Chris Hedges's Blog, page 165

Trump Administration Wants to Deport Gravely Ill Migrant Kids

In what may be a new low on the inhumanity scale when it comes to the Trump administration’s fervent pursuit of anti-immigrant policies, it has quietly and unexpectedly informed families of kids with cancer and other grave conditions that they face deportation because it is ending the federal “medical deferred action” program.

The program has allowed undocumented immigrants to stay in the U.S. without threat of deportation for needed medical treatment that might not be offered in their home country. The administration’s actions were first revealed by Boston’s WBUR News and followed up in the Boston Globe, among others.

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by Ilana Novick

According to WBUR News, some of the immigrants’ lawyers began receiving letters from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) denying their renewal requests and giving the ill immigrants 33 days to depart the U.S. or face “removal proceedings.” Advocates said they did not receive any formal announcement. Similar letters reportedly have been received by families in the San Francisco Bay Area and Miami, The New York Times reported.

For its part, USCIS, after some confusion, confirmed the program is ending, saying it is necessary as field offices “focus agency resources on faithfully administering our nation’s lawful immigration system.”

A Boston Globe editorial headline summed it up thusly: “Can the Trump administration sink any lower than threatening to deport sick kids?” It continued:

Step by malicious step, the Trump administration is turning the immigration system into an apparatus of appalling intentional cruelty.

The latest case in point is a relatively small program known as “medical deferred action” in which immigrants without legal status who are suffering from serious medical conditions are granted a reprieve from deportation so they can have access to much needed medical treatment in the United States.

Trump halted the program this month, threatening to deport these patients, including children with leukemia, children with muscular dystrophy, children with cystic fibrosis. The program`s termination means suspending or interrupting the children`s medical care, which in some cases is virtually a death sentence.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and the Times have highlighted the case of 24-year-old Maria Isabel Bueso, who was recruited at age 7 to come to the United States from her home country of Guatemala to take part in a clinical trial for the treatment of her rare genetic disease, an enzyme disorder that inhibits cells from processing sugars. Her participation led to the approval of medication for the condition, which has increased survival rates by more than a decade. Bueso has won awards for her patient advocacy efforts and her parents pay for her treatment through private medical insurance, but she nonetheless received a letter threatening deportation.

“I have been feeling super scared and overwhelmed,” Bueso, whose lower body is paralyzed from the disease, told the Times. “The treatment that I receive keeps me alive.”

Since the beginning of his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump has cast undocumented immigrants as drug smugglers and rapists as well as “bad hombres,” and dismissed those seeking asylum at the U.S. southern border as “an invasion of our country.” These sentiments are reflected in the shocking number of anti-immigrant policies enacted over the last 30-plus months by the Trump administration, inflicting misery on undocumented families as children and law-abiding mothers and fathers have been separated, detained and/or deported.

However, this particular action is seen as particularly heinous. As Sen. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, bluntly summed up, it’s an attempt to “terrorize sick kids with cancer who are literally fighting for their lives.”

WBUR News reports that on Friday, more than 100 members of Congress, led by Markey and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, sent a letter to the acting chiefs of U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement urging the Trump administration to reinstate the program.

The lawmakers state: “These summary denials have understandably caused anguish and fear for families whose children and other loved ones are in the United States receiving treatment for potentially fatal diseases, and who might not be able to receive life-saving treatment elsewhere. According to agency estimates, USCIS receives approximately 1,000 deferred action requests annually.” The letter gives the administration until Sept. 13 to provide details about the decision to end the program.

To Cheers of 4,000, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Declares ‘I Am Alive’

WASHINGTON—Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Saturday she’s “alive” and on her way to being “very well” following radiation treatment for cancer.

Ginsburg, 86, made the comments at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington. The event came a little over a week after Ginsburg disclosed that she had completed three weeks of outpatient radiation therapy for a cancerous tumor on her pancreas and is now disease-free.

It is the fourth time over the past two decades that Ginsburg has been treated for cancer. She had colorectal cancer in 1999, pancreatic cancer in 2009 and lung cancer surgery in December. Both liberals and conservatives watch the health of the court’s oldest justice closely because it’s understood the Supreme Court would shift right for decades if Republican President Donald Trump were to get the ability to nominate someone to replace her.

On Saturday, Ginsburg, whose latest book “In My Own Words” came out in 2016, spoke to an audience of more than 4,000 at Washington’s convention center. Near the beginning of an hour-long talk, her interviewer, NPR reporter Nina Totenberg, said: “Let me ask you a question that everyone here wants to ask, which is: How are you feeling? Why are you here instead of resting up for the term? And are you planning on staying in your current job?”

“How am I feeling? Well, first, this audience can see that I am alive,” Ginsburg said to applause and cheers. The comment was a seeming reference to the fact that when she was recuperating from lung cancer surgery earlier this year, some doubters demanded photographic proof that she was still living.

Ginsburg went on to say that she was “on my way” to being “very well.” As for her work on the Supreme Court, which is on its summer break and begins hearing arguments again Oct. 7, Ginsburg said she will “be prepared when the time comes.”

Ginsburg, who was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1993, did not directly answer how long she plans to stay on the court. Earlier this summer, however, she reported a conversation she had with former Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired from the court in 2010 at age 90. Ginsburg said she told Stevens: “My dream is to remain on the court as long as you did.” Stevens responded: “Stay longer.” He died in July at age 99.

Ginsburg said Saturday that she loves her job.

“It’s the best and the hardest job I’ve ever had,” she said. “It has kept me going through four cancer bouts. Instead of concentrating on my aches and pains, I just know that I have to read this set of briefs, go over the draft opinion. So I have to somehow surmount whatever is going on in my body and concentrate on the court’s work.”

Ginsburg’s appearance Saturday was not her first following her most recent cancer announcement. Earlier this week she spoke at an event at the University at Buffalo, where she also accepted an honorary degree. At the time she talked only briefly about her most recent cancer scare, saying she wanted to keep her promise to attend the event despite “three weeks of daily radiation.”

American History for Truthdiggers: The Obama Disappointment

Editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?

Below is the 37th installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, who retired recently as a major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 37 of “American History for Truthdiggers.”

See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12; Part 13; Part 14; Part 15; Part 16; Part 17; Part 18; Part 19; Part 20; Part 21; Part 22; Part 23; Part 24; Part 25; Part 26; Part 27; Part 28; Part 29; Part 30; Part 31; Part 32; Part 33; Part 34; Part 35; Part 36.

* * *

Most serious historians, especially academics, believe that accounts of recent events—particularly within 10 years of the present—are more journalistic than historical. It is for good reason that journalism has been called the “first draft of history.” As the “American History for Truthdiggers” series nears an end, it looks at the administration of Barack Obama, who left the presidency less than 32 months ago. Because so little time has passed, the essay below is more a brief, analytical essay than a comprehensive reading based on established, long-scrutinized historical sources and discovery of new information. It should be viewed as this author’s first draft of rather recent history. —Danny Sjursen

* * *

Barack Hussein Obama. That a man with a black Kenyan father and a name derived from African and Islamic etymology was elected president of the United States seemed profound indeed. America’s legacy of chattel slavery and racial apartheid was such that only a decade and a half before the 2008 election Tupac Shakur would rap that Americans “ain’t ready to see a black president.” Nonetheless, Obama won—with authority—over his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. By carrying traditionally Republican states such as Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana, Obama appeared to have forged a new Democratic coalition. Perhaps more important was the claim of some of his admirers that he inaugurated a new “post-racial” America. That would turn out to be only wishful thinking.

Without the utter, historical failure and (by then) unpopularity of the George W. Bush administration, due largely to the 2007-2008 financial collapse and the intractable, unwinnable Iraq War, a man with Obama’s name and skin color would never have been elected. Indeed, it might have taken many more decades to elect a black president. Such is the contingency of history. Seen in this light, Obama was as much anomaly as transformational. Never as progressive as his rhetoric, always the astute—and ultimately mainstream—politician first, and often fearful of appearing “weak” or providing ammunition for his intransigent Republican opposition, President Obama proved disappointing for liberals and tragic for the Greater Middle East.

Tribal America: Party Over Country and More of the Same

Obama entered the spotlight and rose to national celebrity almost overnight. A last-minute choice to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, the then-little-known Illinois state senator (running for the U.S. Senate at the time) delivered a thunderous and articulate address. This new, young face of color inspired the audience with his call for unity in a time of partisan division. Those who divide the nation into red states and blue states are incorrect, he said, declaring, “We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” The speech was indeed excellent. Yet, as Obama’s later tenure as president would illustrate, the young state senator himself was wrong: There were, and are, two Americas. The people, and especially their elected representatives, were and are tribal and divided. The result for the Obama presidency was often stalemate, infighting and rightward moderation of even Obama’s most modest “liberal” legislation. In other words, the 44th president’s domestic policy was fated to be more of what had come before.

Obama entered the presidency at the nadir of what was dubbed the “Great Recession,” America’s worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Decades of right-wing, hypercapitalist, free-market orthodoxy—combined with fiscal deregulation, much of it stemming from President Bill Clinton’s policies—had set the stage for that collapse. Nonetheless, it was Obama who was expected to pick up the pieces and who would have his legacy judged by his response to the fiscal free fall. As a relative newcomer and an ostensible outsider among the party’s “New Democrat” leaders, Obama had a profound opportunity to forever transform the American economy and stanch the growing economic inequality plaguing the nation. That this was not to be became clear when the new president appointed an economic team spearheaded by Wall Street-friendly Clinton administration veterans such as Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers. Rather than nationalize banks, “bust” monopolies and pass a true New Deal-style public works and massive stimulus program, Obama—partly due to partisan opposition, it must be admitted—settled on a modest stimulus, weak financial regulations, counterintuitive tax cuts and a taxpayer-financed bailout of the criminals atop the nation’s largest corporations. None of the company executives were punished, most received “golden parachute” bonuses and America’s flawed, radically rightist economy remained in place.

Next, though he had been warned by his staff that it was politically unpalatable, Obama decided to move for health care reform, a goal long sought by liberals. Democratic presidents from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton had tried to achieve something approaching universal health care coverage for the citizenry but had failed in the face of fierce Republican opposition and the well-funded lobbying efforts of the lucrative private insurance industry. Obama meant to succeed where his predecessors had failed. Nonetheless, precisely because of his obsession with getting something passed in Congress, the president failed to seriously alter America’s broken health care system. Realizing that Republican opposition, and Americans’ fear of the boogeyman of “socialized medicine,” remained strong, Obama never seriously considered the single-payer, universal coverage system prevalent and successful in most of the Western World. Though European single-payer, government health care systems cost far less than the American employer-based system, and though health outcomes in the privatized U.S. system lagged behind those of its industrialized peers, Obama decided that only a hybrid compromise had any chance of passing Congress. Perhaps he was right, but the new president did seem to fold rather quickly, and utterly failed to sell the logic of single-payer, universal coverage directly to the American people as both cost-effective and inherently moral.

