Chris Hedges's Blog, page 219

What Corruption in Sports Can Teach Us About Trump’s America

A half-century ago, the sporting Cassandras predicted that the worst values and sensibilities of our increasingly corrupted civic society would eventually affect our sacred games: football would become a gladiatorial meat market, basketball a model of racism, college sports a paradigm of commercialization, and Olympic sports like swimming and gymnastics a hotbed of sexual predators.

Mission accomplished!

The Cassandras then forecast an even more perverse reversal: our games, now profaned, would further corrupt our civic life; winning would not be enough without domination; cheating would be justified as gamesmanship; extreme fandom would become violent tribalism; team loyalty would displace moral courage; and obedience to the coach would supplant democracy.

Okay, I think it’s time for a round of applause for those seers. Let’s hear it for Team Trump!

Even as those predictions were coming true over the past two years, as a longtime sports reporter, columnist, TV commentator, and jock culture correspondent for TomDispatch, I waited with a certain dread and expectation for the arrival of the true Jockpocalypse, the prophetic revelation that Jock Culture had indeed become The Culture. There would be three clear signs, I thought, of this American sports version of a biblical Armageddon.

The first arrived last February, when a leading NFL owner was arrested, allegedly in flagrante delicto, in a Florida massage parlor before an important game. The second hit the news in March, when several dozen parents were caught spending millions of dollars to get their distinctly unathletic children admitted to elite colleges by masquerading as promising varsity sports prospects.

The third and most convincing sign came in April when the world’s greatest golfer tacitly endorsed the world’s greatest golf cheater. Admittedly, none of those signs was as blatant as ongoing outrages like the growing roster of young women athletes who had been sexually abused by their team coaches and doctors; the continuing corruption at the highest levels of European soccer (where anything goes financially speaking and, as the New Yorker’s Sam Knight put it, “The best leagues are awash in Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds, and Chinese conglomerates”); or the sexism of the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport in refusing to allow Caster Semenya, a South African runner with naturally elevated testosterone, to compete against other women unless she doped down her hormone levels.

Nevertheless, the three signs I’ve noted reveal how the worst aspects of Jock Culture have indeed transcended all the traditional borders of sportsdom, ruining for many, including me, the full enjoyment of sports. How can a moral person watch games in which players are damaged and exploited? How has sports, cherished as an innocent sanctuary, become such a “guilty pleasure”?

You can argue with obvious justification, historically speaking, that sports was never anything like the chaste Oz of our fantasies, whether you’re talking about foul play in the ancient Olympics, the 1919 World Series Black Sox game-fixing scandal, or the contemporary revelations of the widespread use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs, especially in baseball, track, and bicycle racing, but those three signs I’m about to explore make, in the opinion of this sports writer, an even more damning case for the coming of the End of Days for sports as a sanctuary of innocence, joy, and pleasure of just about any sort.

Signs of the Jockpocalypse

Sign No. 1: My first instinct was to ignore the story of an aged widower, allegedly paying for some version of sex, who was scooped up after being caught on surveillance video at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida, during a local police investigation of alleged human trafficking for the sex trade. However, because it was Robert Kraft, the 77-year-old owner of the New England Patriots, one of the National Football League’s most powerful figures, I grew ever more curious — and not just because he had previously liked to flaunt girlfriends half his age or because he supported Donald Trump.

After all, it was on his watch as owner that the Patriots had drafted two players of highly dubious character. In 1996, the team drafted Christian Peter, who had been arrested eight times and convicted four times of assaulting women while a star defensive lineman at the University of Nebraska, the national collegiate champion. Kraft’s late wife, Myra, successfully demanded that Peter, who ultimately had a career with other teams and has apparently turned his life around, be let go.

Then, in 2010, the team drafted Aaron Hernandez, a dominant tight end at national champion Miami, which kicked him out after his junior year for drug use and violent behavior. He played well at New England, but in 2013 was charged with murder and convicted two years later. In 2017, he committed suicide in his prison cell. Later that year, Boston University researchers dissecting Hernandez’s brain diagnosed Stage 3 Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or severe brain injury.

It’s no stretch to associate Kraft with both the murder and the suicide. He was at the very least an important bystander in the “League of Denial,” the NFL’s longstanding attempt to dismiss and obfuscate the striking connections between the game and the traumatic brain injuries that turn out to afflict hundreds of its players. Almost all NFL players whose brains have been studied, which is only possible after death, seem to have suffered grievous trauma from the hits inflicted in that game. Since all of this is now known, any time you turn on professional football, one thing is guaranteed: you are watching sponsored, encouraged assaults on screen or, if you’re in a stadium, in person. And if that isn’t end times in action, what is?

Sign No. 2: Spending upwards of a million dollars or more to enhance the lives of kids seems like a highly worthy endeavor — unless, of course, they turn out to be your own kids and the money is being fraudulently siphoned to those who can get them into prestigious colleges through fraud. Think of it as the new Gilded Age of the twenty-first century, the one in which the rich only grow richer and the poor… well, their kids better actually be able to play sports damn well.

