Human Rights

Assassination is always unlawful – Regardless of who is Killed and on whose Orders

The Conversation08/07/2024

By Mary Ellen O’Connell, University of Notre Dame | –

(The Conversation) – >Assassination is a particular form of murder. Regardless of who carries out the act, on whose orders or why, it is always unlawful.

This is the reason Vadim Krasikov was languishing behind bars in Germany prior to being released on Aug. 1, 2024, as part of a historic prisoner exchange.

Krasikov was serving a life sentence for killing exiled Chechen separatist Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in a Berlin park in 2019.

The German court that sentenced him found that he was carrying out the Kremlin’s orders; his victim had fought Russian forces in the Chechen wars and was suspected of terrorist attacks in Moscow. But neither of these factors provide legal justification for the killing.

The same is true in the case of Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas political leader. He was killed on July 31, 2024, while in Tehran at the invitation of the Iranian government. The Israeli government, which is widely believed to be behind the killing, has repeatedly expressed a willingness to hunt down Hamas leadership around the world following the group’s deadly attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel has carried out many such assassinations in Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere over the years.

Despite these and other international cases, the term “assassination” is not defined under international law. Legal scholars like me rely on standard dictionary definitions where assassination is defined as “murder by sudden or secret attack often for political reasons.” But treaties and other international law do make clear that killing for political reasons by sudden or secret attack is unlawful.

The most important treaty on this question is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – adopted in 1966 by the United Nations and binding today on 174 states, including Russia, Israel and the United States. The covenant affirms: “Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.”

Treacherous acts

This does not mean that deliberate killing can never be justified. International law contains rules that determine when it is permissible to use deadly force.

In peacetime, it is lawful for police to use lethal force to save lives in immediate danger. Officers killed the man who shot at Donald Trump, for example, to prevent the gunman from shooting again, as lives were in immediate danger.

The use of military force against another state is regulated under the United Nations Charter. The Charter prohibits all uses of force, unless authorized by the U.N. Security Council or in a case of self-defense. The charter allows a state to use force in individual or collective self-defense “if an armed attack occurs” until the Security Council can act.

The U.N.’s International Court of Justice has further clarified that even when a state has the right of self-defense, military action in response must be necessary, proportionate and aimed at a sovereign state responsible for the initial armed attack. The court has repeated these principles in multiple decisions, most comprehensively in a case brought by Iran following lethal U.S. attacks on its oil platforms in the Persian Gulf.

Once an armed conflict has begun, parties to the fighting have the right to use lethal force to defeat the adversary. International humanitarian law permits intentional killing of enemy fighters within legally defined armed conflict hostilities. Even then, no one may be singled out for killing based on what they did in the past. And civilians not participating in the fighting may never be intentionally targeted.

Recent international decisions support the importance of the concept of restricting the killing of fighters to within active zones of hostilities. Outside such areas, the peacetime human right to life applies. The European Court of Human Rights has emphasized this point in a series of rulings, most recently in early 2021.

These decisions contradict an older view held by some in the U.S. military that political or military leaders of a wartime adversary may be killed wherever they are found.

As a political leader of a party at war with Israel in Gaza, Haniyeh might fit this older interpretation. However, it still would not extend to killing “treacherously or perfidiously,” as laid out in the binding regulations annexed to Hague Convention IV of 1907. To kill treacherously or perfidiously means to kill someone who has no expectation of being in danger of death. For example, a soldier who falsely raises a white flag of surrender to lure an enemy in close enough to kill them would be guilty of killing treacherously.

Haniyeh had such an expectation of safety in Tehran, and as such his killing can be seen as treacherous.

A double standard

All principles on the use of lethal force under international law rule out assassination. And yet, countries including Israel, Russia and the U.S. persist in using it. A few others – France, India, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom – have used it in a few infamous, high-profile cases.

Israel has acknowledged responsibility for assassinations dating to even before its founding.

The U.S. has joined the rest of the world in criticizing these killings. In 1988, for example, Israel assassinated a PLO leader named Khalil al-Wazir in Tunisia. The U.N. Security Council condemned the operation in a resolution that the U.S. refused to veto.

To try to mollify critics, Israel began referring in 2000 to its practice of assassination as “targeted killings.”

The term makes it sound more like the legitimate killing in wartime. In 2001, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk rejected Israel’s attempt to legitimize assassination when he said on Israeli television: “The United States government is very clearly on the record as against targeted assassinations. They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.”

Then the Sept. 11 attacks occurred and the U.S. itself adopted the practice of targeted killing. The first known case was carried out by the CIA against six suspected members of al-Qaida in Yemen in November 2002. The killings were condemned as unlawful by a U.N. human rights expert soon after.

Yet, U.S. killings with drones and other means have continued to this day. All the while, the U.S. has consistently condemned Russian assassinations. What many international law experts, including me, see is a U.S. double standard when it comes to the use of lethal force, including its use in assassination.

While efforts may have been made to mount a defense of assassinations such as that of Hamas’ Haniyeh, there is a simple truth: Lethal force is highly restricted, and assassination is never legal.

Mary Ellen O’Connell, Professor of Law and International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

INFORMED COMMENT

 

The Alternative Facts of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

David Remnick/The New Yorker

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (photo: Alessandro Bremec/NurPhoto)

08 july 23

The Democratic Presidential candidate talks about his right-wing admirers, his distrust of scientists and the media, and his belief that the C.I.A. was involved in J.F.K.’s death.

In November, 2007, the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, appeared on ABC News for one of those soft-focus get-to-know-the-candidate segments. Obama admitted that, after he was at Harvard Law School for a while and felt “comfortable” among his hyper-ambitious classmates, he allowed himself to think that maybe he’d run for President someday. “Did you think to yourself, Barack, what kind of hubris is this?” the broadcaster Charlie Gibson said.

“I think if you don’t have enough self-awareness to see the element of megalomania involved in thinking you can be President, then you probably shouldn’t be President,” Obama said. “There’s a slight madness to thinking that you should be the leader of the free world.”

I was thinking about that moment last week, after finishing a long interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Kennedy is running for President as a Democrat. He is polling between eight and twenty-one per cent.

If there is a madness, slight or otherwise, in Kennedy’s bid, it is not confined to his hubris. He is roiling with conspiracy theories: S.S.R.I.s like Prozac might be the reason for school shootings, vaccines cause autism. There are many. To prepare for the conversation, I listened to some of Kennedy’s podcast sessions with the likes of Bari Weiss, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and Joe Rogan. I watched his marathon announcement speech and tuned in to all the hosannas he was getting from a peculiar amen corner that includes Steve Bannon, Jack Dorsey, and Tucker Carlson. In his 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy accuses Fauci, who was then the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor, of helping to carry out “2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” (The book has blurbs from Carlson, Naomi Wolf, Alan Dershowitz, and Oliver Stone.)

Kennedy’s habits of mind are MAGA-adjacent, but his manner differs from that of his Republican doppelgänger. Donald Trump is a bully—rude, swaggering, out to flatten his questioner under an avalanche of lies and volume. Kennedy is not rude. Rather, he is serenely convinced of his virtue and his interlocutor’s pitiful susceptibility to conventional wisdom. The experience of interviewing him and listening to his previous interviews, I found, was like settling in for a long train ride with a seemingly amiable stranger in the next seat. You ask a straightforward question and, an hour later, as you race by Thirtieth Street Station, in Philadelphia, he is still going on about the fraud of COVID vaccines and how he was unfairly “deplatformed” for spouting conspiracy theories. By the time you’ve pulled into Wilmington, he might be talking about how drugs known as poppers helped cause the AIDS epidemic, or how “toxic chemicals” might contribute to “sexual dysphoria” in children. As you head south, he is talking about being “censored” by Instagram, the F.B.I., and the Biden White House. New technologies like 5G towers and digital currencies are totalitarian instruments that could “control our behavior.” Wi-Fi causes “leaky brain.” After a while, you begin to wonder why you bought a ticket. But it’s too late. You’re pinned into the window seat.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Kennedy has never run for public office, but, at sixty-nine years old, he says that he has “been involved in almost every Presidential election during the last sixty years.” He has had a career as a conservationist and, more recently, as a litigator, author, and public speaker. Recently, he appeared in videos stripped to the waist, doing pushups and straining at a bench press. The conspicuous display, it can be reasonably supposed, was intended to draw comparisons with the sitting President, whose greatest liability is his age. Kennedy is ripped, that is true, but, like Trump, he had no experience as an elected official before seeking the White House. I asked how his experience qualified him to hold what is arguably the most consequential job on the planet.

