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Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale Jailed Ahead of Sentencing
Alex Emmons, The Intercept
Emmons writes: "It's unclear precisely why Hale was arrested, and court documents show that his lawyers objected."
aniel Hale, a former Air Force intelligence analyst who pleaded guilty to sharing classified documents about drone strikes with a reporter, has been arrested ahead of his sentencing in July.
In March, Hale pleaded guilty to one charge under the Espionage Act, and he faces up to 10 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced in July, but a federal judge has ordered him incarcerated until then for violating the terms of his pretrial release, according to court records.
It’s unclear precisely what Hale is accused of doing, and court documents show that his lawyers objected to his jailing. Minutes from a hearing last week indicated that the prosecution “seeks continued detention at this time” and that Hale’s lawyers argued that “there [are] no actual violations committed by the [defendant] as alleged.”
An attorney for Hale, Cadence Mertz, declined to explain the reason for Hale’s arrest. “Unfortunately there isn’t any comment we can make,” Mertz told The Intercept by email.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jesselyn Radack, a whistleblower attorney who has assisted Hale in the past, said in a phone interview that Hale was seeing a court-appointed therapist and that his arrest came as a surprise. “We had goodbye, farewell activities that his friends and supporters wanted to have in this final, very tense time before July,” Radack said. “He didn’t even have time to find someone to take care of his cat.”
Last month, after Hale pleaded guilty, District Judge Liam O’Grady ordered that the conditions of his pre-sentencing release include submitting to “substance abuse testing and/or treatment as directed by Pretrial Services.”
According to his 2019 indictment, Hale enlisted in the Air Force in 2009 and was assigned to work for the National Security Agency. He deployed to Afghanistan in support of the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2012, and was responsible for “identifying, tracking, and targeting” high-valued terror suspects.
As part of his plea agreement, Hale admitted to leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. Other reporters have alleged that the documents were used in an eight-part series about drone strikes published by The Intercept. The series raises questions about the accuracy of strikes, targeting procedures, and special operations’ expanding footprint in Africa.
After the series ran, the Obama administration committed to further transparency for the drone program, including releasing an estimate of the number of “noncombatants” killed outside war zones like Afghanistan between 2009 and 2015. Civil liberties groups praised it as a step forward, though the administration’s figures were much lower than some independent groups had estimated.
The Intercept “does not comment on matters relating to the identity of anonymous sources,” Intercept Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed said at the time of Hale’s indictment.
“These documents detailed a secret, unaccountable process for targeting and killing people around the world, including U.S. citizens, through drone strikes,” Reed noted. “They are of vital public importance, and activity related to their disclosure is protected by the First Amendment. … No one has ever been held accountable for killing civilians in drone strikes.”
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Rudy Giuliani at the White House last year. Former prosecutors say the warrant's details suggest some potential charges against Giuliani. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Giuliani Cuts Down His Entourage
FBI Raid Exposes Giuliani and Signals Widening Criminal Search, Experts Say
Peter Stone, Guardian UK
Stone writes: "The extraordinary FBI raid on Rudy Giuliani's New York apartment and office has sparked debate about what criminal charges Giuliani may face, and signals a widening criminal investigation into his Ukraine drive to help Trump in 2020 by sullying Joe Biden, former prosecutors say."
High-profile nature of search highlights inquiry’s seriousness and suggests officials may have new Ukraine-related leads to follow
he extraordinary FBI raid on Rudy Giuliani’s New York apartment and office has sparked debate about what criminal charges Giuliani may face, and signals a widening criminal investigation into his Ukraine drive to help Trump in 2020 by sullying Joe Biden, former prosecutors say.
The high-profile nature of the raid meant it required senior Department of Justice sign-off, and underscored the investigation’s seriousness and progress. It also obtained several of Giuliani’s electronic devices and thus may have harvested a rich trove of new evidence and leads for investigators to follow.
“A search warrant involving a lawyer is always a sensitive matter, and even more so when the lawyer was the president’s lawyer,” said Mary McCord, a former prosecutor who led the national security division at the DoJ at the end of the Obama administration until May 2017.
She added: “This would have needed approval at a very high level within the Department of Justice, which would not have been given absent very solid grounds. And department lawyers would have thought through legal issues like the expected assertions of privilege.”
Ex-prosecutors and lawyers note that Giuliani seemed to rely heavily on several controversial Ukrainian officials, including a politician linked to Russian disinformation in his drive to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who had ties to a Ukraine energy firm, to boost Trump. They also point out Giuliani played a key part in ousting the US ambassador in Kyiv, suggesting the investigation could be looking at whether Giuliani broke multiple laws.
Several outlets have reported that Giuliani is being investigated to determine if he broke the Foreign Agents Registration Act, requiring people who lobby the US government on behalf of foreign officials to disclose that to the justice department. The inquiry is reportedly focused on Giuliani’s role in Trump’s firing of ambassador Marie Yovanovitch in May 2019, a move that Giuliani and two close associates – indicted earlier on charges of campaign finance violations – pushed, and a central issue in Trump’s first impeachment.
The criminal inquiry into Giuliani, an ex-New York mayor and former federal prosecutor, grows out of one that in 2019 charged Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Soviet-born Giuliani associates who were heavily involved in his Ukraine projects, with illegal campaign donations from a foreign source. Parnas and Fruman are slated for trial in October.
Among the 2019 charges against Parnas and Fruman were several alleged illegal donations, including a $325,000 check to a pro-Trump Super Pac. In 2020, a second indictment charged Parnas and another associate, David Correia, with running a sham company called Fraud Guarantee, which was aimed ostensibly at protecting investors against corporate fraud, but allegedly bilked its investors out of $2m, and paid $500,000 to Giuliani for legal and technical advice. Correia pleaded guilty late last year and has been sentenced to a year in jail.
According to the 2020 indictment, a Long Island backer of Trump loaned the $500,000 to Fraud Guarantee for Giuliani’s services in 2018, the year that Giuliani began working as Trump’s personal lawyer.
Reuters has reported that the search warrant authorizing the raid, which seized over 10 cellphones and computers, was seeking information about Giuliani’s communications with more than a dozen individuals, including ex-Ukrainian prosecutors and political figures, and trying to learn of contacts he had with US officials about Yovanovitch.
Former prosecutors say the warrant’s details suggest some potential charges against Giuliani.