I’m thinking, of course, about the millionaire parents who bribed go-betweens to bribe coaches of minor college sports to help admit their kids to prestigious schools. As a sportswriter, it seems to me like the end of a long historical arc of sports corruption that began in the last century when coaches at wannabe powerhouse football and basketball schools first doctored high-school transcripts and then the college version of the same to admit potential star players and keep them eligible. (Famed Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne classically did that for his all-American George Gipp, better known from the phrase “win one for the Gipper.”) A successful team, of course, also gives its school a bump in applications and donations.

Recruiting is most obvious in big-time basketball because it’s quite literally written in black and white. Back in 1992, Richard Lapchick, director of the Center for the Study of Sports in Society, offered me these statistics: at NCAA Division 1 schools, 56% of the varsity basketball players are black; 7% of the students on campus are black; and 1.56% of the faculty is black. (Nothing much has changed since.)

When it came to the recent admission scandals, that perverted flipside of athletic recruiting, however, the racial mix was reversed — unsurprisingly, given who has the real money in America. The fraudulent future volleyball champions, tennis aces, and champion sailors were mostly white, and their parents were clearly no less desperate (and far better endowed) to get their children into their first-choice schools than the mostly African-American mothers I’ve met at the summer basketball camps run by sneaker companies as auditions for big-time coaches.

The colleges, in turn, proved themselves greedy for both the unpaid sports performers and the rich kids whose parents were ready to shell out box office prices to get in. As in the case of Robert Kraft, there will be some shaming, inconvenience, and fines for the wealthy, but undoubtedly little else. The players are the ones who, in the end, will absorb and have to live with the traumas.

Comeback for What?

Sign No. 3: To this sports writer, in the moment when a smiling Tiger Woods allowed Donald Trump to hang the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, around his neck, the Jockpocalypse was fully revealed.

The day after Woods won the 2019 Masters Tournament, Trump tweeted that he would bestow the medal to honor “his incredible Success & Comeback in Sports (Golf) and, more importantly, LIFE.” It was, of course, another chance for a president who undoubtedly thinks emoluments are hair conditioners to showcase his golf resorts. In the new normal, we’ve come Jockpocalyptically to expect nothing less from the shameless kleptocrat in the White House.

But what about Tiger, whom we sports types have known since he was a toddler hitting golf balls on TV? We watched his dad drive him relentlessly to stardom and dub him “the Chosen One.” Many fans were sympathetic, even sad, when he cracked up emotionally, physically, and professionally. And then cheered him on when, with extraordinary dedication, he made his way back. In the process, the golf industry was economically recharged.

But in this era in which championship teams and other athletes regularly reject White House invitations to protest the man who occupies the Oval Office, Tiger was hardly obliged by convention to accept the medal. Of course, he has a right to be a Trump supporter or to crave the award and the attention that goes with it. As we know — if we couldn’t have already guessed it — from a recent, acclaimed critical biography of him, Tiger is a selfish and morally challenged figure, distinctly in the presidential mode of the moment.

He is also, however, the leading face of the sport, which might lead you to think that he had a responsibility to uphold golf’s famously self-righteous posture on honest play, even when no one is looking. The sport regularly trumpets stories of players who call fouls on themselves, losing tournaments to preserve the game’s integrity.

And since integrity is marketed as the soul of golf, how can that sport — and its greatest player — ignore the barefaced dishonesty of the world’s most famous golf club owner on the course? As sportswriter Rick Reilly, who has golfed with Trump, describes the president in a hilariously depressing new book, Commander in Cheat, he routinely lies about how many tournaments he’s won, whom he’s beaten, and what his score was. He regularly sneaks his own balls off the rough and kicks his opponent’s onto it. “Somebody should point out,” writes Reilly, “that the way Trump does golf is sort of the way he does a presidency, which is to operate as though the rules are for other people.”

Well, Reilly did point that out, which should have led Tiger to assume his true role as the soul of golf. Instead, as avaricious as Robert Kraft and those golden-helicopter parents, he embraced the devil and helped bring on the Jockpocalypse.

Think of big-time sports, the stuff that makes TV hum every season of the year, as now truly being, like Tiger himself, on the Trump Team where crime, bribery, and cheating of every sort is the order of the day. No wonder this ancient sports writer has the urge to finally say goodbye to all that sweaty hoopla. It’s end times now. And don’t we have better things to do?

The Largest Migrant Shelter Is a House of Horrors, Report Finds

President Trump announced and then quickly called off Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids targeting undocumented immigrants this weekend, but it’s little relief for the migrants already in government custody.

The Texas Tribune reported Sunday that the McAllen, Texas-area Customs and Border Patrol shelter, the largest of its kind in the U.S., was so overcrowded that immigrants were forced to sleep outside. Toby Gialluca, an immigration lawyer, told the Tribune the water in the facility “tastes like bleach,” adding, “It was so bad that the mothers would save any bottled water they could get and use that to mix the baby formula.”

Children don’t have clean clothes, advocates say, and are not receiving sufficient medical care. “Unable to clean themselves, young mothers reported wiping their children’s runny noses or vomit with their own clothing,” the Tribune reported.

The McAllen facility is separate from the Clint, Texas, one that most of the 300 children that were there were moved from, according to reports Monday from the Associated Press, via Texas station KVIA.

“Basic hygiene just doesn’t exist there,” Gialluca told the Tribune. “It’s a health crisis … a manufactured health crisis.”