KENNEDY: I’ve been around government and studying government since I was a little boy. I went to the 1960 convention. I’ve been to most of the conventions since. I was involved in the [1980] election with my uncle Edward Kennedy. I began writing about foreign policy when I was nineteen years old. My first article was for The Atlantic. I have a very, very strong vision and opinion about what our foreign policy should be. I’ve met with heads of state. I’ve been to a large portion of the countries. I’ve been to every country in Latin America. I’ve been to many of the countries in Africa and Asia.

Experience of attending conventions and being around politics is not the same as being involved in the making of policy, either as an executive or as a legislator or as a governor. Are you saying that that kind of experience is not necessary to be President of the United States? The one President I can think of who hasn’t had any experience at that level is Donald Trump.

Well, there’s nothing in the United States Constitution that says that you have to go to Congress first and then Senate second—or be a governor—before you’re elected to the Presidency of the United States.

Or even mayor of a small town. But you haven’t done any of it. Do you think that is irrelevant experience?

I think my life experience is absolutely relevant.

Among the obvious parallels between Kennedy and Trump is their disdain for “élites,” their suspicion of, in Trump’s words, the “deep state,” and their belief that traditional media and “cancel culture” threaten to silence them. With Kennedy, this is particularly curious. The Kennedys are the embodiment of dynastic power. Tens of thousands of books have been written about the family. It is impossible to imagine both the tragedy and the privilege Kennedy experienced as a child and adolescent. His uncle was murdered when he was nine. His father was murdered when he was fourteen. As a young man, he was kicked out of prep schools, got arrested for marijuana possession, was addicted to heroin, and still managed to graduate from Harvard. He now works as a lawyer, and his income last year was $7.8 million.

While Kennedy fashions himself as a warrior against the billionaire class, income inequality, and the corruption of institutions ranging from the intelligence agencies to the universities, he is a pure romantic about his own family. Camelot is his brand. As the polls appear to indicate, the Kennedy name still carries weight among Democratic voters.

You’re running as a Democrat for President, and I wonder, Who in the Democratic Party do you feel is kindred to you? Obviously not Joe Biden, but—A.O.C.? Or Joe Manchin? Or are you something new entirely? How would you define your ideology?

I’m something old. I’m a Kennedy Democrat. I believe in labor unions. I believe in a strong, robust middle class. I believe in racial justice, in policies that are going to actually help the lowest people on the totem pole.

I don’t think Joe Biden would disagree with any of that.

Well, then, why did he do the lockdowns? Lockdowns robbed four trillion [dollars] from the middle class and the poor in this country and transferred it to the super rich. We created five hundred new billionaires—a billionaire a day, every day. [Fact-checking Kennedy’s assertions is like chasing rabbits. This is a good example. The four-trillion dollar figure was likely an estimate for the price of the federal bailout. Many of the five hundred billionaires he seems to refer to rose up in other countries, especially China.]

Do you think he did lockdowns, or politicians did lockdowns, in order to enrich billionaires? That was the goal?

I think that, if they cared about the middle class in this country, they wouldn’t have done it. They wouldn’t have shut down 3.3 million businesses without due process, without just compensation.

Did they make mistakes, or were they carrying out some kind of perfidious plot?

No, I think that they made mistakes, which disqualifies them from continuing to do that job.

I’m finding it curious, and maybe even disturbing, that some of your early admirers include Trumpists like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone. Do you welcome that, or do you think maybe—just maybe—someone like that is delighted that a strong Democratic opponent will wound Joe Biden and in the long run help Donald Trump?

I’m trying to unite the country, David. I’m not going to do what you do, which is to pick out people and say that they’re evil, they should be cancelled, or whatever. I’m a Democrat. I know what my values are. I’ve always spoken to Republicans my entire life. During all the years that I was a leader of the environmental movement, I was the only environmentalist who regularly went on Fox News. And, when Tucker Carlson recently did a special on endocrine disruptors, and he was condemned by the left, I thought that was crazy. I think what we ought to be doing is inviting people into our tent, without changing our values. I don’t change my values. I have the same values that my father had, that my uncle had, and that I have harbored and fought for since I was a kid. But that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to speak to people who don’t share those values. I think the kind of tribalism that you’re advocating is poisonous to our country. I think it’s toxic. It’s created a polarization, a division, in this country that is more dangerous than at any time since the American Civil War.

Isn’t there a difference between disagreement and—

What you’re trying to get me to do now is to lash out against other Americans. And what I’m saying is: I don’t agree with what those people represent in many parts of their lives. I don’t agree with it, and I don’t like it. But I’m still going to talk to them. I’m not going to cancel them. I’m going to invite them into my tent. If I can get them to support a vision of the idealistic America that I believe in—the same America that my father and my uncle believed in: an America without censorship; an America that fights for our Constitution; an America that is a moral authority around the world, that projects economic power around the globe rather than military violence—if I can get people to support that, I don’t care if they’re Republican or independent, or what they are. These are democratic values.

At what point do you say, with respect, that this is not about “tribalism” or “cancellation” or the terms that you’re using, but just an insistence on a certain level of decency and principle? Somebody like Alex Jones comes forward and he has nice things to say to you. At what point do you say, “You know what, Alex Jones, with all due respect, I don’t want your support”?

I’m not a cancel-culture guy.

That’s not cancel culture. That’s a principled insistence that he’s a bridge too far.

If you’re just saying you’re going to dismiss certain people because this human being is so irredeemable that I am going to exclude him or her from any future activity on the planet—I just don’t think that’s consistent with my spiritual beliefs. It’s not consistent with my political philosophy. I believe that we should invite our enemies into the tent with us to the extent that they want to break bread with us, that they may want to endorse some of the values that we hold dear.

Kennedy seemed to be talking not only about Steve Bannon or Alex Jones but about himself. “I believe in redemption,” he said. “I got an opportunity for redemption in my own life, and there’s plenty of people who had good excuses to write me off forever.”

Tell me about your own sense of redemption. I think you’re probably referring to problems with addiction.

I was a heroin addict for fourteen years. I’m lucky to be alive. People have plenty of reason to write me off forever because of the way I conducted my life during that fourteen-year period. And, when I was at Riverkeeper, I made a point of hiring people who were felons, who were convicted, who had served their time in prison. And that divided the organization. I believe in redemption. I don’t think we can dismiss human beings, no matter what they did earlier on in their lives. Everybody gets another chance. And what Jesus said is, Not only do you give them seven chances, but you give them seven times seven chances.

You suffered something that I think is just beyond imagination. When you were a small child, your uncle, the President of the United States, was murdered in full view of the world. Five years later, your own father, who was competing for the Democratic nomination for President, was murdered in full view of the world. I can’t quite imagine what effect that would have on a human being, a child who’s just growing up, and to live that life in the full view of the world. Later, you came to see both of those assassinations as conspiracies with the C.I.A. behind them. I want to know why you believe that when most do not, and how that has shaped your thinking in the rest of your life.

Are you saying that most Americans do not believe President Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy?

I want to know why you believe it. What leads you to believe it?

I don’t think anybody who has looked at my uncle’s murder seriously believes that the Warren Commission was correct. I’m a trial lawyer. I’ve tried hundreds of cases. I can guarantee you, looking at this case, that I could prove that my uncle’s death was caused by the C.I.A. I have enough evidence right now, without any depositions, to go to prove that my uncle’s death was the result of a conspiracy. And that the C.I.A. was involved—not only in the original conspiracy but in the sixty-year coverup—and continues to maintain the coverup.

What was the C.I.A.’s motivation?

They were angry at my uncle. Their initial anger came when he failed to invade the Bay of Pigs and provide air cover for [Cuban opponents of Fidel Castro], which they consider a betrayal. They had trained those men. Those men were dying on the beach. At that point, they believed that my uncle was a traitor to the United States. When my uncle and my father halted the raids on Cuba, after the missile crisis, they agreed as part of their agreement with Khrushchev during the missile crisis, to halt the raids from Miami by Alpha 66 and the other groups that were going into Cuba to halt them . . .