“It’s a very aggressive tactic to seek an attorney search warrant,” said Michael Zeldin, a former federal prosecutor. “The warrant lists a who’s who of Ukrainian officials with whom Giuliani is believed to have been working in 2019-20. The fact that a judge issued the warrant despite the high bar for obtaining one, would seem to indicate that Giuliani is at least a subject of what appears to include violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara).”
Giuliani has denied lobbying for any foreign officials. In a post-raid statement, he said his “conduct as a lawyer and a citizen was absolutely legal and ethical” and Monday he told Fox News federal investigators are “trying to frame him”.
Likewise, Giuliani’s attorney Robert Costello has called the raids “legal thuggery”, noting that Giuliani offered twice to answer prosecutors’ questions – except ones involving privileged talks with Trump – and was rebuffed. Costello, who did not return several calls seeking comment, has indicated that attorney-client privilege issues will figure in Giuliani’s defense.
Despite Giuliani’s adamant denials, DoJ veterans say the search warrant underscores the inquiry’s progress and multiple directions. “The search warrant could be a microcosm leading to several potential charges, including violations of Fara,” said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the DoJ’s fraud section. “And following the money could open up a pandora’s box of possible charges against Giuliani and his associates.”
Other recent FBI moves suggest the Giuliani investigation may be wider than Fara issues.
The FBI also seized electronic devices from the home of Victoria Toensing, a conservative DC lawyer and Giuliani ally, who with her lawyer husband Joe diGenova represented a wealthy Ukrainian oligarch, Dmitry Firtash, fighting extradition to the US for several years on complex charges he violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which bars bribes to win business.
Firtash, who had a $1m contract with the two Washington lawyers for a year, reportedly played a role through associates in assisting Giuliani’s Ukraine search for Biden dirt. Toensing has indicated she was informed she is not a target in the federal inquiry.
Phil Halpern, a recently retired federal prosecutor who spent 36 years dealing with corruption and campaign finance cases, said Giuliani’s Ukraine political work “exposes him to a veritable potpourri of different federal offenses”.
“His efforts to assist the Trump campaign directly – and through his indicted associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman – could be viewed as illegal campaign finance violations as they were never recorded in any campaign finance disclosures.” Further, the $500,000 payment Giuliani received from Parnas and Fruman “could be seen as part of a wider bribery or money-laundering conspiracy”.
With complex legal battles looming, Giuliani has been getting advice from Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor emeritus who helped represent Trump during his first impeachment, and recently has launched high-decibel media attacks on the raid.
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The constellation of forces that led to India's coronavirus crisis is not unique; it's the default in most of the world. (photo: Rebecca Conway/Getty)
Dhruv Khullar | Inside India's COVID-19 Surge
Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker
Khullar writes: "Read The New Yorker's complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. For Arora, as for many Indians, the apocalyptic COVID-19 surge the country now faces was unexpected."
ajat Arora, an interventional cardiologist, is the managing director of the Yashoda Hospital and Research Centre, a medical system that operates several hospitals in and around New Delhi. For the past year, Arora and his team have designated two specific hospitals for their system’s COVID-19 patients. Situated in the city of Ghaziabad, just east of Delhi, the hospital that Arora looks after is large and modern, with a full range of subspecialties; it has two hundred and forty COVID beds, including sixty-five in the adult I.C.U. and fifteen in a pediatric I.C.U.
India, like the rest of the world, has struggled with the coronavirus. The number of patients at the COVID hospital reached a hundred and thirty in the fall. Still, by December of 2020, life in Delhi had almost returned to normal. Temples had been opened for worship, political rallies had resumed, and India’s famously large wedding celebrations were back on. Arora’s COVID hospital was never stretched beyond capacity and was always flush with supplies and medications; in February, it was caring for fewer than ten coronavirus patients at a time, and many had symptoms of long COVID, not acute infection. The rest of the hospital provided cardiac care, elective surgeries, and labor and delivery services. It came as a surprise to Arora, therefore, when he contracted the virus, in late January. “Everyone said, ‘COVID is gone—where the hell did you get COVID? This is such a random time to get COVID,’ ” he told me. All around him, he recalled, a sense of triumph had settled in: people asked, “Are we immune to this disease?” and “Did we win the war?”
For Arora, as for many Indians, the apocalyptic COVID-19 surge the country now faces was unexpected. In March, cases started to rise in the western state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai. “We thought it would be like the first wave,” Arora said. “We thought things would pick up but pretty much be manageable. You always reason from your past experience.” Today, India is home to the worst coronavirus outbreak in the world—a medical and humanitarian crisis on a scale not yet seen during the pandemic. Though the reported case numbers are in the hundreds of thousands, some experts estimate that millions of Indians are infected each day; thousands are dying, with more deaths going uncounted or unreported. More than one in every five coronavirus tests returns positive—a marker of insufficient testing and rampant viral spread. Hospitals are running out of oxygen, staff, and beds; makeshift funeral pyres burn through the night as crematoriums are flooded with dead bodies.
Arora, like leaders at other Indian hospitals, now regularly hears that critical supplies and medications could run out at his hospital in days or hours, if they haven’t already. He is constantly working the phones to procure what’s needed for basic COVID-19 care: oxygen, ventilators, immunosuppressive medications, antiviral drugs, and the like. Day and night, these calls are interspersed with pleas from increasingly desperate patients or their families, who ask and sometimes beg for admission. Almost always, Arora has to refuse. His hospital can admit around thirty patients per day, based on the number of discharges and deaths; he estimates that he and other hospital administrators receive upward of a thousand requests daily. Arora’s cousin, a woman in her thirties, is currently admitted. After arriving, she required escalating doses of oxygen and needed I.C.U.-level care, but Arora was unable to get a bed for her until nearly half a day had gone by. “There’s nothing we can do until someone gets better or someone dies,” he said. “If I put up a thousand-bed hospital today, it would be full in an hour.”
Not infrequently, Arora receives messages from families of patients to whom he refused admission and who later died. The other day, a loved one of a previously healthy, thirty-nine-year-old man texted Arora that if he had given her just two minutes of his time the man would have survived. Not long afterward, Arora received a message from another man’s son: “My father left us,” he wrote. “I begged you Doctor.” Last week, a young girl called him in the middle of the night on behalf of her father, whose breathing was rapidly deteriorating. The I.C.U. was filled past capacity, and Arora couldn’t admit him. The next day, the girl told Arora that her father had died and that now her mother was struggling to breathe. Arora treated the mother in the emergency room, and she survived.
