Chris Hedges's Blog, page 221

Trump Delays Nationwide Deportation Sweep

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump on Saturday said he was postponing a nationwide immigration sweep to deport people living in the U.S. illegally, including families, saying he would give lawmakers time to work out border solutions.

The move came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had called Trump on Friday asking him to call off the operation. Separately, administration officials told The Associated Press that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was concerned that details leaked to the media could jeopardize its agents.

Related Articles





Activists Step Up Trainings in Wake of Deportation Threats



by

“At the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “If not, Deportations start!”

Lawmakers are mulling whether to give $4.6 billion in emergency funding to help border agencies struggling to manage a growing number of migrants crossing the border. The measure passed committee on a 30-1 vote. The bipartisan vote likely means that the Senate will take the lead in writing the legislation, which needs to pass into law before the House and Senate leave for vacation next week.

Pelosi called Trump on Friday night, according to a person familiar with the situation and not authorized to discuss it publicly. The person spoke on condition of anonymity.

Pelosi responded to Trump’s announcement with her own tweet, saying: “Mr. President, delay is welcome. Time is needed for comprehensive immigration reform. Families belong together.”

Three administration officials told AP the operation had been delayed because of major concerns about officer safety after details of the sweep leaked to the media. The operation was expected to begin Sunday and would target people with final orders of removal, including families whose immigration cases had been fast-tracked by judges.

The cancellation was another signal of the administration’s difficulty managing the border crisis. The number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has risen dramatically under Trump, despite his tough rhetoric and hardline policies. Balancing a White House eager to push major operational changes with the reality on the ground is a constant challenge for the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump tweeted Saturday morning hinting the operation was still on, saying the immigrants “that Ice (sic) will apprehend have already been ordered to be deported,” he wrote. “This means that they have run from the law and run from the courts.”

Earlier this week, he tweeted that an operation was upcoming and said the agency would begin to remove “millions” of people that were here illegally. Later leaks in the media included sensitive law enforcement details, like the day it was to begin, Sunday, plus specific cities and other operational details.

Coordinated enforcement operations take months to plan. Surprise is also an important element. ICE officers don’t have a search warrant and are working from files with addresses and must go to people’s home and ask to be let inside. Immigrants are not required to open their doors, and increasingly they don’t. Officers generally capture about 30% to 40% of targets.

The planned operation was heavily criticized by Democratic lawmakers as cruel, and many local mayors said they would refuse to cooperate with ICE. Immigrant advocates stepped up know-your-rights campaigns.

Another complication is that ICE needs travel paperwork from a home country to deport someone, so immigrants often end up detained at least temporarily waiting for a flight. ICE was reserving hotel rooms in for families in the event the operation went off as planned Sunday.

The adult population of detainees was 53,141 as of June 8, though the agency is only budgeted for 45,000. There were 1,662 in family detention, also at capacity, and one of the family detention centers is currently housing single adults.

Activists Step Up Trainings in Wake of Deportation Threats

CHICAGO—Ceci Garcia believes that if her husband had a better understanding of his rights, he would have avoided deportation to Mexico after telling a suburban Chicago police officer during a 2012 traffic stop that he was living in the U.S. illegally.

“He failed to remain silent,” said the U.S. citizen mother of five. “He proceeded and told the truth.”

The Chicago woman now spends her time teaching others how to avoid her husband’s fate, part of a growing national effort since President Donald Trump took office that has taken on new urgency in recent days. As he kicked off his 2020 campaign, Trump had proclaimed that his administration would launch a new operation in the coming days to deport millions living in the country illegally. On Saturday, he tweeted that he had delayed the plan two weeks in hopes that Democrats and Republicans could work out solutions to “Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.”

From Los Angeles to Atlanta, advocates and attorneys have brought “know-your-rights” workshops to schools, churches, storefronts and consulates, tailoring their efforts on what to do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows up at home or on the road. They’ve role-played interactions, handed out pocket guides, provided hotlines, hosted webinars and offered scripts. The result, advocates argue, is more savvy immigrants who are increasingly refusing to open their doors or provide information, something they hope will blunt any impact of Trump’s latest operation.

Related Articles











ICE's Human Smuggling Operation Has a More Sinister Objective



by

“It’s more about making sure that people feel like they have some power over what is happening in their lives,” said Katarina Ramos, a National Immigrant Justice Center staff attorney. “And that they have some control over what is inherently a very scary situation.”

Whether it’s the American Civil Liberties Union or a neighborhood nonprofit, the trainings focus on the same ideas: the right to remain silent; refusing officers entry into a home; not signing anything without legal representation; and asking for paperwork from agents. They are rights attorneys say apply to everyone regardless of citizenship status.

Opening the door to an agent is an invitation that could lead to collateral arrests, so activists suggest talking through a door or a window, something the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles depicts in an animated know-your-rights video. A booklet by political organization Mijente advises immigrants not to carry identification with country of origin to avoid having evidence that could end up in immigration court. The Chicago-based Resurrection Project tells immigrants to film interactions. If the agent asks to drop the phone, activists tell trainees to comply but not turn off the recorder.

“We don’t want things to escalate,” said immigration organizer Laura Mendoza. “That’s why we constantly, constantly talk about know your rights.”

A glossy blue and white flyer script distributed by the group tells the person to ask for “a judicial warrant signed by a judge” to gain entry into the home and shows a picture of one next to an administrative warrant, which is signed only by ICE.

Even without many details released about Trump’s plan, advocates ratcheted up their actions.

The American Business Immigration Coalition hosted a Thursday webinar and told the businesses on the call — hotel managers, restaurateurs and dairy farmers — to not immediately turn over employment records in case of a raid. The head of the Immigrants’ Assistance Center in the Massachusetts fishing city of New Bedford said she would speak in the coming days about contingency plans for children’s care to church congregations and on local Spanish and Portuguese language TV and radio stations. Chicago activists vowed more public demonstrations.

Trump said on Twitter, “ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in.”