Kennedy believes that the evidence of C.I.A. involvement in “perpetrating my uncle’s death is overwhelming. The evidence of C.I.A. involvement with my father’s death is circumstantial, but very highly suggestive.” Talking about the murder of his father, Kennedy referred to a second gunman, stray bullets, and a mob lawyer whose body was later found “chopped up in a hundred pieces in an oil drum.” Kennedy visited Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of murdering his father, in prison, and supports his release.

I asked Kennedy if it was possible that his distrust of American institutions—regulatory agencies, the intelligence agencies, the medical establishment, the “mainstream media,” and more—was rooted in his view of the assassinations. “Not at all,” he said. It was only in the past decade or so, he said, that his interest was sparked by reading “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters” by James W. Douglass, which Oliver Stone has called “the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance.”

Now, we were talking about President Biden before. First, just a short yes or no answer: Did you vote for him in the last election?

Yes, I did.

So what about the Biden Presidency, which came out of the Trump Presidency, obviously, so severely disappoints you that it causes you to run for President?

No. 1, the policies on the war. I think it’s very clear that this has little to do with protecting the Ukraine. It’s more to do with the neocon ambition of deposing Vladimir Putin, which I think is very problematic. I think regime change is always problematic, but, in the case of a country that has nuclear weapons, I would characterize it as close to insane. And it’s clear from President Biden’s direct statements that that is why he believes we should be in Ukraine.

So, if you were President now, would you withdraw military aid to Ukraine?

I would end the war. I would negotiate a peace.

And what would that peace look like?

Well, you never know that until you negotiate.

Would you allow a peace that allowed much of eastern Ukraine and Crimea to remain in Russian hands?

I don’t know what I would negotiate. I know that the Russians had come to two different peace agreements, both of which were eminently reasonable. And so I don’t—

What I’m asking is: what would be a reasonable peace?

Well, you know what, the answer to that question is strategic ambiguity. If I intend to be President of the United States, I’m not going to tell my adversary what my final negotiating position would be.

What about the voter?

I’m not going to—I’m going to negotiate. You negotiate a treaty.

When there was a political campaign [in 1968], your father said exactly what he would’ve done vis-à-vis the United States and Vietnam. As did Eugene McCarthy. [Both Kennedy and McCarthy said they wanted an end to the war in Vietnam.] Why is it unreasonable for you to—

I’m telling you exactly what I would do. I consider the terms of the Minsk accords fair. And that’s what Russia already offered to sign. Now, you know, we have worsened our position in the debate clearly through these ill-advised policies of encouraging war, of refusing to negotiate, of refusing to even talk to our adversaries. And my uncle, President Kennedy, again and again, told the country, You’ve got to put yourself into the shoes of your adversary. And he did that with Khrushchev. He put in a hotline in our home in Massachusetts and in the White House, so that he could pick up the phone and call Moscow, because he was scared of provoking a nuclear response. And, today, Russia has more nuclear weapons than we do. We are toying with Armageddon here.

At a town hall, just recently, you said that you were “proud” that Donald Trump likes you. Why is that? Donald Trump—I think you’ve criticized him in the past. I think maybe we can agree that he’s a threat to democratic norms and the rule of law. Why would you be proud that he likes you?

I’d be proud if President Biden liked me, and—

They’re quite different figures, no?

Well, President Biden has also acted against our Constitution, in many, many areas. You know, this is the first Administration in our history that has colluded with the press to censor Americans—directly out of the White House, including me by name. And my purpose, my intention—

How are you being censored out of the White House?

The White House was ordering the social-media sites to censor me. And in fact—

You’re everywhere in the press. You’re in what you call mainstream media. You’re on Joe Rogan. Who censored you?

I am, since I declared for President. But before that I was deplatformed. I was deplatformed completely, from . . . eight hundred thousand followers were taken away from me on Instagram at the behest of the White House.

So you’re equating President Biden’s attitude toward the Constitution and the law with former President Trump.

What do you think is worse, David? What do you think is worse: the White House using the F.B.I. to censor political dissenters, or whatever Trump has done?

But why do you think Donald Trump admires you? Are you not suspicious of that?

You know what? My job is not to drive people apart. I think what you guys have decided that you’re going to do, in the press, is create this polarization and feed the anger and feed the hatred. And I don’t want to do that.

So polarization is a bad thing. I understand that. But you’re also critical—

You belong to a class of élite journalists who once were the guardians of the press and the protectors of American values and the American middle class, and you now consider those people to be deplorable.

I don’t consider anybody to be deplorable. That’s somebody else’s vocabulary. And let’s talk about the word “élite” for a second. You come from a highly privileged background, eclipsing mine by some order of magnitude. Isn’t it a little rich for you to be calling people élites?

When I use the word “élite,” I’m talking about the people who are inside the Beltway, the press figures who are supposed to be speaking truth to power, but instead have become propagandists for the government. Who view their jobs as quashing dissent, and quashing political criticism of the government that they’re supposed to be actually criticizing.

Do you really believe this, or do you think it plays well?

Of course I believe it. I mean, I don’t think—

Then what press do you read to be informed? Do you get up in the morning and read the New York Times? Or the L.A. Times?

I read everything I can get my hands on.

O.K. But what would that be? What’s your go-to way to find out what happened in the world today and yesterday?

I read everything that I can get my hands on. I read the Times. I read the L.A. Times, although not religiously. And I read a lot of alternative press sources, which are now, you know, oftentimes better sources for unvarnished truth than the mainstream media.

Like what?

On what subject?

Well, foreign policy. Domestic policy.

Well, if I want to know about what’s happening in Ukraine, I might read Doug Macgregor’s site, or a number of other just alternative sites. I have a podcast where I interview people, and I interview people on both sides.

Douglas Macgregor is a retired Army colonel. Trump had hoped to nominate Macgregor as ambassador to Germany until his comments about Muslim refugees as “unwanted invaders” were repeated in the press. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Macgregor spoke repeatedly on Fox News in defense of the action, adding that Russia had been “too gentle” in the early days of the war. The former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney has characterized Macgregor as representing “the Putin wing of the GOP.”

I think I’m going to surprise you with the next question because I really—I’ll be very honest with you, I don’t want to engage you in deep detail on the question of vaccinations and your belief, stated in the past, that vaccines are responsible for autism to some degree. I have a child with quite severe autism, and, while no one would want to know the cause of autism more than I do, I frankly think, with respect, that you’ve been slinging around a lot of theories over time that don’t have any great credibility among scientists. And they do a lot of harm to a lot of people. I want to ask you this question: Do you not have any second thoughts about this? You seem to be altering your rhetoric about this very recently, saying that you just want to see vaccines tested. You seem to be shifting on this, without quite saying so.

I’ve never shifted on it. I’ve said from the beginning that I got involved with this issue, that’s what I wanted. I’ve always said, I’m not anti-vaccine. I want good testing with the vaccines, and I want good science. I’ve written about the science. I’ve read—I’m one of the few people that actually have read the science. You say that scientists don’t believe that—

No, they don’t.

Well, you know, the scientists all, at one point, believed that the COVID vaccine prevented transmission. And when I said, No, they don’t prevent transmission, because I read the monkey studies in May of 2020, and I saw that the amount of the concentration of the virus in the nasal pharynx of the vaccinated monkey was identical to the unvaccinated monkeys. And I said, These vaccines should be dead in the water. They won’t prevent transmission. [In fact, vaccines have proved highly effective against the worst outcomes of COVID-19, including hospitalization and death. The C.D.C. has reported that widespread vaccination in a population reduces the spread of the virus.] And I was deplatformed for spouting conspiracy theories. And because all the scientists said they’re going to prevent transmission. So, you know, I don’t necessarily believe all the scientists, because I can read science myself. That’s what I do for a living. I read science critically. That’s how I win cases. And I’ve read the science on autism and I can tell you, if you want to know. David, you’ve got to answer this question: If it didn’t come from the vaccines, then where is it coming from?

