transit project, and that’s not good.”
It’s that lack of institutional know-how, of which consultants are both a symptom and a cause, that really hampers projects. The lack of a good in-house team, for example, leads to farming out so-called “design-build” contracts, which ultimately produces more expensive projects by offloading risk to contractors, who bid accordingly. It means staff are overwhelmed by change orders as projects evolve. In the case of New York’s Second Avenue subway, the lack of a powerful, effective team of civil servants may also explain some inexplicable conflicts and mistakes: misunderstandings and feuds with local agencies, hugely overbuilt stations, and so little standardization that the escalators in the three new stops were built by three different companies.
Not all problems can be laid at the feet of consultant culture. Transit routes picked at the ballot box are bound to be worse than those drawn up by experts; transit’s role as a “job creation” bonanza doesn’t create incentives to be particularly efficient. But the takeaway here might be relevant for the public sector at large. That consultants are draining state capacity is also the argument of a forthcoming book by a pair of London-based academics. In The Big Con, Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington argue that consultants have hollowed out government functions well beyond transit construction.
As the title suggests, they take a view that consultants are not simply the beneficiaries of a reduced bureaucracy. On issues as diverse as vaccination campaigns and climate change preparedness, the role of consultants, they argue, is like a “psychotherapist having no interest in her clients becoming independent with strong mental health, but rather using that ill health to create a dependency and an ever greater flow of fees.” An overreliance on consultants, they argue, is actually to blame for public sector debacles like the rollout of Healthcare.gov.
That’s the story of the U.S. federal government since the 1960s, according to a theory outlined by John DiIulio in Bring Back the Bureaucrats. The shift to contractors in the place of federal employees, he argues, has created a federal apparatus that’s at once bigger, less efficient, and less accountable. It’s an apt description of what is happening to state and local governments, too, whose workforce is currently smaller than it was in 2008. Those diminished bureaucracies have trouble handling responsibilities like environmental review, which further erodes our ability to get things done.
In the case of the Transit Costs Project, the conclusion is not just the old left-wing bromide of investing in the public sector. Consultants are paid in public money, after all. It’s a philosophical shift toward an empowered, full-time civil servant class. Spending money now to save money later.
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Michael Adam Windecker II, FBI Informant. (photo: Michael Windecker/YouTube)
FBI Paid Informant to Sow Discord During 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests
Ashlee Banks, TheGrio
Banks writes: "A newly released investigative podcast revealed that the FBI paid a felon to infiltrate Denver's Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old man killed by law enforcement in Minneapolis, Minnesota."
“There was a predisposition within the FBI to view Black political activism as violent,” journalist Trevor Aaronson told theGrio.
A newly released investigative podcast revealed that the FBI paid a felon to infiltrate Denver’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old man killed by law enforcement in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Journalist Trevor Aaronson produced the podcast “Alphabet Boys,” which details how the FBI allegedly used Michael Adam Windecker II to target Black activists and coerce them into joining a plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.
According to the podcast, Windecker tried to recruit activist Zebbodios “Zebb” Hall to participate in the assassination plan. Hall said he refused and that Windecker, an ex-felon, coerced him to purchase a gun on his behalf.
Hall told theGrio, “I had to get this guy this gun because if I don’t get this guy this gun, he’s got my information. He’s got my family’s information.”
Aaronson told theGrio that Hall was frightened of what Windecker would do if he refused to conspire.
“Everyone I talked to described how they were deathly afraid of [Windecker]. He had pictures of dead ISIS fighters on his phone,” he claimed.
He added, “Windecker spoke of having killed people. He had a criminal history that was violent. And so, people that got close to him were afraid to back away from him, in part because they were fearing physical harm from him.”
Aaronson believes that Hall should not have faced any consequences for his actions.
“This crime was wholly manufactured and would not have taken place were it not for the FBI,” he argued. “Zab used FBI money to purchase a gun to give to an FBI informant who then gives that gun to the FBI. So, this was an entirely victimless client crime, and it was a crime that would not have happened were it not for the FBI pushing them to do this.”
Despite Aaronson’s analysis, FBI agents arrested Hall and charged him with a felony firearms violation. He pleaded guilty and was given a three-year probation sentence.