ICE’s new acting director Mark Morgan said the operation would be nationwide and continue for weeks and no one was exempt from deportations, including families. Morgan said there had been 2,000 letters sent to families telling them they had been ordered removed and he implored people to come in so they did not have to go out and find them.

That’s the scenario organizers are planning for, particularly challenging for families with mixed citizenship status.

National Immigrant Justice Center organizers suggested authorizing someone outside the family to pick up children from day care ahead of time and not only having an emergency contact, but memorizing the phone number in case a cellphone is confiscated. The Resurrection Project has walked families through asset protection, like how to manage a bank account if the head of household is detained.

While activists argue their efforts are successful, it’s difficult to gauge. Chicago advocates say their reach has been deep; A city legal fund established after Trump took office helped pay for more than 460 trainings from January 2017 until October 2018, involving approximately 40,000 people. The National Partnership for New Americans, with affiliated organizations in 31 states, boasts of 150 attorneys and legal staff nationally.

Advocates also point to anecdotal evidence.

In May, a New York activist used tactics he learned in training to keep immigration enforcement officers from taking two people with him into custody, something he filmed and posted online. Ceci Garcia said that a person she trained — who did not speak English — called and put her on speaker phone through a window when an ICE agent showed up and was deterred.

Julieta Bolivar, 50, wished she had the training when she was taken into ICE custody in 2002 during a traffic stop and signed papers agreeing to voluntary departure.

Orphaned as a young girl in Bolivia, she was brought to the U.S. by a godmother on a visitor visa and overstayed. She worked cash jobs to support her three American-born children. She eventually became a legal resident after making her case to a judge, but being arrested in front of her children still haunts her.

She uses her story while conducting trainings in Chicago for The Resurrection Project. Among her top lessons: Talk to children and make sure they know the plan.

“Don’t open the door,” she said. “And don’t let the kids open the door.”

___

Associated Press writer Andrea Smith in Atlanta, Philip Marcelo in Boston, and Colleen Long in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

White House Unveils Palestinian Economic Plan

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration on Saturday unveiled a $50 billion Palestinian investment and infrastructure proposal intended to be the economic engine to power its much-anticipated but still unreleased “deal of the century” Middle East peace plan.

The scheme, which calls for a mix of public and private financing and intends to create at least a million new jobs for Palestinians, was posted to the White House website ahead of a two-day conference in Bahrain that is being held amid heavy skepticism about its viability and outright opposition from the Palestinians.

The so-called “Peace to Prosperity” workshop on Tuesday and Wednesday will also take place amid heightened regional tensions over Iran that threaten to overshadow its goals.

Related Articles











What Palestinians Really Think of Jared Kushner's Plan



by

With no official participation from the two main protagonists, Israel and the Palestinians, and scant enthusiasm from others, continued uncertainty and strong doubts over the plan’s political vision and the distraction of potential U.S.-Iran conflict, expectations are decidedly low. President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner faces high hurdles in building support for the initiative.

The 10-year plan calls for projects worth $27.5 billion in the West Bank and Gaza, and $9.1 billion, $7.4 billion and $6.3 billion for Palestinians in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, respectively. Projects envisioned include those in the health care, education, power, water, high-tech, tourism, and agriculture sectors. It calls for the creation of a “master fund” to administer the finances and implementation of the projects that is says are akin to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II.

The plan foresees more than doubling the Palestinian gross domestic product, reducing the Palestinian poverty rate by 50 percent and cutting the sky-high Palestinian unemployment rate to nearly single digits, according to the documents, which do not specify exactly how the projects will be funded.

“Generations of Palestinians have lived under adversity and loss, but the next chapter can be defined by freedom and dignity,” the White House said, calling the plan “the most ambitious international effort for the Palestinian people to date.”

But an already tough sell that has vexed U.S. administrations for decades is made tougher not least because Trump and his aides have refused to endorse a two-state solution to the conflict that has long been seen as the only viable path to lasting peace. They have also suggested they are open to unilateral Israeli annexation of disputed territory. And, officials say there is no intention of discussing either issue or the most contentious parts of their proposal to end the long-running conflict.

Thus, the core political issues that are key to resolving the dispute, such as borders, the status of the holy city of Jerusalem, Israel’s security and the fate of Palestinian refugees, will not be raised. Such matters, U.S. officials have said, may have to wait until the fall, after Israeli elections, leaving numerous questions that potential investors almost certainly want answers to before making even tentative financial commitments.

Palestinian leaders, angered by what they and their supporters see as blatant U.S. bias toward Israel, want nothing to do with the workshop and will not participate. The Palestinians have called for mass demonstrations against the conference on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

“We reject this workshop,” said Nabil Abu Rdeneh, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ spokesman. “We will not agree to any meeting without a political horizon. Our cause is a political one and should be dealt with as such. It is a strategic mistake and the American administration is committing daily mistakes against the Palestinian people. Without Palestinian approval, there is no value to any meeting, and without a political horizon, no one will deal with any effort. This conference was born dead just like the deal of the century.”

In Gaza, the rival Hamas militant group has also condemned the conference. “In one voice, we say no to the Manama workshop and the deal of the century,” Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said. He appealed to Bahrain’s king to “take a brave, strong, authentic Arab decision not to host this workshop” and called on Arab countries to cancel their planned participation.

Complicating the Bahrain meeting is the fact that it coincides with a pledging conference in New York for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, a 70-year-old institution that the Trump administration has defunded and wants to eliminate entirely. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, already provides health, education and other services to millions of Palestinians.

Its supporters suspect the administration purposely scheduled the Bahrain conference to conflict with its event, noting that Kushner’s peace plan partner Jason Greenblatt has publicly called for UNRWA’s dissolution. Greenblatt argued last month that the agency perpetuates Palestinian victimhood, abets anti-Israel sentiment and is an inefficient drain on funds that could be better directed.

Regardless of American intent, the dueling meetings are likely to leave donors, particularly European nations, in an awkward position: torn between supporting an established international organization or a mystery concept being put together by a U.S. administration that has in two years reversed a half-century of American Middle East policy.

