13 May 23
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Ask the public: do you want more jobs and higher wages, or huge companies making fatter profits by raising prices?
Yet the Federal Reserve, corporate economists and the Republican party have turned the goal upside down – into fewer jobs and lower wages. Otherwise, they say, we’ll face more inflation.
This upside-down logic is pushing the United States economy toward a recession, which could hit about the same time as the next presidential election – which will make Joe Biden a one-term president, just as Fed-induced recessions made Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush one-term presidents.
None of this is necessary.
The Fed has raised borrowing costs at 10 consecutive meetings, pushing its benchmark rate to over 5%. Yet inflation has barely budged. In April, it dropped to 4.9% (year-over-year) from 5% in March – according to Wednesday’s Labor Bureau data.
Why are the Fed’s rate hikes having so little effect?
Because inflation is not being propelled by an overheated economy. It’s being propelled by overheated profits.
Wage gains still lag behind price increases. Average hourly earnings grew by just 0.3% in March, with year-over-year growth of only 4.2%. Wages and salaries in the Employment Cost Index, a broader measure of worker compensation, have been trending downward for a year.
Supply chains have returned to normal. Freight-trucking prices peaked in spring 2022 and since then have tumbled close to pre-pandemic levels. In March, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s global supply-chain-pressure index fell to its lowest level since 2008, and it has been dropping since December 2021. Prices for raw goods have also dropped from mid-2022 highs.
Meanwhile, consumers have used up whatever extra money they accumulated during the pandemic.
So, what’s causing inflation? Corporations with enough monopoly power to raise their prices and fatten their profits – which the Fed’s rate hikes barely affect.
Even the Wall Street Journal (in a lead article last week headlined “Why Is Inflation So Sticky? It Could Be Corporate Profits”) spotlights corporations boosting profit margins.
Corporate profit margins were around 10% in 2019. Last year, they reached over 15% – their highest level since 1950 – rising 6.6% year over year. By the end of 2022, profits were still near 14%.
Prices remain sky-high because corporations got hooked on price-gouging and won’t give it up.
Corporate economists argue that businesses couldn’t possibly be padding their profits; if they could, they would have done it before the inflation of the last two years.
Baloney. Businesses have been using the cover of inflation to justify price increases, so consumers accept them.
According to Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, businesses are betting that consumers will go along with the price hikes because they assume prices are being driven by supply bottlenecks and higher energy prices. Corporations “are confident that they can convince consumers that it isn’t their fault, and it won’t damage their brand”.
Last month, Procter & Gamble said in an earnings call that it had boosted its profit margins in the first three months of the year by raising its prices.
Last Thursday, Budweiser-owner Anheuser-Busch reported a jump in profit margins for the first quarter by raising its prices.
Chipotle’s chief financial and administrative officer, Jack Hartung, said in the firm’s first-quarter earnings call that menu prices have risen by about 10%, and chairman and CEO Brian Niccol said they were “staying the course” on pricing – despite the fact profits were up 17% for the quarter. “We’re in a really strong position that when we’re ready and we believe it’s necessary to pull that pricing lever, we can.”
Big corporations have enough monopoly power to raise prices. With just a handful of companies dominating each market, it’s easy to implicitly agree they’ll all raise their prices.
What to do about this? Put the burden of fighting inflation on corporations rather than on workers and consumers.
Instead of relying on the Fed to “tame” inflation via fewer jobs and lower wages, Congress should pass legislation that:
– Allows the justice department to bust up monopolies (and prevent further consolidation through mergers and acquisitions) when three or fewer corporations have more than half the sales of a particular market.
– Directs the Federal Trade Commission to find that any such corporation has engaged in unlawful price gouging whenever it has raised prices higher than the rate of inflation and impose a fine that would claw back those unlawful gains.
– Permits the treasury department to impose a windfall profits tax on large corporations, above a specific reasonable rate of return or profit margin.
Republicans won’t go along with any of this, of course.
Which presents Biden and the Democrats with a clear opportunity.
Make this a major campaign theme for 2024. Ask the public: do you want more jobs and higher wages, or do you want large corporations making fatter profits by raising prices?
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Russian soldiers. (photo: Creative Commons)
Moscow statement is first admission that Ukraine is successfully recapturing ground around eastern city
The statement on Friday was the first admission by Moscow that Ukraine was successfully recapturing ground around Bakhmut, a largely destroyed city with a pre-war population of about 70,000 that Russia has been trying to conquer for more than 10 months.
The Russian defence statement came hours after Kyiv said that its forces had advanced by about 2km (1.2 miles) around Bakhmut this week.
Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, said on Friday: “The enemy suffered great losses of manpower. Our defenders advanced 2km in the Bakhmut sector. We did not lose a single position in Bakhmut this week.”
Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign ministry condemned the UK for supplying Ukraine with the long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles that Kyiv wants to boost its chances in a counteroffensive – the first western country to do so.