In addition to a shortage of beds, Arora’s hospital doesn’t have enough medications. Supplies of the immunomodulator drug tocilizumab, which is given to patients to treat the immune-system storm that can devastate the lungs and other organs, are in short supply. The scarcity of the antiviral drug remdesivir has given it an almost mythic status. Some studies have found that the medication confers a modest benefit—shortening the duration of COVID-19 symptoms by a few days—but others suggest that it’s no better than a placebo. (It’s routinely given in the U.S., but the W.H.O. recommends against it.) Nonetheless, “everyone is desperate for it,” Arora said. “We don’t have much else in our armamentarium.” He estimates that his hospital has enough remdesivir for about a fourth of eligible patients. At some Indian hospitals, patients are able—even encouraged—to bring in scarce medications and supplies, if they can procure them. Some of Arora’s patients have turned to the black market, paying thousands of dollars for a vial of remdesivir, only to learn that it’s counterfeit. “Families buy these vials, desperate to save their loved ones,” Arora said. “Then we find out they’re filled with coconut water and milk.”
The tale of the Indian pandemic is both mysterious and familiar. For much of the past year, the world’s largest democracy—with a population of some 1.4 billion living on a landmass a third the size of the U.S.—escaped the worst. Researchers have advanced all sorts of theories to explain this outcome. They point out that India is a young country, with a median age of twenty-eight; that it instituted an early and strict lockdown; that it has undercounted cases and deaths; and that Indians may have had some level of preëxisting immunity to the novel coronavirus, owing to exposure to similar viruses in the past. Studies have indicated, perplexingly, that more than half of the residents in some dense urban centers had previously been infected, even though their hospitals hadn't filled up. None of these explanations have been fully proved, and, separately or in combination, they may not account for why India was spared last year. That debate will likely continue for a long time to come.
The reasons for the country’s current surge, on the other hand, appear straightforward. Since the New Year, there’s been a substantial relaxing of public-health precautions. Mask-wearing declined; sporting events, political rallies, and religious festivals brought large numbers of people close together. Lacking a sense of urgency, the country’s vaccination campaign proceeded slowly: India is the world’s leading manufacturer of vaccines for a wide range of diseases, but has fully immunized roughly two per cent of its population against COVID-19.
Many assume that the rise of more contagious variants is accelerating the damage. Almost certainly, B.1.1.7—originally identified in the U.K. and now dominant in many countries, including the U.S.—is contributing to India’s viral spread. But a new variant, known as B.1.617, has also captured headlines and the attention of scientists and the general public. The predominant form of the variant, misleadingly referred to as the “double-mutant”—it has at least thirteen mutations—was first detected in December. B.1.617 has several mutations on its spike protein, including E484Q and L452R, which seem to increase the virus’s ability to bind to and enter human cells, and which may improve its capacity for evading the immune system. Some scientists have hypothesized that another mutation, P681R, could improve the variant’s ability to infect cells.
Still, the role played by B.1.617 in India’s crisis is uncertain. India has sequenced only about one per cent of positive coronavirus tests, rendering claims about the relative contribution of variants hard to disentangle from other factors, such as a rise in unrestricted gatherings in a densely populated country with limited health-system capacity. In any case, Covaxin—India’s domestically developed COVID-19 vaccine—appears to work against both B.1.1.7 and B.1.617. Arora told me that, although several fully vaccinated clinicians at his hospital have recently contracted the virus, none went on to develop severe disease—exactly the kind of protection the vaccines are designed to deliver.
Last week, the Biden Administration announced that the U.S. would send a hundred-million-dollar aid package to India, including testing kits, ventilators, oxygen cylinders, and P.P.E. The U.S. has also removed restrictions on exporting raw materials for vaccines so that India can increase its production. Last weekend, syringes, oxygen generators, and ventilators poured in from across Europe, and a hundred and fifty thousand doses of Sputnik V, Russia’s vaccine, landed in Hyderabad. The Indian diaspora has committed tens of millions of dollars in aid.
Whether these interventions will be enough remains to be seen. In a country as large, diverse, and bureaucratically complex as India, the logistical challenges of converting aid into impact cannot be overestimated. Meanwhile, the Indian experience holds a deeper lesson for the world—especially for wealthy countries that have hoarded vaccines and supplies. The constellation of forces that led to India’s crisis—pandemic fatigue, the premature relaxation of precautions, more transmissible variants, limited vaccine supplies, weak health-care infrastructure—is not unique; it’s the default in most of the world. Absent a paradigm shift in our approach, there’s no reason to believe that what’s happening in India today won’t happen somewhere else tomorrow.
When we spoke, Arora told me that most patients arrive at his hospital in taxis or in vehicles driven by their families. Few can afford the luxury of an ambulance, either because none are available or because private companies have raised prices amid endless demand. When they arrive, many patients linger in emergency rooms, where they can receive some oxygen—and a modicum of relief—even if they are ultimately refused admission to the hospital. At other hospitals, people have died in the parking lot.
As hospitals, emergency rooms, and the streets fill with younger and younger COVID-19 patients, Arora said, an all-consuming, unrelenting despair has taken hold among health-care workers. At Arora’s hospital, even the pediatric I.C.U. is now full, with children as young as six struggling to breathe. (In India, more children than in the first wave now seem to be falling ill; data is limited, and it’s not clear whether there is a higher proportion of children getting sick or just a higher over-all number.) Many of the deceased are people middle-aged or younger.
“Our staff is struggling,” Arora said. “Many are on the brink of a complete breakdown. Every day, they come to work and see nothing but death. They go home, and their own family has gotten COVID and can’t breathe or have died. This is the situation. There’s no end in sight.”
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Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Believe Me, Mark Zuckerberg Isn't Going to Police Himself
Shoshana Zuboff: Facebook's Oversight Board Is Not Enough. The Government Has to Regulate Big Tech
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "First of all, why did Mark Zuckerberg indulge and appease Donald Trump for so many years, and especially in that last year of election season as things became more bizarre, inflammatory and dangerous?"
ormer President Donald Trump will continue to stay off Facebook after the company’s oversight board ruled Wednesday that his ban was justified for creating “an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible.” Trump was banned shortly after the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which he helped foment by promoting baseless claims of election fraud. The oversight board also said Facebook should reassess its ban and make a final decision in six months. Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School and author of the book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” says that Facebook’s recent moves follow years of inaction by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “He showed that he was willing to do just about anything to appease Trump … to keep regulation at bay,” Zuboff says.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report, I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. You can watch, listen and read transcripts using our iOS and Android apps. Download them for free from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store today.