Since Trump took office, he has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv, downgraded the consulate devoted to Palestinian issues, shut down the Palestinian office in Washington and slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to the West Bank and Gaza.

Such steps have made Kushner’s prospects for success in Bahrain even slimmer, according to experts.

“This is trying to dangle some benefits to the Palestinians to accept terms they already rejected,” said Shibley Telhami, a Mideast scholar and the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland. “A lure to get the Palestinians to accept the unacceptable is not going to work. It’s impossible.”

Militia Threat Shuts Down Oregon Statehouse

SALEM, Ore.—The president of the Oregon Senate ordered the state Capitol to close on Saturday due to a “possible militia threat” from right-wing protesters as a walkout by Republican lawmakers over landmark climate change legislation dragged on.

Republican state senators fled the Legislature — and some, the state — earlier this week to deny the majority Democrats enough votes to take up the climate bill, which would dramatically reduce fossil fuel emissions by 2050. It would be the second program of its kind in the nation after California if passed.

Gov. Kate Brown then dispatched the state police to round up the rogue lawmakers, but none appeared in the Capitol on Friday and the stalemate seemed destined to enter its third day with a week left in the legislative session.

Right-wing groups posted their support for the GOP lawmakers Friday on social media — in one instance offering to provide escorts to them should the state police come for them.

Related Articles











Thom Hartmann: This is How Republics Die



by

A group of local Republicans were set to protest inside the Capitol on Saturday when lawmakers were present, and anti-government groups threatened to join prompting the statehouse shutdown.

One of the groups, the Oregon Three Percenters, joined an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Dozens of people occupied the remote Oregon refuge for more than a month to protest federal control of Western lands. The standoff began to unravel when authorities fatally shot the group’s spokesman and arrested key leaders as they headed to a community meeting.

“The Oregon State Police has recommended that the Capitol be closed tomorrow due to a possible militia threat,” Carol Currie, spokeswoman for Senate President Peter Courtney, said in an e-mail to the AP late Friday.

The governor’s office also confirmed the threats.

Oregon State Police, in a statement, said it has been “monitoring information throughout the day that indicates the safety of legislators, staff and citizen visitors could be compromised if certain threatened behaviors were realized.”

Also late Friday, Courtney and House Speaker Tina Kotek, both Democrats, condemned comments made by Sen. Brian Boquist, a Republican from Dallas, Oregon, that urged the state police to “send bachelors and come heavily armed” when they come to bring him back to the Capitol.

“His comments have created fear among employees in our workplace,” the leaders said in a joint statement. “We will always defend free speech and welcome frank policy discussions, but threats like these are unacceptable.”

Boquist has not responded to multiple requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Senate Republicans did not respond to queries about the statehouse closure.

Democrats have an 18 to 12 majority in the chamber, but they need 20 members present for a quorum. One GOP senator recently died and has not yet been replaced.

Under the proposed cap-and-trade bill, Oregon would put an overall limit on greenhouse gas emissions and auction off pollution “allowances” for each ton of carbon industries plan to emit. The legislation would lower that cap over time to encourage businesses to move away from fossil fuels: The state would reduce emissions to 45% below 1990 levels by 2035 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

Those opposed to the cap-and-trade plan say it would exacerbate a growing divide between the liberal, urban parts of the state and the rural areas. The plan would increase the cost of fuel, damaging small business, truckers and the logging industry, they say.

Democrats say the measure is an efficient way to lower emissions while investing in low-income and rural communities’ ability to adapt to climate change. It has the support of environmental groups, farmworkers and some trade unions.

California has had for a decade an economy-wide cap and trade policy like the one Oregon is considering. Nine northeastern states have more limited cap-and-trade programs that target only the power sector.

GOP Lawmakers Try to Squelch Voter Initiatives in 16 States

LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Arkansas voters have been active in recent years, passing ballot initiatives that legalized medical marijuana, raised the minimum wage and expanded casino gambling.

That hasn’t gone over well with Republicans.

Arkansas’ GOP-dominated Legislature has taken steps this year that will make it harder to put such proposals before voters, and they are not the only ones.

Florida, North Dakota, South Dakota and Utah also have enacted restrictions on the public’s ability to place initiatives on the ballot. In Michigan, the state’s top election official is being sued over Republican-enacted requirements that make it harder to qualify proposals for the ballot.

Related Articles











Data Suppression Is the GOP’s Latest Anti-Voter Tactic for the Midterms



by

In all, lawmakers in 16 states introduced more than 120 bills this year that would weaken the initiative process, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. The moves worry advocates who say they undermine the idea of direct democracy and could effectively shut down the initiative process in some states.

“This is a way to make sure that there is absolutely no way that anyone can do something that (Republican lawmakers) don’t already approve,” said Florida state Sen. Oscar Braynon, a Democrat who opposed state restrictions recently signed into law.

In Arkansas, the changes came after voters legalized medical marijuana in 2016 and last year approved raising the state’s minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2021.

The state’s governor signed into law legislation overhauling the way measures are approved for the ballot so that a proposed initiative and the signatures collected in favor of it are reviewed at the same time. The change, critics say, would mean groups could waste time and money circulating petitions only to find out afterward that there was a problem with the wording that would disqualify it from the ballot.

Arkansas lawmakers also placed on next year’s ballot a measure that, if approved by voters, would impose additional restrictions. Those would include tripling the number of counties where initiative sponsors must collect a minimum number of signatures and eliminating a 30-day period groups have to gather additional signatures if they initially fall short. The lawmakers’ ballot measure also would move up by several months the deadline for submitting petitions.

“Everything they have done has … the ultimate goal to eliminate the petitioning process so that the people have no voice, and it is outrageous,” said Melissa Fults, executive director of the Drug Policy Education Group, who plans to try and get a recreational marijuana proposal on next year’s ballot.

The success of the medical marijuana initiative was celebrated by Arkansas residents such as Joanie Hopson, who was one of the first in line when retailers started selling marijuana last month. The 36-year-old said she suffers from a host of ailments, including muscle spasms, seizures and a connective tissue disorder, and cried when she was finally able to buy cannabis legally to ease her pain.