After the release of “Alphabet Boys,” Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon publicly condemned the FBI’s actions against BLM activists.
In statements provided to The Guardian by Wyden’s office, he said, “If the allegations in Mr. Aaronson’s podcast are true, the FBI’s use of an informant to spy on First Amendment-protected activity and stoke violence at peaceful protests is an outrageous abuse of law-enforcement resources and authority.”
He added, “The FBI owes the public a full accounting of its actions, including how anyone responsible for attempting to entrap and discredit racial justice activists will be held accountable.”
Many are comparing the Denver ordeal to the FBI’s 1956 Counterintelligence Program known as COINTELPRO. During that time, FBI agents infiltrated Black organizations like the Black Panther Party and violated the First Amendment rights of Black activists.
Aaronson told theGrio that the FBI used tactics that were “intrusive” and saw BLM as a “terrorist group.”
“There was a predisposition within the FBI to view Black political activism as violent…even though on its face the overwhelming majority of racial justice demonstrations that summer were peaceful,” he said.
He continued, “While COINTELPRO no longer exists, you can see very clearly in this case and in the summer of 2020 that many of these methods that were used to a devastating effect against the civil rights movement in the 1960s were used against the racial justice movement in 2020.”
Hall told theGrio that Windecker used an old FBI technique called “snitch-jacketing” and would accuse real activists of being FBI informants whenever people suspected he could be one.
Aaronson said the informant did that to “sow chaos” similar to what FBI informants did in the 60s.
“The COINTELPRO investigations of the ‘60s showed that the informants were encouraging violence, encouraging activists to commit crimes, but they were also accusing real activists and real leaders of these movements of being informants themselves,” he said.
Hall believes the FBI has a history of infiltrating Black organizations because “the government” fears how resilient Black Americans can be.
“Look what happened in 2020. Look at all those people out there. You had Black, brown, white, yellow, red, LGBT… you had everything. That’s what Black power is. They fear that. They see that through our perseverance, everything that we go through [threatens] their power,” he said.
Aaronson told theGrio, “The FBI has an enormous amount of power that’s received very little Congressional oversight.”
He noted that, following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI was granted a substantial amount of power.
“A lot of its practices such as sting operations and the use of informants were more tolerated by the American public,” he asserted.
He added, “Then you fast forward to 2020 and the racial justice demonstrations, and I think given this new power that it had been given in the post-9/11 era, the FBI kind of slipped back and returned to many of its ways during COINTELPRO.”
Hall told theGrio that he hopes his story will empower “people to start talking.”
He continued, “Look how many brothers and sisters have been locked up since the ’60s. Look how many Panthers are still locked up because people won’t talk. Spill the beans. I mean, you can’t say you’re about that life or are a revolutionary or anything if you ain’t willing to talk.”
Aaronson told theGrio that, despite the findings depicted in his podcast, he hopes people continue to protest.
“I think you’re allowing these tactics to win if ultimately you’re choosing not to exercise your First Amendment rights for fear of government infiltration,” he said.
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Kirk Dalrymple of the U.S. Marines watches as the statue of Saddam Hussein falls in Baghdad's Firdos Square in 2003. (photo: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)
Baghdad Memories: What the First Few Months of the US Occupation Felt Like to an Iraqi
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Guardian UK
Abdul-Ahad writes: "When I was 28, the US arrived in Baghdad. The soldiers were announced as liberators and their leaders talked of democracy. I watched the regime and Saddam statues fall, chaos reign and a sectarian war unfold."
When I was 28, the US arrived in Baghdad. The soldiers were announced as liberators and their leaders talked of democracy. I watched the regime and Saddam statues fall, chaos reign and a sectarian war unfold
On 9 April 2003, I stood on the roof of my building in Baghdad, looking at the clear sky. The city was quiet; the Americans had stopped their bombing early that morning. In the distance, I saw a helicopter, hanging low over the houses. Unlike the chubby Russian ones that we were used to, which swayed left and right like giant flying rams, this one was nimble, like an angry wasp.
Thirty-five years of Saddam Hussein’s rule had dissolved overnight, collapsing without a trace. Baghdad, that city of fear and oppression, was free for an hour, suspended between the departure of the dictator and the arrival of the occupiers.