Republican opposition to Obama’s eventual plan, the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—rapidly, if pejoratively, dubbed “Obamacare”—was vehement and cynical. The ACA, after all, kept in place the employer-based system (almost unique to the United States) and was even based on Republican models and plans, such as the Massachusetts system under Mitt Romney (who in 2012 would run against Obama) and a 1989 recommendation of the conservative Heritage Foundation. In a staggering bit of political chicanery, Republicans—including former Gov. Romney—who had once championed such plans unapologetically flip-flopped into fierce opposition as soon as the ACA took on an Obama and Democratic flavor. Luckily for Obama and the Dems, the party had won slight House and Senate majorities in 2006 and 2008 as the electorate reacted to the failures of Bush. Thus, the chief executive and his party had enough votes to get the ACA compromise passed although nearly no congressional Republicans supported the legislation. In order to get the ACA through, however, Obama had to eliminate its most progressive aspects, including the “public option” to purchase insurance from the government and public funding for birth control and abortions. So it was that a watered-down health care bill—only modestly improving on what already existed—barely squeezed by in Congress. Ultimately, millions of Americans were left still uninsured.

If Obamacare was a tactical “success,” it seemed a strategic failure. The Republicans rallied in opposition to so-called socialized medicine and ran against the bill in 2010, 2012 and 2014, scoring major electoral victories in Congress. No doubt, the “old guard” Republican leadership in the House and Senate had been intransigent from the start. After all, the GOP leaders had put politics before country from the first, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell literally stating that his party’s top priority in 2009 was to ensure Obama would be “a one-term president.” Still, this was nothing compared with the racialized, populist furor of the grass-roots “tea party” movement that arose in opposition to the ACA and Obama’s modest economic stimulus plan (meant to save capitalism as it existed, mind you). Republicans swept to control of the House in 2010, took the Senate back soon afterward and ensured that Obama would achieve no further major legislative achievements. Stagnation, intransigence and filibuster would epitomize Obama’s second term.

Left without any real legislative options, Obama was forced—under questionable constitutional circumstances—to address the nation’s worst problems through a series of modest executive orders. As such, he provided minor protections to “illegal” immigrants who had spent most of their lives in the U.S., while at the same time deporting a record number of undocumented migrants, a practice that earned him the nickname “deporter in chief” among progressives. Worse still, even amid escalating gun violence and the uniquely American epidemic of mass shootings (notably the execution of first- and second-graders and others at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut), Obama could not pass a single piece of basic, common-sense gun control. As Republicans closed ranks, rejected any limitations on the widely misunderstood Second Amendment and cashed in on massive donations from the National Rifle Association lobby, the president could again only issue a few limited executive orders. Nothing, however, stopped the epidemic of mass shootings in a country with more guns per capita than any other place in the world. That lawless Yemen was a distant second ought to have been instructive.

The U.S. also suffered a racial implosion under the first black president, and the racial harmony that had been hoped for proved to be out of reach. Highly instrumental in the public unrest was the vastly increased use of cell phone cameras and YouTube and other branches of social media, allowing widespread and almost instantaneous dissemination of images that caused outrage. Depictions of brutality by militarized police, specifically police killings of a string of unarmed young black men, helped launch a new grass-roots civil rights movement named Black Lives Matter. BLM, often critical of the centrism of Obama, was a true grass-roots movement, rising as names such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray resonated. In response to the almost totally peaceful BLM-influenced nationwide protests, a newly empowered white supremacist backlash appeared. Blandly titling itself the “alt-right,” this extremist movement built upon a sense of white victimization. Epitomized by the massacre of Bible study worshippers in a historically black church in Charleston, S.C., at the hands of a young white radical named Dylan Roof—who had consumed news from alt-right sources—newly powerful and overtly extreme groups of white supremacists seemed here to stay.

Far from inaugurating the post-racial America of popular fantasy, Obama’s presidency, and the backlash against it, ushered in a new age of reinvigorated racial combat sure to extend well past his second term. And, while the dog-whistle politics of the Republican Party no doubt fanned the flames of racist fire, the American people—especially hateful, insecure whites—bore equal responsibility for what followed.

Obama the Superficial: The Inertia and Expansion of the ‘Terror’ Wars

It is highly unlikely that Obama would have defeated the Democratic favorite, Hillary Clinton, in the primaries of 2008 or the veteran senator and war hero John McCain in the general election had it not been for the widespread opposition to Bush’s foolish, dishonest and illegal invasion of Iraq. By 2008, that country was fractured, unstable, violent, in the midst of stalemated civil war and a haven for Islamist jihadism. Whereas Clinton had taken the then (she thought) politically expedient decision to vote in favor of the Iraq invasion, Obama had, at the time, seemed to oppose the war.

Then again, it was easy for him to do so. As a lowly and obscure state senator in a safe Chicago district, he knew he would pay no political price for rowing against the prevailing nationalist tide. Thus he made a critical speech before the invasion that he later used to burnish his anti-war credentials and separate himself (successfully, it turned out) from Clinton. Still, Obama’s speech wasn’t, instructively, against all wars, but rather—as he termed it—against “dumb wars.” Furthermore, had Obama been a national figure, it’s likely he would have voted right along with the former first lady and her mainstream Democratic colleagues. That Obama, as president, proved to be a standard interventionist and even expanded the post-9/11 “forever wars” further bolstered this supposition.

It took him nearly three years, but Obama as president did pull nearly all American troops out of Iraq. Hiding behind the politically and militarily popular myth that George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus’ 2007-2010 “surge”—which Sen. Obama had rightly, if ironically, opposed—had been successful, the new president was able to do so despite (mostly) Republican opposition. In truth, the Iraqi civil war had taken only a temporary pause, and Sunni jihadism had hardly disappeared. On the contrary, Petraeus had simply shortsightedly bought their temporary allegiance. Once the Americans were gone and the cash stopped flowing, the al-Qaida franchise in Iraq rose again like the mythical phoenix and went back to war in both Iraq and the nearby, by then war-torn Syria under the banner of the newly christened Islamic State (ISIS). By 2016, as Obama prepared for an undoubtedly lucrative retirement, U.S. troops were back in Iraq battling the Frankenstein’s monster of Islamist jihadism that the American invasion had helped create.

In what he would absurdly referred to as the “good war” in Afghanistan, Obama sold out the tiny antiwar movement and tripled U.S. troop levels in his own Bush-like “surge.” American and Afghan casualties soared, but the Taliban was never defeated and the corrupt, U.S.-backed Kabul-based regime still lacked legitimacy. Though he had promised his surge would be temporary and that all troops would withdraw by the end of 2014, more than 10,000 remained in country in 2016. By that time, some 2,300 U.S. military deaths had not changed the prevailing facts on the ground in this most unwinnable of wars: The Taliban controlled more of the country than at any time since 2001, the Afghan central government was financially broke and politically ineffective, and casualties in the Afghan security forces were massive and unsustainable. The war was essentially lost, though Obama would never admit it. Indeed, by the end of his second term he preferred not to mention the “good war” at all.

In 2011, in opposition to a series of venal, authoritarian—usually U.S.-backed—regimes, a series of “Arab Spring” protests spread across the Mideast from Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Yemen to Bahrain to Syria. The movement seemed to spring from the grass roots but was complicated and multifaceted from the start. There were, indeed, early signs that though the dictatorships were abhorrent, Islamist jihadis were quickly infusing, and soon dominating, the armed rebel groups and protesters. Obama, for his part, was unsure how to respond. His humanitarian-interventionist conscience leaned toward moral and physical support for the varied oppositions, but his caution and practicality led him away from decisive action in either direction. In the end, Obama—cheered on by his militarist advisers such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—chose the worst of all roads: indecisiveness, inconsistency and (sometimes) ill-considered intervention.

The inconsistency was obvious from the start and increased the popular notion on the “Arab street” that U.S. policy was infused with hypocrisy. While Obama eventually called for the rulers of Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya and Syria to step down, he turned a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s military suppression of Shiite majoritarianism in nearby Bahrain. Furthermore, in 2015, when a vaguely Shiite militia movement, the Houthis, overthrew the Saudi-backed transitional government in Yemen, Obama quietly provided vital diplomatic and military support for a U.S.-backed Saudi terror war on Yemen. Saudi planes, fueled by U.S. Air Force aircraft, unleashed a brutal bombing campaign that killed tens of thousands. Furthermore, the U.S. uttered not a peep as a Saudi starvation blockade led to the deaths of nearly 100,000 civilians, created millions of refugees and unleashed the world’s worst cholera epidemic on Yemeni civilians. Washington, it seemed, supported democracy so long as it did not upset its oil-rich Persian Gulf State “partners.” Clearly, there were limits to the “humanitarian” piece of Obama’s humanitarian-interventionist proclivities.

Obama’s worst move during the Arab Spring—a move that, to his credit, he later called a “shit show” and the “worst mistake” of his presidency—came in Libya. There, a brutal dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, had ruled for decades, suppressing free speech but also choking any hint of violent Islamism. He had even unilaterally given up on his feeble nuclear weapons program (probably out of fear of an Iraq-style regime-change invasion by Bush) and cooperated with the CIA to fight Libyan Islamists. When a rebellion broke out in 2011-2012, though Washington knew little about the country or the rebels’ dynamics, Clinton pressed Obama to intervene to “save” the rebellion from a supposed bloodbath. Soon enough, U.S., French and British planes were pummeling the Libyan army. The rebels rode to victory, committed many atrocities of their own, and eventually sodomized (with a bayonet) and executed the captured dictator. Gadhafi was gone, but what was to come next? Obama had no plan and few ideas. Within a year, varied militias and thousands of jihadis divided the country up into competing fiefdoms. Civil war resulted and raged on through the end of the Obama presidency. Worse still, the massive depots of the Libyan army’s arms were carried south and west by various ethnic and religious militiamen, fueling growing insurgencies in Mali, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria that would soon “require” the deployment of U.S. troops in restive West Africa. Libya had, indeed, been a debacle.

The most bloody, tragic and regionally dangerous rebellion and civil war broke out in Syria in 2011. There, too, an authoritarian strongman, Bashar al-Assad, had ruled, stifling free speech and democracy but protecting minority communities and suppressing jihadism. It was clear early on that the most numerous and effective rebels were Islamists, often allied with the al-Qaida franchise the Nusra Front, and even Islamic State. Though he hesitated, equivocated and wavered, Obama was eventually convinced to supply the mythical, phantom “moderate” rebels with arms and cash. Nearly all of it ended up in the hands of the very violent Islamists that the U.S. was purportedly fighting in the “war on terror.” In reality, the U.S.—pushed in this direction by Israel, the Persian Gulf States and U.S. neoconservatives—was more interested in checking Iran and Russia (which had long backed Assad) than in the defeat of transnational jihadism or the well-being of the Syrian people.