Former President Trump’s Facebook account will remain suspended — at least for now. On Wednesday, an oversight board set up by Facebook upheld the January 7th ban, saying Trump’s rhetoric created a, quote, “serious risk of violence.” But the board said Facebook should review whether the ban should be indefinite.
For more, we go to Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, author of the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
Professor Zuboff, welcome back to Democracy Now! Your reaction to the Facebook-appointed board’s decision?
SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: Well, you know, it looks like this so-called oversight board, which of course, everyone should understand, was set up by Mr. Zuckerberg with a $130 million endowment and really is a device to help keep him free of public law, help keep him free of regulation. So, we know that Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t do a very good job taming political speech. He allowed political speech to go free of fact-checking. And the worst example of this, of course, was Mr. Trump, who became a clear and present danger to our democracy. So, rather than grappling with that, this decision was given to this so-called oversight board, and now it looks like they’ve kicked it back to Facebook.
The real issue here, though, Amy, is that in kicking it back to Facebook, they’ve actually kicked it back to the Biden administration. And here’s why I’m going to say that. First of all, why did Mark Zuckerberg indulge and appease Donald Trump for so many years, and especially in that last year of election season as things became more bizarre, inflammatory and dangerous? Well, there were — the key reason was political appeasement. Just as the oversight board, so-called, is set up to keep him free of regulation, he showed that he was willing to do just about anything to appease Trump, appease the Trump administration, appease the conservative allies, to keep regulation at bay. And in appeasing Trump, all that Zuckerberg really had to do was not intervene in his economic machine, surveillance capitalism, which is programmed, engineered to maximize engagement and data extraction by circulating and amplifying what turns out to be the most inflammatory, the most bizarre, the most dangerous, the most threatening, the craziest content. So, by keeping Trump going, he satisfied his political goals, and he also satisfied his economic goals.
Now, as we saw yesterday, very, very quickly, Trump is back on his microphone — not on Facebook, not on Twitter, but he’s got plenty of other outlets. And what was the first thing he started to do? Threaten Zuckerberg with regulation. Threaten Zuckerberg with Republican retaliation. Right? So, now we are back in the political arena. And this means that the Biden administration, that team, is going to have to take a stand, because the thing that’s going to keep Mr. Trump off Facebook and save American democracy is going to be a situation where Mr. Zuckerberg fears the Democrats as much as he fears the Republicans. And so far that has not been the case. So, we are now back into a political power match. And that’s going to really change the dynamics of these next few months.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Zuboff, could you respond to those who have criticized the decision by Facebook to indefinitely suspend Trump’s account? It’s not just conservatives in this country, but also several European leaders who have said that tech companies have no place in making decisions like this; this decision and decisions like it should be in the hands of governments.
SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: Well, that is absolutely true. You know, Mr. Zuckerberg and his so-called oversight board are running around the rim of a donut chasing each other’s tails, looking for solutions, when the solution space is in the hole. And the problem is that surveillance capitalism, companies like Facebook that depend upon the secret extraction of behavioral data, which gets turned into targeting and targeted ads, you know, this is a very pernicious, extractive, dangerous, anti-democratic economics that has taken hold in the last 20 years, the last two decades.
And it’s done so because democracy has failed to act. And it’s not only true in America, but the liberal democracies around the world have failed to develop a distinct vision of how do you design and deploy and apply the digital world, digital technology, in a way that advances democracy and allows democracy to flourish. So, we’re not China, but instead we’ve allowed these private companies to create a different kind of surveillance state in our surveillance society in America and in the West that operates under private capital.
So, we are long overdue for the same kind of period of tremendous creativity and invention that we saw in the 20th century. You know, the first part of the 20th century, the employers, the owners of the great industrial enterprises, they had all the power. They had all the decision rights. Everything that happened, happened based on their private property rights. That’s the same situation we’re in today. And in the 20th century, you know, we created these huge behemoths, the monopolies, the cartels, the trusts, and it looked like ordinary citizens, and even democracy itself, had no chance. And we were looking forward to a century of extreme inequality and serfdom. But, ultimately, beginning in the third and especially the fourth decades of the 20th century —
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.
SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: — democracy fought back. And we created the rights, laws and institutions we needed to tame industrial capitalism, tether it to democracy. We can do the same thing today. This third decade is now. Our opportunity for citizens and lawmakers to come together, we need to bring the digital into democracy’s house. And —
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zuboff, we’re going to do Part 2 of this discussion, post it online at democracynow.org. Her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
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Idaho governor Brad Little. (photo: AP)
Idaho Governor Signs Bill to Ban Critical Race Theory From Being Taught in Schools
Mike Jordan, Guardian UK
Jordan writes: "Idaho's governor, Brad Little, has a bill signed into law that aims to restrict critical race theory from being taught as a subject in schools and universities."
Theory states that racism is embedded in US history and modern American law, and that legal institutions are inherently racist
daho’s governor, Brad Little, has a bill signed into law that aims to restrict critical race theory from being taught as a subject in schools and universities.
The bill, H 377, prevents teachers from “indoctrinating” students into belief systems that claim that members of any race, sex, religion, ethnicity or national origin are inferior or superior to other groups. Signed into law last week, H 377 also makes it illegal to make students “affirm, adopt or adhere to” beliefs that members of these groups are today responsible for past actions of the groups to which they claim to belong.
Critical race theory is a concept developed by academics and leading scholars of jurisprudence, with intellectual origins in the 1960s which were organized officially in the late 1980s. The theory states that racism is embedded both in US history and modern American law. It holds that legal institutions in the US are inherently racist.
Often abbreviated as CRT, it seeks to challenge racism and improve equitable racial power through legal reform. Equitable treatment under the law for all races, according to the theory, renders the law incapable of recognizing systemic and indirect racist practices.
In the bill’s transmittal letter to Idaho’s Republican house speaker, Scott Bedke, Little, who is also a Republican, cited the undermining of “trust and local governance of our public schools” and “popular support for public education in Idaho” as concerns.
“We must be focused on facts and data, not anecdotes and innuendo,” Little wrote in the letter.
Since the publication of The 1619 Project in the New York Times, a number of school districts and school boards across the US have begun to adopt elements of critical race theory in their curricula.
As a result, Republican state legislatures have begun to push back, sending bills through statehouses that attempt to quell the momentum of teaching slavery and other such moments of American history as dark periods of the country’s past that continue to affect American life today.