“We were really on the verge of moving out of the state because I need my medicine,” said Hopson, who lives in the community of East End, a short drive south of Little Rock.

Lawmakers pushing the restrictions said they are trying to rein in an initiative process that has been an easy target for out-of-state groups. Previous initiatives included unsuccessful attempts by pro-casino groups to give certain companies a gambling monopoly in the state.

Republican state Sen. Mat Pitsch, who co-sponsored the changes in Arkansas, said the state’s constitution has been changed 20 times over the past seven elections — a number that also includes measures lawmakers themselves put before voters.

“When you change your constitution three times every other year, that’s more like legislating than having a constitution,” said Pitsch, who noted the proposal on next year’s ballot also would raise the threshold for lawmakers to send measures to voters.

A similar argument was used in Florida when the governor this month signed wide-ranging legislation that erects a number of hurdles to those trying to get initiatives before votes.

The new Florida laws require paid petition gatherers to register with the secretary of state, prohibit payments based on the number of signatures collected and levy fines if petitions aren’t turned in within 30 days. The petitions also must include the name and permanent address of the signature-gatherer.

Gov. Ron DeSantis defended the bill, saying it’s aimed at protecting the Florida Constitution from outsiders. The governor said he wants to take more steps to revise the process of changing the constitution.

“This is not supposed to be driven by out-of-state special interests; it’s supposed to be driven by Floridians, but that’s really not what’s happened,” DeSantis said. “If people really feel the need to do it, then you band together, you do your organizations, you do it. Right now, you just have one guy write a check and you pay these people per signature. It creates a lot of bad incentives.”

Florida voters have approved a number of petition-driven amendments that Republicans don’t like, including limits on class sizes, preschool education for all, medical marijuana legalization and, last fall, restoring voting rights for felons who have completed their sentences. In the works are petition drives for 2020 seeking to ban assault rifles and raise the minimum wage.

In Utah, where voters last year approved medical marijuana, Medicaid expansion and redistricting proposals, the state’s Republican governor signed legislation delaying the implementation of successful initiatives to give lawmakers a chance to change them.

Rep. Brad Daw, the bill’s Republican sponsor, said the change allows lawmakers to keep state agencies running smoothly by revising portions of voter-approved laws that conflict with other rules before they go into effect.

“The fact is, the Legislature can make changes one way or another,” he said.

But critics say they worry the changes will leave voters feeling powerless.

“When you pass a ballot measure, you want to see something change,” said Yoram Bauman with Clean the Darn Air, which is pushing to get on the 2020 ballot with a proposed a carbon tax to curb pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. “If you have to wait an extra year to see something change, that’s frustrating, especially when you feel like during that extra time the Legislature can come in and monkey with it.”

Not all changes are winning favor in Republican states. Idaho Gov. Brad Little vetoed proposals that would have made it tougher to qualify a measure for the ballot, saying he didn’t believe the restrictions would stand up in court. The legislation was seen primarily as a reaction by the Republican-dominated Legislature to last year’s voter approval of Medicaid expansion.

“We argued that for a change to constitutional rights of this magnitude, the correct process is to take that to the voters as a constitutional amendment,” said Rebecca Schroeder, executive director of Reclaim Idaho, the group behind the Medicaid expansion initiative.

In Arkansas, the fight over initiative restrictions may not be over, with groups opposing them preparing a lawsuit. David Couch, the attorney who sponsored the minimum wage and medical marijuana initiatives, also sees another path to fighting back — placing an initiative on next year’s ballot that competes with the one pushed by the Legislature.

___

Associated Press Writers Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Florida, Keith Ridler in Boise, Idaho, and Lindsay Whitehurst in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.

Key Witness in Navy SEAL Case Stuns Court by Taking Blame

SAN DIEGO — When prosecutors called a special forces medic to testify, they expected him to bolster their case against a decorated Navy SEAL accused of stabbing an Islamic State fighter in his care.

Corey Scott delivered in part, saying Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher unexpectedly plunged a knife into the adolescent detainee in 2017 after treating his wounds in Iraq.

But the government was floored by what came next: Scott took the blame for the killing, saying he suffocated the boy in an act of mercy shortly after Gallagher stabbed him.

It was a stunning twist in an already tumultuous case — illustrating the challenges of prosecuting war crimes cases, especially those involving members of the secretive special forces.

Related Articles











Liberals' Dangerous Love Affair With the U.S. Military



by Maj. Danny Sjursen

The turn of events also exposed the risk that prosecutors take when immunity is granted to witnesses.

“You’re assuming a certain amount of risk that you know what they’re going to say and that what they’re going to say is truthful,” said Retired Army Maj. Gen. John Altenburg Jr., who has handled or oversaw about 1,000 military trials. “If you get surprised, you get surprised. That’s what can happen when you have cases like this.”

Scott wanted to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and not answer questions when he was called by the prosecution. But he was granted immunity and ordered to testify.

After Scott made the declaration, a visibly angry prosecutor accused him of lying, saying Scott had told investigators a different story several times and changed it only after he was granted immunity, which prevents him from being charged in the killing.

“So you can stand up there and you can lie about how you killed the ISIS prisoner so Chief Gallagher does not have to go to jail,” John said. “You don’t want Chief Gallagher to go to jail, do you?”

“He’s got a wife and family,” Scott said. “I don’t think he should be spending his life in prison.” The testimony was the latest setback for prosecutors and a big boost for Gallagher, who is fighting charges of premeditated murder in the boy’s death and attempted murder in the shooting of civilians.

The defense has said Gallagher only treated the prisoner for a collapsed lung and that disgruntled sailors fabricated the murder accusations because he was a demanding leader and they did not want him promoted.

When asked if Scott’s testimony, which did not dispute that Gallagher stabbed the militant in his care, would mean a lesser charge of premeditated attempted murder for the special operator, defense attorney Tim Parlatore said it only proved one thing: “It means he’s not guilty,” he said.