In the years preceding the war I had been living in a small room, barely large enough to hold a single bed, a writing table and a trunk. A nook at one end housed the sink, the stove and the toilet. For decoration, I had painted one wall a bright orange-red, which amplified and radiated the hot Baghdad sunlight. The old air conditioner had died and I had no money to fix it. In the summer of 2002, the room was stifling hot, and I felt the walls were closing in on me. I hadn’t paid the rent for six months. As an architect working in private practice, I was paid $50 every few months. In the years of sanctions, I was doing ugly work for ugly people who had the money to afford their ugly houses. I wanted to leave the country, to travel and walk through the streets of different cities, but I was a military deserter, and without documentation I could not get a passport.
I had not been tortured by the mukhabarat, the regime intelligence service, nor did any of my family vanish into a mass grave, but like the rest of the nation, I was trapped with no hope and no prospects. What if, we wondered, the Leader were to become mortally ill one day? How would our lives change after his death? Would we be ruled by one of his sons? Would that be better than this? Worse? In the years before the invasion, I had felt that my life was seeping slowly away in that hot and oppressive place I called home. Now, aged 28, it seemed that a different life might be possible.
I went down to my room to listen to the news bulletin when the neighbour came knocking on my door. “The Americans are here,” he said with excitement.
“Yes, I heard on the radio that they had reached Hillah,” I said, referring to a city 60 miles south of Baghdad.
“Hillah?” the neighbour said with a grin. “They are here, down in the street.”
I went down, and I saw a few boat-like armoured amphibious vehicles spread around the intersection near my flat, as if the shores of Normandy lay just behind the buildings. They were slung with the soldiers’ large backpacks, covered in dust. Descending from one of these boats were American soldiers, like the ones we’d seen on TV, in my street, in my own city.
The soldiers spread across the road, knelt on a single knee and pointed their guns at us, the handful of people who stood watching them. Behind the soldiers came men dressed in blue vests and carrying big cameras. Their helmets bore the letters “TV”.
I sat on the kerb watching as the soldiers trained their guns at the buildings around them. One of the men in blue, tall with a bald head, and carrying two cameras with large zooms, was moving gingerly towards us, like a wildlife photographer approaching a herd of wild animals, not wanting to scare them away and yet not sure if they might charge him. He squatted a few feet in front of me and trained a long white lens at me; fuck off, I shooed him away, I didn’t want to become an item of news, another face of a defeated nation. The soldiers climbed back into their armoured boat-trucks and started driving down the road, past the national theatre and down Sadoon Street. A small crowd of men and children followed.
The armoured vehicles and the crowd moved slowly, passing in front of the Vatican embassy, where a papal diplomat, dressed in his black cassock with a purple sash around his waist, stood observing the invading army. He shook his head in disbelief and muttered to anyone who cared to listen that this was bad, that this was an illegal occupation. On the other side of the street, a chubby middle-aged Iraqi man, standing at the entrance of his shop, sputtered insults, but most of the crowd that followed the Americans was excited. The old and decaying regime had fallen. The armoured column came to a stop in front of the Meridian and Sheraton hotels, where most of the international media had set up base. In front of the hotels stood a large statue of Saddam, his right arm stretched awkwardly into the sky, inviting looks of scorn and spite from the crowd below, like someone still lingering uninvited long after the party was over.
I stood there watching, along with a few other Iraqis and a much larger crowd of foreign journalists, as a handful of enthusiastic men began banging at the plinth base of the statue with hammers and metal rods, succeeding only in cracking the marble cladding. It was taking the men a long time, and the journalists were getting bored, when one of the armoured vehicles, with a large crane on the back, started reversing into the middle of the square. A marine climbed to the top and dropped a thick rope around the neck, and then he pulled out an American flag. No, no, you can’t be doing this, I gasped, at least allow the facade of liberation to last for a day. But no, with all the arrogance of every occupying soldier throughout history, he covered the face of the defeated dictator with the flag of his victorious nation; briefly, but long enough to seal the fate of the invasion in the eyes of many.
But then, why shouldn’t he raise an American flag? Maybe in all the declarations and justifications of the war by leaders and commanders who spoke of liberation and democracy, the act of that marine was the most honest; he understood the war as a conflict between the US and Iraq – a conflict that he and his countrymen had won. It was his right to plant a flag.