When Assad allegedly used chemical weapons on his own people, killing perhaps 1,000—and thereby crossing what Obama had foolishly said was a “red line”—it seemed Washington would be obliged to militarily strike the Syrian regime. Obama, tempered by the Libya “shit show,” balked. This probably was prudent, but rather than sell the downsides of intervention and expanded war to the American public in an honest way he took the political path and punted “authorization” for the strikes to a Congress he knew full well had no stomach for another war. As such, rather than insist that Congress reauthorize or declare war in the dozens of locales where the U.S. was involved in combat, Obama limited the supposed (and constitutionally mandated) need for congressional approval to the Syria case alone. Nonetheless, when Islamic State—which the U.S. had helped catalyze and indirectly supported in the Syrian civil war—suddenly conquered large swaths of Syria and Iraq in 2014-2015, Obama felt obliged to go to war. U.S. troops, though in modest numbers, hit the ground in Syria and (once again) Iraq, and U.S. planes pummeled Islamic State and nearby civilians. Ultimately Obama would hand this mess over to his successor in 2017.

Obama, though he had lambasted Bush for his domestic civil liberties abuses and use of indefinite “terrorist” detention at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba, turned out to be an equally oppressive “war president.” As the National Security Administration whistleblower Edward Snowden would reveal, the U.S. had secretly and illegally imposed—and Obama had silently continued—a massive domestic surveillance program that violated the privacy of countless American citizens. Instead of starting a major policy shift and giving a medal to Snowden, Obama continued and expanded his veritable war on leakers and the press in general. In fact, Obama—the one-time constitutional law professor—used the archaic, controversial, World War I-vintage Espionage Act to prosecute leakers and whistleblowers more times than all his presidential predecessors combined. And, though his Justice Department (only just) decided not to indict any media outlets themselves for publishing leaked material, Obama’s overall press suppression policy opened the door for more hawkish successors to do just that, in a major threat to the First Amendment itself.

What’s more, Obama the “peacemaker,” who had ludicrously been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize almost entirely on the basis of conciliatory speeches he had given, proved to be the veritable “assassin in chief.” Indeed, partly as (what he saw as) an alternative to massive military occupations and counterinsurgencies, Obama violated foreign air space sovereignty across the region and conducted exponentially more drone-strike executions than even George W. Bush. The administration, and its military, then regularly undercounted the many thousands of civilians killed as “collateral damage” in these strikes. Allegedly holding “Terror Tuesday” meetings with his national security staff throughout his administration, Obama would choose people for assassination and order their executions. This was done, ostensibly, in secret, but it was (probably purposefully) the worst kept secret in the world. It was all so Orwellian. At one point, Obama publicly made an absurdly macabre joke when he threatened to unleash a Predator drone on the pop group the Jonas Brothers if any of its members dared to “make a move” on the president’s two young daughters (who were avid fans). That a Nobel Peace Prize recipient who had run on an antiwar platform would so boldly joke about a brutal assassination program (that he simultaneously claimed did not exist) was perhaps the ultimate symbol and manifestation of a morbid and ghoulish era.

In two related incidents, which registered only briefly in the U.S. media or public consciousness, Obama unilaterally used aerial drones to assassinate a man and his son in Yemen, both U.S. citizens. The targets were the Islamist firebrand cleric Anwar Awlaki—admittedly an al-Qaida sympathizer—and his teenage son. Though there was no independent judicial review of the case against the Awlakis, and absolutely zero constitutionally mandated due process (besides internal, classified legal “memos” within the Obama Justice Department), the drone-launched assassinations went forward. The incidents were distressing, even if the senior Awlaki was the terrorist mastermind he had been alleged to be; they were indicative of the logical extension and end state of drone warfare combined with the evaporation of domestic civil liberties. If, some progressive activists asked, notoriously cautious “no-drama” Obama was capable of assassinating American-born citizens, to what lengths would a more extreme, militarist-interventionist president go to in the future as the U.S. waged its “forever wars”? The prospect was indeed haunting.

If Obama was ultimately disappointing in his generally militaristic, inconsistent and interventionist foreign policy, he had some limited successes. Less overtly bombastic, and more informed, than Bush, Obama wisely—at least after the failure of his Afghanistan “surge”—lowered overall troop levels in the Greater Middle East. The upside was that U.S. casualties decreased and the overstretch of the Army and Marine Corps eased. The downside was related to the very decrease in casualties; by keeping to a modest level the number of flag-draped coffins shipped home, Obama managed to squelch dissent and war opposition while simultaneously escalating and expanding America’s never-ending wars throughout a broad swath of territory from West Africa to Central Asia.

One admirable decision was Obama’s willingness to engage with Iran, avoid military escalation (or the regime-change invasion of neoconservative fantasies) and negotiate a settlement that avoided war and halted, if only temporarily, Tehran’s nuclear program. In a multilateral agreement known as the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) the U.S., France, Britain, Russia, China and Iran had forged a deal to freeze Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for reducing international sanctions against Iran. It was, genuinely, a profound exercise in diplomacy and war avoidance. This was Obama at his (rare) very best. Nonetheless, congressional opposition—mainly, of course, from hawkish Republicans—ensured that the agreement was essentially framed as an executive order. Thus, when an Obama-hating successor, Donald Trump, took office in 2017, it was all too easy for the new president to unilaterally withdraw from the deal and ensure a new war-scare crisis with Iran. Such were the limitations and dangers of the tribally partisan atmosphere in Washington, D.C., and the reign of imperial presidents.

When Obama left office, the American warfare state, and the military-industrial-congressional-media complex that enabled it, remained firmly in place. Though he had tried in vain to close Guantanamo Bay’s purgatory-like detention center, it remained open. U.S. troops were bombing and occupying even more countries, at least two dozen from West Africa to Central Asia. The wars had escalated in Africa; significant numbers of troops remained on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan and, now, Syria. Libya had been destroyed by U.S. intervention. Osama bin Laden (killed under secretive and questionable circumstances in Pakistan by Navy SEALs in May 2011) was dead, sure, but his ideology and its more radical outgrowth in Islamic State were more powerful and prevalent than ever. The American people were still under massive surveillance, and the war on leakers and the free press was in full force. The United States, in sum, remained an empire—it had expanded in its imperial fantasies, in fact—and had been led, it turned out, by just another emperor. That Obama, the coolheaded, handsome, articulate leader that he was, had seemed the polite emperor mattered rather little to the American troops and exponentially larger totals of foreign civilians that continued to be killed. By 2016, American empire was a way of life.

* * * 

Truly profound are the ironies and paradoxes of history. Elected while espousing a somewhat “liberal” agenda, President Obama proved mostly a centrist in the Clintonian “New Democrat” mold. He naively sought to work with Republicans, compromised and tacked rightward as a result and achieved little of substance for the progressive cause. What’s more, elected as an opponent of the Iraq War (though a cheerleader for the “good war” in Afghanistan), Obama may have altered the tenor of Bush’s wars but overall only escalated and maintained the forever wars, adding his own flavor but submitting to the inertia of interventionism. As such, he left North Africa, the Mideast and Central Asia in worse shape than he had found it.

Matters got only stranger. Though he had been a constitutional law professor, he flouted civil liberties, stretched the Constitution, spied on the citizenry and even executed an American citizen and his U.S.-citizen son via aerial drones, absent any transparency or legal due process. Furthermore, Obama knew about but chose to keep secret and maintain the Bush-era mass surveillance state that Edward Snowden eventually exposed. That Obama was so undoubtedly highly educated and informed on topics of constitutional law implies—disturbingly—that the man knew better but, in the interest of hoarding executive power and seeking political expediency, went forward anyway with this range of civil liberties violations. This was a strange legacy, indeed, for the man elected on a platform of “Hope and Change,” elected as the anti-Bush, as a “transformational” figure.

Such is the disappointment and tragedy of the Obama years. His own Beltway centrism, interventionism and political opportunism, combined with the combative obstructionism of the tribal conservative opposition, ensured that Obama’s presidency would be mostly a failure. One expected as much from the unapologetic, and buffoonish, neoconservatism and imperialism of the George W. Bush team. That Obama was hardly better was far more discomfiting, challenging one’s capacity to believe in meaningful progress at all.

Most striking and significant were the moral shortcomings and failures of the American populace, defects that became apparent as the Obama years ground to a close. That so many Americans fell for phony conspiracy theories about Obama’s supposed foreign birth, Muslim faith and even “Manchurian Candidate”-style treason, and joined a growing movement characterized most of all by white backlash, demonstrated clearly that the first black president was an anomaly. If the emotional reaction to the Bush years was for Americans to take a chance on Obama, the even more emotional riposte to a black presidency was the reinvigoration of white supremacy and the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. Sick of the establishment style of Obama, the Clintons and the entire mainstream pool of both parties, voters chose to “blow up” the system and support a true outsider in the celebrity billionaire and reality TV star Donald Trump.

Perhaps that’s the final rub: If there could have been no Obama without Bush, there most certainly would never have been a President Trump without establishment, African-American Barack Obama as his predecessor. The shame and the consequences belong not only to a broken political system, but to the people. To us Americans.

* * *

To learn more about this topic, consider the following scholarly works:

• Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974” (2019).

• Jill Lepore, “These Truths: A History of the United States” (2018).

Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a retired U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He lives in Lawrence, Kan. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast, “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris “Henri” Henrikson.

Pia Klemp Is the Badass Hero the World Desperately Needs Right Now

It is rare nowadays to read about a person in the deluge of bad news flooding our screens 24/7 and immediately think: Now this is a true hero. But when it comes to Pia Klemp, the description is not only entirely appropriate but entirely necessary. Appropriate because the German ship captain and human rights activist, at the ripe age of 36, has personally saved thousands of migrants from drowning as they attempt the deadly journey across the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. Necessary because at this very moment, Klemp faces 20 years in prison in Italy for the trumped-up charge of “aiding and abetting illegal immigration.”

Klemp was with her colleagues from the nongovernmental organization-run ship Iuventa,  which was seized by Italian authorities in 2017 as it entered the port of Lampedusa with rescued migrants aboard. Prior to its seizure, the ship, previously used for fishing, is estimated to have saved about 14,000 people.

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The global refugee crisis has reached a frightening peak, with the highest number of displaced persons ever recorded in history. And yet Western nations, many of which have had a hand in destabilizing the Middle East and other regions where refugees hail from, often respond with fear and disdain for the lives of those desperate enough to risk everything and leave all they’ve known in search of a better, safer life for themselves and their loved ones.