“More than 144,000 migrants were apprehended or denied entry to the country last month—the largest number in 13 years,” the Tribune reported, adding, “More than half of them were families with children and about 8% were unaccompanied minors. Last month, Texas shelters held more than 5,800 migrant children.”

The agencies responsible for the shelters, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (for adults), and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, say they’re swamped with the influx.

The Trump administration insists there is a “right way” for these migrants to seek asylum, encouraging them to do so at an official port of entry. In a statement following the death of 7-year-old Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin under U.S. custody, the Department of Homeland Security told migrant parents “Please present yourselves at a port of entry and seek to enter legally and safely.”

However, as The Guardian explained in December, appearing at a port of entry is far from a guarantee of fair treatment while a claim is made and processed, much less asylum itself:

Those seeking asylum–like Guatemalan migrants Jakelin and her father–face a difficult task in actually making a claim, something that often forces migrants to instead risk their lives in illegal treks across the desert. This is especially true at the more than 40 smaller border crossings, such as the one nearest to where the Maquins crossed.

The migrants Gialluca spoke with at the McAllen-area shelter told her they had appeared at a port of entry, but that didn’t stop them from ending up in these overcrowded, unhygienic shelters.

The Trump administration does not seem to be in a hurry to address these conditions. During a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals hearing last week regarding conditions at shelters for migrant children, the Trump administration attorney argued the government was “not legally required to provide all of them with such items as soap, toothbrushes and sleeping accommodations,” The San Francisco Chronicle reported. In June 2017, a federal judge ruled the Trump administration was violating a 1997 court settlement that required the government to keep unaccompanied minors in safe and sanitary conditions.

The Trump administration is appealing the 2017 ruling, arguing that the 1997 agreement does not mention the need for the government “to provide minors, in all situations, with sleeping accommodations, toothbrushes, toothpaste, showers, soap, towels and dry clothes,” as long as the facility itself was safe and sanitary, the Chronicle reported. A ruling by the 9th Circuit has not been made.

 

 

U.S. Moves Migrant Kids After Facility’s Poor Conditions Exposed

The U.S. government has removed most of the children from a remote Border Patrol station in Texas following reports that more than 300 children were detained there, caring for each other with inadequate food, water and sanitation.

Just 30 children remained at the facility near El Paso on Monday, said Rep. Veronica Escobar after her office was briefed on the situation by an official with Customs and Border Protection.

Attorneys who visited the Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, last week said older children were trying to take care of infants and toddlers, The Associated Press first reported Thursday. They described a 4-year-old with matted hair who had gone without a shower for days, and hungry, inconsolable children struggling to soothe one another. Some had been locked for three weeks inside the facility, where 15 children were sick with the flu and another 10 were in medical quarantine.

“How is it possible that you both were unaware of the inhumane conditions for children, especially tender-age children at the Clint Station?” asked Escobar in a letter sent Friday to U.S. Customs and Border Protection acting commissioner John Sanders and U.S. Border Patrol chief Carla Provost.

She asked to be informed by the end of this week what steps they’re taking to end “these humanitarian abuses.”

Lawmakers from both parties decried the situation last week.

Border Patrol officials have not responded to AP’s questions about the conditions at the Clint facility, but in an emailed statement Monday they said: “Our short-term holding facilities were not designed to hold vulnerable populations and we urgently need additional humanitarian funding to manage this crisis.”

Although it’s unclear where all the children held at Clint have been moved, Escobar said some were sent to another facility on the north side of El Paso called Border Patrol Station 1. Escobar said it’s a temporary site with roll-out mattresses, showers, medical facilities and air conditioning.

But Clara Long, an attorney who interviewed children at Border Patrol Station 1 last week, said conditions were not necessarily better there.

“One boy I spoke with said his family didn’t get mattresses or blankets for the first two nights and he and his mom came down with a fever,” said Long, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch. “He said there were no toothbrushes, and it was very, very cold.”

Vice President Mike Pence, asked about the unsafe, unsanitary conditions for the children on “Meet The Press” on Sunday, said “it’s totally unacceptable” adding that he hopes Congress will allocate more resources to border security.

Long and a group of lawyers inspected the facilities because they are involved in the Flores settlement, a Clinton-era legal agreement that governs detention conditions for migrant children and families. The lawyers negotiated access to the facility with officials and say Border Patrol knew the dates of their visit three weeks in advance.

Government rules call for children to be held by the Border Patrol in their short-term stations for no longer than 72 hours before they are transferred to the custody of Health and Human Services, which houses migrant youth in facilities around the country through its Office of Refugee Resettlement. Customs and Border Protection referred AP’s questions Sunday to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which did not immediately respond.

Trump Attacks Federal Reserve Again, Wants Interest Rate Cut

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is continuing efforts to pressure the U.S. central bank system, saying the stock markets and economic growth would be much higher if not for its actions.

Trump says the Federal Reserve “doesn’t know what it’s doing” and raised interest rates too quickly.

The Republican president tweeted Monday “think of what it could have been if the Fed had gotten it right.”

Trump is encouraging the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, saying “now they stick, like a stubborn child, when we need rates cuts, & easing, to make up for what other countries are doing against us. Blew it!”

The Fed at its last meeting kept its benchmark rate in a range of 2.25% to 2.5% but hinted at future cuts. The rate influences many consumer and business loans.