Echoing comments from the Kremlin on Thursday, the foreign ministry said it considered “London’s decision to transfer Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine a hostile act leading to a serious escalation”. Moscow has said the UK’s move will require an “adequate response” from Russia.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who earlier this week said his forces needed more time before launching a major counteroffensive, also said Kyiv’s forces had pushed back Russian positions “on several directions”, without specifying where.
“Ukraine is much stronger now than last year or in any other year of this war for freedom and independence of our country,” the Ukrainian president said in a separate post on Twitter.
Zelenskiy said that he held a phone call with Rishi Sunak in which he thanked the UK for delivering the Storm Shadow missiles and “other irreplaceable military assistance”.
“We discussed further defence cooperation,” Zelenskiy added in a tweet.
The Russian defence ministry said it had repelled a surge of attempted Ukrainian attacks against its positions in eastern Ukraine. It said the attacks had taken place in the direction of Soledar, a town Moscow captured at the beginning of the year.
In a video message on Friday, Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose Wagner group has spearheaded the months-long assault on Bakhmut, strongly criticised the military leadership for “abandoning” its positions near the city.
“There was no tactical retreat … What happened was the outright flight of units of the ministry of defence from the flanks,” Prigozhin said, in a characteristic video outburst directed at the country’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu.
“Stop lying … our flanks are falling apart … this is all leading to a massive tragedy for Russia,” Prigozhin said.
He said Ukraine had retaken strategic highlands, potentially putting the Wagner group at risk of encirclement.
Ukrainian intelligence said on Friday that Prigozhin’s public bickering with the army leadership confirmed “their fear of responsibility for the inevitable geopolitical defeat of Moscow”.
There has been intense speculation that Kyiv is about to launch a significant counteroffensive. Several Russian military bloggers claimed on Thursday that Ukraine had launched its much-anticipated offensive, breaking through parts of the frontline. But Ukrainian officials on Friday played down these reports.
“This situation has actually been going on in the east for several months,” Maliar said. “That’s it. Nothing more is happening.”
Military analysts have suggested that Ukraine’s localised offensive in Bakhmut appear to indicate it is trying to pin down Russian forces in the city.
“Ukraine seems to be attacking with forces that are unlikely to be related to the main effort,” said Michael Kofman, the director of the Russia studies programme at the CNA thinktank. “Hence hoping to fix Russian units at Bakhmut and roll back gains over the past few months, while setting the conditions for a major offensive that probably will take place elsewhere.”
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Protestors chant at a vigil in the Broadway-Lafayette subway station Wednesday, May, 3, 2023, in Manhattan, New York. (photo: Barry Williams/NY Daily News)
Penny, a 24-year-old Marine Corps veteran, turned himself in at Manhattan Criminal Court on Friday morning, 11 days after Neely, 30, was killed. Speaking to reporters outside the police station, Thomas A. Kenniff, one of Penny’s attorneys, said his client surrendered to police at the request of the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Penny was released on $100,000 cash bond and ordered by New York City Supervising Judge Kevin McGrath to turn over his passport within 48 hours. Penny, who was seen leaving the courthouse at around 12:30 p.m., also signed a waiver of extradition and must get permission from the court should he seek to leave the state, according to the district attorney’s office.
Penny’s next court appearance is scheduled for July 17. If convicted, Penny could face five to 15 years in prison.
“After an evaluation of the available facts and evidence, the Manhattan D.A.’s Office determined there was probable cause to arrest Daniel Penny and arraign him on felony charges,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) said in a statement. “Jordan Neely should still be alive today, and my thoughts continue to be with his family and loved ones as they mourn his loss during this extremely painful time.”
The fatal incident on May 1 sparked calls for an arrest and charges against Penny when video of the encounter showed him putting Neely, who was homeless, in a minutes-long chokehold. Penny was initially arrested and released without charges, which led to protests and outrage from public officials after the video went viral. According to police, witnesses described Neely as acting in a “hostile and erratic manner.”
After New York’s chief medical examiner ruled on May 3 that Neely’s death was a homicide, the Manhattan district attorney’s office confirmed Thursday that Penny would face a second-degree manslaughter charge.
Steven M. Raiser, who is also Penny’s attorney, confirmed on Friday that the attorneys had set up an online fundraiser on GiveSendGo, a Christian crowd-funding site, to help pay for Penny’s legal fees. More than $430,000 had been raised for Penny’s legal defense fund as of Friday afternoon on GiveSendGo. The funding platform was created after the siteGoFundMe removed far-right campaigns that went against its terms of service. GiveSendGo has also hosted fundraisers for defendants involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and for Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted on all charges after killing two people and wounding a third in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020. Conservative pundits and Fox News hosts have defended Penny, describing the manslaughter charge as “pro-criminal” and “anti-hero.”