The armoured vehicle pulled, the statue resisted a bit, and then gave way just above the feet. It tumbled into the square with a hollow crash. Like his state, the Leader’s statue was only an empty cast with a single metal pillar inside supporting it. A dozen or so men jumped on the statue, beating it with chains and shoes. That iconic image has played again and again on every report on Iraq ever since, as if those men represented all the nation; their jubilation was a justification, even if briefly, for the madness that would follow. The head of the statue was dragged through the streets and more men spat on it and cursed it.
I met a friend, also standing in the square. We walked around the block imagining what would come next: the hopes, the future, and the anxieties. The Unicef building, less than 50 metres away from the square where the Americans had established their base, was in the process of being looted.
We met an old woman dragging a carpet from the directorate of dams and irrigation. “This is my money, Saddam stole it from me,” she said. The carpet was old and torn and worth nothing, but maybe she felt that this was a piece of the regime, part of Saddam’s tyranny and authority, and that claiming it might magically erase her suffering of the last few decades.
The next morning I found the garage of my building piled with junk: a desk chair flipped upside down, an old air-conditioning unit, computer cases and a couple of monitors stacked on top of each other, all looted from the Ba’ath party newspaper offices nearby. A neighbour and her two sons inspected the loot cheerfully. The doorman came into the garage carrying another computer case.
I decided to walk to the presidential palace. I wanted to see where the Leader had lived. I thought that the walls of the rooms and corridors where he walked, where he conferred with his closest aides and ordered the destruction of tens of thousands of his people, might get me closer to him, help me make sense of what he was and why he shaped our lives and our history the way he did. Or maybe it was my own act of desecration of the holy sanctum of power, an act of insolence just like that of the people looting.
It was still early and the streets were empty. Tongues of black smoke poured from the windows of buildings that had been looted the night before. There were American checkpoints, defended by young soldiers and coils of barbed wire; I talked my way through them by claiming that I was a British journalist and that the Iraqi police had confiscated my papers.
The combination of the knapsack on my back and my imitation of a World Service accent did the trick. I reached the Jimhouriya bridge and crossed the Tigris. At the entrance to the presidential palace complex, I passed an armoured vehicle. I asked the exhausted soldier who sat atop the vehicle behind a machine gun if I could go inside, and he waved me a through.
I walked through the tall arches of the gate and down the well-paved, clean road, lined with trees and rose bushes. Halfway down I came across a swollen and blackened corpse that lay to the side of the road. I hesitated, I hadn’t seen a dead man before, but kept walking.
The presidential palace loomed in the distance. Giant bronze busts of the Leader adorned its four corners. His moustached head, wearing a helmet in the shape of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, was peering from above with silent and solemn greatness, ignoring the insolent soldiers who had occupied his palace, continuing to stare at the distant horizon.
Inside, a young American officer gave me a tour of a massive dining hall, with a beautiful cascading wooden ceiling, now converted into a large dormitory with dozens of metal beds stacked next to each other. I wanted to walk further towards the intelligence headquarters, another symbol of the regime.
But the American told me that there was still fighting going on, so I walked back towards the gate, and hitched a ride with James Meek, a British journalist who worked for the Guardian. He hired me as his interpreter.
In the Baghdad of 2003, chaos reigned. All was permissible and everything was possible. Beer and whisky were sold on the pavements or from the boots of parked cars. Mobs ransacked government offices and ministries, apart from the Ministry of Oil, protected by American tanks. They gutted factories, pulled the doors off their hinges and stripped electrical wiring from the walls, and then sold the looted equipment as scrap metal. Weapons and ammunition from looted military camps and depots were traded on the open market. In the months and years to come, these arsenals would sustain civil wars in Iraq and Syria, with some smuggled out to nourish distant wars in Yemen and Somalia. Soviet jet fighters, hidden in the deserts outside military bases to save them from American attacks, lay half buried in the sand like the skeletons of beached whales. They, too, were stripped of their weapons and metal plates. But there was probably nothing more painful and damaging than the pillaging of the Iraqi Museum. Nearly 15,000 items were looted, most disappearing for ever.