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FOCUS: Elaine Godfrey | Sudden Russian Death Syndrome

 

 

30 December 22

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FOCUS: Elaine Godfrey | Sudden Russian Death Syndrome
Elaine Godfrey, The Atlantic
Godfrey writes: "It's not a great time to be an oligarch who's unenthusiastic about Putin's war in Ukraine." 

It’s not a great time to be an oligarch who’s unenthusiastic about Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Here is a list of people you should not currently want to be: a Russian sausage tycoon, a Russian gas-industry executive, the editor in chief of a Russian tabloid, a Russian shipyard director, the head of a Russian ski resort, a Russian aviation official, or a Russian rail magnate. Anyone answering to such a description probably ought not stand near open windows, in almost any country, on almost every continent.

Over the weekend, Pavel Antov, the aforementioned sausage executive, a man who had reportedly expressed a dangerous lack of enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, was found dead at a hotel in India, just two days after one of his Russian travel companions died at the same hotel. Antov was reported to have fallen to his death from a hotel window. The meat millionaire and his also-deceased friend are the most recent additions to a macabre list of people who have succumbed to Sudden Russian Death Syndrome, a phenomenon that has claimed the lives of a flabbergastingly large number of businessmen, bureaucrats, oligarchs, and journalists. The catalog of these deaths—which includes alleged defenestrations, suspected poisonings, suspicious heart attacks, and supposed suicides—is remarkable for the variety of unnatural deaths contained within as well as its Russian-novel length.

Some two dozen notable Russians have died in 2022 in mysterious ways, some gruesomely. The bodies of the gas-industry leaders Leonid Shulman and Alexander Tyulakov were found with suicide notes at the beginning of the year. Then, in the span of one month, three more Russian executives—Vasily Melnikov, Vladislav Avayev, and Sergey Protosenya—were found dead, in apparent murder-suicides, with their wives and children. In May, Russian authorities found the body of the Sochi resort owner Andrei Krukovsky at the bottom of a cliff; a week later, Aleksandr Subbotin, a manager of a Russian gas company, died in a home belonging to a Moscow shaman, after he was allegedly poisoned with toad venom.

The list goes on. In July, the energy executive Yuri Voronov was found floating in his suburban St. Petersburg swimming pool with a bullet wound in his head. Think Gatsby by the Neva. In August, the Latvia-born Putin critic Dan Rapoport apparently fell from the window of his Washington, D.C., apartment, a mile from the White House—right before Ravil Maganov, the chairman of a Russian oil company, fell six stories from a window in Moscow. Earlier this month, the IT-company director Grigory Kochenov toppled off a balcony. Ten days ago, in the French Riviera, a Russian real-estate tycoon took a fatal tumble down a flight of stairs.

To reiterate: All of these deaths occurred this year.

One could argue that, given Russia’s exceptionally low life expectancy and unchecked rate of alcoholism, at least some of these fatalities were natural or accidental. Just because you’re Russian doesn’t mean you can’t accidentally fall out of an upper-story window. Sometimes, people kill themselves—and the suicide rate among Russian men is one of the highest recorded in the world. For Edward Luttwak, a historian and military-strategy expert, that’s at least part of what’s happening: an outbreak of mass despair among Russia’s connected and privileged elite. “Imagine what happens to a globalized country when sanctions kick in,” he told me. “Some of them will commit suicide.” But the sheer proliferation of these untimely deaths warrants a closer look.

After all, this is what the Kremlin does. There is precedent for this phenomenon. In 2020, Russian agents poisoned—but failed to kill—the Putin critic Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent; a decade earlier, they succeeded in a similar attempt on the Russian-security-services defector Alexander Litvinenko. In 2004, when Viktor Yushchenko ran against a Kremlin-backed opponent for Ukraine’s presidency, he was poisoned with dioxin and left disfigured. Thirty years earlier, the Bulgarian secret service, reportedly with the help of the Soviet KGB, killed the dissident Georgi Markov by stabbing him on the Waterloo Bridge in London with a ricin-laced umbrella tip. Russian agents often “turn to the most exotic,” Luttwak told me. “People who do assassinations for commercial purposes look at [their methods] and laugh.”

Suicides are more difficult to decipher. For oligarchs who have failed to show sufficient loyalty to Putin, coaxed suicide is not an implausible scenario. “It is not uncommon to be told, ‘We can come to you or you can do the manly thing and commit suicide, take yourself off the chess board. At least you’ll have the agency of your own undoing,’” Michael Weiss, a journalist and the author of a forthcoming book on the GRU, the Russian military-intelligence agency, told me. Did Antov really fall out his window in India? Was he pushed by a Kremlin agent? Or did he get a call that threatened his family and made him feel he had no option but to leap? “All of these things are possible,” Weiss told me.

In the Kremlin’s Gothic murderverse, imagination is key.

Defenestration has been a favorite method of removing political opponents since the early days of multistory buildings, but in the modern era, Russia has monopolized the practice. Like Tosca’s climactic exit from the battlements of Castel Sant’Angelo, death by falling from a great height has a performative, even moral aspect.

In Russian, this business of assassination is known as mokroye delo, or “wet work.” Sometimes, the main purpose is to send a message to others: We’ll kill you and your family if you’re disloyal. Sometimes, the goal is to simply remove a troublesome individual.

A few years after the Russian whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny died while jogging outside London in 2012, at least one autopsy detected chemical residue in his stomach linked to the rare—and highly toxic—flowering plant gelsemium. “These are the clues of evidence that the Russians are fond of using,” Weiss told me. A calling card, if you will. “They want us to know that it was murder, but they don’t want us to be able to definitely conclude it was murder.”

Poisoning has that ambiguity. It is literally covert, concealed, sometimes hard to detect. Defenestration is a bit less ambiguous. Yes, it could be an accident. But it’s a lot easier to conclude it was murder—an overt assassination.

“Things that mimic natural causes of death like a heart attack or a stroke, the Russians can be quite good at doing that,” Weiss said. The deaths range in their showiness, but they’re all part of the same overarching scheme: to perpetuate the idea that the Russian state is a deadly, all-powerful octopus, whose slimy tentacles can search out and seize any dissident, anywhere. As the Bond franchise had it, the world is not enough.

The war in Ukraine is not universally popular among Russia’s ruling elite. Since the conflict began, sanctions on oligarchs and businessmen have constrained their profligate and peripatetic lifestyles. Some are, understandably, said to be unhappy about this. High-level Russian elites feel as if Putin “has essentially wound the clock backwards,” Weiss said, to the bad old days of Cold War isolation.

This year’s spate of deaths—so brazen in their number and method as to suggest a lack of concern about plausible, or even implausible, deniability—is quite possibly Putin’s way of warning Russia’s elites that he is that deadly octopus. The point of eliminating critics, after all, isn’t necessarily to eliminate criticism. It is to remind the critics—with as much flair as possible—what the price of voicing that criticism can be.

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RSN: Republicans Can Win the Next Elections Through Gerrymandering Alone

 

 