Due to its geographic location, Italy is one of the places migrants initially head for in order to seek asylum in the European Union. But the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment there has propelled such racist leaders as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini into power. Salvini, whom the German journal Der Weisse describes as a nationalist who “has been instrumental in barring rescue ships from Italy,” has virulently attacked Klemp and her fellow activists, and this week barred ships carrying refugees from entering Italian ports. As a Quartz article explains, the Italian-led crackdown on rescue ships, including those working with the NGO Sea-Watch, has garnered support from EU officials.

The EU has recently ended search-and-rescue missions in the [Mediterranean], in part due to pressure from Italy. The EU operation [Sea-Watch], launched in 2015 at the peak of the migrant crisis, saved tens of thousands of migrants. The EU has outsourced its rescue work to the Libyan coast guard, which activists and researchers say is unprepared, and often unwilling, to save migrants.

[Recently] Italy intensified the pressure on NGOs, passing a decree that allows it to apply fines of up to €50,000 ($56,000) on humanitarian organizations caught operating in Italian waters or trying to reach Italian ports. Italy also threatened to use the new rule to fine Sea-Watch.

Klemp and the rest of the Iuventa 10, as she and her fellow shipmates are known, face an expensive, uphill legal battle, which she calls a “show trial.” An online petition started by a nurse aboard the Iuventa calling for Italian authorities to drop charges against the activists has received nearly 400,000 signatures as of Wednesday.

When asked by The Intercept how Klemp deals with the grief implicit in her work, her response highlighted her selflessness and impassioned adherence to her values.

It’s not very much on my mind. [Tragedies] happen, unfortunately, regardless of us being there and seeing it or not.

What I really wonder is how [the people we rescue] deal with their grief and the torture, the hardship, and the denial of any kindness and human decency from anyone else—how they deal with that. A lot of these people have been on the run for years and years and years. They’ve had to go through Africa, see a lot of their family members die in the desert, and they end up in these detention camps in Libya where the situation is absolutely horrendous. There’s almost no words for the situation, for the status of the people in these camps, when they’re at gunpoint forced onto these wrecked boats, which are completely unseaworthy. Like, the moment you set foot on them, they’re drifting around the Mediterranean Sea, no water, no navigation equipment. Not even enough fuel on board to get anywhere. They’re completely left alone, then they have to fear being intercepted by the Libyan militias, then they are denied a port of safety in Europe.

I think the much more interesting question is, how do all these people that have to endure real hardship deal with it? Because they’re so far away from any point of being able to rest and to breathe. Me, I can always go back to my perfect little privileged world in Germany if I choose to. And these people have nothing and nowhere to go. And we don’t want to give it to them.

In a recent TED talk titled “Why I fight for solidarity,” the rescue-ship captain, who admitted to feeling uncomfortable on land and on stage, gave a poignant speech about the urgency of the refugee crisis and the horrors so many people face, both on land and at sea, on their journeys.

In one of the most powerful parts of her 13-minute speech, Klemp points out that the legal charges she faces would never have been levied at her had she saved “EU passport-holders.” The racist implications of such a contradiction are crystal clear and all the more painful to think of as Klemp tells the story of the 2-year-old child who died aboard one of her rescue vessels as the ship was denied entry in port after port. Klemp also points to a previous time in recent history in which a lack of solidarity and inaction on the part of many of her ancestors led to one of the most horrific episodes in Western history.

“I’m part of a generation that grew up asking their grandparents, ‘What did you do against it?’” the Bonn-born activist says. “And I’ve come to realize that I’m part of a generation that will have to answer the very same question to their grandchildren.”

Making an impassioned call for solidarity with refugees and those who risk their lives and freedom to save their fellow humans from certain death, Klemp also makes a bold promise: “We will not be intimidated, and we will continue to fight for a world in which we want to live in, for a world in which everyone is given the chance to live in.”

Despite persecution, Klemp has not backed down one bit in her courageous mission. She has a new rescue ship, Sea Watch 3, which was also seized for some months by Maltese authorities in 2018. In August, Klemp made headlines for rejecting the city of Paris’ Grand Vermeil Medal for bravery, highlighting the rancid hypocrisy behind the French award. At the same time your police is stealing blankets from people that you force to live on the streets, while you raid protests and criminalize people that are standing up for rights of migrants and asylum seekers. Addressing Mayor Anne Hidalgo, Klemp writes, “You want to give me a medal for actions that you fight in your own ramparts. I am sure you won’t be surprised that I decline the medaille Grand Vermeil.” Her full scathing Facebook post can be read below:

While Klemp rejects the term “hero” when used by duplicitous authorities, it is more important than ever to find meaningful ways to celebrate people like her who refuse to be intimidated by the rise of xenophobia across the Western world and the criminalization not just of solidarity, as she points out, but of the saving of lives. Perhaps it would be more appropriate, however, to honor Klemp for her bravery alongside the refugees who themselves face unimaginable obstacles with immense valor as our Truthdiggers of the Month. We hope she, her fellow activists and the refugees they help consider this designation a symbol of Truthdig’s solidarity with Klemp’s efforts to “cast all medals into spearheads of revolution” as she continues her fearless activism and sets an example for us all.

Valerie Harper, Taboo-Busting ‘Rhoda’ TV Star, Dies at 80

LOS ANGELES—Valerie Harper, who scored guffaws, stole hearts and busted TV taboos as the brash, self-deprecating Rhoda Morgenstern on back-to-back hit sitcoms in the 1970s, has died.

Longtime family friend Dan Watt confirmed Harper died Friday, adding the family wasn’t immediately releasing any further details. She had been battling cancer for years, and her husband said recently he had been advised to put her in hospice care.

Harper was a breakout star on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” then the lead of her own series, “Rhoda.” She was 80.

She won three consecutive Emmys (1971-73) as supporting actress on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and another for outstanding lead actress for “Rhoda,” which ran from 1974-78. Beyond awards, she was immortalized — and typecast — for playing one of television’s most beloved characters, a best friend the equal of Ethel Mertz and Ed Norton in TV’s sidekick pantheon.

Fans had long feared the news of her passing. In 2013, she first revealed that she had been diagnosed with brain cancer and had been told by her doctors she had as little as three months to live. Some responded as if a family member were in peril.

But she refused to despair. “I’m not dying until I do,” Harper said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show. “I promise I won’t.” Harper did outlive her famous co-star: Mary Tyler Moore died in January 2017. Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman and Betty White are among the former cast members who survive her.

In recent years, Harper’s other appearances included “American Dad!” ”The Simpsons” and “Two Broke Girls.”

Harper was a chorus dancer on Broadway as a teen before moving into comedy and improv when, in 1970, she auditioned for the part of a Bronx-born Jewish girl who would be a neighbor and pal of Minneapolis news producer Mary Richards on a new sitcom for CBS.

It seemed a long shot for the young, unknown actress. As she recalled, “I’m not Jewish, not from New York, and I have a small shiksa nose.” And she had almost no TV experience.

But Harper, who arrived for her audition some 20 pounds overweight, may have clinched the role when she blurted out in admiration to the show’s tall, slender star: “Look at you in white pants without a long jacket to cover your behind!”

It was exactly the sort of thing Rhoda would say to “Mar,” as Harper recalled in her 2013 memoir, “I, Rhoda.” Harper was signed without a screen test.

Of course, if CBS had gotten its way, Rhoda might have been a very different character with a much different actress in place. As “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was being developed, its producers were battling a four-point decree from the network, which insisted that the nation’s TV viewers would not accept series characters who were (1) divorced, (2) from New York, (3) Jewish or (4) have mustaches.

The producers lost on having Mary Richards divorced (instead, she had been dumped by her long-time boyfriend). But with Rhoda they overrode the network on two other counts.

The show that resulted was a groundbreaking hit, with comically relatable Rhoda one big reason.

Item: “What am I? I’m not married, I’m not engaged. I’m not even pinned. I bet Hallmark doesn’t even have a card for me!”

Item: Eyeing a piece of candy, Rhoda wise-cracked: “I don’t know whether to eat this or apply it directly to my hips.”

“Women really identified with Rhoda because her problems and fears were theirs,” Harper theorized in her book. “Despite the fact that she was the butt of most of her own jokes, so to speak, … her confident swagger masked her insecurity. Rhoda never gave up.”

Neither did Harper, who confronted her own insecurities with similar moxie.

“I was always a little overweight,” she once told The Associated Press. “I’d say, ‘Hello, I’m Valerie Harper and I’m overweight.’ I’d say it quickly before they could. … I always got called chubby, my nose was too wide, my hair was too kinky.”

But as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” evolved, so did Rhoda. Rhoda trimmed down and glammed up, while never losing her comic step. The audience loved her more than ever.

A spinoff seemed inevitable. In 1974, Rhoda was dispatched from Minneapolis back home to New York City, where she was reunited with her parents and younger sister in a new sitcom that costarred Nancy Walker, Harold Gould and Julie Kavner.

She also met and fell in love with the hunky owner of a demolition firm.

The premiere of “Rhoda” that September was the week’s top-rated show, getting a 42 percent share of audience against competition including Monday Night Football on ABC. And a few weeks later, when Rhoda and her fiance, Joe, were wed in a one-hour special episode, more than 52 million people — half of the U.S. viewing audience — tuned in.

But “Rhoda” couldn’t maintain those comic or popular heights. A domesticated, lucky-in-love Rhoda wasn’t a funny Rhoda. By the end of the third season, the writers had taken a desperate step: Rhoda divorced Joe. Thus had Rhoda (and Harper) defied a third CBS taboo.

The series ended in 1978 with Harper having played Rhoda for a total of nine seasons.

She had captured the character by studying her Italian stepmother. But Harper’s own ethnicity — neither Jewish nor Italian — was summed up in a New York Times profile as “an exotic mixture of Spanish-English-Scotch-Irish-Welsh-French-Canadian.”

And she was not a Gothamite. Born in Suffern, New York, into a family headed by a peripatetic sales executive, she spent her early years in Oregon, Michigan and California before settling in Jersey City, New Jersey.

___

Frazier Moore, a long-time television writer for The Associated Press, was the principal writer of this obituary.

Protecting Accused Sexual Harassers on an Illinois Campus

This article was originally published on ProPublica and was produced in partnership with NPR Illinois, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

By the time officials at the University of Illinois’ flagship campus in Urbana-Champaign found that an assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine had engaged in sexual harassment, three women had come forward to raise concerns about his behavior.

All three said he had showed up at their homes uninvited.

Though the professor, Valarmathi Thiruvanamalai, denied doing anything wrong, the university office that investigates harassment and discrimination claims ruled against him. “When three different complainants, who have no prior relationship and no significant commonalities other than the lab in which they work, all assert the same type of interaction, one must question Respondent’s credibility and honesty in responding to the allegations,” a specialist in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Access wrote in February 2015 following an investigation. She recommended that Thiruvanamalai face discipline and possibly termination.

Instead, the university took a series of steps that helped keep Thiruvanamalai’s reputation intact.