Armed mobs roamed the city looking for plunder. What they couldn’t claim, they set on fire, like the national library, or the TV and radio archives that burned for days. In central Baghdad, I saw the smoke rising from the windows of the directorate of nationality: the archives and registries of a century were burning. Yes, destroy everything, I thought to myself with the naivety of the self-righteous. Why do we even need the directorate of nationality? Didn’t Saddam manipulate everything for his own interest? Didn’t he deport tens of thousands, and strip millions more of their will to live? Wasn’t our whole state a construct of his will? So why not destroy everything, and from the carnage a new country will be born, with no fear or oppression, where everyone will be equal and prosperous?
The “Great Leader” had dominated our lives and moulded the whole nation in his image for decades. So when his statue was toppled and people wanted vengeance for the years of oppression, they not only destroyed the symbols of his power, his palaces, his statues and murals, they also turned their anger on anything that symbolised the state, because the state was Saddam and Saddam was the state, as he used to say. Even words like citizenship, solidarity, patriotism were soiled because they were associated with his rule. In that destructive atmosphere many, foreigners and Iraqis, were willing to tear the very concept of an Iraqi state apart completely.
The poor moved out of their wretched, overcrowded neighbourhoods and started building on military camps and government lands. These new slums of one-storey concrete shacks with rivulets of oily green sewage and heaps of trash were called Hawassim, after the name of the Leader’s last battles – and the same name given to those who subsequently acquired colossal wealth.
It was also a time of grim discovery, of unearthing the horrors committed by the regime and its men. Mass graves were discovered near prisons, or on remote roadsides, where thousands of men had been buried after the failed 1991 uprising.
Bulldozers exhumed what was left of their bodies amid heaps of dry yellowish-grey earth. Women draped in black wailed and scratched their faces in grief over piles of bones and skulls that lay on plastic sheets, as a hot, dry and dusty wind blew. Some could identify their missing one from a picture stashed in a pocket, or an ID card; others hurriedly gathered bones, any bones, to bury and finally have a grave at which to mourn their lost children. In their homes, families hung pictures of relatives who had been executed or long since disappeared by the regime; they were now able to show their pride in people who up until a few weeks ago they had striven to hide and disown. In other houses, a rectangle of white appeared on grimy walls where the portrait of the Leader had recently hung.
The history that had been written by the Leader was unravelling, and people demanded that the lies be corrected. They wanted compensation and amendments for the oppression, a redress of the wrongs committed against them for decades. And just as these mass graves were exhumed, local conflicts, grievances and struggles were coming to the surface after decades buried under the monolithic power of the regime. In late April 2003, I watched thousands of people march to the city of Karbala, their feet kicking up a thick cloud of dust. They were commemorating the Arba’een, marking 40 days after the day of Ashura when Imam Hussein had been killed 12 centuries earlier. It is traditionally a day of sadness and mourning – people weep and beat their chests – but on that occasion, it was also a day of joy, because for the first time in decades Shias were allowed to freely express a religious and cultural identity long suppressed by the Leader. It was an extreme contrast to how the day of Ashura had been observed a few weeks earlier, just before the war, when I had sat in the Khadimiya, the biggest Shia shrine in Baghdad, and watched a few people shuffle quickly in and out.
In May 2003, I met an old man in a poor and crowded suburb of eastern Baghdad. He sat on an empty tin box, with a broad smile drawn across his face. He said the Americans who had brought all these tanks and planes would fix everything in a matter of weeks.
They would bring electricity and turn his wretched neighbourhood into heaven. He spoke as if he could see his tiny alleyway already transformed, the sewage flowing next to his feet disappearing, the poverty dissipating, the houses of concrete cinder blocks cleaned up and freshly painted. But weeks and months passed, and the situation was only getting worse. The collective intoxication of Iraqis at the end of the regime wore off quickly, and the people of Baghdad moved from euphoria to frustration and then fury.
When they wanted to go to hospitals they found them looted. Schools had either been burned down or were occupied by squatters. There was no one in control and public services had collapsed. Mile-long queues had formed outside petrol stations because oilwells and refineries had been damaged in the looting. Electricity failed because there was no fuel for the power plants and because transmission towers and high-voltage cables had been stripped and sold as scrap copper. With no electricity, water pumps and purification plants stopped running and raw sewage was piped into the rivers. Doctors and nurses carried guns and stood guarding the few hospitals and clinics that had not already been ransacked.