29 June 21

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28 June 21 Live on the homepage now! Reader Supported News EVERYONE CAN AFFORD A DONATION THEY CAN AFFORD • Some people can afford more and some people can afford a little less, but everyone who comes to RSN can afford a donation that works for them. That is all it takes. Marc Ash • Founder, Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation!   Republicans Can Win the Next Elections Through Gerrymandering Alone David Daley, Guardian UK Daley writes: "Even if voting patterns remain the same, Republicans could still win more seats in Congress through redistricting." n Washington, the real insiders know that the true outrages are what’s perfectly legal and that it’s simply a gaffe when someone accidentally blurts out something honest. And so it barely made a ripple last week when a Texas congressman (and Donald Trump’s former White House physician) said aloud what’s supposed to be kept to a backroom whisper: Republicans intend to retake the US House of Representatives in 2022 through gerrymandering. “We have redistricting coming up and the Republicans control most of that process in most of the states around the country,” Representative Ronny Jackson told a conference of religious conservatives. “That alone should get us the majority back.” He’s right. Republicans won’t have to win more votes next year to claim the US House. In fact, everyone could vote the exact same way for Congress next year as they did in 2020 – when Democratic candidates nationwide won more than 4.7 million votes than Republicans and narrowly held the chamber – but under the new maps that will be in place, the Republican party would take control. How is this possible? The Republican party only needs to win five seats to wrench the Speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi. They could draw themselves a dozen – or more – through gerrymandering alone. Republicans could create at least two additional red seats in Texas and North Carolina, and another certain two in Georgia and Florida. Then could nab another in Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and New Hampshire. They won’t need to embrace policies favored by a majority of Americans. All they need to do is rework maps to their favor in states where they hold complete control of the decennial redistricting that follows the census – some of which they have held since they gerrymandered them 10 years ago. Now they can double down on the undeserved majorities that they have seized and dominate another decade. If Republicans aggressively maximize every advantage and crash through any of the usual guardrails – and they have given every indication that they will – there’s little Democrats can do. And after a 2019 US supreme court decision declared partisan gerrymandering a non-justiciable political issue, the federal courts will be powerless as well. It’s one of the many time bombs that threatens representative democracy and American traditions of majority rule. It’s a sign of how much power they have – and how aggressively they intend to wield it – that Republicans aren’t even bothering to deny that they intend to implode it. “We control redistricting,” boasted Stephen Stepanek, New Hampshire’s Republican state party chair. “I can stand here today and guarantee you that we will send a conservative Republican to Washington as a congressperson in 2022.” In Kansas, Susan Wagle, the Republican party state senate president, campaigned on a promise to draw a gerrymandered map that “takes out” the only Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation. “We can do that,” Wagle boasted. “I guarantee you that we can draw four Republican congressional maps.” Texas Republicans will look to reinforce a map that has held back demographic trends favoring Democrats over the last decade by, among other things, dividing liberal Austin into five pieces and attaching them to rural conservative counties in order to dilute Democratic votes. Texas will also have two additional seats next decade due largely to Latino population growth; in 2011, when similar growth created four new seats for Texas, Republicans managed to draw three for themselves. North Carolina Republicans crafted a reliable 10-3 Republican delegation throughout the last decade. When the state supreme court declared the congressional map unconstitutional in 2019, it forced the creation of a fairer map in time for 2020. Democrats immediately gained two seats. But the state GOP will control the entire process once again this cycle, so those two seats will likely change side – and Republicans could find a way to draw themselves the seat the state gained after reapportionment. Two Atlanta-area Democrats are in danger of being gerrymandered out of office by Republicans. The single Democratic member from Kentucky, and one of just two from Tennessee, are in jeopardy if Republicans choose to crack Louisville and Nashville, respectively, and scatter the urban areas across multiple districts. Florida Republicans ignored state constitution provisions against partisan gerrymandering in 2011 and created what a state court called a conspiracy to mount a secret, shadow redistricting process. It took the court until the 2016 election to unwind those ill-gotten GOP gains, however, which provides little incentive not to do the same thing once more. This time, a more conservative state supreme court might even allow those gains to stand. Might Democrats try the same thing? Democrats might look to squeeze a couple seats from New York and one additional seat from Illinois and possibly Maryland. But that’s scarcely enough to counter the overall GOP edge. In Colorado, Oregon and Virginia, states controlled entirely by Democrats, the party has either created an independent redistricting commission or made a deal to give Republicans a seat at the table. Commissions also draw the lines in other Democratic strongholds like California, Washington and New Jersey. There are no seats to gain in overwhelmingly blue states like Massachusetts, New Mexico and Connecticut. In many ways, the Republican edge is left over from 2010, when the party remade American politics with a plan called Redmap – short for the Redistricting Majority Project – that aimed to capture swing-state legislatures in places like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida, among others. They’ve never handed them back. Now Redmap enters its second decade of dominance – just as the lawmakers it put into office continue rewriting swing-state election laws to benefit Republicans, under the unfounded pretext of “voter fraud” that did not occur during 2020. Republicans already benefit from a structural advantage in the electoral college and the US Senate. Presidents that lost the popular vote have appointed five conservative justices to the US supreme court. Now get ready for a drunken bacchanalia of partisan gerrymandering that could make “hot vax summer” look like a chaste Victorian celebration. Meanwhile, this is how a democracy withers and disappears – slowly, legally, and in plain sight. READ MORE Republican congressional candidate Derrick Van Orden. (image: Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty Images) WISCONSIN GOP Candidate Bankrolled Jan 6 Riot Trip With Campaign Cash Roger Sollenberger, The Daily Beast Sollenberger writes: "Derrick Van Orden barely lost his race to be a Congressman. But then he used campaign funds to get to D.C. for the Jan. 6 riot. Now he's running again." wo months after Republican congressional candidate Derrick Van Orden lost his 2020 race, he joined “stop the steal” rioters on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol—and he paid for the trip with donor money left over from his failed campaign. Now Van Orden is running again, and has already scored major endorsements from senior GOP House leadership, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL and small-time actor, has previously acknowledged attending the Jan. 6 rally, but has repeatedly claimed he never entered the Capitol grounds. However, social media posts from the riot suggest that isn’t true. A Facebook image from Jan. 6 shows Van Orden standing on a wall on the Capitol grounds that was inside a restricted area. (The Daily Beast recreated the photo on Friday and confirmed that Van Orden would have had to cross police barricades to reach that area.) As for Van Orden’s campaign expenses surrounding Jan. 6, it’s unclear how they relate to Van Orden’s attendance. Federal Election Commission regulations state that travel expenses must be “directly related to the campaign.” Van Orden—who wrote off roughly $4,000 in transportation and D.C. hotel costs around Jan. 6 for him, his wife, and a campaign staffer—lost his race in November and didn’t declare his 2022 candidacy until April. Jordan Libowitz, communications director for campaign finance watchdog Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, questioned the legitimacy of the expenses. “Campaign accounts are not personal slush funds. They must be used for campaign-related activities. Attempting to overthrow an election you just lost is not a proper campaign activity,” Libowitz told The Daily Beast. “If he did use his campaign to pay for travel for him and his staff to attend the rally-turned-insurrection, it would raise serious questions about his compliance with campaign finance laws.” In an op-ed published the week after the attack on the Capitol, Van Orden claimed he made the trip “for meetings and to stand for the integrity of our electoral system,” both “as a citizen and at the behest of my neighbors here in Western Wisconsin.” He didn’t specify the nature of those meetings, and did not reply to The Daily Beast’s questions about the trip. “If those were campaign-related meetings, he should say so,” Libowitz said. “If it was a personal trip as a private citizen, that’s another matter.” Van Orden’s op-ed went on to call the riot “one of the most tragic incidents in the history of our nation.” “At no time did I enter the grounds, let alone the building,” he said. But that Facebook image, posted at 5:15 p.m. on Jan. 6, shows Van Orden clearly on the Capitol grounds. And in a Facebook Live video shared earlier that afternoon from the Washington Mall, one of the candidate’s friends said he was heading to meet Van Orden, who, according to the friend, was “on the wall” and had told him he “got a great spot to watch.” “I got off the phone with Derrick Van Orden. He and a bunch of his frogman buddies are on the wall,” the friend says in the video. “He said he got a—they got a pretty good vantage point on the wall to the left side of the building. So that’s where I’m aiming for. He said, ‘Come on up. We got a great spot to watch.’ So that’s kind of where I’m shooting for.” The video was posted around 2:15 p.m., when the attack was in full swing. At one point, the friend says, “I can see people up on the steps. Apparently, last I heard they were inside the building at the door of the Senate.” In the op-ed, however, Van Orden claimed he “stood on the parapet that lines the perimeter of the grounds and watched what should have been an expression of free speech devolve into one of the most tragic incidents in the history of our nation.” He left, he said, when it became clear that “a protest had become a mob,” fearing his presence “could be construed as tacitly approving this unlawful conduct.” Van Orden’s attendance at the Capitol puts him in league with a slew of political hopefuls who attended the insurrection and have since declared candidacies for office. What sets Van Orden apart, however, is his support from powerful House Republicans and his strong showing in last year’s election. He lost by about 2.5 points to longtime incumbent Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI), who has held the seat since 1997. After the election, Van Orden questioned the vote count. Van Orden’s 2022 bid has already drawn major endorsements. Since April, he has scored support from McCarthy, as well as House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and newly minted conference chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). McCarthy, Scalise, and Stefanik all objected to the election results, as did two Wisconsin Republican congressmen who have also endorsed Van Orden—Rep. Tom Tiffany and Rep. Scott Fitzgerald. That tight 2020 race, which Kind described as “competitive since day one,” also attracted a record amount of campaign contributions. Federal disclosures show Kind raised about $3 million, and Van Orden pulled in almost $2 million—adding up to the district’s largest haul in at least 20 years. The fight nearly drained both campaigns, and by the end of the year, Van Orden had about $12,500 left. He spent about a third of it on the trip to what would become the Capitol riot.