The Link Between Austerity and Our Global Mental Health Crisis

The United Nations’ top health envoy warned Monday that inequality and austerity are fueling a global mental health crisis that can only be solved by government interventions to reduce economic insecurity and increase funding for crucial public services.

Dr. Dainius Pūrasa, a Lithuanian psychiatrist and the U.N.’s special rapporteur on health, said in an interview with The Guardian that purely “biomedical” approaches to treating mental illness are not sufficient because they ignore the social and economic conditions that exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other conditions.

Measures to redress inequality, poverty, and discrimination, Pūrasa said, “would be the best ‘vaccine’ against mental illness and would be much better than the excessive use of psychotropic medication which is happening.”

“The best way to invest in the mental health of individuals is to create a supportive environment in all settings, family, the workplace,” said Pūrasa. “Then of course [therapeutic] services are needed, but they should not be based on an excessive biomedical model.”

Pūrasa’s interview with The Guardian came just before he delivered a major new report(pdf) on mental health to the U.N. General Assembly on Monday.

While it does not single out any country in particular, the report slams as damaging to mental health “[c]uts to social welfare, laws, and policies that restrict access to sexual and reproductive health information, and services, the criminalization of drug possession or cultivation for personal use, laws that restrict civil society space, and corporal punishment of children and adults.”

The report describes inequality as “a key obstacle to mental health globally” and states that action to curb inequities should be considered “a human rights issue.”

“Given the deep connections between inequality and poor health,” the report says, “states are required to act on structural interventions far upstream, including in the political arrangements that allocate resources.”

“Reducing inequalities,” the report continues, “is a precondition for promoting mental health and for reducing key risk factors, such as violence, disempowerment, and social exclusion.”

At this point, there’s no denying what a complete catastrophe austerity has been for the poor and vulnerable in our society.https://t.co/tWDLswa6qc

— Momentum (@PeoplesMomentum) June 24, 2019

Pūrasa’s report comes as global inequality continues to soar. As Common Dreams reported in January, an Oxfam analysis found that 26 billionaires own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people combined.

Meanwhile, the right-wing governments of major countries like the United States and the United Kingdom continue to push austerity policies while putting more money into the pockets of the wealthy.

Jeremy Corbyn, the U.K. Labour Party leader, tweeted Monday that he is not surprised by Pūrasa’s assessment of the impacts of austerity.

As Common Dreams reported last month, Philip Alston—U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights—issued a report condemning the British government for years of austerity policies that have gutted social services and exacerbated suffering throughout the country.

Corbyn said Monday that austerity “has caused insecurity across the country in people’s housing, employment and access to public services, like healthcare.”

“We must end austerity,” said Corbyn, “and start investing in people and communities.”

Border Patrol Has Acted With Virtual Impunity for Years

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Perhaps the most far-reaching idea was to reclassify the more than 40,000 Border Patrol agents and customs officers as “national security employees,” just as all FBI agents and employees at a number of other Homeland Security agencies currently are. Taking away their status as civil servants, the thinking went, would make it easier to fire corrupt and abusive employees.

It was, to be sure, an extreme measure. But the panel, a subcommittee of a larger Homeland Security advisory council, had been created late in President Barack Obama’s second term because U.S. Customs and Border Protection seemed in crisis, and the panel subsequently determined that the agency was plagued by a system that allowed bad actors to stay on the payroll for years after they’d engaged in egregious, even criminal, misconduct. Because of civil service protections, a Border Patrol agent who’d been disciplined for bad behavior could challenge his or her punishment through four rounds of escalating appeals before taking the case to an arbitrator or a federal hearing board.

And the panel — headed by William Bratton, who had run police departments in Boston, New York City and Los Angeles — was deeply concerned about the persistent strain of lawlessness among CBP employees. In a preliminary 2015 report, the panel had noted that “arrests for corruption of CBP personnel far exceed, on a per capita basis, such arrests at other federal law enforcement agencies.” CBP, the panel’s members concluded, was “vulnerable to corruption that threatens its effectiveness and national security.”

The civil service idea, it turned out, was dead on arrival, one of any number of the panel’s recommendations that have failed to materialize. At least nine of the panel’s suggested reforms, first put forward more than three years ago, have been dropped or haven’t yet been fully put into practice, according to a CBP spokesperson. CBP officials rejected taking away civil service protections in part because it would anger the union representing Border Patrol agents.

“That was going to be a difficult one,” recalled R. Gil Kerlikowske, who served as CBP commissioner at the time of the panel’s reports on corruption and misconduct in 2015 and 2016.

The union did not respond to requests for comment.

CBP, and chiefly the Border Patrol, is again front and center as the nation confronts the volatile issue of illegal immigration. The administration of President Donald Trump has pledged to take the “handcuffs off” law enforcement agents as part of an aggressive push to stem the flow of migrants across the country’s southern border. The performance of Border Patrol agents was one element of the widespread outrage provoked by the administration’s decision to separate children from their parents at the border.

The agency, at least publicly, agreed with many of the advisory council’s recommendations when they were issued in 2016. And last year, Kevin McAleenan — then head of CBP and recently named by Trump to be the acting secretary for Homeland Security — told Congress that the agency had implemented 42 of the panel’s 53 recommendations.