Donte Mills and Lennon Edwards, attorneys for Neely’s family, said at a news conference Friday that while the family was pleased about Penny’s arrest and charge, they believed he should have been charged with second-degree murder. The family’s attorneys said they are seeking a grand jury indictment.
The family’s attorneys also said they spoke with Bragg on Tuesday and pushed for prosecutors not to wait to bring charges. Bragg’s office said that didn’t happen.
“Should Daniel Penny be charged with manslaughter? Absolutely,” Mills said. “He acted with indifference. He didn’t care about Jordan. He cared about himself.”
In a statement to The Washington Post, Penny’s attorneys said the arraignment “marks the first step in a long process to get to the truth.”
“In the end of that process, we fully expect that Danny will be exonerated of all charges,” Raiser and Kenniff said.
Penny’s arrest suggests prosecutors believed there was probable cause to file an initial set of charges. An indictment through the grand jury process can take time, and its efficiency is often at odds with the availability of witnesses, court schedules, the collection of evidence and other logistical factors.
In the May 1 incident, shortly after 2 p.m., Neely, a Black man, walked into the F train at the Second Avenue station and began shouting that he was hungry and thirsty, said freelance journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez, who was aboard the train and recorded the fatal chokehold.
“I don’t have food. I don’t have a drink. I’m fed up,” the man screamed, according to Vazquez. “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.”
Vazquez said Neely then “removed his jacket and aggressively whipped it to the floor” of the train. As Neely started shouting, much of the subway car cleared out, Vazquez said.
That’s when Penny, who is White, pinned Neely to the ground and placed him in a chokehold while two other passengers helped restrain him, video recorded by Vazquez shows. Neely, video shows, flailed his arms, kicked his legs and struggled to free himself before Penny released him and put him on his side.
Neely, who appeared unconscious at the end of the video, was pronounced dead at the hospital, authorities said.
Neely used to perform on the subway as a moonwalking Michael Jackson impersonator and had been placed in foster care after his mother was murdered when he was 14, Gothamist reported. He had lived in the Bronx, public records show.
Authorities have not said how long he had been in the chokehold, but Vasquez wrote on Facebook that the men were in that position “for about 15 minutes” while bystanders and the train operator called the police.
Days after the Neely’s death, Penny, whom authorities had not yet publicly identified, released a statement saying he acted in self-defense after Neely “aggressively” threatened him and other passengers. In the three paragraphs released May 6 by his lawyers, Penny said he “never intended to harm Mr. Neely and could not have foreseen his untimely death.”
Penny, a college student, served in the Marines as a rifleman from 2017 to 2021, reaching the rank of sergeant, according to records provided by the service. A Marine Corps spokesperson said in an email that the service is aware of the incident involving Penny and will cooperate, if asked, with the agencies investigating the events.
Neely’s death prompted outrage among some public officials. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called the incident “disgusting” and labeled the man who placed Neely in the chokehold a “murderer.” The Rev. Al Sharpton also urged authorities to pursue manslaughter or murder charges.
New York Mayor Eric Adams (D), who has made subway safety a focus during his administration, said in a statement to The Post on Thursday: “I appreciate DA Bragg conducting a thorough investigation into the death of Jordan Neely. I have the utmost faith in the judicial process, and now justice can move forward against Daniel Penny.”
Penny’s arrest was celebrated by Democratic lawmakers and activists. Sharpton said the charge against Penny was “just step one in justice for Jordan Neely.”
“The justice system needs to send a clear, loud message that vigilantism has never been accepted,” Sharpton said in a news release. “Being homeless or Black or having a mental health episode should not be a death sentence.”
Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Democratic Congress member who represents the Bronx, praised Penny’s arrest, saying Neely “did not manifest any physical threat.”
“There was no justification for choking him to death,” Torres tweeted. “Daniel Penny has been charged with manslaughter and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Penny was seen walking in to the police station at 8 a.m. Friday wearing a suit and sneakers. He did not answer questions from journalists. He left the precinct in handcuffs before 11 a.m. and headed over to the court to be arraigned.
Lawyers Mills and Edwards were joined at the Friday news conference by Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, and Neely’s aunt, Mildred Mahazu. The family’s attorneys said that after Neely’s mother was murdered, Neely turned his attention to becoming a Jackson impersonator to make other people smile when he could not. Edwards denounced Penny and his attorneys for saying that Penny never intended to harm Neely.
“Daniel Penny is getting a chance to rewrite his story as time goes by,” Edwards said. “He cannot rewrite how the story ends. The story ends with his arms wrapped around Jordan’s neck and choking him to death.”
They said the charge is a step in the right direction for Neely’s family and the supporters who’ve demanded accountability in the days since Neely’s name became known across the country.
“Mr. Neely did not attack anyone, he did not touch anyone, he did not hit anyone. But he was choked to death,” Mills said. “That can’t stand. That can’t be what we represent.”
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Smoke billows after an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City. (photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP)
Islamic Jihad commander killed in Israeli air raid as foreign mediators press ahead with ceasefire efforts.