Bills to ban or restrict the teaching of critical race theory and other subjects deemed “divisive” have been drafted in Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, West Virginia and other states. Bills have already passed in Utah, Arkansas and Tennessee.
The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has recently spoken out against The 1619 Project specifically, as the Biden administration is considering $5.3m in American History and Civics Education grants for anti-racist scholarship.
In a letter to the US secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, McConnell wrote that families in the US. “did not ask for this divisive nonsense”, and that a decision to move forward was not made by voters.
“Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,” McConnell wrote.
The UCLA and Columbia law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw disagrees, telling CNN last year that The 1619 Project was “an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it”.
According to the Organization of American Historians, which is the nation’s largest organization of professional US history scholars, there are “myriad injustices” that must be addressed and acknowledged if any serious historical inquiries into oppression related to gender, ethnicity, class and race are to occur.
“Critical race theory provides a lens through which we can examine and understand systemic racism and its many consequences,” the organization said in a statement released last year.
“The history we teach must investigate the core conflict between a nation founded on radical notions of liberty, freedom and equality and a nation built on slavery, exploitation and exclusion.”
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An American soldier aboard a Chinook helicopter over Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sunday. (photo: Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
Alfred W. McCoy | The True Meaning of the Afghan 'Withdrawal': Will the Nightmare of Saigon's Fall Return in Kabul?
Alfred McCoy, TomDispatch
McCoy writes: "Many of us have had a recurring nightmare. You know the one."
Shouldn’t we be amazed? After all, for almost 20 years, the U.S. military has been supporting, equipping, training, and building up the Afghan military to the tune of more than $70 billion. The result: a corrupt mess of a force likely to prove incapable of successfully defending the U.S.-backed Afghan state from the Taliban once our troops are gone — that is, by this September 11th.
I mean, what were the odds? All too high, I’m afraid, given the U.S. military’s record in Afghanistan and elsewhere in these years. (Think about the collapse of the American-trained and armed Iraqi military in the face of ISIS in 2014.) In fact, for those of you who are old enough, a few Vietnam War-era bells should already be ringing as well, given the fate of the South Vietnamese military, supported in a similar fashion, once the U.S. pulled out of that conflict.
Recently, three New York Times reporters interviewed Afghan officials and military and police figures across the country and concluded that Washington had
“produced a troubled set of forces that are woefully unprepared for facing the Taliban, or any other threat, on their own… Afghan units are rife with corruption, have lost track of the weapons once showered on them by the Pentagon, and in many areas are under constant attack… Prospects for improvement are slim, given slumping recruitment, high casualty rates and a Taliban insurgency that is savvy, experienced and well equipped — including with weapons originally provided to the Afghan government by the United States.”
Consider that also a verdict on the crew that America’s taxpayers have invested in so staggeringly in these years. I’m thinking about the Pentagon. In a set of conflicts that used to go under the title of “the war on terror,” but now are generally just called our “forever wars,” that military has essentially won nothing and, in return, continues to get ever more taxpayer dollars (just in case you think that only the Afghan military is corrupt).
As the American war in Afghanistan winds down, perhaps the only question is: Who’s been on what drugs all these years? It’s a subject that TomDispatch regular and author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power Alfred McCoy takes up in his always striking fashion today. In fact, he offers us a unique look at the Afghan War as, in so many senses and at so many levels, both a drug and a drugged war. In the process, he gives the very word “withdrawal” new meaning. In his treatment of America’s disastrous Afghan War, he also offers a hint of the striking analysis to come in his new imperial history of the world, his latest Dispatch book due out this fall, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
any of us have had a recurring nightmare. You know the one. In a fog between sleeping and waking, you’re trying desperately to escape from something awful, some looming threat, but you feel paralyzed. Then, with great relief, you suddenly wake up, covered in sweat. The next night, or the next week, though, that same dream returns.
For politicians of Joe Biden’s generation that recurring nightmare was Saigon, 1975. Communist tanks ripping through the streets as friendly forces flee. Thousands of terrified Vietnamese allies pounding at the U.S. Embassy’s gates. Helicopters plucking Americans and Vietnamese from rooftops and disgorging them on Navy ships. Sailors on those ships, now filled with refugees, shoving those million-dollar helicopters into the sea. The greatest power on Earth sent into the most dismal of defeats.
Back then, everyone in official Washington tried to avoid that nightmare. The White House had already negotiated a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese in 1973 to provide a “decent interval” between Washington’s withdrawal and the fall of the South Vietnamese capital. As defeat loomed in April 1975, Congress refused to fund any more fighting. A first-term senator then, Biden himself said, “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” Yet it happened anyway. Within weeks, Saigon fell and some 135,000 Vietnamese fled, producing scenes of desperation seared into the conscience of a generation.
Now, as president, by ordering a five-month withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by this September 11th, Biden seems eager to avoid the return of an Afghan version of that very nightmare. Yet that “decent interval” between America’s retreat and the Taliban’s future triumph could well prove indecently short.
The Taliban’s fighters have already captured much of the countryside, reducing control of the American-backed Afghan government in Kabul, the capital, to less than a third of all rural districts. Since February, those guerrillas have threatened the country’s major provincial capitals — Kandahar, Kunduz, Helmand, and Baghlan — drawing the noose ever tighter around those key government bastions. In many provinces, as the New York Times reported recently, the police presence has already collapsed and the Afghan army seems close behind.
If such trends continue, the Taliban will soon be primed for an attack on Kabul, where U.S. airpower would prove nearly useless in street-to-street fighting. Unless the Afghan government were to surrender or somehow persuade the Taliban to share power, the fight for Kabul, whenever it finally occurs, could prove to be far bloodier than the fall of Saigon — a twenty-first-century nightmare of mass flight, devastating destruction, and horrific casualties.
With America’s nearly 20-year pacification effort there poised at the brink of defeat, isn’t it time to ask the question that everyone in official Washington seeks to avoid: How and why did Washington lose its longest war?
First, we need to get rid of the simplistic answer, left over from the Vietnam War, that the U.S. somehow didn’t try hard enough. In South Vietnam, a 10-year war, 58,000 American dead, 254,000 South Vietnamese combat deaths, millions of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian civilian deaths, and a trillion dollars in expenditures seem sufficient in the “we tried” category. Similarly, in Afghanistan, almost 20 years of fighting, 2,442 American war dead, 69,000 Afghan troop losses, and costs of more than $2.2 trillion should spare Washington from any charges of cutting and running.