A closer look, however, indicates that CBP has moved slowly on several central reform proposals. To cite one: The panel encouraged CBP to create a discipline czar, a high-level official who could track all the misconduct and corruption cases and keep the agency’s commissioner informed about them.

In a statement to ProPublica, CBP said the agency, more than three years later, was still “working on the best options to meet this recommendation.”

Perhaps most significant: The panel recommended that CBP hire 350 internal affairs investigators over a three-year period and task them with looking into misconduct and corruption. So far, the agency has brought on only about 50 investigators.

Some experts on immigration and border protection fear that the prospects for lengthy and lasting reforms of CBP have dimmed under the current administration.

“They’re dragging their feet,” said Vicki Gaubeca, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, an advocacy group focused on holding CBP accountable. “What’s the motivation behind this taking so long?”

Looking at his former agency, Kerlikowske said he was more optimistic about the progress CBP has made, noting that some key reform proposals had been enacted and are still in effect. “I think it’s trending in the right direction.”

CBP is a relatively new creation. It was formed in the aftermath of 9/11, in 2003, when federal officials took two distinct organizations — the U.S. Customs Service and the Border Patrol — and fused them into a single agency operating beneath the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. (Several smaller agencies were also part of this reorganization.) It is now the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, a behemoth far larger, in both budgetary terms and personnel numbers, than either the FBI or the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Over the past 16 years, CBP employees have earned a reputation for both heroism and misconduct. Working under challenging conditions, they have disrupted dangerous smuggling rings and saved the lives of desperate migrants stranded in the scorching deserts of the American Southwest. But customs officers and Border Patrol agents have also run afoul of the law, often in extreme fashion. Every year, approximately 250 CBP employees are arrested, many on suspicion of serious felonies; dozens have been jailed in recent years on corruption charges, including weapons trafficking and collaborating with Mexican drug cartels.

During the Obama years, critics decried a series of incidents in which Border Patrol agents shot civilians, many of them Mexican nationals, often under questionable circumstances.

“It was a critical issue,” said Kerlikowske, who headed the agency at the time. “The Border Patrol was under a huge amount of scrutiny from the advocacy groups and the press.”

Kerlikowske and his deputies dramatically changed the agency’s policies around using firearms, bringing them in line with those of other law enforcement organizations. Shootings dropped precipitously.

But complaints of physical and verbal abuse by migrants taken into custody have not. According to a CBP document, each year the agency “receives and reviews hundreds of allegations” of excessive force. This year, CBP paid $125,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging that a Border Patrol agent groped the breasts and genitals of two teenage Guatemalan girls detained in Presidio, Texas. It’s unclear whether the agent at the center of the allegations has been disciplined or ousted from the patrol.

It was this sort of toxic behavior that Bratton and the other members of the advisory panel named by Obama were looking to address. Their assessment of CBP was stinging — the agency’s “discipline system is broken,” they wrote — and their recommendations were extensive, covering everything from the use of real-time GPS tracking to the deployment of body cameras.

Investigations into misconduct and criminality within the agency are handled by a host of different units with overlapping jurisdiction: local CBP supervisors; CBP’s nationwide internal affairs unit; the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general; the civil rights office at Homeland Security; and, in certain cases, the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice. The situation has led to bureaucratic turf battles and a general inefficiency, experts said.

The panel encouraged the two key players, CBP and the inspector general, to draft a formal memorandum of understanding laying out which cases would be investigated by the inspector general’s staff and which would be examined by CBP’s internal affairs investigators.

Three years later, the two sides have been unable to come to an agreement.

A CBP spokesperson blamed the impasse on the inspector general, who gets first crack at most misconduct investigations, saying the office “does not want to relinquish its first right of refusal.”

The inspector general’s office said it has a “productive working relationship” with CBP and its internal affairs unit. But the office believes that it, not CBP, should “investigate the most egregious allegations” of misconduct and that the inspector general’s staff should get the first look at those cases.

This week, the office issued a withering 69-page audit on disciplinary practices across the Department of Homeland Security, including CBP. According to the report, the department “does not have sufficient policies and procedures to address employee misconduct.”

CBP came in for particular scrutiny. Auditors surveyed more than 4,000 supervisors with the agency. Of those surveyed, 58% said they needed more training in responding to bad behavior by employees and taking disciplinary action. Thousands of lower-ranking employees who were surveyed expressed little faith in their bosses, with nearly a quarter saying that they feared retaliation for reporting misconduct by their colleagues, and more than 32% stating that they didn’t trust their supervisors to “take appropriate action to correct misconduct in the workplace.” Nearly 47% said they’d personally witnessed four or more acts of misconduct at CBP over the past three years.

The inspector general’s office has had its own embarrassments of late. This month, Acting Inspector General John V. Kelly resigned after the publication of damning media stories suggesting that he had improperly edited and revised the office’s reports on disaster relief efforts. Kelly insisted at the time that he had merely retired, although he said he had failed to set a tone of objectivity for his staff.

Few experts and advocates interviewed by ProPublica expressed faith in the CBP’s fragmented oversight system. They described it as a black hole, a vortex in which serious complaints are ignored or lost, simple investigations drag on for years, and victims are barred from learning whether the government employees who’ve harmed them have been sanctioned in any way.