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Michelle Bachelet, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights shown here last year, is urging countries worldwide to do more to help end discrimination, violence and systemic racism against people of African descent. (photo: Martial Trezzini/AP)

A UN Report on Racism Launched After George Floyd's Murder Calls for Reparations
Associated Press
Excerpt: "The U.N. human rights chief, in a landmark report launched after the killing of George Floyd in the United States, is urging countries worldwide to do more to help end discrimination, violence and systemic racism against people of African descent and 'make amends' to them - including through reparations."

The report from Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, offers a sweeping look at the roots of centuries of mistreatment faced by Africans and people of African descent, notably from the transatlantic slave trade. It seeks a "transformative" approach to address its continued impact today.

The report, a year in the making, hopes to build on momentum around the recent, intensified scrutiny worldwide about the blight of racism and its impact on people of African descent as epitomized by the high-profile killings of unarmed Black people in the United States and elsewhere.

"There is today a momentous opportunity to achieve a turning point for racial equality and justice," the report said.

The report aims to speed up action by countries to end racial injustice; end impunity for rights violations by police; ensure that people of African descent and those who speak out against racism are heard; and face up to past wrongs through accountability and redress.

"I am calling on all states to stop denying — and start dismantling — racism; to end impunity and build trust; to listen to the voices of people of African descent; and to confront past legacies and deliver redress," Bachelet said in a video statement.

While broaching the issue of reparation in her most explicit way yet, Bachelet suggested that monetary compensation alone is not enough and would be part of an array of measures to help rectify or make up for the injustices.

"Reparations should not only be equated with financial compensation," she wrote, adding that it should include restitution, rehabilitation, acknowledgement of injustices, apologies, memorialization, educational reforms and "guarantees" that such injustices won't happen again.

The U.N.-backed Human Rights Council commissioned the report during a special session last year following the murder of Floyd, a Black American who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was sentenced to 22-1/2 years in prison last week.

Protests erupted after excruciating bystander video showed how Floyd gasped repeatedly, "I can't breathe!" as onlookers yelled at Chauvin to stop pressing his knee on Floyd's neck.

The protests against Floyd's killing and the "momentous" verdict against Chauvin are a "seminal point in the fight against racism," the report said.

The report was based on discussions with more than 340 people — mostly of African descent — and experts; more than 100 contributions in writing, including from governments; and review of public material, the rights office said.

It analyzed 190 deaths, mostly in the U.S., to show how law enforcement officers are rarely held accountable for rights violations and crimes against people of African descent, and it noted similar patterns of mistreatment by police across many countries.

The report ultimately aims to transform those opportunities into a more systemic response by governments to address racism, and not just in the United States — although the injustices and legacy of slavery, racism and violence faced by African Americans was clearly a major theme.

The report also laid out cases, concerns and the situation in roughly 60 countries including Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Colombia and France, among others.

"We could not find a single example of a state that has fully reckoned with the past or comprehensively accounted for the impacts of the lives of people of African descent today," Mona Rishmawi, who leads a unit on non-discrimination at the U.N. human rights office, told a news conference. "Our message, therefore, is that this situation is untenable."

Compensation should be considered at the "collective and the individual level," she said, while adding that any such process "starts with acknowledgment" of past wrongs and "it's not one-size-fits-all." She said countries must look at their own pasts and practices to assess how to proceed.

The U.N. report called on countries to make " amends for centuries of violence and discrimination" such as through "formal acknowledgment and apologies, truth-telling processes and reparations in various forms."

It also decried the "dehumanization of people of African descent" that was "rooted in false social constructions of race" in the past to justify enslavement, racial stereotypes and harmful practices as well as tolerance for racial discrimination, inequality and violence.

It cited inequalities faced by people of African descent and the "stark socioeconomic and political marginalization" they face in many countries, including unfair access to education, health care, jobs, housing and clean water.

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Gavin Grimm. (photo: ACLU)

Supreme Court Gives Victory to Transgender Student Who Sued to Use Bathroom
Ariane de Vogue and Chandelis Duster, CNN

he Supreme Court on Monday left in place a decision that allowed a transgender student to use the bathroom that corresponded to his gender identity, a victory for the LGBTQ community that has been fearful the high court would take up the case and reverse a lower court opinion.

The case concerns the scope of Title IX that prohibits schools from discriminating "on the basis of sex." It began when Gavin Grimm, a transgender male who was then a high-school student, challenged the local school board's decision to require him to use either a unisex restroom or a restroom that corresponds to the sex, female, he was assigned at birth.

Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito said they would have taken up the case for next term.

"I am glad that my years-long fight to have my school see me for who I am is over. Being forced to use the nurse's room, a private bathroom, and the girl's room was humiliating for me, and having to go to out-of-the-way bathrooms severely interfered with my education," Grimm -- who has since graduated -- said in a statement Monday.

"Trans youth deserve to use the bathroom in peace without being humiliated and stigmatized by their own school boards and elected officials," he added.

The court's decision not to review an opinion by the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals means that public school students in the mid-Atlantic states covered by the 4th Circuit, as well as states governed by the 7th Circuit and the 11th Circuit, can use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity. The issue is unsettled in other states and another appeal could conceivably make its way back to the Supreme Court, although Grimm's legal fight is over.

Grimm filed suit against the board in 2015, arguing that the school's policy violated Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause. The Obama Justice Department filed a "statement of interest" accusing the board of violating Title IX. A federal appeals court deferred to the interpretation ruling in Grimm's favor. The school board appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which agreed to take up the case.

Before the high court could rule, however, the Trump administration withdrew the Obama-era guidance, and the Supreme Court wiped away the decision by the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals and sent the case back down for further proceedings. The case began again at the district court and ultimately the 4th Circuit again ruled in favor of Grimm, this time citing the Supreme Court's landmark decision in 2020 that held that federal employment law protects LGBTQ workers.

Grimm began fighting the Gloucester County School Board's policies when he was a sophomore at a Virginia high school in 2015. As part of Grimm's medical treatment for severe gender dysphoria, Grimm and his mother notified school administrators of his male gender identity and received permission for Grimm to use the boys' restroom for almost two months. But once the school board began receiving complaints, it adopted a new policy denying him access to the boys' bathrooms.

In 2019, a federal judge in Virginia also ruled in favor of Grimm, telling the school board it must recognize him as male and saying the board had violated his constitutional rights. The judge awarded him one dollar in damages and told the school district to pay his court fees. The district was also told it must update his records to indicate he is male.

Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said Monday the high court's ruling is "an important tactical victory for transgender individuals, especially in public schools."

"The larger question, which wasn't at issue in this case, is how the Justices are going to address circumstances where accommodations based upon sexual orientation or gender identity run headlong into compelling countervailing interests, such as the protection of religious liberty," Vladeck said. "Just as in the Bostock employment discrimination ruling from last Term, leaving the decision below in this case intact kicks that question down the road."

The decision means that, for now, the high court won't wade into the culture wars on a key issue for members of the transgender community, which has faced an onslaught of attacks this year by conservative lawmakers around the country seeking to impose restrictions trans people in everything from public school athletics to access to gender-affirming health care.

The transgender bathroom debate has long been a flash point for conservatives and it was brought to the forefront during the 2020 Republican National Convention by the Rev. Billy Graham's granddaughter Cissie Graham Lynch, who told viewers that "Democrats pressured schools to allow boys to compete in girls' sports and use girls' locker rooms." And more than half the country's states have introduced more than 100 bills that aim to curb the rights of transgender people.