One of the people killed in Friday’s air raid on an apartment was a senior leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group (PIJ), local media reported. It brought the total number of Palestinians killed in this week’s bombardment to at least 33, including several children, with more than 110 also wounded.
Hundreds of rockets have also been launched from the Strip towards Israel, with a 70-year-old killed in central Israel.
Al Jazeera’s Youmna El Sayed, reporting from central Gaza, said the latest attack targeted a six-storey building in the “densely populated” al-Nasr neighbourhood.
Israel “targeted a residential apartment” which destroyed at least three floors of the building, she said.
“These people were not warned to get out of their homes, there was no warning missile fired prior to this targeting,” El Sayed added.
Salameh Maarouf, head of Gaza’s government information office, said the enclave has been “reeling from the bombardment”.
“The international community is turning a blind eye to our plight,” he told reporters in Gaza.
Maarouf said at least 139 buildings have been completely damaged so far, while more than 500 have been partially damaged.
One Gaza resident described the moment an Israeli missile hit her home.
“I was sitting peacefully at home, we received notification to evacuate, we had no idea what was going on,” she told Al Jazeera.
“My sons’ wives, grandchildren and I rushed out of the house leaving behind everything. I hardly managed to cover my head with a scarf,” she said.
Funerals also continued to be held for the Palestinians who have been killed in the latest Israeli attacks.
Al Jazeera’s Issam Adwan, reporting from Gaza, said that “basically every city in Gaza has been targeted by Israeli airstrikes” on Friday.
“In the latest hours, we’ve witnessed several Israeli air strikes at many cities across the Gaza Strip,” Adwan said.
“One significant development … is the Israeli crime of targeting a residential building next to al-Aqsa hospital in Deir El Balah refugee camp, which severely damaged several departments of the hospital,” Adwan said. The attack caused patients, including women and children. to experience panic attacks, he added.
Meanwhile, Islamic Jihad and Hamas officials have reiterated the “unity of the resistance” in responding to Israeli attacks, he said.
Jennifer Austin, director of operations in the Gaza field office for the UN refugee agency (UNRWA), said the humanitarian situation is “already dire”.
“It’s a really bad situation coming off of 15 years of … an economic and social blockade,” Austin told Al Jazeera.
“The people here are not very hopeful … they’re at the end of their coping mechanisms,” she said.
Despite days of bombardment, UNRWA has been continuing their food distribution programme, as well as sanitation in the camps, Austin said. The agency’s 22 health centres are also still operating.
Earlier, Palestinians surveyed the wreckage caused by the Israeli attacks.
“The dream that we built for our children, for our sons, has ended,” said Belal Bashir, a Palestinian living in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza whose family home was reduced to a heap of rubble in an air raid late on Thursday.
“Our situation is the same as that of any Palestinian citizen whose house is targeted and whose dream, built over the years, is destroyed,” he said.
He and his family would have been killed in the explosion if they had not run outside when they heard shouting, he said.
“We were shocked that our house was targeted,” Bashir said, as he pulled his children’s dolls and blankets from a bomb crater.
Al Jazeera’s Willem Marx, reporting from Ashkelon in Israel, said sirens were sounding throughout the area, warning residents of incoming fire.
“Possibly about two dozen rockets were fired from Gaza, among the more than 800 launched this week,” Marx said on Friday. “The Israeli military has confirmed to us it is moving residents away from these areas to get them to places less likely to be hit by this heavy rocket fire.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met army and intelligence officials early on Friday. “That will indicate how the Israeli military will proceed over the coming hours,” Marx said.
A rocket slammed into an open field in the south Jerusalem illegal settlement of Bat Ayin, said Josh Hasten, a spokesperson for the area. Videos showed Israelis jumping out of their cars and crouching beneath highway rails as sirens sounded.
An umbrella group of Gaza-based Palestinian factions known as the “joint operations room” said it launched rockets “in response to the assassinations and continued aggression toward the Palestinian people”.
Ceasefire talks
The cross-border exchanges this week have pitted Israel against Islamic Jihad, the second-largest armed group in Gaza after the territory’s Hamas rulers.
Meanwhile, Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations have been working to broker a ceasefire.
Hamas officials told local media on Friday that Egypt was ramping up its diplomatic efforts to stop the fighting through “intensive contacts” with both Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Islamic Jihad figures have sent mixed signals about the talks.
Senior official Ihasan Attaya complained on Friday that the mediators “have been unable to provide us with any guarantees”. A sticking point has been Islamic Jihad’s demands that Israel cease its policy of targeted killings, Attaya said.
This week’s battles began on Tuesday when Israel launched simultaneous air raids that killed three Islamic Jihad commanders along with at least 10 civilians – some of their wives, children and neighbours – as they slept in their homes.
Israel said it was retaliating for a barrage of rocket fire launched last week by Islamic Jihad after the death of one of its occupied West Bank members, Khader Adnan, from a hunger strike while in Israeli custody.