The answer to that critical question lies instead at the juncture of global strategy and gritty local realities on the ground in the opium fields of Afghanistan. During the first two decades of what would actually be a 40-year involvement with that country, a precise alignment of the global and the local gave the U.S. two great victories — first, over the Soviet Union in 1989; then, over the Taliban, which governed much of the country in 2001.
During the nearly 20 years of U.S. occupation that followed, however, Washington mismanaged global, regional, and local politics in ways that doomed its pacification effort to certain defeat. As the countryside slipped out of its control and Taliban guerrillas multiplied after 2004, Washington tried everything — a trillion-dollar aid program, a 100,000 troop “surge,” a multi-billion-dollar drug war — but none of it worked. Even now, in the midst of a retreat in defeat, official Washington has no clear idea why it ultimately lost this 40-year conflict.
Secret War (Drug War)
Just four years after the North Vietnamese army rolled into Saigon driving Soviet-made tanks and trucks, Washington decided to even the score by giving Moscow its own Vietnam in Afghanistan. When the Red Army occupied Kabul in December 1979, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, crafted a grand strategy for a CIA covert war that would inflict a humiliating defeat on the Soviet Union.
Building upon an old U.S. alliance with Pakistan, the CIA worked through that country’s Inter Service Intelligence agency (ISI) to deliver millions, then billions of dollars in arms to Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet guerrillas, known as the mujahideen, whose Islamic faith made them formidable fighters. As a master of geopolitics, Brzezinski forged a near-perfect strategic alignment among the U.S., Pakistan, and China for a surrogate conflict against the Soviets. Locked into a bitter rivalry with its neighbor India that erupted in periodic border wars, Pakistan was desperate to please Washington, particularly since, ominously enough, India had only recently tested its first nuclear bomb.
Throughout the long years of the Cold War, Washington was Pakistan’s main ally, providing ample military aid and tilting its diplomacy to favor that country over India. To shelter beneath the U.S. nuclear umbrella, the Pakistanis were, in turn, willing to risk Moscow’s ire by serving as the springboard for the CIA’s secret war on the Red Army in Afghanistan.
Beneath that grand strategy, there was a grittier reality taking shape on the ground in that country. While the mujahideen commanders welcomed the CIA’s arms shipments, they also needed funds to sustain their fighters and soon turned to poppy growing and opium trafficking for that. As Washington’s secret war entered its sixth year, a New York Times correspondent travelling through southern Afghanistan discovered a proliferation of poppy fields that was transforming that arid terrain into the world’s main source of illicit narcotics. “We must grow and sell opium to fight our holy war against the Russian nonbelievers,” one rebel leader told the reporter.
In fact, caravans carrying CIA arms into Afghanistan often returned to Pakistan loaded with opium — sometimes, reported the New York Times, “with the assent of Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance.” During the decade of the CIA’s secret war there, Afghanistan’s annual opium harvest soared from a modest 100 tons to a massive 2,000 tons. To process the raw opium into heroin, illicit laboratories opened in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands that, by 1984, supplied a staggering 60% of the U.S. market and 80% of the European one. Inside Pakistan, the number of heroin addicts surged from almost none at all in 1979 to nearly 1.5 million by 1985.
By 1988, there were an estimated 100 to 200 heroin refineries in the area around the Khyber Pass inside Pakistan operating under the purview of the ISI. Further south, an Islamist warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the CIA’s favored Afghan “asset,” controlled several heroin refineries that processed much of the opium harvest from the country’s southern provinces. In May 1990, as that secret war was ending, the Washington Post reported that American officials had failed to investigate drug dealing by Hekmatyar and his protectors in Pakistan’s ISI largely “because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.”
Charles Cogan, director of the CIA’s Afghan operation, later spoke frankly about the Agency’s priorities. “We didn’t really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade,” he told an interviewer. “I don’t think that we need to apologize for this… There was fallout in term of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.”
There was also another kind of real fallout from that secret war, though Cogan didn’t mention it. While it was hosting the CIA’s covert operation, Pakistan played upon Washington’s dependence and its absorption in its Cold War battle against the Soviets to develop ample fissionable material by 1987 for its own nuclear bomb and, a decade later, to carry out a successful nuclear test that stunned India and sent strategic shockwaves across South Asia.
Simultaneously, Pakistan was also turning Afghanistan into a virtual client state. For three years following the Soviet retreat in 1989, the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI continued to collaborate in backing a bid by Hekmatyar to capture Kabul, providing him with enough firepower to shell the capital and slaughter some 50,000 of its residents. When that failed, from the millions of Afghan refugees inside their borders, the Pakistanis alone formed a new force that came to be called the Taliban — sound familiar? — and armed them to seize Kabul successfully in 1996.
The Invasion of Afghanistan
In the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, when Washington decided to invade Afghanistan, the same alignment of global strategy and gritty local realities assured it another stunning victory, this time over the Taliban who then ruled most of the country. Although its nuclear arms now lessened its dependence on Washington, Pakistan was still willing to serve as a springboard for the CIA’s mobilization of Afghan regional warlords who, in combination with massive U.S. bombing, soon swept the Taliban out of power.
Although American air power readily smashed its armed forces — seemingly, then, beyond repair — that theocratic regime’s real weakness lay in its gross mismanagement of the country’s opium harvest. After taking power in 1996, the Taliban had first doubled the country’s opium crop to an unprecedented 4,600 tons, sustaining the economy while providing 75% of the world’s heroin. Four years later, however, the regime’s ruling mullahs used their formidable coercive powers to make a bid for international recognition at the U.N. by slashing the country’s opium harvest to a mere 185 tons. That decision would plunge millions of farmers into misery and, in the process, reduce the regime to a hollow shell that shattered with the first American bombs.
While the U.S. bombing campaign raged through October 2001, the CIA shipped $70 million in bundled bills into Afghanistan to mobilize its old coalition of tribal warlords for the fight against the Taliban. President George W. Bush would later celebrate that expenditure as one of history’s biggest “bargains.”
Almost from the start of what became a 20-year American occupation, however, the once-perfect alignment of global and local factors started to break apart for Washington. Even as the Taliban retreated in chaos and consternation, those bargain-basement warlords captured the countryside and promptly presided over a revived opium harvest that climbed to 3,600 tons by 2003, or an extraordinary 62% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Four years later, the drug harvest would reach a staggering 8,200 tons — generating 53% of the country’s GDP, 93% of the world’s illicit heroin, and, above all, ample funds for a revival of… yes, you guessed it, the Taliban’s guerrilla army.