American soldiers, stupefied by the Baghdad heat, stood clueless amid that chaos, and Iraqis – accustomed to decades of efficient centralised bureaucracy – were baffled at the rash and arbitrary way the Americans were running the country. Everything was decided on the spur of the moment. Sometimes the soldiers tried to stop the looting, but mostly they just stood by; sometimes they tried to control the massive traffic gridlocks, while at others they drove their tanks into the middle of roads causing even bigger snarl-ups. The Iraqis could not believe that their new colonial masters had made no preparations for what was going to happen after the invasion. Or that the whole adventure was based solely on their might and the messianic half-beliefs of Bush and co. When the myth of American-generated prosperity clashed with the realities of occupation, chaos and destruction followed. All the suppressed rage of the previous decades exploded.
I abandoned my former life as an architect. I worked first as an interpreter and fixer, and was then promoted to news assistant – a glorified interpreter and fixer – leading a peripatetic lifestyle. For years I moved from one hotel room to another, travelling the width and length of Iraq. In reality, I – the Iraqi who had never left Iraq – was discovering my country for the first time, just as the foreign journalists were. My only advantage was that I spoke the language.
With my daily fees, an enormous fortune compared to the meagre salary I was paid as an architect, I bought a camera and I started taking pictures of the chaos unfolding around me. One picture got published, then another, and by 2004 I was hired as a stringer for a wire agency.
Around that time I published my first article in the Guardian. I wrote how both Saddam and I spent our first night in an American prison cell. The Leader had been taken earlier that day, and the American journalists for whom I was interpreting thought it unwise to show up in the Leader’s home town the day he had been captured by their government, so I volunteered to go and do some vox pops. On my way back that night we were stopped at a checkpoint north of Baghdad, and the American officer thought the driver and I looked suspicious. (Well, I did have a beard.) An hour later we were blindfolded and taken to an American military base and locked in a prison cell. We slept on the cold concrete floor, and the next day, when we were led out, I laughed at the irony of it all: we were in a former Iraqi military base, which the Americans were using, and I, who proudly spent years dodging my Iraqi military service and avoiding capture, was finally locked in an Iraqi military prison by my own supposed “liberators”.
We were told, much later, that the adventure of the Iraq war was based on the myopic vision of a band of American neoconservatives, who – in their desire to project American power in a unipolar world – argued that regime change here would bring democracy not only to Iraq but the whole Middle East, bringing it closer to the US. The oil wealth of Iraq, they thought, would pay for its reconstruction. Some still use the same argument to preach war with Iran.
In May 2003, the UN security council bestowed posthumous legitimacy on the illegal war by granting the Americans “occupying power status” with all the happy connotations the word “occupation” has in the Middle East. After some weeks of faffing about, a new American administration was established, led by Paul Bremer, a close ally of the neocons in Washington. He became the viceroy and the ruler of the country, and was given sweeping legislative and executive powers reminiscent of a British proconsul of the Indian Raj. The new occupation authority – called the Coalition Provisional Authority, the CPA – was staffed by young, naive zealots who held unchallenged powers to reshape Iraq the way their masters wanted. They represented the worst combination of colonial hubris, racist arrogance and criminal incompetence. Many would later write books about their heroic struggle in the lands of the Arabs. Some of these CPA officials were put in charge of ministries, upending existing administrative systems. Others ran whole cities or provinces.
In Baghdad, the presidential palace, former government buildings and neighbouring streets became the green zone, the centre of the delusional administration. Access to the Americans in these chaotic days when blocks of dollars were handed out without oversight established the model of corruption that the new state would be based on. Contracts were inflated for projects that were never built, and in some cases, there was corruption within the CPA itself. Fortunes were made, corruption institutionalised. Long queues formed outside the gates of the green zone; they included the sincere who wished for American help in forming an NGO, the maverick tribal sheikhs who wanted recognition and financial subsidies, and opportunists looking for any niches they might exploit.
In the years since, many western writers and journalists have argued that Bremer’s first two fatal decisions – the disbanding of the Iraqi army and all security apparatuses, and the banning of members of the Ba’ath party from public jobs, both of which left hundreds of thousands of men without pension or salary – helped instigate the insurgency that would consume the country. These western pontificators lamented the stupidity of Bush and the neocons. If only, they said, they had done their homework and planned for the post-invasion Iraq, things could have been so different. But the truth is that the occupation was bound to collapse and fail, because a nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to instantly become a democracy. No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation.