First, the head of the Department of Comparative Biosciences placed Thiruvanamalai on paid administrative leave for the remainder of his contract with the school and banned him from the lab and other university workspaces.

Then in November 2015, the university, known as UIUC, signed a separation agreement with the professor, extending his paid leave through August 2016, at which point his resignation would take effect. He continued to draw his annual salary of more than $98,000, according to salary records and the agreement between the school and Thiruvanamalai, obtained by NPR Illinois and ProPublica.

Finally, as part of that agreement, the university agreed to keep secret the terms of Thiruvanamalai’s departure, easing his path to get a university job in another state.

Thiruvanamalai’s case, which has never before been reported, highlights the covert way in which the university has dealt with accusations of sexual misconduct against professors.

An NPR Illinois-ProPublica investigation found that the university helped several professors keep seemingly unblemished records even though they were found to have violated its policies: letting them resign, paying them for periods they weren’t working, promising not to discuss the reasons for their departures and, in some cases, keeping them on the faculty.

Professors found to have violated policies at UIUC, including Thiruvanamalai, have moved on to teaching positions at other universities and, in at least one case, secured a prestigious Fulbright grant.

Since last year, allegations of harassment and sexual misconduct have surfaced against three UIUC professors and one administrator. In each instance, the public wasn’t told by the university until news organizations or others brought the allegations to light.

The problem, however, runs deeper, our investigation found. On top of the four cases already known, NPR Illinois and ProPublica uncovered three more in recent years that have received no attention.

In two of the cases, professors were allowed to resign and the university agreed to keep it confidential. A third professor remains on the payroll but has been removed from the classroom, campus records show.

We spoke with numerous staff members and students who raised concerns about the way substantiated cases are handled.

“The entire way that we engage with questions of perpetration on campuses is wrong and broken,” said Kathryn Clancy, a UIUC anthropology professor who is an expert on sexual harassment in academia. She worked on a report published last year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that found that 20% to 50% of students in STEM fields have experienced sexual harassment. “So we are just doing what everyone else is doing. And it’s the wrong way to be doing things.”

University leaders have said they are committed to change. For example, the UIUC provost and chancellor told NPR Illinois last week that the university has stopped using confidentiality clauses, which keep investigations and findings under wraps after professors leave. UIUC and the University of Illinois System have also created several task forces and committees to examine issues including faculty misconduct and relationships between students and professors.

“We want to be the best of the breed, in a way, on all of these issues, recognizing that it’s a very important topic,” University of Illinois President Timothy Killeen said after a board meeting this spring.

But, he added, “Nothing’s broken.”

A Grilling Over a Little-Known Case at a #MeToo Panel

Concerns about sexual harassment at UIUC spilled into the open during a panel on #MeToo and academia at the College of Law in the fall of 2018.

At the lunchtime discussion in the law school auditorium, an audience member asked the panelists, two of whom were UIUC law professors, why more was not being done to protect students from a professor who had been investigated by the university for sexual misconduct. She pressed the panel about allegations that professor Jay Kesan had made students and faculty uncomfortable with inappropriate touching and sexual conversations, singling him out by name.

The claims against Kesan had not been widely known, even though allegations of inappropriate behavior against him dated back to 2002, only months after he was granted tenure, documents show. The law school’s then-dean warned Kesan in writing that she had been told details about his conduct that “would constitute a serious breach of appropriate behavior by a faculty member” if true. Kesan denied those claims. The dean gave Kesan suggestions for avoiding further allegations, such as not commenting on others’ appearance.

At the #MeToo panel last year, the woman’s questions focused on an investigation into claims made against Kesan in 2015. The investigative report, finalized by the campus Office of Diversity, Equity and Access in 2017, found that school leaders were concerned enough about Kesan that, at one point, an administrator was directed to watch Kesan’s interactions with female guests at a public event and intervene if the situation warranted. Investigators even recommended considering employment action. (The Office of Diversity, Equity and Access is now called the Office for Access and Equity.)

Ultimately, the school found that Kesan violated the university’s code of conduct, and as a result he would not qualify for certain salary programs or lucrative endowment positions for a limited time. He is currently on voluntary unpaid leave until 2020.

Lesley Wexler, a professor and associate dean of UIUC’s College of Law, said efforts are underway to address the university’s handling of cases like the one involving Kesan, who was found to have violated the “spirit” of the sexual misconduct policy but not the policy itself.

“The definition of what might count as sexual harassment is up for debate,” said Wexler, who had told the audience at the #MeToo forum last year that she was not satisfied with the result of the Kesan investigation.

In a recent interview, Wexler said the current definition of sexual harassment under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination within federally funded educational programs, has “been interpreted over time in a very narrow way.”

The behavior must be severe or pervasive, she said, which “sets a very high bar.”

“So even touching breasts or buttocks, if it only happens once, some courts have said that didn’t meet the threshold.”

But Wexler said she’s unsure if universities are capable of adequately investigating their employees and holding them to account.

“The past does not provide a record that would make one particularly optimistic,” she said. “In speaking of my own university, I think the will is there. But like so many things relating to widespread social and institutional change, it’s hard to know at this sort of stage of things where it will end up.”

Kesan told university investigators that he may have touched people, but the intent was misconstrued. In a letter to the College of Law community last year, Kesan said the allegations laid out in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Access report were described correctly.

In an interview with NPR Illinois, Kesan wouldn’t comment on whether he believes the university treated him fairly, but he credited the #MeToo movement with opening the door to conversations like the one that revealed the allegations against him. “I believe it’s a very good thing,” Kesan said, adding that he offered to disclose the investigation on his syllabus going forward.

Robin Kar, a professor in the UIUC College of Law, is chairman of a task force formed in the wake of the Kesan controversy to explore potential changes to the sexual misconduct policy as it relates to faculty. “I think we’re witnessing a growing awareness of a problem that has been festering for some time,” he said in an interview, noting that women are increasingly confident in talking about harassment.

“I think institutions around the nation are starting to take note of what the problem is,” he said. Meanwhile, solutions aren’t easy to come by. “We haven’t found there’s a simple gold standard outlook there.”

Leaving With Their Records Intact

UIUC doesn’t often fire tenured faculty members, even for serious offenses like sexual harassment. Instead, the university allows them to leave quietly — and continue their careers.

That’s what happened to Amita Sinha, a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture, who was accused by a colleague of harassment, including stalking, for over a decade, according to a report from the Office of Diversity, Equity and Access summarizing its investigation.

University investigators concluded that Sinha, a woman, ignored directives about her conduct from her department head and had engaged in unwanted attention toward a male colleague “intermittently for fifteen years.”

Sinha agreed to “voluntarily retire” in October 2017, and the university gave her paid leave before her resignation took effect in August 2018. During that time, she was paid her nearly $102,000 annual salary, documents show. The agreement promised confidentiality and that both parties wouldn’t speak ill of each other. It also states she would not be disciplined. She now collects a pension from the university; her last reported monthly payment from May was nearly $5,000, documents obtained by NPR Illinois and ProPublica show.

In a letter to the then chancellor in June 2017, a lawyer for Sinha called the report’s findings “inaccurate.” The letter argued that the university had violated procedural guidelines and disputed its assertion that Sinha had caused a colleague “significant emotional distress.”

Through her current lawyer, Sinha maintained that most of her interactions with the colleague were professional.

Sinha was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for the 2018-19 academic year, during which she studied and lectured on the cultural landscape of an area of Bolpur, a city in India just north of Kolkata. On the Fulbright website, Sinha’s home institution is listed as UIUC, even though it did not offer her emeritus status upon her resignation. A spokesperson for UIUC “did not know” about the grant and Sinha’s listing the university as her host school.

An official with the Fulbright program told NPR Illinois and ProPublica in a statement that it has a “zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment” but declined to comment on what it knew or didn’t know about Sinha’s past before her selection.

Sinha’s lawyer said she applied for and received the Fulbright grant while still a faculty member at UIUC and that “she has complied with all its requirements.”

Lee Waldrep was an undergraduate student services administrator and instructor who also resigned in 2017 in the face of allegations — in his case, from eight female students. Their claims included that he had made inappropriate comments and “blocked their path on a stairwell, backed them into a railing or wall, pinned their legs between his … or stood uncomfortably close to them,” according to investigative documents.

Waldrep denied the allegations, according to an August 2017 report from the Office of Diversity, Equity and Access, and declined to comment through a lawyer.

He went on to work as an academic adviser at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Last year, after the Kesan case made local and national headlines, reporters published details of Waldrep’s departure. The University of Tennessee subsequently fired him and acknowledged that its screening process had failed.

Worries About Litigation — From the Accused

In dealing with staffers found to have committed harassment, universities, like other employers, are often constrained by concerns about litigation.

UIUC spokeswoman Robin Kaler said confidentiality expectations are common. She said that they are frequently “included to protect the privacy interests of third parties who have been impacted by the situation that led to the separation,” such as the victim.

In a subsequent interview last week, Provost Andreas Cangellaris and Chancellor Robert Jones said that going forward, they have decided to eliminate such confidentiality provisions.

Nicole Gorovsky, an attorney who specializes in representing victims of sexual violence, said it’s common for institutions to fear lawsuits from accused employees, who can claim that terminations violate their due process rights or that sharing the details of an investigation is defamatory. Gorovsky said confidentiality and nondisclosure clauses in agreements are a way to limit the liability of an institution.

She said she has seen it happen in churches, elementary and high schools, colleges and businesses.

With the clauses, the parties agree to not speak about the reasons for resignation. They keep the university from proactively sharing the investigation with an employee’s future employer. (An exception is if someone files a public records request, which NPR Illinois did in these cases.)

Gorovsky said these agreements can be harmful to the victims.

“One of the classic things that I hear from survivors is ‘I didn’t want it to happen to anyone else,’” Gorovsky said.

Nondisclosure agreements aren’t just used to resolve allegations against professors. The Seattle Times reported how universities sometimes require them when resolving complaints filed by students. One woman told the newspaper that after complaining about her music professor sexually harassing her, and then being retaliated against, the university offered to cover her tuition for a year, so long as she agreed not to talk about the details of the settlement agreement. The student called it “literal hush money.”

Now, Washington state lawmakers are crafting legislation to make findings of sexual misconduct by university employees more transparent. Among the ideas: barring public colleges and universities from using nondisclosure provisions in the handling of sexual misconduct cases, and creating an interstate system to share findings of credible investigations among universities, Democratic state Rep. Gerry Pollet said.

Pollet, whose district includes parts of Seattle and who serves on the Legislature’s higher education committee said, “We shouldn’t have to have the Legislature step in, but we have to because it appears that the institutions and their legal advisers are simply very fearful of liability to the employee who’s been accused and found to have actually committed harassment or assault.”

Molly McLay recently left her position of assistant director at UIUC’s Women’s Resources Center to pursue a doctorate in social work with a focus on gender-based violence and prevention.