“A multibillion-dollar federal agency shouldn’t work that way,” said Jeremy Slack, an assistant geography professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies migration patterns and law enforcement. The agency, he argued, has become secretive to a fault. “They’re not exactly open. A lot of the insight that I have comes from people who work at CBP and are afraid to go on the record.”

CBP said it is barred by federal privacy laws from disclosing the names of officers and agents sanctioned for misconduct. “However, to promote accountability and transparency, CBP does publish an annual discipline report containing aggregate discipline data,” said a spokesperson. The report tallies the number and types of misconduct investigations across the agency, but it does not detail the outcomes of individual cases.

Based in Nogales, Arizona, a small, dusty town in the Sonoran Desert, Joanna Williams works for the Kino Border Initiative, a Catholic group that aides migrants. She has frequent contact with federal officials.

In her experience, allegations of misconduct are frequently dealt with at the local level by supervisors, rather than professional investigators at any of the bodies tasked with overseeing CBP. In Williams’ estimation, the number of cases handled by local Border Patrol supervisors “far exceeds the number that are getting sent to the official investigators.”

Some of CBP’s reforms have clearly stalled, said Chris Rickerd, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU who tracks border issues, and Trump’s recurring rhetoric about getting tough at the border, Rickerd said, “sets precisely the wrong tone.”

Rickerd would like to see the agency get body cameras out into the field. While CBP has tested out cameras in two pilot programs, it still has not adopted the technology, which is common in many big city police departments. The cameras could help cut down on abusive behavior, Rickerd said.

In Kerlikowske’s view, Border Patrol agents would welcome body cameras. “The difficulty we had was finding a camera that could withstand the terrain,” he said of the harsh climate along the southern border. “The cameras we tested back then were pretty much gummed up by the dust or the dirt within about two months.” He also noted that at an agency the size of CBP, the costs of storing the vast amounts of footage accrued could be massive.

Bratton and his panel also encouraged CBP to revamp the penalties for employees who flout agency rules — and to create “mandatory consequences for the most serious offenses.” Today, the new penalty guidelines are still a work in progress. CBP said they are “currently under final review” but are not yet in effect.

Perhaps the most important recommendation made by Bratton and the other members of the advisory panel regarded staffing. In the view of the panel, CBP needed to add some 350 internal affairs investigators to keep up with the number of complaints streaming into the agency. The panel said CBP should hire them over the next three years.

Since then, the agency has added about 50 new investigators and said it has received funds to hire 30 more.

“They staffing component continues to be a concern. I’m glad they’re working on it. But they’re not there,” Williams said. “And, of course, I think there’s a role for Congress to make it a funding priority.”

Some wonder whether the union representing Border Patrol agents, the National Border Patrol Council, is working to stifle changes that would impact its members. The union has achieved a new level of prominence in the Trump era, with union head Brandon Judd appearing frequently on Fox News to champion the president’s hardline approach to immigration policy; Trump has often spoken and tweeted his support for Judd, a tough-talking veteran who has spent more than two decades with the Border Patrol.

The union did not respond to questions about its stance on various reform proposals.

“I think there’s a lot of resistance from the union,” said Slack, who is the author of “Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border.” “The union is a very powerful voice for a much more radical vision of what border enforcement can be. They have a vision of the Border Patrol as a paramilitary force.”

Corporate Media’s Ludicrous New Line on Iran

Quick question: Does the US ever break, breach or violate its international agreements?

Apparently not, according to US coverage of Iran’s recent announcement that it intended to go beyond the limits of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in enriching uranium for its civilian nuclear program (frequently mischaracterized as a nuclear weapons program in media coverage). Reading corporate media’s inversion of reality, it’s hard to escape the impression that while Iran betrays its international agreements, the US just leaves them behind.

An Associated Press report carried by USA Today (6/17/19) was headlined: “Iran Says It Will Break Uranium Stockpile Limit in 10 Days,” and reported that Iran’s announcement indicated its “determination to break from the landmark 2015 accord,” while noting that “tensions have spiked between Iran and the United States,” partly because the US “unilaterally withdrew” from the landmark agreement. Note that the US rejection of its obligations under the deal is referred to in neutral terms—Washington “withdrew”—while Iran’s response to US nonobservance gets negatively characterized as a “break”—a pattern that persists throughout the coverage.

There was no indication in the AP piece that Iran offered conditions under which it would continue to comply with the Iran Deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), which gives the false impression that Iran’s decision to end compliance with the JCPOA is settled and unconditional.

The Wall Street Journal (6/17/19) offered the same kind of misleading headline: “Iran to Breach Limits of Nuclear Pact, as US to Send More Troops to the Middle East.” Again, Iran’s potential departure from the pact whose terms the US has vitiated is portrayed as a “breach,” while the US’s actual violation of the deal is labeled a “pullout” in the accompanying piece.

The Journal, unlike the AP, did note that Iran offered conditions under which it would continue to comply with the JCPOA’s terms:

The spokesman for Iran’s atomic energy agency, Behrouz Kamalvandi, said that by June 27—10 days from Monday—the country would surpass its enriched-uranium limits. He said Iran would further increase its production in early July, but could reverse both steps if Europe provided relief from [US] sanctions.