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Abu Zubaydah has created a series of 40 drawings that chronicle the torture he endured in a number of CIA dark sites between 2002 and 2006 and at Guantánamo Bay. (photo: Abu Zubaydah)
Exclusive: For 21 years, the detainee has been in US custody without charge, tortured and sexually humiliated, with no prospect for release
Abu Zubaydah has created a series of 40 drawings that chronicle the torture he endured in a number of CIA dark sites between 2002 and 2006 and at Guantánamo Bay. In the absence of a full official accounting of the torture program, which the CIA and the FBI have labored for years to keep secret, the images give a unique and searing insight into a grisly period in US history.
The drawings, which Zubaydah has annotated with his own words, depict gruesome acts of violence, sexual and religious humiliation, and prolonged psychological terror committed against him and other detainees. They were sketched from memory in his Guantánamo cell and sent to one of his lawyers, Prof Mark Denbeaux.
Together with his students at the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University law school, Denbeaux compiled Zubaydah’s images and words into a new report. The Guardian is posting the report, American Torturers: FBI and CIA Abuses at Dark Sites and Guantánamo, for the first time along with a set of never-before-seen sketches.
“Abu Zubaydah is the poster child for America’s torture program,” Denbeaux said. “He was the first person to be tortured, having been approved by the Department of Justice based on facts that the CIA knew to be false. His drawings are the ultimate repudiation of the failure and abuses of torture.”
The new report comes at a critical moment for Zubaydah, who is being held in Guantánamo under Kafkaesque terms. He is known as a “forever prisoner”, because he has neither been charged with a crime nor offered any prospect of release.
Last week a UN body called for him to be set free immediately, finding that his ongoing detention may be a crime against humanity. The detainee’s international legal representative, Helen Duffy, said that the judgment of the UN working group on arbitrary detention chimed with Zubaydah’s visual account of his torture.
“The drawings are a powerful depiction of what happened to him, and are remarkable given that he has not been able to communicate directly with the outside world,” she said.
Denbeaux added that the combination of the UN’s intervention and the new drawings provided a glimmer of hope that Zubaydah’s legal quandary would be addressed. “The only thing that’s ever kept him incarcerated has been silence and darkness, and now sunlight is shining on this forever prisoner,” Denbeaux said.
Zubaydah’s sketches provide a unique visual record of the US government’s use of torture in the wake of 9/11. Videotapes of Zubaydah being tortured were filmed by the CIA but then destroyed in violation of a court order, while a 6,700-page torture report by the Senate intelligence committee remains secret almost a decade after it was completed.
Though the full Senate report has never been made public, its conclusion is known: that the abuse of Zubaydah and other detainees failed to elicit any new intelligence. In other words, torture does not work.
Zubaydah, 52, was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 and renditioned to several CIA dark sites in Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere. He was the first victim of what was to become the widespread use of torture by the US against terror suspects.
He was transferred to Guantánamo in 2006, where he has been held ever since.
The US initially claimed he was a top al-Qaida operative but was forced to concede he was not even a member of the terror group. “Everybody agrees, they tortured the wrong guy; they went ahead anyway so they could get permission to torture other people,” Denbeaux said.
Zubaydah’s depictions are so accurately rendered that the faces of the CIA and FBI agents have been redacted to protect their identities. They reveal the extent to which the US government violated international laws and even its own guidelines on what it euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
Among the images the Guardian is publishing for the first time is one showing masked agents physically threatening Zubaydah with anal rape. The detainee also reconstructs the extremely violent technique used against him known as “walling”.
In another image, Zubaydah draws himself chained in the nude in front of a female interrogator. A further drawing shows guards threatening to desecrate the Qur’an – techniques which were never officially approved by the justice department.
“Sexual assault was never approved, nudity was never approved, humiliation by having women present was never approved, and nor was subjecting someone to prolonged torture to the point of exhaustion or worse,” Denbeaux said. In his account, Zubaydah calls the prolonged use of multiple torture techniques “the Vortex”.
Zubaydah was subjected to simulated drowning, or waterboarding, 83 times. The detainee records different variations of the technique, including one in which he was placed in a coffin-sized box that was then filled with water up to his nose.
He remained “terrified of drowning all day”, he writes.
Zubaydah’s annotations, which have been lightly edited for length and clarity, describe the abuses that Zubaydah suffered personally as the first victim of the American torture program. But Denbeaux said his client had produced the material in order to highlight not just his own suffering but also that of the many others subjected to the same techniques.
According to a 2014 summary of the Senate report, at least 119 individuals were victimized under the program.