Gallagher’s wife said she was relieved that the truth was finally emerging.

“To hear today that someone’s finally had the bravery to stand up for the truth was refreshing after all these years,” Andrea Gallagher said as she stood with her husband and their two children outside of court.

The Navy in a statement said it will not drop the premeditated murder charge and that it’s up to jurors to decide the credibility of witnesses.

Before the stabbing, Scott said that he and Gallagher had stabilized the sedated prisoner who had been wounded in an airstrike and that he was breathing normally through a tube inserted to clear his airway.

Scott said he was shocked when Gallagher, the platoon’s leader, stabbed the boy at least once below the collarbone. He said there was no medical reason for it. Gallagher then grabbed his medical bag and walked away.

“I was startled and froze up for a little bit,” Scott said.

Scott said the patient would have survived the stabbing, but he plugged the youth’s breathing tube with his thumb because he believed the prisoner would eventually be tortured by the Iraqi forces who had captured him and delivered him to the SEAL compound for medical treatment.

“I knew he was going to die anyway, and I wanted to save him from waking up to whatever would happen to him,” Scott said.

Scott said no one asked him how the patient died.

Four SEALs and one former SEAL have taken the stand. Several have described instances when they said Gallagher fired at civilians, once shooting an old man.

Gallagher’s case has drawn the attention of President Donald Trump, who is reportedly considering a pardon.

The trial came after a judge’s removed the lead prosecutor over a bungled effort to track emails sent to defense lawyers in order to find the source of leaks to the media.

The judge determined that the effort violated Gallagher’s constitutional rights and reduced the maximum possible punishment from life in prison without parole to the possibility of parole.

The seven-man jury is made up of five Marines and two sailors — all war zone veterans. A two-thirds majority — at least five — is needed to convict. Anything less ends in acquittal.

The Navy has said the jury can convict Gallagher of a lesser charge, such as premeditated attempted murder, which carries a maximum penalty of life with the possibility of parole. There is no minimum sentence.

___

Melley reported from Los Angeles.

The Danger of Poeticizing Horror While Bearing Witness

[image error]

[image error] “What You Have Heard Is True”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

Poet Carolyn Forché first visited El Salvador in 1978 when, in the words of her self-ascribed mentor Leonel Gómez Vides, its peace was “the silence of misery endured.” The country was on the precipice of a deadly civil war during which more than 65,000 people were killed or “disappeared” by a regime supported by the United States. Forché opens her recent memoir, “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance,” which reflects on those visits (she traveled there repeatedly between 1978 and 1980), with a description of finding the dismembered body of a man: “The parts are not quite touching, there is soil between them, especially the head and the rest. […] Why doesn’t anyone do something? I think I asked.”

Forché was in El Salvador on a Guggenheim fellowship to work with Amnesty International. The resulting eight poems, published in the collection “The Country Between Us” (1981), are brutal in their stark depictions of rape, mutilation, torture, and horror.

“Go try on / Americans your long, dull story / of corruption, but better to give / them what they want: Lil Milagro Ramirez […] who fucked her, how many times and when,” she writes in “Return,” in which she tries to explain to her friend Josephine something of what she learned in El Salvador. In “The Colonel,” a colonel empties a bag of human ears “like dried peach halves” onto the dinner table, then ironically tells her, “Something for your poetry, no?”

The colonel’s derision of both the work of human rights and the idea of making art out of it is a subject that Forché takes up herself: “It would be good if you could wind up / in prison and so write your prison poems,” she writes, sarcastically, in the poem “Expatriate,” directed at a young American man who seeks violence in Turkey in order to play out his own naïve fantasy of politics. The poem is also, seemingly, a self-warning not to try and make a “muse” of conflict. In 1981, she wrote an essay published in Granta called “El Salvador: An Aide-Mémoire,” in which she elucidated the problem of being a “poet of witness,” the dangers of reduction and oversimplification, of poeticizing horror, of starkly dividing the world into black and white, of speaking for others, before nevertheless concluding: “It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human condition demands a poetry of witness.”

Related Articles











'Civilizing' Perpetual Foreigners



by Elaine Margolin

Click here to read long excerpts from “What You Have Heard Is True” at Google Books.

Her memoir, written over 15 years, is the story of how she came to this position, what happened during her journey in El Salvador, which “bequeathed an education on how to see the world.”

Starting from the myopic gaze of her 27-year-old self to the sights and encounters that she (and the reader) doesn’t fully understand in El Salvador, she narrates a shift in her act of engagement:

I would pay attention, and try to see as much as I could, not the world as imagined in my continuous waking dream, but as it was, not only the obvious but the hidden, not only the water cántaros but their weight, not only their weight but why it was necessary to carry water such distances.

She is guided in this journey by Leonel Gómez Vides, a man whom she later described as “seeming like he was playing twelve-dimensional chess against the world, against evil.” He invites her to learn about his country after arriving unannounced at her doorstep in California and proceeds to arrange a kaleidoscopic series of meetings with corrupt high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and persecuted clergy. Each encounter is seemingly “a puzzle piece to be locked into place so as to reveal a picture he imagined he was showing me.”

Gómez Vides is himself trying to piece together the rhythms of change and to detach the distorted illusions from the reality of what’s happening in his country—the new human rights policies of the new United States administration, the position of the guerrillas, the internal games of individuals within the military. He understands the importance of gathering information without necessarily trusting it. Their relationship is complicated. Both need the other in different ways, and he endangers her life on several occasions. But underlying it is the unquestioning trust that he places in her and in her work.

“You have to be able to see the world as it is, to see how it is put together, and you have to be able to say what you see. And get angry.”

After she fails to provide an exact description of a suspicious man at a mass performed by Archbishop Óscar Romero, he tells her: “[G]uard your credibility. This is something that cannot be recovered once lost.”

Her encounters with women taking independent paths—a doctor treating the poor, a woman who entertains assassins in order to gather information, an endangered nun—and the relationships they form show both clinical and tender dimensions of female solidarity. It is with them that she narrowly escapes death squads on two separate occasions.