As an advocate for survivors, she said she struggles to see how allowing perpetrators to leave with their records intact gives them any reason to change their behavior.

“I understand that resignation versus termination is commonly used,” she said. But these cases are unique. “Other people are impacted. There is another person involved. There is a survivor.”

Cangellaris, the provost, said that terminations are rare because faculty have certain employment protections, which are in place to ensure professors’ freedom to pursue their research and speak their mind in the classroom without fear of censorship, discipline or termination.

“It is a process that is dictated by the bedrock of every university and that is academic freedom and shared governance,” he told NPR Illinois. “We process every case in a way that we protect academic freedom.”

After publication of this story, UIUC reached out to say it is seeking to change its policy going forward to prevent academic freedom from being used as a shield in sexual misconduct cases.

“Historically university disciplinary policies were created to protect the academic freedom of the faculty and be respectful of our shared governance processes,” Cangellaris said in an emailed statement. “We are working to revise our policies and practices in ways that appropriately separate issues such as sexual harassment or other egregious misconduct from those protections. Harassment of any kind undermines academic freedom.”

As for confidentiality agreements, Cangellaris and Jones, the chancellor, said they hope other universities join them in disclosing the reasons for professors’ departures.

“If others don’t follow suit, then it makes it more difficult for us,” Jones said. With the discussion around #MeToo, this is “critically important in this particular point in our history.”

Remaining on the Payroll

NPR Illinois and ProPublica found a case similar to Kesan’s in which a professor faced multiple allegations of harassment. The university found anthropology professor Mahir Saul in violation of its code of conduct but not its sexual misconduct policy, and he has remained on its payroll.

In January 2018, a research assistant claimed that Saul invited her back to the apartment where Saul was staying while they were both conducting field research in Turkey, according to an investigative summary obtained by NPR Illinois and ProPublica. They shared dinner and drinks. After hours of conversation, the assistant claimed Saul pressured her to stay the night.

A complaint was filed and an investigation ensued. In August 2018, the university concluded that Saul violated its code of conduct by “pressuring his employee, a vulnerable junior academic, to spend the night with him,” but that his actions did not violate the sexual misconduct policy. The official recommendation was that Saul no longer be allowed to meet one-on-one with female students or junior female employees.

But later that month, the head of the Department of Anthropology, Brenda Farnell, went further, opting to take Saul out of the classroom entirely. In a letter, Farnell wrote to Saul, “As you are aware, this is not the first complaint that has surfaced regarding your interaction with women.”

In 2016, the Office of Diversity, Equity and Access opened a separate investigation into Saul after an international undergraduate student alleged that he had placed her in “situations where he could be alone with her, and sought to use his power and authority to encourage a romantic relationship with her.” Two other individuals also expressed their concerns about his behavior at the time, according to that report.

The office found that there was not enough evidence to support the claims of sexual harassment, but that the allegations “call into question Dr. Saul’s judgment and the perceptions that he is creating through his interactions with students outside of the classroom.” It recommended that Saul receive training on sexual harassment and Title IX. Saul was warned he could lose his job if the behavior continued.

As of this July, the university was still paying Saul as a professor, based on records obtained by NPR Illinois and ProPublica. His yearly salary is around $91,200, plus benefits, records show.

Saul told NPR Illinois that the allegations as conveyed by the investigative reports are false, and that he has been on medical leave, which he requested in January. He said he had dinners with the student who filed the 2016 complaint but there were no “romantic” topics of conversation. He said the 2018 allegations were the result of a labor dispute involving a disgruntled employee.

Clancy, the anthropology professor, had expressed concerns about Saul in an emailto her colleagues in the spring of 2018. She said the administration had a decision to make: protect students and accusers or protect the professor.

“Rather than abdicate responsibility of our students’ safety to the legal system, I think we can choose to set particular standards for appropriate conduct within our department regarding student interactions, safety, mentoring, and professional behavior,” she wrote.

A university spokesperson said the restrictions on Saul will remain in place, including a directive not to interact with students.

Seeking Change

After finding that he violated university policies, UIUC gave Thiruvanamalai time to pursue other employment and paid him during his search. In September 2017, he started a job teaching at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

His last month there was this June, a month after NPR Illinois and ProPublica asked for records about his employment, including background checks and any possible new complaints. The university would not comment on the reason he left.

One of the students he was accused of harassing back in Illinois spoke with NPR Illinois and ProPublica after hearing that he had gone on to teach at another school. She spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

By going forward with a complaint and asking the school for a full investigation, she said she knew she was making herself a target.

She had watched as another student who had spoken up before her was taken out of the program and put on a track toward a lesser degree while the professor stayed without facing an investigation, a maneuver the university labeled an “informal resolution.”

The second student, who insisted that her own complaint be considered a formal one, said most students in her position wouldn’t feel secure enough to speak out the same way. “For me, I’m an international student. I knew nobody in this country when I got here,” she said. “So it took me a while to figure out what to do about the situation.”

Without speaking up, she figured others might be “suffering in the same situation” — having their concerns lead to minor or no consequences. A lab tech joined her in the complaint, saying she too repeatedly faced harassment. One woman told investigators that the professor had “made their lives hell,” according to the report from the Office of Diversity, Equity and Access.

The woman said she considers herself a strong person, which is why she was able to continue on with her education. This is even after moving apartments in hopes she could prevent Thiruvanamalai from finding her as he had back in December 2014. She said UIUC failed when it helped Thiruvanamalai leave the school with his reputation intact.

“I think that’s really bad. I think there should be a system that can track what he has done.”

Christine Herman from Illinois Public Media contributed to this report.

ProPublica Illinois reporter Jodi S. Cohen contributed to this report.

DNC Reverses Course on Virtual Voting in Two States

Cybersecurity concerns have prompted the Democratic National Committee to reverse course on offering a telephone voting option in 2020’s presidential caucuses in Iowa and Nevada. But those key early states may find another way for voters not present at February caucuses to take part—possibly by voting early at voting centers.

The DNC’s announcement on Friday came a week after the DNC held its summer meeting, where its Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) continued reviewing each state’s 2020 plans. The DNC technology staff, an advisory panel, and the RBC co-chairs concluded that there was too great a risk of malevolent outsiders disrupting the “virtual voting” process that Iowa and Nevada had hoped to offer voters to increase participation.

“The statement will go into some detail on the views of the security and IT people at the DNC and their outside advisory panel. It will cite strongly the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian activity,” James Roosevelt Jr., the longtime RBC co-chair, said Friday.

Iowa, the first contest, and Nevada, the third contest, had been developing a telephone-based ballot—as well as related systems that registered voters, authenticated identity, counted votes and reported results—to increase participation beyond precinct caucuses.

“The DNC technology people are very skeptical about whether a reasonably safe system can be constructed,” Harold Ickes, a longtime RBC member, referring to online voting, said a week ago at the DNC summer meeting. “And point two, forget the technology, what if it melts down? What if the management of it doesn’t work?”

While there was much consternation—mostly aired in closed sessions—the Rules Committee faced a mid-September to approve how the state parties running caucuses, which also include Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas and Wyoming, will offer a way for voters to remotely participate. That inclusionary mandate was part of the post-2016 Unity Reform Commission report, which “requires absentee voting,” and its 2020 Delegate Selection Rules.

Roosevelt said the Rules Committee will hold a special meeting after Labor Day to formally vote on the recommendation to reject virtual voting in Iowa and issue a waiver that essentially would revert to the process used in 2016. An early voting or vote-by-mail alternative was being studied, although it might impinge on New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary.

In Nevada, the alternative appears to be using early voting centers and special precincts on the Las Vegas strip. When asked what Nevada might do if it could not get approval for its virtual voting plan, its lone RBC member, Artie Blanco, replied that Nevada also planned four days of early voting.

Wyoming was also planning on using early voting centers. Hawaii was considering mailing ballots to registered Democrats. Alaska, in contrast, was still seeking to use a smart phone system that West Virginia and Denver have piloted for overseas military and civilian voters, as state party officials said cell phone service was more reliable than mail in rural areas where many Native Americans live.

Good Intentions, Gnarly Details

The goal of expanding participation in 2020’s caucuses goes back to healing the party’s splits from the 2016 presidential campaign. In its December 2017 report, the Unity Reform Commission said any caucus state should help people who could not be physically present to participate. Those voters include the elderly, shift-workers, people with disabilities, young adults and even college students.

A year later, the Rules Committee issued 2020 Delegate Selection Rules that built on the reform panel’s report. These rules said that “The casting of ballots over the Internet may be used as a method of voting” in caucuses. The rules also required caucus states to create a paper record trail for audits or recounts. Its members are the DNC’s procedural experts. They are not technologists. The RBC left it to state parties to fill in the details, and further relied on DNC technology, cybersecurity and voter protection staff to critique each state’s 2020 plans.

The virtual voting plans worked out by Iowa and Nevada were not the same, but they shared features. Both states wanted to use a telephone keypad for a voter to rank their presidential preferences. The ranking is intended to emulate the in-person caucus process, where participants vote in rounds as candidates are disqualified. (Candidates must receive 15 percent of the vote to be viable.)

A virtual caucus participant would have to register beforehand. They would receive instructions by email, including a log-in and PIN number. Certain dates and time windows would be open for virtual voting. Voters would dial in and hear recordings where candidates were listed in alphabetical order. They would enter numerical choices on their keypad to rank them, like paying a bill by phone.

Iowa divided all of its virtual voters into four precincts, one for each of its House districts. These votes would be tallied and added to the in-person precinct totals from the rest of the state. However, the virtual votes would only be awarded 10 percent of the night’s delegates. (As of this writing, the RBC has not yet approved that allocation.)

Nevada, in contrast, was more ambitious. It planned to give 1,700 precinct caucus chairs an app to let them announce the early voting results to people in the room, and then to report the in-person votes to party headquarters. A vendor would do the math combining the virtual and precinct totals for awarding delegates to the process’s next stage. (In June’s RBC meeting, Nevada party officials said that app was still under development.)

Both states had won conditional Rules Committee approval. However, final approval was dependent on having the DNC staff signing off on the systems to be deployed, as well as the committee approving the delegate allocation formula, and judging that any new process would be well-run. Suffice it to say that despite determined efforts by Iowa and Nevada state party officials, the DNC’s staff has so far not had completed voting systems before it to fully evaluate.

When the RBC met in July in Washington, it discussed the status of these virtual voting systems at a closed breakfast—but not in the open session. After meeting for five-plus hours on August 22, the panel was set to adjourn without discussing virtual voting states, when Ken Martin—DNC vice chair, Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chairman, and president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs—spoke up.

“I want to be very careful in how I say this, but I want to express a deep, deep frustration on behalf of my colleagues in three very important states,” he said, referring to Iowa, Nevada and Alaska. “This is the third meeting we have now asked them to come to. They’ve incurred incredible expense to bring their teams too. And we put them on the tail end of a meeting, which we knew was going to go long, and leave no time for a very important conversation.”