Walling
Zubaydah: Sometimes they would use a towel wrapped with duct tape which they place around the prisoner’s neck and they hit him against the cement or the timber wall. They would suddenly enter the prisoner’s cell and start to hit him against the wall without any towel or even gloves and they deliberately hit him strongly on the back of his head and back many times and continue for a long time until he passes out. Then they awake him with cold water and continue the beating even if he does not pass out, they will start to slap his face while they were asking him questions and verbally cursing him with obscene language and continue to beat him strongly on his head, back and buttocks until he collapses on the ground.
Waterboarding
Zubaydah: Waterboarding is not only using a water and a board. In this type they put him in a wooden coffin for a long time, until he urinates on himself. His hands are behind his back, or he’s restrained in front. If he was restrained from the front, he will stay like this for days. They leave him drowned in his waste.
If it was behind his back … they converse with him from a small hatch on the top of the coffin, asking him things that as soon as he denies or swears that he doesn’t know it, another person starts strongly pouring very cold water from another small hatch. Because the coffin is made of wood the water would leak, but slowly.
During this time the investigator asks him and threatens him, then leaves him, until the water reaches his nose, mouth, and then he starts to move strongly with distress, coughing [to stop] drowning. Then, the investigator will come over again and the other person stops pouring water. The water will leak from the box, but the cycle is repeated, and he’ll stay terrified of drowning all day.
The Vortex
Zubaydah: This drawing shows the Vortex – the vortex of conciseness, pain, stress, hunger and cold where they place the detainee in 24 hours a day of intense torture, which continues for long weeks or months … They use a specific torture method, in this case hitting with a stick in very cold weather, so the pain will be doubled, and they focus on hitting till the prisoner almost passes out, or even passes out for real. They wake him up roughly, then they start focusing on another torture method for an hour … Then, the next hour they use a third method and so on until they finish all their methods. Then they start again with the first method for a second time, third time, and so on, for the whole day and for the whole torture duration, as long as it takes.
Female interrogator
Zubaydah: I am sitting on the chair for continuous long weeks, and I am completely naked. Very hungry. I feel frozen from the very cold weather. I almost get hallucinations because of the psychological nerves and body pressure … In addition to the sleep deprivation I feel that I’m really hallucinating. And then a woman immediately came in wearing very light clothing (like it was summer). She sat next to me and there were two men wearing very thick clothes (suitable for the north pole) … !! I didn’t move at all, not even to cover my genitals as it should be following the courtesy and religious beliefs, because really in the beginning I thought I was hallucinating. But when they talked to me … I covered my genitalia completely. I shouted to them: “At least give me something to cover my genitalia in front of that female … Don’t you feel ashamed of yourselves?” They only gave me a bucket of very cold water. And they poured it over my head. I couldn’t speak for a period of time due to the severe shivering in my mouth and lips, and all over my body. She stayed sitting, looking and staring, waiting for me to answer her first question. She was waiting a half hour without any answers, then she left and she was shaking with coldness and anger.
Threatening with rape
Zubaydah: This drawing shows threatening the detainee with rape … They used to drop the prisoner on the ground, and hold him in a way as if actually someone will sodomize him, and they start using dirty sexual words describing the beauty, size or softness of his behind. Then they start the disgrace, using their hands or some sticks in the sensitive areas around the anus. Wherever the detainee resists, the other guards would place him back in the proper way to do sodomy … They used to say loudly, “We will put this big stick or a bigger one in your anus to perforate it” … You can picture the feelings the prisoner suffers, such as fear, pain and embarrassment.
Threat to desecrate the Qur’an
Zubaydah: I was hearing the sound of the power drill moving very powerfully and violently, and no other sound could cover it up … They were opening the door of my cell (which I stay locked behind 24 hours a day) only when the interrogators/torturers entered. They opened the “cell” door of the person that they will torture with the power drill, so I could hear the drill and the shouting, begging and crying in horror of the brother who is receiving the torture. When they turned off the power drill after several hours, I could hear the tortured brother still shouting, begging and crying, then I hear the person who is doing the torture shouting and threatening that he will drill the tool into the head and/or foot, and/or rear end, and/or stomach of the brother who is exposed to torture …
Did they drill the brother’s head?!! Did they drill his stomach or his foot or his rear end?!! Using the power drill?!! All these questions kept going through my mind for days and months until another day when they come back and use the same method: threat with power drill. The same sounds of horror come back, and craziness sounds come back to my head with new questions: is he the same brother?!! Didn’t he die? Didn’t they kill him? Or this is another brother different than the first one? Who is the second one? And who will be the third one? Will it be me?
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Migrant children in Roma, Texas. (photo: Kirsten Luce/NYT)
A 17-year-old migrant who arrived unaccompanied in the US from Honduras has died in government custody.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) acknowledged the death in a statement that did not name him or say how he died.
US officials have braced in recent days for an influx of border crossings.
On Friday, Enrique Reina, the secretary of foreign affairs in Honduras, said on Twitter the death had occurred at a shelter in Safety Harbor, a city on the Tampa Bay coastline in western Florida.
The shelter is managed by the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is in charge of housing and caring for unaccompanied migrant children.