¤

In her introduction to “Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness” (1993), Forché situates “poetry of witness” in a social space, “the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice.” That anthology included 145 works by Latin Americans, Russians, Eastern Europeans, and Arabs, as well as those writing about the Holocaust—poets who had “endured conditions of historical and social extremity during the twentieth century.”

Poetry of witness is not political, she says, because it is not partisan, it does not celebrate solidarity in the name of a class or a common enemy. It is not intended to be polemical; it is a testimony, a solemn attestation to the truth. She draws upon the work of philosophers Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno who argued, she says, that oblivion, a mark of modernity, “is willful and isolating: it drives wedges between the individual and the collective fate to which he or she is forced to submit.” To be a poet of witness is therefore to be in solidarity with “the party of humanity.” By combining the personal with the systemic, it serves to create a space for sharing.

In Forché’s own poems, the clinical precision of the language of witness derives its power from its photographic quality. It has similar shock tactics to the works described by Susan Sontag in “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003), such as the “Krieg dem Kriege! Guerre à la Guerre! War against War! Oorlog aan den Oorlog!” photography book, published in 1924 by German conscientious objector Ernst Friedrich, whose images were so graphic they were deemed unpublishable. That publication was based on the belief, unfortunately inaccurate, that if people could only see the true insanity of war they would not let it happen again.

But the job of poetry is to disrupt the rhythms and logic upon which we normally depend. In Forché’s “The Memory of Elena,” she transforms the meal of paella into “shells, / the lips of those whose lips / have been removed, mussels / the soft blue of a leg socket.” Part of the horror of these lines comes in visualizing the permutations of trauma, how it seeps uncontrollably into the everyday, how it contorts and warps. The shock is not in the immediacy, but in the lingering invasion of the senses which follows, and the intimate entrance we are granted to the workings of Forché’s own mind. It is a multilayered engagement, with both herself, the witness, and the victims.

If part of the power of “poetry of witness” is the personability of the witness, it raises the necessary questions of who is doing the witnessing and what they are choosing to witness. Witnessing, in itself, is not necessarily a “progressive” act. Bearing witness to human rights atrocities, of which there are no shortages, animates many humanitarian endeavors today. How we create testimonies, how we remember, what we do with what we have witnessed, before what court of law, are all ongoing questions, each with their own dilemmas.

When bearing witness is communicated through language, the specific language used differs depending on the witness and their motivations (known or unknown). A humanitarian may portray a traumatized victim, while the media may present an aggressor/aggressed binary. The agenda of the witness and the language they use to frame or fulfill that agenda, in turn complicates how we witness.

“‘I am writing these words from a prison cell’ […] is a dangerous sentence that can be used to exploit people’s feelings,” jailed Turkish author Ahmet Altan wrote in 2017 before being tried and sentenced to life in prison for allegedly having ties to the outlawed Gülen movement. He is one of a number of imprisoned Turkish writers publishing work from behind bars, building on a rich tradition of Turkish and Kurdish prison literature. Their voices remind us not only of this ongoing injustice but connect us without pity to their humanity, in the equalizing space of the imagination and resistance.

His attempt not to “exploit” readers through sentimentality indicates that, as much as there are ways of seeing and ways of telling, there are also ways of receiving and remembering. Like the Miklós Radnóti poems which Forché also references in “Against Forgetting,” this is “not a cry for sympathy but a call for strength.” It is an attempt to move from the purely personal into the social space, in which Forché had suggested that claims could be made not along emotional lines, but in the name of justice.

¤

“[T]he protest against violence will not be forgotten,” Carolyn Forché writes in her introduction to “Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness,” “and this insistent memory renders life possible in communal situations.” “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance” documents how we see and engage with the world through one woman’s consciousness. Her experiences led her to the conclusion that only by bearing witness and remembering can we be fully participatory citizens. “There is a cyclone fence between / ourselves and the slaughter and behind it / we hover in a calm protected world like / netted fish […] It is either the beginning or the end / of the world, and the choice is ourselves / or nothing.”

“[W]hat good is the memory archive?” the academic Andreas Huyssen asks. “How can it deliver what history alone no longer seems to be able to offer?” The act of bearing witness alone is not enough, but tracing Forché’s journey in El Salvador allows us to reexamine how we interpret, process, and remember. She opens the book with a quote from Salvadoran writer Manlio Argueta: “Hope also nourishes us. Not the hope of fools. The other kind. Hope, when everything is clear. Awareness.” We still face questions of how this witnessing, and memory created through witness, can be channeled in a collective way, not only to denounce, account for, and resist, but also to reimagine something better.

This review originally appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books .

 

Donald Trump Accused of Sexual Assault by 24th Woman

Advice columnist and journalist E. Jean Carroll publicly accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault on Friday.

Carroll is the 24th woman to accuse the president of assault, harassment, or molestation.

In an excerpt from her upcoming book, “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal,” published on New York magazine’s website, Carroll described Trump pushing her into a dressing room at the department store Bergdorf Goodman 25 years ago, hitting her head against a wall, holding her against the wall, and forcibly penetrating her:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway—or completely, I’m not certain—inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand—for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other—and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

Related Articles











Trump's Crusade Against Women Goes Global



by

The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door—I don’t recall which door—and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue.

The story will appear in the magazine’s print edition next week, with Carroll on the cover wearing the dress she was wearing when Trump allegedly assaulted her.

In next week’s cover story, E. Jean Carroll shares for the first time her violent encounter with Donald Trump. The coatdress she was wearing that day has hung in her closet ever since; she wore it again for the first time for her portrait with New York https://t.co/yPaLsRoVcH pic.twitter.com/Tx2HAzt1mi

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) June 21, 2019

The excerpt published in New York details numerous encounters Carroll had with “hideous men” during her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—including one with former CBS executive Les Moonves—as she embarked on a career as a journalist and the author of the “Ask E. Jean” column at Elle.

Carroll also describes the questions she believes she may be asked as the public learns about the alleged assault:

Did I tell anyone about it?