At that point, Roosevelt replied that there were closed meetings scheduled the following day with RBC members, DNC staff and party officials from the three states. “And I actually have more data that I would like to share with this committee in executive session as soon as we adjourn,” he said. The committee emptied the hearing room.

According to a report first published by Yahoo and Bloomberg, “the DNC [staff] told the panel that experts convened by the party [technology staff] were able to hack into a conference call among the [Rules] committee, the Iowa Democratic Party and Nevada Democratic Party, raising concerns about teleconferencing for virtual caucuses.” It continued, “The test and the revelation of hacking enraged party officials in caucus states who say the systems were not fully built and the hack of a general teleconferencing system is not comparable.”

Earlier in the week, the RBC, DNC tech staff, caucus state officials and vendors had a series of conference calls on security issues and to demonstrate certain system elements, said Roosevelt afterward.

RBC members later asked to confirm whether the DNC staff had hacked its own conference call would not comment. A contractor working with one caucus state said they had heard a rumor about the purported hack. An outside computer scientist critical of any online voting said the state party officials were correct; hacking conference calls was not the same as hacking a voting system.

However, it didn’t appear to matter. Showing the possibility of a hack, or even making the accusation, highlighted this approach’s vulnerability. Meanwhile, the larger takeaway among many RBC members was that debuting telephone voting was premature.

“Our tech team basically said that there was no company that can do this,” one member said, recounting the executive session.

Needless to say, Iowa and Nevada officials were upset. Committee members were also divided. Some said that the risks were too great to debut virtual voting in 2020’s early caucuses. Others said these states were doing what they had been told under the 2020 rules.

Looking for Alternatives

After that executive session, the RBC co-chairs, DNC staff and the caucus state party officials held more closed meetings. Those meetings continued this past week, culminating in Friday’s announcement to back off from virtual voting in Iowa. That decision was not unexpected.

As the dust settled at the DNC summer meeting, the sense gathered from hallway interviews was that the Rules Committee co-chairs were looking at other ways to expand participation, especially in Iowa. It appeared that a mix of voting by mail and/or early voting centers might be an alternative, if it didn’t conflict with the New Hampshire primary process.

Nevada’s RBC member, Artie Blanco, said her state already was planning on offering four days of early voting before the February 22 caucus. (Any voter would have to register several weeks beforehand.) Iowa, in contrast, did not anticipate offering an early voting option in its 2020 plan.

It would be premature to conclude that remote participation in 2020’s party-run caucuses will not occur. The Rules Committee has a history of looking for ways to meet their goals. It will be meeting after Labor Day, where it is expected to finalize the early caucus states’ plans, including possibly having early voting centers or a vote by mail option.

This article was produced by Voting Booth , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

 

The Whistleblower Who Almost Stopped the Iraq Invasion

Editor’s note: This article was initially published on Consortium News.

Two-time Oscar nominee Keira Knightley is known for being in “period pieces” such as “Pride and Prejudice,” so her playing the lead in the new film “Official Secrets,” scheduled to be released in the U.S. on Friday, may seem odd at first. That is until one considers that the time span being depicted — the early 2003 run-up to the invasion of Iraq — is one of the most dramatic and consequential periods of modern human history.

It is also one of the most poorly understood, in part because the story of Katharine Gun, played by Knightley, is so little known. Having followed this story from the start, I find this film to be, by Hollywood standards, a remarkably accurate account of what has happened to date — “to date” because the wider story still isn’t over.

Katharine Gun worked as an analyst for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent of the secretive U.S. National Security Agency. She tried to stop the impending invasion of Iraq in early 2003 by exposing the deceit of George W. Bush and Tony Blair in their claims about that country. For doing that she was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act — a juiced-up version of the U.S. Espionage Act, which in recent years has been used repeatedly by the Obama administration against whistleblowers and now by the Trump administration against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

Gun was charged for exposing —around the time of Colin Powell’s infamous testimony to the UN about Iraq’s alleged WMDs — a top-secret U.S. government memo showing it was mounting an illegal spying “surge” against other U.N. Security Council delegations in an effort to manipulate them into voting for an Iraq invasion resolution. The U.S. and Britain had successfully forced through a trumped-up resolution, 1441 in November 2002. In early 2003, they were poised to threaten, bribe or blackmail their way to get formal United Nations authorization for the invasion. [See recent interview with Gun.]

The leaked memo, published by the British Observer, was big news in parts of the world, especially the targeted countries on the Security Council, and helped prevent Bush and Blair from getting the second UN Security Council resolution they said they wanted. Veto powers Russia, China and France were opposed as well as U.S. ally Germany.

Washington invaded anyway of course — without Security Council authorization — by telling the UN weapons inspectors to leave Iraq, issuing a unilateral demand that Saddam Hussein leave Iraq in 48 hours and then saying the invasion would commence regardless.

‘Most Courageous Leak’

It was the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, where I work (accuracy.org), Norman Solomon, as well as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who in the U.S. most immediately saw the importance of what Gun had done. Ellsberg would later comment: “No one else — including myself — has ever done what Katharine Gun did: Tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it. Hers was the most important — and courageous — leak I’ve ever seen, more timely and potentially more effective than the Pentagon Papers.”

Of course, no one knew her name at the time. After the Observer broke the story on March 1, 2003, accuracy.org put out a series of news releases on it and organized a sadly, sparsely attended news conference with Ellsberg on March 11, 2003 at the National Press Club, focusing on Gun’s revelations. Ellsberg called for more such truth telling to stop the impending invasion, just nine days away.

Though I’ve followed this case for years, I didn’t realize until recently that accuracy.org’s work helped compel Gun to expose the document. At a recent D.C. showing of “Official Secrets” that Gun attended, she revealed that she had read a book co-authored by Solomon, published in January 2003 that included material from accuracy.org as well as the media watch group FAIR debunking many of the falsehoods for war.

Gun said: “I went to the local bookshop, and I went into the political section. I found two books, which had apparently been rushed into publication, one was by Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, and it was called Target Iraq. And the other one was by Milan Rai. It was called War Plan Iraq. And I bought both of them. And I read them cover to cover that weekend, and it basically convinced me that there was no real evidence for this war. So I think from that point onward, I was very critical and scrutinizing everything that was being said in the media.”

Thus, we see Gun in “Official Secrets” shouting at the TV to Tony Blair that he’s not entitled to make up facts. The film may be jarring to some consumers of major media who might think that Donald Trump invented lying in 2017.

Gun’s immediate action after reading critiques of U.S. policy and media coverage makes a strong case for trying to reach government workers by handing out fliers and books and putting up billboards outside government offices to encourage them to be more critically minded.

Solomon and Ellsberg had debunked Bush administration propaganda in real time. But Gun’s revelation showed that the U.S. and British governments were not only lying to invade Iraq, they were violating international law to blackmail whole nations to get in line.

Mainstream reviews of “Official Secrets” still seem to not fully grasp the importance of what they just saw. The AV Club review leads: “Virtually everyone now agrees that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a colossal mistake based on faulty (at best) or fabricated (at worst) intelligence.” “Mistake” is a serious understatement even with “colossal” attached to it when the movie details the diabolical, illegal lengths to which the U.S. and British governments went to get other governments to go along with it.

Gun’s revelations showed before the invasion that people on the inside, whose livelihood depends on following the party line, were willing to risk jail time to out the lies and threats.

Portrayal of The Observer

Other than Gun herself, the film focuses on a dramatization of what happened at her work; as well as her relationship with her husband, a Kurd from Turkey who the British government attempted to have deported to get at Gun. The film also portrays the work of her lawyers who helped get the Official Secrets charge against her dropped, as well as the drama at The Observer, which published the NSA document after much internal debate.

Observer reporter Martin Bright, whose strong work on the original Gun story was strangely followed by an ill-fated stint at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, has recently noted that very little additional work has been done on Gun’s case. We know virtually nothing about the apparent author of the NSA document that she leaked — one “Frank Koza.” Other questions persist, such is prevalent is this sort of U.S. blackmail of foreign governments to get UN votes or for other purposes? How is it leveraged? Does it fit in with allegations made by former NSA analyst Russ Tice about the NSA having massive files on political people?

Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy is energetically depicted getting tips from former CIA man Mel Goodman. There do seem to be subtle but potentially serious deviations from reality in the film. Vulliamy is depicted as actually speaking with “Frank Koza,” but that’s not what he originally reported:

The NSA main switchboard put The Observer through to extension 6727 at the agency which was answered by an assistant, who confirmed it was Koza’s office. However, when The Observer asked to talk to Koza about the surveillance of diplomatic missions at the United Nations, it was then told ‘You have reached the wrong number’. On protesting that the assistant had just said this was Koza’s extension, the assistant repeated that it was an erroneous extension, and hung up.

There must doubtlessly be many aspects of the film that have been simplified or altered regarding Gun’s personal experience. A compelling part of the film — apparently fictitious or exaggerated — is a GCHQ apparatchik questioning Gun to see if she was the source.

Little is known about the reaction inside the governments of Security Council members that the U.S. spied on. After the invasion, Mexican Ambassador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser spoke in blunt terms about U.S. bullying — saying it viewed Mexico as its patio trasero, or backyard — and was Zinser was compelled to resign by President Vicente Fox. He then, in 2004, gave details about some aspects of U.S. surveillance sabotaging the efforts of the other members of the Security Council to hammer out a compromise to avert the invasion of Iraq, saying the U.S. was “violating the U.N. headquarters covenant.” In 2005, he tragically died in a car crash.

“Official Secrets” director Gavin Hood is perhaps more right than he realizes when he says that his depiction of the Gun case is like the “tip of an iceberg,” pointing to other deceits surrounding the Iraq war. His record with political films has been uneven until now. Peace activist David Swanson, for instance, derided his film on drones, “Eye in the Sky.” At a D.C. showing of “Official Secrets,” Hood depicted those who backed the Iraq war as being discredited. But that’s simply untrue.

Leading presidential candidate Joe Biden — who not only voted for the Iraq invasion, but presided over rigged hearings on in 2002 — has recently falsified his record repeatedly on Iraq at presidential debates with hardly a murmur. Nor is he alone. Those refusing to be held accountable for their Iraq war lies include not just Bush and Cheney, but John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi.

Biden has actually faulted Bush for not doing enough to get United Nations approval for the Iraq invasion. But as the Gun case helps show, there was no legitimate case for invasion and the Bush administration had done virtually everything, both legal and illegal, to get UN authorization.

Many who supported the invasion try to distance themselves from it. But the repercussions of that illegal act are enormous: It led directly or indirectly to the rise of ISIS, the civil war in Iraq and the war in Syria. Journalists who pushed for the Iraq invasion are prosperous and atop major news organizations, such as Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt. The editor who argued most strongly against publication of the NSA document at The Observer, Kamal Ahmed, is now editorial director of BBC News.