Last month, Tennessee's GOP governor signed into law a measure that requires public schools to make "reasonable accommodation" for a person who cannot or will not use a restroom or changing facility designated for their sex in a public school building or at a school-sponsored activity, which LGBTQ advocates said will deny trans students access to facilities that are consistent with their gender identity.

Meanwhile, advocates filed a lawsuit against Tennessee last week seeking to challenge another recently approved law that requires some businesses in the state to post signs indicating that they allow transgender and other non-binary people to use the bathroom in their establishment that matches their gender identity, a policy LGBTQ advocates say is "offensive and humiliating" for members of the community and could lead to harassment.

In December, the Supreme Court declined to take up a case from parents in Oregon who challenged a public school's policy allowing a transgender student to use the bathroom that corresponded with his gender identity. In declining to take up the petition, the justices left in place an appeals court decision earlier that year that held that the school's policy intended to "avoid discrimination and ensure the safety and well-being of transgender students."

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Donald Trump supporters stand gather for his first post-presidency campaign rally in Wellington, Ohio, on Saturday. (Photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

Revealed: Neo-Confederate Group Includes Military Officers and Politicians
Jason Wilson, Guardian UK
Wilson writes: "Leaked membership data from the neo-Confederate Sons of Confederate Veterans organization has revealed that the organization's members include serving military officers, elected officials, public employees, and a national security expert whose CV boasts of 'Department of Defense Secret Security Clearance.'"

Leaked data shows other high-profile members have overlapping membership in more explicitly racist or violent groups

But alongside these members are others who participated in and committed acts of violence at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and others who hold overlapping membership in violent neo-Confederate groups such as the League of the South (LoS).

The group, organized as a federation of state chapters, has recently made news for increasingly aggressive campaigns against the removal of Confederate monuments. This has included legal action against states and cities, the flying of giant Confederate battle flags near public roadways, and Confederate flag flyovers at Nascar races.

Last Monday, the Georgia division of SCV commenced legal action against the city of Decatur with the aim of restoring a Confederate memorial obelisk which was removed in June 2020, and later replaced with a statue of the late congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis.

Last year, in a widely criticized move, the University of North Carolina’s board of governors proposed creating a $2.5m charitable trust which would pay the state’s SCV organization to maintain a Confederate “Silent Sam” statue which had been removed from the campus.

That deal fell apart in recent weeks. But critics – including former members – alleged that the SCV commander for the state, Kevin Stone, associated with extremists and other “scary” individuals who had been recruited to the group.

Stone, who who also co-founded the SCV Mechanized Cavalry, a motorcycle club associated with the SCV, reportedly led a takeover of the branch which pushed out anti-racist members.

College of Charleston historian, Adam Domby, whose book, The False Cause, details the history of the neo-Confederate movement, said in a telephone conversation that “throughout its history, the SCV has been linked with white supremacist groups, and historically it has avowedly supported white supremacist groups”.

Jalane Schmidt, a professor of religion at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has been active in the campaign to remove the statues that the Unite the Right rally sought to defend in 2017, and is working on a book about the history of neo-Confederate groups including SCV in Virginia.

In a telephone conversation, she pointed to an 1 April ruling of the Virginia supreme court which reversed lower court rulings in favor of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Monument Fund in their quest to ensure Charlottesville’s monuments stayed in place.

“According to the supreme court, the SCV and the Monument Fund were wrong all along, and we could have taken down our statues in 2017,” she said.

Instead, the statues were still standing when Unite the Right was organized. As a result of the rally, Schmidt added: “People are dead.”

SCV’s attempts to preserve Confederate monuments have become more difficult in the face of intensifying demands for their removal since the rise of the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement, and the neo-Confederate-inspired mass murder of Black church-goers by Dylann Roof in South Carolina in 2015.

SCV last year rededicated removed statues of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest at its National Confederate Museum in Columbia, Tennessee.

The data

The national membership data was provided to the Guardian by a self-described hacktivist whose identity has been withheld for their safety.

The data reveals the names, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses of almost 59,000 past and present members of the organization, including 91 who used addresses associated with government agencies for their contact email, and 74 who used addresses associated with various branches of the armed forces.

They noticed that the organization’s website had been misconfigured, allowing access to membership rolls, recruiting data, and other information about the internal workings of the group. The website has had the security issue for a number of years, according to the hacktivist.

The membership data shows members’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, whether they are active or not, and their email addresses.

The Guardian identified members who were listed as active, and whose contact information included addresses associated with government agencies, the armed forces, educational institutions, and non-government organizations.

There was some previous reporting on an earlier version of the membership database, made public by Atlanta Antifa, which noted the presence of Georgia state legislators in the group’s data.

But the Guardian has found additional legislators, and active members who are in positions of influence and responsibility that stretch far beyond the walls of state legislatures.

High-profile members

One member listed as active in the data is Scott Wyatt, who represents the 97th district in Virginia’s house of delegates, which comprises rural counties north of Richmond, which served as the Confederate capital for much of the civil war.

Duane AJ Probst, who was elected coroner of Osage county, Missouri in 2020, after reaching the rank of Lt Col in the US Army National Guard, is also listed as an active member of the group.

In a telephone conversation, Probst confirmed his membership, saying that he had joined in the last “four or five years” after he discovered a relative had fought for the Confederacy, had attended meetings until around two years ago when he became too busy for regular attendance.

He said that in his experience of the local group in Missouri, it was “a friendly organization that doesn’t advocate white supremacy”, and the main activities he had been involved in were dinners and lectures.

On the question of statues, Probst said that “the men who forged the country were flawed”, and that “I don’t know that taking down a statue is going to ameliorate any issues”, adding that he was not opposed to adding plaques to monuments since “perspectives change as time goes on”.

On the presence of extremists in SCV, Probst said he had never encountered any, but that “it doesn’t surprise me. There are militant members of every organization.”

Probst, who ran for coroner as a Republican, added that: “I am a member of a political faction in this country. There are members of that faction who are loony in my opinion. That doesn’t mean I have to walk away from the organization. Instead I fight for the values I think it represents.”

Another member of the group who is listed as active, Dr Danny W Davis, is both a professor and program director at Texas A&M University and a training consultant to the US army reserve. His membership data includes a US army contact email address.

Davis states on his publicly available CV that he has “Department of Defense Secret Security Clearance”, that he is a “Training Consultant to US Army Reserve, San Antonio, Texas”, and the “Director, Certificate in Homeland Security Program”.

Davis’s CV includes details of courses Davis has taught and developed, including “Domestic Terrorism: The Internal Threat to America”, which is described as “a comprehensive survey of domestic terrorism”. The CV also points to Davis’s 20-year military career, which ended in 1997 with Davis a lieutenant colonel.

In a telephone conversation, Davis confirmed his active membership in the group, saying that he had joined because he had “three great grandfathers” who had fought for the Confederate army.

On the question of statues he said that “when we start taking down monuments, I think that’s wrong”, and that to him they “represent men who were fighting for something they believed in”.

Davis said that those beliefs “included slavery, but not only slavery”, adding: “Do I think the right outcome came out of the civil war? Yes.”

Davis said “I am not a white supremacist” and said he was surprised to hear about the overlap between the group and extremist organizations, saying that members were mostly “re-enactors”, “people like me who are interested in history”, and “military veterans”.

He said that he includes rightwing extremists in his graduate courses on domestic terrorism, and that he is currently revising a course to include the 6 January assault on the US Capitol, as well as the activities of “Antifa and BLM in the north-west”.

A number of members listed as active members use email addresses associated with the Citadel, a public military academy located in Charleston, South Carolina.

A total of 13 members using Citadel or Citadel alumni email addresses appear in the membership database, with six listed as active members.

One of those active members is retired National Guard Brig Gen Roger Clifton Poole, who has twice served as interim president of the college, and remains a professor in The Citadel’s School of Business.

Wyatt and Poole did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Radical neo-Confederates

Alongside these SCV members, however, are others who have overlapping membership in more explicitly racist or violent groups, or who have been involved in political violence at events like Unite the Right, the event where Heather Heyer was murdered by white supremacist James Fields in 2017.

They include North Carolina lawyer, Harold Crews, who is listed as an active member of the SCV. Crews is also a member of the League of the South, and marched with the group at Unite the Right in 2017.