Mr Reina said his government was in contact with the teenager's family and called for "an exhaustive investigation" into the circumstances of his death.
The boy had been in US custody for five days, a source told CBS News, the BBC's US partner. He was found unconscious on Wednesday morning, taken to a local hospital and was pronounced dead an hour later, the source added.
A federal official told CBS there had been "no altercation of any kind" involved in the death.
The teenager "wanted to live the American Dream" his mother, Norma Saraí Espinoza Maradiaga, told the Associated Press.
"He told me he was in a shelter and not to worry because he was in the best hands," she said in a phone interview. "We only spoke two minutes, I told him goodbye and wished him the best."
A medical examiner's investigation is currently underway. Bill Pellan, director of investigations, told US media that a cause of death has yet to be determined. He said hospital staff had failed to resuscitate the boy.
Border officials are required by law to place unaccompanied minors in ORR care within 72 hours of apprehension. The ORR then houses these children in shelters and other facilities nationwide until they turn 18 or are claimed by a US-based sponsor.
Deaths in ORR custody are rare, according to Aura Bogado, a senior reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting, but CBS reports that a four-year-old child from Honduras described as "medically fragile" died from a cardiac arrest event in March while in HHS custody in Michigan.
In 2019, the outlet also reported that six migrant children - some with health issues - were known to have died over the past year, either after being detained by border patrol or after being released by HHS to a hospital.
In its statement on Friday, the HHS said it was in touch with the child's family and was "reviewing all clinical details of this case, including all inpatient health care records" per standard practice.
The department cited "privacy and safety reasons" for its inability to share further information on the child's death.
News of the death follows the overnight expiry of Title 42, a pandemic-era border policy used to swiftly expel migrants who cross illegally.
Officials had expressed concern about a possible influx of migrants in the coming weeks, possibly leading to overcrowded detention and shelter facilities.
But HHS officials said there has been no substantial increase in migrants processed into custody on Friday, and it is not clear if the minor's death is related to the lifting of Title 42.
The White House is "certainly aware of the tragic loss, and our hearts go out to the family", press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Friday.
She declined to comment further until the medical investigation concludes, adding she did not know if President Biden had yet been briefed on the death.
Government figures show that more than 8,000 unaccompanied migrant minors are currently under HHS care, with an average custody period of 29 days.
Over the last fiscal year, three in 10 migrant minors in US custody came from Honduras.
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Puffins in the Farne Islands, Northumberland. (photo: David Tipling/Alamy)
The number of ocean going birds has declined 70 percent since the 1950s. New research shows how projects bringing them back can also bolster ocean ecosystems that sequester carbon.
They distribute nutrients, in the form of guano, that’s beneficial to plankton, seagrass and coral reefs, which, in turn, nurtures fish populations that are eaten by seabirds and marine mammals in a cycle that forms a biological carbon pump. The stronger the pump, the more carbon dioxide it pushes into seabed sediment storage.
Seabird colonies of almost unimaginable size likely persisted through eons of profound climate shifts and the geological upheavals of colliding continents, playing a profound role in the ocean carbon cycle. But even in their most far-flung island realms, they were quickly decimated by humans who colonized and industrialized the planet during the past 200 years.
By some estimates, the overall global seabird population has dropped by as much as 90 percent during that time, with a decline of 70 percent just since 1950. Seabirds are the most threatened group of birds and one of the most endangered groups of species, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Of 346 seabird species, 97 are globally threatened, and another 35 are listed as near-threatened. Almost half of all seabird species are known or suspected to be experiencing population declines.
Most of the damage has been from invasive predators—humans themselves, and the rats, cats, dogs and pigs they brought along as they exploited island after island. After millions of years of predator-free evolution, the birds didn’t recognize the new species as threats. They were particularly vulnerable because they don’t breed as prolifically as many terrestrial birds, and spend a long time nurturing their flightless young on land.
There was also direct human predation on an industrial scale, with the harvest of seabird eggs for food, their guano as fertilizer and the birds themselves to render for oil, along with seals, sea lions and whales, or as the unwanted bycatch of commercial fishing boats. On the Farallon Islands near San Francisco, home to the largest single seabird nesting colony in the United States, the murre population dropped from 400,000 to 60,000 in just a few decades during the gold rush, as people harvested up to half a million eggs per year.
Today the Farallon Islands are protected as part of a marine sanctuary and the nesting seabird colonies are recovering, helping to sustain the surrounding marine ecosystem, including great white sharks, apex predators that sometimes feed on the population of northern fur seals that have returned to the islands since they were protected. Rhinoceros auklets, related to puffins, have also returned and more than 20 endangered and threatened species—birds, reptiles, insects, marine mammals and even sea turtles—live on and and around the islands.