CNN (6/17/19) went with “Iran says it will break the uranium stockpile limit agreed under nuclear deal in 10 days,” as their headline. Only people who read past the headline, which most people don’t, would’ve known that that’s not really what Iran is saying:

Iran has reiterated that it could reverse the new measures should the remaining European signatories in the nuclear deal (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) step in and make more of an effort to circumvent US sanctions.

To its credit, CNN added “withdraw” in addition to the usual “violate,” “break” and “breach” in its list of words to describe Iran’s potential departure compared with just “withdrew” to describe the US’s actions.

The New York Post (6/17/19) chose “Iran Will Violate Nuclear Deal, Boost Uranium Stockpile” as the headline to mislead readers, and kept with the pattern of describing the US’s JCPOA breach as “pulling out of the deal.” However, unlike other reports, it didn’t feature any sources skeptical of Iran’s responsibility for the recent Gulf of Oman attacks on Japanese and Norwegian commercial oil tankers, despite crew members aboard the Japanese Kokuka Courageous contradicting US allegations of an Iranian mine attack by claiming to have been hit by a “flying object,” and European officials calling for further investigation and urging “maximum restraint.”

The New York Times’ headline (6/17/19): “Trump Adds Troops After Iran Says It Will Breach Nuclear Deal,” not only continued the above trends by not giving any hint that Iran might not depart from the pact, and characterizing the US’s JCPOA violations as a mere “withdrawal,” it also reported on US sanctions on Iran without mentioning that the sanctions themselves are violations of international law (Guardian, 10/3/18).

The Times uncritically cited Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statements that the US is “considering a full range of options”—including military strikes—without mentioning that these would be violations of international law because they go against UN Security Council Resolution 1887, which requires peaceful resolutions to disputes regarding nuclear issues, in accordance with the UN Charter and the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which both the US and Iran are parties to.

In fact, virtually all coverage fails to address the JCPOA in light of the NPT, because none of it challenges the legitimacy of the US’s prerogative to impose limits on Iran’s civilian nuclear program to begin with. Article IV of the NPT supports the “inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes,” in accordance with Articles I and II forbidding the transfer and receiving of nuclear weapons from nuclear-weapon states.

FAIR (10/17/17) has observed that corporate media frequently attribute malicious intentions to Official US Enemies without going through the bother of presenting evidence. Iran is often accused of sneakily plotting to develop nuclear weapons, the way US ally Israel actually did when it built the only nuclear weapons arsenal in the Middle East (Guardian, 1/15/14).

This is ironic, because Iran has actually been a consistent leader in the nuclear disarmament movement. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, when Iran was the chair of the Non-Aligned Movement, critiqued the JCPOA because it didn’t go far enough to ensure peace in the Middle East by not establishing a Nuclear Weapons–Free Zone there. Iran was also one of the first countries to propose making the Middle East a NWFZ, bringing up the proposal to the UN General Assembly in 1974 (CounterPunch, 12/13/13).

Journalist Gareth Porter (Foreign Policy, 10/16/14), reporting on Iran’s little-understood theocratic system, noted that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini’s fatwa against building any kind of WMDs in the 1990s is a formal ruling on Islamic jurisprudence, holding a legal status above mere legislation. He also pointed to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s refusal to develop WMDs when up to 20,000 Iranians were killed by chemical weapons by then–US ally Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (Reuters, 9/16/13)—with an additional 100,000 survivors developing chronic diseases. Current US sanctions aiming to bring Iran’s “oil exports to zero” are exacerbating those chronic diseases, in addition to further strangling Iran’s economy, by restricting access to necessary medicine (Guardian, 9/2/13).

Of course, none of this can be mentioned, because it contradicts the corporate media narrative of Iran being an enemy that must be confronted, with US aggression against Iran being portrayed as defensive countermeasures (FAIR.org, 5/19/19, 6/6/19). For US media, Iran is the only JCPOA party with commitments that can be “breached,” “violated” or “broken,” with the US free to leave them whenever it wants to, without harming its reputation as a trustworthy party to international agreements.

Trump Signs Order Imposing Sanctions on Iran Supreme Leader

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday targeting Iran’s supreme leader and his associates with financial sanctions, the latest action the U.S. has taken to discourage Tehran from developing nuclear weapons and supporting militant groups.

The sanctions follow Iran’s downing of a more than $100 million U.S. surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz that has ratcheted up tensions. Trump pulled back from the brink of retaliatory military strikes on Iran last week, but is continuing his pressure campaign.

The targets of the new sanctions include senior military figures in Iran, blocking their access to any financial assets under U.S. jurisdiction.

“These measures represent a strong and proportionate response to Iran’s increasingly provocative actions,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

“We will continue to increase pressure on Tehran until the regime abandons its dangerous activities and its aspirations, including the pursuit of nuclear weapons, increased enrichment of uranium, development of ballistic missiles, engagement and support for terrorism, fueling of foreign conflicts and belligerent acts directed against the United States and its allies.”

The sanctions work to deny Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his close aides access to money and support.

Iran’s naval commander, however, has warned that Iranian forces would not hesitate to act again and shoot down more U.S. surveillance drones that violate Iranian airspace. The U.S. said the drone was flying over international waters.