Stunned by the realization that its client regime in Kabul was losing control of the countryside to the once-again opium-funded Taliban, the Bush White House launched a $7-billion drug war that soon sank into a cesspool of corruption and complex tribal politics. By 2009, the Taliban guerrillas were expanding so rapidly that the new Obama administration opted for a “surge” of 100,000 U.S. troops there.
By attacking the guerrillas but failing to eradicate the opium harvest that funded their deployment every spring, Obama’s surge soon suffered a defeat foretold. Amid a rapid drawdown of those troops to meet the surge’s use-by date of December 2014 (as Obama had promised), the Taliban launched the first of its annual fighting-season offensives that slowly wrested control of significant parts of the countryside from the Afghan military and police.
By 2017, the opium harvest had climbed to a new record of 9,000 tons, providing about 60% of the funding for the Taliban’s relentless advance. Recognizing the centrality of the drug trade in sustaining the insurgency, the U.S. command dispatched F-22 fighters and B-52 bombers to attack the Taliban’s labs in the country’s heroin heartland. In effect, it was deploying billion-dollar aircraft to destroy what turned out to be 10 mud huts, depriving the Taliban of just $2,800 in tax revenues. To anyone paying attention, the absurd asymmetry of that operation revealed that the U.S. military was being decisively outmaneuvered and defeated by the grittiest of local Afghan realities.
At the same time, the geopolitical side of the Afghan equation was turning decisively against the American war effort. With Pakistan moving ever closer to China as a counterweight to its rival India and U.S.-China relations becoming hostile, Washington grew increasingly irritated with Islamabad. At a summit meeting in late 2017, President Trump and India’s Prime Minister Modi joined with their Australian and Japanese counterparts to form “the Quad” (known more formally as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), an incipient alliance aimed at checking China’s expansion that soon gained substance through joint naval maneuvers in the Indian Ocean.
Within weeks of that meeting, Trump would trash Washington’s 60-year alliance with Pakistan with a single New Year’s Day tweet claiming that country had repaid years of generous U.S. aid with “nothing but lies & deceit.” Almost immediately, Washington announced suspension of its military aid to Pakistan until Islamabad took “decisive action” against the Taliban and its militant allies.
With Washington’s delicate alignment of global and local forces now fatally misaligned, both Trump’s capitulation at peace talks with the Taliban in 2020 and Biden’s coming retreat in defeat were preordained. Without access to landlocked Afghanistan from Pakistan, U.S. surveillance drones and fighter-bombers now potentially face a 2,400-mile flight from the nearest bases in the Persian Gulf — too far for effective use of airpower to shape events on the ground (though America’s commanders are already searching desperately for air bases in countries far nearer to Afghanistan to use).
Lessons of Defeat
Unlike a simple victory, this defeat offers layers of meaning for those with the patience to plumb its lessons. During a government investigation of what went wrong back in 2015, Douglas Lute, an Army general who directed Afghan war policy for the Bush and Obama administrations, observed: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing.” With American troops now shaking the dust of Afghanistan’s arid soil off their boots, future U.S. military operations in that part of the globe are likely to shift offshore as the Navy joins the rest of the Quad’s flotilla in a bid to check China’s advance in the Indian Ocean.
Beyond the closed circles of official Washington, this dismal outcome has more disturbing lessons. The many Afghans who believed in America’s democratic promises will join a growing line of abandoned allies, stretching back to the Vietnam era and including, more recently, Kurds, Iraqis, and Somalis, among others. Once the full costs of Washington’s withdrawal from Afghanistan become apparent, the debacle may, not surprisingly, discourage potential future allies from trusting Washington’s word or judgment.
Much as the fall of Saigon made the American people wary of such interventions for more than a decade, so a possible catastrophe in Kabul will likely (one might even say, hopefully) produce a long-term aversion in this country to such future interventions. Just as Saigon, 1975, became the nightmare Americans wished to avoid for at least a decade, so Kabul, 2022, could become an unsettling recurrence that only deepens an American crisis of confidence at home.
When the Red Army’s last tanks finally crossed the Friendship Bridge and left Afghanistan in February 1989, that defeat helped precipitate the complete collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its empire within a mere three years. The impact of the coming U.S. retreat in Afghanistan will undoubtedly be far less dramatic. Still, it will be deeply significant. Such a retreat after so many years, with the enemy if not at the gates, then closing in on them, is a clear sign that imperial Washington has reached the very limits of what even the most powerful military on earth can do.
Or put another way, there should be no mistake after those nearly 20 years in Afghanistan. Victory is no longer in the American bloodstream (a lesson that Vietnam somehow did not bring home), though drugs are. The loss of the ultimate drug war was a special kind of imperial disaster, giving withdrawal more than one meaning in 2021. So, it won’t be surprising if the departure from that country under such conditions is a signal to allies and enemies alike that Washington hasn’t a hope of ordering the world as it wishes anymore and that its once-formidable global hegemony is truly waning.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author most recently of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books). His latest book (to be published in October by Dispatch Books) is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.
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Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, seen in 2017. (photo: Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
A Narrow Path for Biden's Ambitious Land Conservation Plan
Sarah Kaplan and Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Months after President Biden set a goal of conserving 30 percent of the nation's land and waters by 2030, the administration Thursday laid out broad principles - but few details - for achieving that vision."
New “America the Beautiful” report offers few specifics on how to protect 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030
onths after President Biden set a goal of conserving 30 percent of the nation’s land and waters by 2030, the administration Thursday laid out broad principles — but few details — for achieving that vision.
The new 22-page document from the Commerce, Interior and Agriculture Departments highlights one of the Biden administration’s central challenges: Having committed to bold environmental goals during their early days in power, officials now face the more uncertain and contentious task of figuring out how to follow through on those ambitions.
The "America the Beautiful” report outlines steps the U.S. could take to safeguard key areas on land and in the sea to restore biodiversity, tackle climate change and make natural spaces more accessible to all Americans.
“This is the very first national conservation goal we have ever set as a country,” White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy said in a call with reporters. “It really reflects the urgency with which we have to respond to a global extinction crisis, the climate crisis and the deep racial and economic disparities that too often dictate who has access to nature.”
But the new report doesn’t identify specific places for enhanced protection, define what level of conservation would be required for an area to count toward the administration’s 30 percent goal or indicate how much federal funding would be needed to make Biden’s vision a reality.