Yes. I told two close friends. The first, a journalist, magazine writer, correspondent on the TV morning shows, author of many books, etc., begged me to go to the police.

“He raped you,” she kept repeating when I called her. “He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.”

My second friend is also a journalist, a New York anchorwoman. She grew very quiet when I told her, then she grasped both my hands in her own and said, “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.” (Two decades later, both still remember the incident clearly and confirmed their accounts to New York.)

[…]

Why haven’t I “come forward” before now?

Receiving death threats, being driven from my home, being dismissed, being dragged through the mud, and joining the 15 women who’ve come forward with credible stories about how the man grabbed, badgered, belittled, mauled, molested, and assaulted them, only to see the man turn it around, deny, threaten, and attack them, never sounded like much fun.

As with the other women who have publicly accused Trump of assaulting them, and with the audio tape of the president himself bragging about committing sexual assault, the White House promptly dismissed Carroll’s account.

On social media, others wrote unequivocally that Carroll had shared a compelling account of having been raped by the president, and condemned the Republican Party for continuing to support Trump despite numerous similar accusations which have been public for years.

This is a compelling account of the president of the United States violently raping someone. https://t.co/jyaezNZNnJ

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) June 21, 2019

Venerated advice columnist @ejeancarroll has written about Donald Trump sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room. It is completely horrific https://t.co/jFSM0hjyCs pic.twitter.com/bheWROvtR6

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) June 21, 2019

So I guess I’m wondering, how many women have to accuse Trump of rape and sexual assault before Republicans give a shit?

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) June 21, 2019

Donald Trump is a sexual predator who has sexually harassed or assaulted at least 20 women. It’s past time for us to listen to survivors and hold Trump accountable.

E. Jean Carroll: We are listening and we believe you. https://t.co/bIhrmQeVxg

— UltraViolet (@UltraViolet) June 21, 2019

The headline says ‘attacked’ but the words clearly describe rape.https://t.co/X0eVZ7Xnp9

— Greg Hogben (@MyDaughtersArmy) June 21, 2019

E. Jean Carroll and her harrowing account and allegation of Trump violently assaulting her in the 80’s should be a major story, not just for today, but for weeks to come. I fear she, like so many other women, will be forgotten and brushed aside.

— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) June 21, 2019

This is who the people who used to lecture about family values have lined up behind. https://t.co/KuttQhWMjR

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 21, 2019

Facebook’s Authoritarian Money Grab

“Don’t be surprised,” said Terence Ray, one of the hosts of the Whitesburg, Ky.-based podcast “The Trillbillies,” “if Mark Zuckerberg starts trying to pay his employees in ‘Facebook Bucks.’ ” Ray made that comment in late May during a Means TV segment on the history of company money, or scrip, which was used throughout the 19th and 20th centuries by mining and logging companies in the United States. In some cases, scrip was still changing hands decades after it was made officially illegal by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Lo and behold, not one week later, the business press began reporting that Facebook would, within the month, announce its own new proprietary cryptocurrency. What’s more, the tech giant would perhaps even “allow employees working on the project to take their salary in the form of the new currency,” a proposal of, at very least, dubious legality in the United States.

The actual announcement came this week—and it was more banal, stupid and terrifying than I had imagined.

This new currency, dubbed “Libra,” is, in the first place, not a currency. A consortium of investors—banks, credit card companies, venture capitalists, etc.—will pool millions or billions of dollars in order to purchase a “reserve” composed of “low-volatility assets, such as bank deposits and short-term government securities in currencies from stable and reputable central banks.” While the Libra will not be “pegged” to any particular currency—set, for example, to a fixed rate against the dollar—this reserve will be structured to “minimize volatility, so holders of Libra can trust the currency’s ability to preserve value over time.” This scheme stands in sharp contrast to something like bitcoin, whose wildly fluctuating values are purely speculative and whose only supposedly intrinsic value is an enforced scarcity: There can never be more than 21 million of its units.

Related Articles











Facebook Is No Friend to Democracy



by

The Libra is therefore not really a currency, but something occupying the interstitial space between a gift card, a share in a mutual fund, a negotiable instrument and an IOU.

And here we enter the territory laid out by the writer Max Read in a smartly speculative article for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: Facebook is less interested in either the crypto or the currency, per se, than it is in becoming the dominant platform for payment, emulating the already existing and ubiquitous Chinese social-cum-payment network WeChat. “If you think Facebook is powerful now, just wait until it’s, essentially, the global federal reserve, overseeing a global currency over which it has not just monetary control but a visible, minable record of every transaction made,” he writes.

I think the likelihood of Facebook becoming such a “global federal reserve” is quite small. The Libra white paper put out by the Libra Association, a “not-for-profit membership organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland,” evinces giddy optimism and the giddier absence of details of any pitch-meeting slide deck. There are no particular mechanisms for how individual units will be valued against either the so-called reserve or against any particular national currency. They’re not pegged to the dollar or euro, but they also can’t be treated as some kind of common share of overall value of the reserve, which would subject the Libra to weird fluctuations each time there was a new influx of capital into the reserve from some new institutional partner. (In a telling line, the white paper compares the reserve to the gold standard, a notorious bugbear of libertarian cranks.)

On the other hand, Read’s warning about “a visible, minable record of every transaction made” is precisely the sort of panoptical scheme that Zuckerberg’s Facebook is infamous for. As the CEO notoriously IM’d a friend in the early days of his company, “they ‘trust me,’ dumb fucks.” Facebook’s value proposition as a publicly traded corporation is precisely that it knows what its users do and like; therefore it’s the world’s most valuable space for targeted advertisement. To know about individuals’ actual finances—what they purchase; how much they send home to mom; what they withdraw from the ATM—is a step beyond, into a realm of omnipresent surveillance that no authoritarian regime dared dream of. That is, at least not before the modern People’s Republic of China, which, notably, Facebook is here self-consciously emulating.

Facebook is also not known for its diligence regarding user data privacy.