Crews was involved in scuffles with counter-protesters on the day. Later, backed by a disinformation campaign pushed by white nationalist blogger, Brad Griffin, who was then LoS’s public relations officer, Crews persuaded a judge to issue a warrant for the arrest of DeAndre Harris, who was badly beaten in a parking garage by six Unite the Right attendees.

While the public positions of SCV emphasize the preservation of Confederate “heritage”, LoS is an openly secessionist group which seeks to separate the states which joined the confederacy as a new white supremacist state. Crews served as the North Carolina chair of LoS, and hosted a podcast called Southern Nationalist Radio, where his guests included LoS founder Michael Hill.

Other active members who attended Unite the Right include Virginian, George Randall, and North Carolina based James Shillinglaw. On the day of the rally, Shillinglaw was captured on video beating a counter-protester with a flagpole.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Randall and Shillinglaw are also LoS members.

Also on the membership rolls, but listed as currently inactive, is long time Georgia-based far-right activist Chester Doles. Doles, a former Klansman and member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance who marched at Unite The Right with the Hammerskins white power gang, was pictured in 2013 wearing the insignia of the SCV Motorized Cavalry, a motorcycle club made up of members of SCV.

Doles was apparently a member of the group long after he was imprisoned first in Maryland in 1993 for beating a black man, and later for weapons charges in Georgia.

Crews, Doles, Randall, and Shillinglaw did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Colombians demanding the end of political violence in New York, U.S., May 5, 2021. (photo: Twitter/Jamie_Margolin)

Colombia: Politically-Motivated Assassinations on the Rise
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Over 350 former FARC-EP members and social leaders have been killed in 2021, and President Ivan Duque is still not addressing the matter."

n Sunday, Colombian Non-Governmental Organization (NGOs) denounced the assassination of 6 former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (FARC-EP) members in the last 24 hours.

The first report is about former FARC-EP member and Peace Agreements signatory Norelia Trompeta's assassination, a 25-year-old girl from Buenos Aires municipality in Cauca Province.

According to Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz), Trompeta was found together with another woman, who still unidentified. Both of them were shot once in the temple, suggesting premeditated assassination.

The second massacre took place in San Vicente of Caguan, Caqueta Department, where five farmers, former FARC-EP members, and Peace Agreements signatory as well were found killed.

These assassinations, together with yesterday's killing of the social leader Diana Jaramillo and her partner, make this weekend one of the bloodiest of the year.

Moreover, on Saturday, government officials informed about the assassination of 4 police officers by unknown armed groups, three of them in the Cesar Department and the other one in Cali's suburbs.

Cali's Metropolitan Police is offering about 22.000 euros for good information leading to perpetrators' capture, something that certainly nobody will do for any of the abovementioned former FARC-EP members or social leaders.

Peace Agreements signatories and social leaders are the most common targets of paramilitary groups operating all over Colombia. Ivan Duque's government keeps turning a blind eye to a phenomenon that has caused over 350 casualties so far (277 former FARC-EP members and over 75 social leaders).

So far, Duque's far-right policies had only enhanced insecurity and violence, while neglecting Colombians' most urgent needs. During his time in office, he has deepened the social crisis and political upheaval in the country, something that has even affected him directly.

On Friday, the President's helicopter was shot in Santander's northern region while heading to Cucuta airport. He was accompanied by Defense and Interior Ministers during the trip. Local media informed that there were no further incidents and that no one suffered injuries.

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Incarcerated firefighters working on the Detwiler Fire in Mariposa County, California, in 2017. (photo: Peter Bohler/High Country News)

The Incarcerated Women Battling Wildfires
Jenny Shank, High Country News
Shank writes: "In 2016, a boulder struck and killed 22-year-old Shawna Jones while she battled the Mulholland Fire in Malibu, California. Jones was part of an inmate crew from Correctional Camp 13."

In ‘Breathing Fire,’ Jaime Lowe uncovers the benefits and drawbacks of California’s inmate fire program.

n 2016, a boulder struck and killed 22-year-old Shawna Jones while she battled the Mulholland Fire in Malibu, California. Jones was part of an inmate crew from Correctional Camp 13, making her the first incarcerated woman to die while fighting a fire since 1983, the year women first joined California’s inmate firefighting program, which started in 1946.

After Jones’ death, the Los Angeles Times published a bare-bones article about the incident. It revealed little about Jones, but it drew the attention of California-raised journalist Jaime Lowe, who was determined to discover more. Lowe’s years-long investigation resulted in Breathing Fire, an immersive, comprehensive look at Jones’ life and the lives of other incarcerated firefighters, as well as California’s history of inmate firefighting and its growing reliance on it. Given the new reality of California’s fire season, which “lasts 13 months,” as environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne puts it, often all that stands between a family’s home and a conflagration are the imprisoned people that labor, sometimes for 24 hours straight, to restrain the flames.

Incarcerated people comprise up to 30% of California’s wildland fire crews. At the time Lowe reported this book, around 200 of these firefighters were female, making up three out of California’s 35 inmate fire camps. Imprisoned people do difficult work, establishing “a line, usually a few feet wide, by cutting through trees and shrubs and removing anything that could burn.” For this grueling and risky labor, they earn $2.56 per day while in camp, and up to $2 an hour while fighting fires. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation estimated that paying such minuscule wages for this vital work, rather than the standard hourly rate, “saved the state at least $1.2 billion” over 13 years.

Lowe delves into California’s history of compulsory labor, including a cruel law passed in 1850 that allowed white people to accuse Indigenous people of lacking employment, whereupon they could be arrested and sold into four months of slavery at a public auction. Lowe draws a direct line from this to the inmate labor that contributed to the construction of much of California’s infrastructure, including building the Pacific Coast Highway and carving out the 22-mile stretch of land to create Sunset Boulevard. When World War II brought personnel shortages, corrections officers began forcing incarcerated people to fight fires.

Lowe vividly paints the realities of present-day firefighting. Her precise descriptions of sensory details — the air is “congested with blackened particles” — and firefighting and inmate lingo make readers feel as if they’re in camp with the women, jumping out of bunks at the 3 a.m. siren and piling into a buggy to race off toward a roaring wildfire. Lowe also weaves in accounts of the women’s lives, including their stints in standard prison facilities before they joined the firefighting program. Most were sentenced for drug offenses, as only nonviolent offenders who complete an intense training regimen can join the program. But even though her interviewees see the benefits of their work, Lowe notes that “most bristled at the idea that they volunteered.” When an incarcerated woman wants to avoid the trauma of prison, from sexual assault to solitary confinement, “she might be looking for any alternative,” Lowe writes. “She might even be willing to risk her life.”

Breathing Fire doesn’t shy away from complicated truths. For many women, the program offers relative dignity and purpose compared to the grim realities of incarceration. Besides receiving good food and exercise, they get to live in the forest of Malibu, where their families can visit them under pine trees rather than the fluorescent lights of a prison. Fire-threatened residents hold up signs to thank them for their work. Because the forestry programs are popular among imprisoned people, talked up as “a prison Shangri-La — lobster, shrimp, ocean breezes,” there is no sustained opposition to them, despite the low pay. But even these benefits are short-lived: Formerly incarcerated people face many obstacles if they seek to build a career in firefighting, given laws that prevent the state from hiring ex-felons and parolees. As Lowe pieces together Shawna Jones’ story through public records and interviews with her fellow inmate firefighters, family and friends, it becomes clear that Jones felt the firefighting program turned her life around. Had she lived, she would have tried to pursue it as a career.

In recent years, the firefighting program has dwindled. In 2016, 65% of California voters approved Proposition 57, which allows nonviolent felons with convictions for multiple crimes to seek early parole after they complete the full sentence for their most significant crime. Its backers aimed to ease prison overcrowding, but it also depleted the pool of potential firefighters. The proposition highlighted a point that David Fathi, the director of the ACLU National Prison Project, expressed to Lowe: “If these people are safe to be out and about and carrying axes and chainsaws, maybe they didn’t need to be in prison in the first place.” In the meantime, as questions surrounding criminal justice loom, the megafires will continue to rage, keeping California in perpetual need of firefighters.

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