This ambiguity is partly by design. Some environmentalists said that it would be impractical to make that assessment at this point, and that it will take time to muster the kind of grass-roots support needed to achieve such a sweeping conservation goal.
“I see it as a starting point that’s telling us this is the direction we want to go in, and this is how we want to do this work to ensure we’re going to get the best outcomes,” said Ali Chase, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “In terms of just trying to bring the country around to a conservation ethic, I think it’s pretty significant.”
The report is less a road map than a vision statement, painting a picture of accessible parks, ranchlands that double as wildlife corridors and farms that could also store carbon instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. It lays out guiding principles for the program — utilizing scientific research, pursuing projects that create jobs — and calls for a “voluntary and locally led” approach to conservation, in which the federal government provides support and guidance to efforts led by landowners, cities, states and tribes.
As part of the effort, the government will launch and maintain an “American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas” to track the amount of protected land and water, and the Interior Department will be required to publish annual reports on the progress being made.
Brenda Mallory, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, said the acreage of protected areas is just one metric for measuring success. Progress will have to be judged, she said, “in the lives of people and the health of ecosystems rather than solely by scale.”
At the moment, roughly 12 percent of U.S. land and 11 percent its freshwater ecosystems enjoy some level of official protection. A much larger portion of U.S. ocean waters is safeguarded, in part because in 2016 President Barack Obama expanded the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument — first established by President George W. Bush — to encompass more than 582,000 square miles of land and sea.
Many private landowners and commercial users of public lands, such as ranchers, fishers and hunters, are leery of Biden’s attempts to more than double that conserved area.
“The devil’s in the details, and it’s yet to be worked out," Trout Unlimited president Chris Wood said in an interview.
He added that landscape restoration on private land — even more so than designating new federal protections — will be key.
“The effect of a changing climate — fire, droughts and floods — don’t respect those boundaries.”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said that the report came out of dozens of conversations with scientists, farmers, hunters and outdoor-recreation businesses as well as city, state and tribal officials, and that the agency will solicit more feedback in the months to come. Meanwhile, she said, “The Interior Department is getting to work.”
The department also hopes to stand up the Civilian Climate Corps, Haaland said, which would employ Americans in reforesting and restoring degraded landscapes. The agency this week proposed opening more than 2 million acres of public lands for hunting and fishing opportunities. And in the coming days, the National Park Service will announce $150 million in new funding to build parks in underserved communities.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that in the coming days the agency will be expanding the National Marine Sanctuary System and the National Estuarine Research Reserve program, which protects the places where rivers flow into the sea.
One of the looming questions is how Biden can reconcile the new conservation target, which has received relatively little publicity, with his better-known plans to tackle climate change.
Last month, for example, the president announced the United States would slash its greenhouse gas emissions between 50 and 52 percent by the end of the decade compared with 2005 levels. The goal of eliminating planet-warming emissions from fossil fuels is backed by roughly two-thirds of registered voters, according to a December poll by George Mason University and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. But the administration has yet to spell out specific reductions that would need to take place in key sectors of the economy.
Broadly speaking, Americans also support the idea of conserving 30 percent of the nation’s land and water by the end of the decade. Recent polls from left-leaning Center for American Progress and Natural Resources Defense Council found large majorities of respondents favor the plan, often abbreviated as “30x30." Bipartisan coalitions of 70 mayors and more than 400 state and local elected officials have declared support for the goal, as have environmental groups, hunting and fishing organizations, and tribal leaders.
Scientists have identified land and water conservation as a vital mechanism for protecting biodiversity and addressing climate change. The 30x30 target puts the United States on par with a group of more than 50 “high-ambition” nations that have pledged to set aside at least that much land for nature.
But when it comes to determining which land to conserve and how it should be protected, the issue becomes much more fraught.
The America the Beautiful campaign proposes increasing that protected area through a hodgepodge of policies, including creating new parks in nature-deprived communities, supporting tribally led management projects and boosting programs that fund conservation efforts on private land.
But the lack of specifics in the report worried American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall.
“AFBF appreciates that the report acknowledges concerns we have raised and recognizes the oversized contributions of farmers and ranchers to conservation while feeding the world," he said in an email. But his members are still seeking reassurance that their property rights will be respected and access to public lands for grazing will be maintained.
Meanwhile, conservative groups have voiced fervent opposition to what some call “the 30x30 land grab.” Multiple GOP-led Western counties have issued resolutions opposing the goal. And in March, more than 60 members of the Congressional Western Caucus — all Republicans — signed a letter expressing skepticism about Biden’s approach, which they said displayed “dangerous thoughtlessness.”
Biden’s plans to expand renewable energy — which calls for a major expansion of large-scale solar and wind farms onshore, in addition to offshore wind — could also pose a challenge for his conservation goal.
Princeton University’s recent Net Zero America study, for example, projects that wind and solar projects will occupy roughly 230,000 square miles by mid-century — more than the states of Arizona and Colorado combined.
Jessica Wilkinson, senior policy adviser for energy and infrastructure at the Nature Conservancy, said in an email that when it comes to addressing climate and conservation: “Our science shows, that we can be successful on both fronts. We do, however, need to get the right policy signals in place now.”
Heather Zichal, chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, said in an interview that her group’s members were confident these tensions could be reconciled.
“If in 2028 what we’re having is a conversation about aggressive deployment of renewable energy versus protection of biodiversity, that will be a really good day for America,” Zichal said. “Mostly because that means we’ll have listened to what the science tells us we need to do to ensure a habitable planet for future generations.”
Though specific policy mechanisms are not included in Biden’s conservation plan, it coincides with other steps from his administration to protect biodiversity. The Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday also proposed reversing a Trump-era rule change that would make it more difficult to hold firms liable for accidentally killing birds in the course of their operations.
Biden is reviewing whether to overturn dozens of other conservation policies adopted under his predecessor, including ones scaling back the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah and the sale of oil and gas leases on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain.
Delivering on both the administration’s conservation and climate goals, however, will require the cooperation of state, local, tribal officials as well as private landowners.
Wilkinson noted that about 90 percent of the renewable energy build-out is likely to happen on private lands.
While large-scale solar and wind farms take up a significant amount of space relative to a nuclear or gas-fired power plant, a 2016 article published in PLoS One noted that the disparities between renewable and fossil fuels even out after a number of decades because extractive industries exhaust the resources in one place and have to relocate. Renewable projects, by contrast, can operate indefinitely in the same site. And other forms of renewables, such as rooftop solar, have a much smaller footprint.
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