The British government — unlike the U.S. — did ultimately produce a study ostensibly around the decision-making leading to the invasion of Iraq, the Chilcot Report of 2016. But that report — called “devastating” by the The New York Times–made no mention of the Gun case. [See accuracy.org release from 2016: “Chilcot Report Avoids Smoking Gun.”]

After Gun’s identity became known, the Institute for Public Accuracy brought on Jeff Cohen, the founder of FAIR, to work with program director Hollie Ainbinder to get prominent individuals to support Gun. The film — quite plausibly — depicts the charges being dropped against Gun for the simple reason that the British government feared that a high-profile proceeding would effectively put the war on trial, which to them would be have been a nightmare.

Top-Flight Cast Takes On American Classic ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’

While working on Almeida Theatre’s Olivier Award-winning revival of the Henrik Ibsen classic “Ghosts” on London’s West End, director Richard Eyre turned to , his leading lady and longtime friend, and suggested they next take on Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical drama, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

“Of course I knew that this epic, huge, complex and delicate play needed to be in hands that I could trust implicitly,” Manville, an Oscar nominee for last year’s “Phantom Thread,” said in an interview with Truthdig. “Because of our history with ‘Ghosts,’ that was all in place for me. We worked brilliantly together, and certainly both of these plays have been the historical highlights of my career.”

Written in 1941, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” looks back at a slice of time following the author’s stint on the high seas, before he began writing plays. Oscar-winner plays James Tyrone, a once-promising actor-turned-alcoholic who squandered his talent for money. That character is similar to O’Neill’s own father, an alcoholic itinerant actor.

Jamie (), is Tyrone’s oldest son, an acting aspirant and, like O’Neill’s real-life brother of the same name, also alcoholic. The youngest, Edmund (Matthew Beard), a poet with tuberculosis, is based on O’Neill. Like Edmund, O’Neill was indirectly responsible for his mother Mary Tyrone’s addiction to morphine, which she began abusing after suffering complications during childbirth.

Produced in 1956, “Long Day’s Journey into Night” won O’Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize three years after his death. Here, Irons, Eyre and Manville discuss their critically acclaimed production, currently running at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Calif., through July 1.

JORDAN RIEFE: What’s key to building a strong relationship with a director?

LESLEY MANVILLE: You’ve got to combine our mutual gifts, him as a director and me as an actress. But he’s very open, he’s hugely clever and he has a great intellectual understanding, and on top of that he has a very human understanding. When you’re doing plays like “Ghosts” and “Long Day’s Journey,” you need somebody who isn’t afraid of being in touch with and posing their vulnerabilities and their tenderness and their understanding of sometimes how hard it is for the character you’re playing to be a proper human being.

RICHARD EYRE: In the theater, what you enjoy is the interaction with the other actors and the interaction with the audience. That’s why I think Jeremy and Lesley are theater animals. They breathe and thrive on that kind of live experience—being present tense with an audience.

JR: Talk to me about rehearsing such a prolix piece. It seems it would be exhausting.

JEREMY IRONS: To a certain extent, Tyrone reacts around Mary’s addiction. So you have to wait until she’s found how she’s going to play to see what you’re going to react to. So the first rehearsals were quite unnerving, because you think, ‘I’m not getting anything, I’m not doing anything.’ But once her performance was solidified, I was able to sort the play around it. I know Olivier had a lot of trouble when he was doing it.

LM: I kind of hit the ground running. I’m a very instinctive actor, and I learned the lines completely before we started rehearsing when we did it in Bristol in 2016, because I knew the rehearsal time we had would have to be spent working out how to play her and make the scenes work rather than be struggling over the lines. So I think I started to deliver for all the other actors rather quickly. I didn’t leave them hanging around to see what my take was going to be.

JR: What did you learn about addicts in preparation for the role?

LM: Practical things, like if you’re injecting morphine into a fleshy part of your body, it probably takes 10 to 15 minutes to hit. But sometimes in the play, she goes upstairs and she comes back down a few minutes later and she’s like a different person. And this doctor says, ‘Yes, if you go into [the] vein, the effect is pretty instant, really.’ As luck would have it, people who are morphine addicts, their behavior is very volatile.

JR: Jeremy, Tyrone is accused of being a skinflint, but don’t all actors, regardless of their level of success, worry that the phone will never ring again?

JI: When I was starting off in my career, before it began to get a rhythm to it and I was lucky enough to create a financial cushion, I was very careful. I remember my first wife—it only lasted a couple of years; I was 21—but I was forever saving. And I remember when we were separated she said it was such a relief not to have to save. I can go out and spend!

JR: How important is a play like this to maintaining your craft?

JI: I’ve tried to make sure that those high-paying jobs subsidize the work I really value, which does not pay too much, and I’ve been pretty lucky. Maybe if I’d stayed and done more great Shakespearean roles—I’d done a few—I would be in a position like Ian McKellen, who has done them all. But then, of course he was very, very happy to go off and do the Tolkien series and be tied up for a long time.

JR: The critics were kinder in the U.K. than they were in Brooklyn.

JI: I think when you’re dealing with a classic, the critics will often, sadly, compare it with what they’ve seen before, and their memories of the play and what it did for them.

LM: We’ve had amazing notices in Bristol and London, and we had some reservations in America, but that’s their prerogative, and maybe there’s an element of them being much more critical because it’s English doing an American play.

JR: The knock is that it’s played too fast.

JI: Yes, we do play it quite fast. Because we play the first scene really quite fast, with lots of overlapping, sort of how a family behaves amongst themselves, they cut in on each other to give some variance, they (the critics) have to listen and they have to work a little bit at the start. But maybe for some critics, this was too much.

JR: Ms. Manville has said it’s the greatest writing she’s ever performed.

RE: I’ve done an awful lot of classics, a lot of Shakespeare, I’ve done Arthur Miller, I’ve done Tennessee Williams and Sean O’Casey. This is pretty high. I think it’s a great play, a formidably great play. I don’t take it for granted in any way. It still seems to be an extraordinary honor to be doing this play in New York and Los Angeles. It’s a thrill.

Hurricane Dorian Now a Category 3, With 10 Million in Florida in Its Path

MIAMI— An increasingly dangerous Hurricane Dorian menaced a corridor of some 10 million people — and put Walt Disney World and President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in the crosshairs — as it steamed toward Florida on Friday with the potential to become the most powerful storm to hit the state’s east coast in nearly 30 years.

Becoming more alarming with every update from forecasters, the storm strengthened into an extremely perilous Category 3 in the afternoon and was expected to become a potentially catastrophic Category 4 with winds of almost 140 mph (225 kph) before blowing ashore late Monday or early Tuesday.

The National Hurricane Center’s projected track showed Dorian hitting around Palm Beach County, where Mar-a-Lago is situated, then moving inland over the Orlando area. But because of the difficulty of predicting a storm’s course this far out, forecasters cautioned that practically all of Florida, including Miami and Fort Lauderdale, could be in harm’s way.

They warned, too, that Dorian was moving more slowly, which could subject the state to a drawn-out and more destructive pummeling from wind, storm surge and heavy rain.

Trump declared a state of emergency in Florida and authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster-relief efforts.

As Dorian closed in, it played havoc with people’s Labor Day weekend plans. Major airlines began allowing travelers to change their reservations without a fee. The major cruise lines began rerouting their ships. Disney World and the other big resorts in Orlando found themselves in the storm’s projected path.

Jessica Armesto and her 1-year-old daughter, Mila, had planned to have breakfast with Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy at Disney World. Instead, Armesto decided to take shelter at her mother’s hurricane-resistant house in Miami with a kitchen full of nonperishable foods.

“It felt like it was better to be safe than sorry, so we canceled our plans,” she said.

Still, with Dorian still days away and its track uncertain, Disney and other major resorts held off announcing any closings, and Florida authorities ordered no immediate mass evacuations.

“Sometimes if you evacuate too soon, you may evacuate into the path of the storm if it changes,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said.

Homeowners and businesses rushed to cover their windows with plywood. Supermarkets ran out of bottled water, and long lines formed at gas stations, with fuel shortages reported in some places. But the governor said the Florida Highway Patrol would begin escorting fuel trucks to help them get past the lines of waiting motorists and replenish gas stations.

At a Publix supermarket in Cocoa Beach, Ed Ciecirski in the customer service department said the pharmacy was extra busy with people rushing to fill prescriptions. The grocery was rationing bottled water and had run out of dry ice.

“It’s hairy,” the 69-year-old Ciecirski said. But he said he was used to commotion after working for years as a supervisor for the post office.

As of 2 p.m. EDT, Dorian was centered about 625 miles (1,005 kilometers) east of West Palm Beach with winds of 115 mph (185 kph) and was moving northwest at a slowed-down 10 mph (17 kph).

Dorian could prove to be the strongest hurricane to hit Florida’s east coast since Andrew, a Category 5 that obliterated thousands of homes south of Miami with winds topping 165 mph (266 kph) in 1992.

An estimated 10 million people live in the 13 Florida counties with the highest likelihood of seeing hurricane-force winds from Dorian by Wednesday morning. After passing through Florida, it is expected to rake the Southeast coast through the Carolinas.

Coastal areas in the Southeast could get 6 to 12 inches (15 to 30 centimeters) of rain, with 18 inches (46 centimeters) in some places, triggering life-threatening flash floods, the hurricane center said.

Also imperiled were the Bahamas, where the sound of hammering echoed across the islands as people boarded up their homes. Canned food and bottled water were disappearing quickly. The storm was expected to hit by Sunday.

Florida’s governor urged nursing homes to take precautions to prevent tragedies like the one during Hurricane Irma two years ago, when the storm knocked out the air conditioning at a facility in Hollywood and 12 patients died in the sweltering heat. Four employees of the home were charged with manslaughter earlier this week.

“I’m glad these people are being held accountable,” DeSantis said, “because that sends the message going into this storm that if you have vulnerable people in your care, it’s your responsibility to make sure you have a plan in place to protect those folks.”

At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, NASA began slowly moving a 380-foot-high mobile launch platform to the safety of the colossal Vehicle Assembly Building, built to withstand 125 mph wind. The launcher is for the mega rocket that NASA is developing to take astronauts to the moon.

The hurricane season typically peaks between mid-August and late October. One of the most powerful storms ever to hit the U.S. was on Labor Day 1935. The unnamed Category 5 hurricane crashed ashore along Florida’s Gulf Coast on Sept. 2. It was blamed for over 400 deaths.

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Associated Press writers Seth Borenstein and Michael Balsamo in Washington; Danica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Marcia Dunn in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Freida Frisaro and Marcus Lim in Miami; Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida; and Bobby Caina Calvan in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report.

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For AP’s complete coverage of the hurricane: https://apnews.com/Hurricanes