“We confidently say that the crushing response can always be repeated, and the enemy knows it,” Rear Adm. Hossein Khanzadi was quoted as saying by the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

Tensions have been escalating since Trump last year withdrew the U.S. from a global nuclear deal with Iran and re-imposed economic sanctions on Iran.

Iran has decried the U.S. sanctions, which essentially bar Iran from selling its oil internationally, as “economic terrorism.”

Earlier, Trump suggested that the United States should not protect ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz without compensation from other countries.

The U.S. blamed Iran for attacks on two oil tankers this month near the strait, denouncing what it called a campaign of “escalating tensions” in a region crucial to global energy supplies.

Buttigieg Criticized at Emotional Town Hall After Shooting

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg faced criticism Sunday from angry residents of South Bend, Indiana, at an emotional town hall meeting a week after a white police officer fatally shot a black man in the city where he is mayor.

Buttigieg (BOO’-tuh-juhj) said he would call for an outside investigation of the shooting of 54-year-old Eric Logan by Sgt. Ryan O’Neill.

The 37-year-old mayor said he would send a letter to the federal Department of Justice’s civil rights division and notify the local prosecutor that he’d like an independent investigator appointed. He conceded that his administration had failed on two key initiatives.

“The effort to recruit more minority officers to the police department and the effort to introduce body cameras have not succeeded and I accept responsibility for that,” Buttigieg said.

Prosecutors investigating said that the shooting was not recorded by O’Neill’s body camera.

The town hall grew contentious when some community members questioned whether the mayor had done enough to reform the police department in the city of 100,000 people, which is about a quarter black.

“Get the people that are racist off the streets,” one woman in the audience said. “Reorganize your department. You can do that by Friday.”

Buttigieg left the campaign trail for several days to deal with the reaction to the shooting, holding a late night news conference, meeting with the family of the man killed and addressing a protest rally where he was heckled by some in the crowd.

The June 16 shooting happened after O’Neill responded to a call about a suspicious person going through vehicles, a prosecutor investigating the case said. O’Neill spotted Logan leaning inside a car. When confronted, Logan approached O’Neill with a 6- to 8-inch knife raised over his head, the prosecutor said. O’Neill fired twice, with the other shot hitting a car door.

Violence flared again in South Bend early Sunday when a shooting at a pub left a Michigan man dead. Police identified the man as Brandon Williams, 27, of Niles, Michigan. Another 10 people suffered gunshot injuries in South Bend Sunday, the St. Joseph County Metro Homicide Unit said. Five of the wounded remained in hospital in stable condition later Sunday. County Sheriff William Redmond said his officers assisted South Bend police in controlling a crowd of more than 100 “upset and angry citizens” who came from the pub to the hospital where the wounded were taken. It was not immediately clear what prompted the shooting.

Asked after the town hall meeting about the latest shootings, Buttigieg described them as a “reversal” after progress in curbing violence in South Bend earlier this year and in 2018.

Buttigieg had surged from obscurity to become a top-tier candidate in a crowded Democratic presidential field. But he has struggled to connect with minority voters.

The white mayor has had a sometimes-tense relationship with the black community dating back to his first term in office, when he fired the city’s first black police chief. He has also faced criticism for his handling of police misconduct cases, including a case involving an officer who was twice disciplined for civil rights violations but not fired, and for not having a police department that reflects South Bend’s diversity. The police department is almost 90 percent white.

In the wake of the shooting, Buttigieg called on his police chief to remind officers to have their body cameras on at all times when they are engaging with citizens.

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AP writer Sara Burnett in Chicago contributed to this story.

Justices Side With Business, Government in Information Fight

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court sided with businesses and the U.S. government Monday in a ruling about the public’s access to information, telling a South Dakota newspaper it can’t get the data it was seeking.

The justices ruled against the Argus Leader, which is owned by USA Today publisher Gannett and is the largest newspaper in South Dakota. The paper was seeking to learn how much money goes annually to every store nationwide that participates in the government’s $65 billion-a-year Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, called SNAP.

The federal government initially declined the paper’s request for the information. In response, the paper sued, arguing that the data is public and shows citizens how the government is spending their tax money. The government lost in a lower court and decided not to appeal. But a supermarket trade association, the Virginia-based Food Marketing Institute, stepped in to continue the fight with the backing of the Trump administration, arguing that the information is confidential and should not be disclosed.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for a six-member majority of the court that at “least where commercial or financial information is both customarily and actually treated as private by its owner and provided to the government under an assurance of privacy,” the information should not be disclosed. He said the SNAP data qualified.

The Food Marketing Institute said in a statement that it believes the ruling will “protect private financial information today and in the future.”

Maribel Perez Wadsworth, president of the USA Today Network, said in a statement that the decision “effectively gives businesses relying on taxpayer dollars the ability to decide for themselves what data the public will see about how that money is spent.” She called it a “step backward for openness.”

The case has to do with the Freedom of Information Act. The act gives citizens, including reporters, access to federal agencies’ records with certain exceptions. A section of the law tells officials to withhold “confidential” ”commercial or financial information” obtained from third parties. The question for the court was when information provided to a federal agency qualifies as confidential.

The Associated Press was among dozens of media organizations that signed a legal brief supporting the Argus Leader.

The case is Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media, 18-481.