The Comeback Has Already Started
And there are hundreds of other seabird restoration projects around the world showing signs of success, said Dena Spatz, a scientist with Pacific Rim Conservation, a nonprofit that focuses on ecosystem repairs. Spatz was lead author of an April 10 study in the Proceedings National Academy of Sciences that compiled data from 851 restoration projects in 36 countries targeting 138 species of seabirds over the past 70 years.
The new study focused on efforts to actively bring back bird populations, including social attraction methods, like using decoys, as well as direct translocation of young birds to new sites free of invasive predators. In more than 75 percent of the restorations, targeted species visited the sites and started breeding within 2 years.
“It’s an incredible success story,” she said. “A lot of seabirds come back without any intervention… But that’s not always the case all the time.”
Some populations of seabirds are tiny and widely dispersed across distant islands, and a few of them have blinked out, she said. That makes it hard for the bird populations to get back to historic breeding levels without help.
“That’s where active restoration, moving things from one place to another, becomes super critical,” she said.
Restoring seabirds could bolster ocean ecosystems and their ability to draw down carbon dioxide, said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a climate scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, who recently co-authored a research paper in Science that spells out the the connections between biodiversity, ecosystem protection and climate stabilization.
In addition to direct CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels and other industrial processes, the disruption of ecosystems and biodiversity declines have also significantly contributed to rising atmospheric greenhouse concentrations that are heating up the planet, he said.
“Biodiversity loss contributes to climate change through loss of wild species and biomass,” the paper concluded. “This reduces carbon stocks and sink capacity in natural and managed ecosystems, increasing emissions.”
The resulting warming disturbs ecosystems in a vicious circle that worsens “the unprecedented loss of biodiversity already caused by human-induced habitat degradation, overexploitation of natural resources, and pollution,” he and his co-authors wrote in the Science paper.
Adding continued biodiversity loss and habitat decline with projections for greenhouse gas emissions, Earth is on a path to heat up to near 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, and that won’t change unless humans proceed on the planet in a way that “allows biodiversity to thrive, and which incorporates a strengthening of the natural pathways of carbon binding and storage,” Pörtner said.
Can Assisted Migration Help?
The new seabird restoration study is part of a growing canon that documents thousands of various nature restoration projects on every continent, according to Restor, a nonprofit network building a global restoration database.
Restoring seabirds can help turnaround the declines in biodiversity and carbon sequestration, Spatz said, describing some of the translocation research pioneered by scientists in New Zealand that will help similar efforts elsewhere. The idea of moving birds physically from one place to another to restore populations is part of a growing effort of assisted migration, which some scientists think will be critical as climate change impacts intensify. For seabirds, it’s done most with species that have evolved to return to the place they are born, she said.
“There’s this amazing biological response in birds like petrels, shearwaters, albatross and some puffins,” she said. “They’re born on an island, they fledge, they go to sea from anywhere between one and eight years, depending on the species and then go back to the place where they were born.”
Relocation of the chicks is timed so they imprint on their new home in the way they normally would at the site where they hatched, she said.
“It’s a huge endeavor to do this stuff. But it works when you do it, right,” she said. “What’s amazing is, once these birds come as fluffy chicks to a restoration site, they’re raised by people, but they don’t imprint on us. That’s just the way seabirds are, so that’s not a worry. Then they get feathers, and they fly on their own out to sea. And when it’s time to breed, they go to the restoration site instead of the place they were born.”
On Hawai’i, she said, scientists have been relocating albatross and petrel chicks from some of the low-lying Northwest Hawaiian Islands, where there are huge bird colonies, but some nesting grounds are already being swamped by rising seas.
“It’s not a future threat,” she said. “It’s a current threat. Those chicks probably wouldn’t have survived anyway if we hadn’t taken them.”
Let Ecosystems Flourish to Benefit the Climate
Scaling up nature restoration and conservation efforts, including with seabirds, is absolutely critical to preventing a worst-case global warming outcome, said Bernie Tershy, an ecology and evolutionary biology researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz.
“A key part of that is pulling pollutants out of the atmosphere, right? So if you’re going to do that, one could argue that the best way to do that is to plant a whole bunch of the fastest growing trees over the most area possible,” said Tershy, who was not an author of the new seabird study but has worked on similar research.
But that would be like putting all your climate eggs in one basket, he said, describing risks, like wildfires and insect infestations that could quickly wipe out such monocultures before they have any climate benefits. A better approach is a diversified investment spread across ecosystems that suck carbon out of the atmosphere.
“It’s also totally the cheapest way because it’s a passive thing,” he said. “All you have to do is protect these natural areas and manage them well. They’ll soak up a ton of carbon and they’ll do it in a way that is incredibly resilient.”
But you can’t just focus on a single species, he added.
“You need a bunch of different plant species,” he said. “And you need insect grazers and fertilizer-producing species. You need small mammal seed dispersers and you need the birds that disperse seeds and the fertilizers they produce that nurture the seeds. You need all that biodiversity to maintain resilient ecosystems that pull carbon out of the atmosphere.”
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