The war that was based on a lie not only destroyed Iraq and unleashed a sectarian war that would engulf the region, but it permanently crippled democracy in the Middle East. So, democracy was another victim of the criminally incompetent administration. “You want democracy? Didn’t you see what democracy did to Iraq?” became the repeated refrain of dictators and potentates throughout the region.
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Synthetic PFAS compounds are commonly known as 'forever chemicals' because they do not break down and can remain permanently in the air, soil and water and in the body. (photo: Pixabay)
'Forever Chemicals' Found in Animals Around the World
Denise Chow, NBC News
Chow writes: "More than 330 species of wildlife around the world are contaminated with widely used chemicals known as PFAS, according to a new analysis that identified traces of the synthetic chemicals in animals on every continent except Antarctica."
Synthetic PFAS compounds are commonly known as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down and can remain permanently in the air, soil and water and in the body.
More than 330 species of wildlife around the world are contaminated with widely used chemicals known as PFAS, according to a new analysis that identified traces of the synthetic chemicals in animals on every continent except Antarctica.
The report, released Wednesday by a nonprofit advocacy group called the Environmental Working Group, is the result of a review of more than 100 recent peer-reviewed studies of PFAS contamination in animals.
The analysis adds to robust research of the negative impact of PFAS pollution on human health and hints at how pervasive these chemicals are across the globe and their far-reaching effects on ecosystems.
“Likely anywhere you test for these compounds, you will find them,” said David Andrews, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group who contributed to the report. “I think that was what is so shocking.”
Synthetic PFAS compounds (short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are commonly known as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down over time and thus can remain permanently in the air, soil, water and in the body. These chemicals have been used extensively since the 1940s in industrial manufacturing and to make products ranging from nonstick cookware and cleaning products to foams and stain- and water-resistant fabrics.
In humans, exposure to PFAS chemicals has been associated with thyroid disease, high cholesterol, infertility, low birth weight, suppression of the immune system and an increased risk of certain cancers, including kidney cancer and liver cancer.
People can come into contact with PFAS compounds by drinking contaminated water, eating food grown or caught near where the chemicals are produced, or through direct contact with materials that contain them, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Biomonitoring studies conducted by the CDC starting in 1999 have found traces of PFAS chemicals in the bloodstream of most of the general U.S. population, though higher concentrations were detected in people who work in manufacturing and communities in and around military bases.
Studies in animals have found similarly harmful health effects, but more research is needed to understand the full impact on various species and their environments. Scientists also have a limited grasp of how PFAS pollution makes its way around the world.
“The full extent of the sources of this contamination — why it’s ending up in some of the far reaches of the globe, and then why some places might be slightly higher than others — I think is still not fully understood,” Andrews said.
Yet the implications could be staggering. The analysis found more than 120 unique PFAS compounds in animals, including in some species that are already threatened or endangered.
Andrews and his colleagues produced a map of their findings, showing the extent of PFAS contamination in wildlife around the world. The affected animals included large mammals such as polar bears and tigers; reptiles; birds; small mammals such as cats; frogs; and many different types of fish.
For species that are already at risk of extinction from habitat loss or ecosystem degradation, PFAS pollution adds to their vulnerabilities, said Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group.
“As we were going through all this and reviewing these studies, one of the other really important things to stress is chemical exposure, and how that can act at the same time along with those other pressures to harm threatened and endangered species,” Stoiber said.
The researchers also noted that while their analysis showed widespread contamination around the world, the results are likely still a conservative estimate. For instance, fewer studies and tests have been conducted in South America and Africa, Andrews said. It's also more challenging to study PFAS contamination in some species, particularly those that are threatened, he added.
In the U.S., the use of certain PFAS compounds is winding down, but the chemicals are still used in manufacturing, and the industry as a whole is largely unregulated. The researchers said they hope their analysis will show what is at stake if PFAS pollution is not restricted.
“Human health and animal health are connected,” Stoiber said. “What affects humans is going to affect animals as well, and vice versa. I think that’s another important takeaway overall.”
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