On a purely operational level, I am cautiously unconcerned about this latest move. Despite its seemingly indelible presence in public life, it increasingly feels as if Facebook is on the wane, buffeted by European investigators and increasingly bipartisan anger in the United States. Its legacy website and app are a disaster: terribly designed, cluttered and unbearably old, although it has retained its hold on younger consumers through its strategic acquisitions of messaging apps and Instagram. Nevertheless, if quitting Facebook is not yet a mass movement, then it has a social and cultural ease that it didn’t even a few years ago. If you gave a person today a binary choice between Facebook and, say, Amazon, I feel certain a vast majority would choose the latter, which may be no less evil, pernicious or ubiquitous, but which is at very least a practical necessity.

But this is a moment for caution, because if we interpret Facebook’s latest move as a hedge against the irrelevance and abandonment that ultimately plagued predecessor social networks (and contemporaneous competitors—I’m lookin’ at you, Ello and Google+), then we should be deeply concerned about its potential for flailing, destructive hostility. Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are confirmed bad actors, and while all corporations are by their nature amoral, Facebook has historically demonstrated a deliberate and almost personal immorality, a callous disregard for its users and partners that seems baked right into its corporate culture. I fully expect it will engage in every possible scheme—legal and otherwise—to convince and outright trick its user base, especially the aging, more affluent users of Facebook’s home app and website, into buying its pseudocurrency and using its payment apps.

At least until we have Fully Automated Gay Luxury Space Communism, money itself is, in a sense, a public good. Though it has been hoarded and corrupted by financial institutions and the billionaire class, misappropriated for wars and stolen from pensions, and though the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank exist at a distance from direct electoral control, national currencies are still subjects of and subordinate to politics; they are at least theoretically susceptible to popular control.

Well, we have already let public forums be privatized by the Facebooks of the world, town squares turned into walled gardens. We might try to keep at least a few of our dollars out of the hands of a handful of weirdos with websites.

Hong Kong Protests Flare Again Over Extradition Laws

HONG KONG—More than 1,000 protesters blocked Hong Kong police headquarters into the night Friday, while others took over major streets as the tumult over the city’s future showed no signs of abating.

The latest protest came after a deadline passed the previous day for the government to meet demands over highly unpopular extradition bills that many see as eroding the territory’s judicial independence.

Police called for the demonstrators to disperse but did not immediately take firm action to remove them.

Related Articles





72 Sent to Hospitals in Hong Kong Protests



by

While the protest began peacefully, the presence again of demonstrators on busy Harcourt Road and in the lobby of the Revenue Tower raised the possibility of violent confrontations.

“I now appeal to the members of the public to leave as soon as possible,” police spokeswoman Yolanda Yu said at a news conference.

Outside, activist Joshua Wong called on police to answer demands over heavy-handed tactics used during a mass protest on June 12, including the firing of 150 rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets and beanbag rounds, and the beating of unarmed protesters by police with truncheons.

“We … urge police to apologize to the people” over the use of such tactics and their labeling of the gathering as a riot, Wong said.

Police seemed reluctant to use force Friday even as the protesters shut down roads in the center of Hong Kong.

While anger seemed to be turning away from civil authorities and toward the police, the mostly black-clad protesters continued to try to shut down the entire government complex, as they have tried off-and-on for the past two weeks.

During the afternoon, some sought to build barriers on Connaught Road, the main thoroughfare in the area known as Admiralty, building barriers of stones, pylons and other materials at hand, at one time temporarily blocking in a police van.

Around the police headquarters, masked and helmeted protesters covered surveillance cameras with masking tape and lashed barriers together with nylon cable ties.

The auxiliary bishop of Hong Kong’s Catholic diocese, the Rev. Joseph Ha, appealed to the protesters to avoid violence. He warned that public opinion could turn against them.

“You have already been on the roads for a long time,” he said on Cable TV Hong Kong. “You’ve already done a lot. You have already expressed very clearly your hopes and wishes. But I am really worried about your personal safety. … Please, absolutely, do not use violence.”

Protest leaders have said they are determined to keep up the pressure on Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam, who has shelved but not abandoned the extradition legislation. She has insisted the bills are needed to uphold justice, but critics see them as part of a campaign by Beijing to diminish Hong Kong’s democratic institutions.

“I myself am not the type to get involved in violence,” student protester Brian Chow said. “I’ll just carry on sitting here, sing some Christian hymns, show our resistance, and keep the government paralyzed until it responds to us.”

Another student, who would only give her first name, Yvonne, said she was determined to maintain the movement’s momentum.

“I’m going to carry on coming out, and carry on protesting,” she said.

Many protesters have been wary of giving their full names and some have obscured their features with face masks to guard their identities against potential retribution from government or school authorities.

Government offices were ordered closed Friday “due to security considerations,” and hearings at the Legislative Council were suspended.

Since the confrontations June 12, police have eased their approach, hoping to avoid a replay of 2014 protests, when officers unleashed 87 rounds of tear gas at protesters in the same location as the current protests. When the smoke from that response cleared, bigger crowds returned, angrier than before, and didn’t leave for nearly three months.

The bills would expand the scope of criminal suspect transfers to include mainland China, Taiwan and Macau. Legal and business groups in Hong Kong oppose the legislation, saying critics of China’s ruling Communist Party would be at risk of torture and unfair trials on the mainland and that it further chips away at the “one country, two systems” framework under which Hong Kong has been governed since 1997.

That framework guaranteed the territory the right to retain its own legal, economic and political system for 50 years, but the Communist Party under Chinese President Xi Jinping has been pushing ever more aggressively to quiet independent voices in Hong Kong. Beijing has squelched all reporting on the protests in mainland media and accused foreign forces of stirring up disturbances in Hong Kong.

Opposition to the legislation has come from a broad range of civic, human rights, legal profession and commercial organizations.

On Friday, the Hong Kong Bar Association reiterated is criticisms, saying Lam’s decision to suspend but not withdraw the bill was “wholly unsatisfactory” because it could still dictate the parameters of future consultation on the issues of surrender of fugitives and cross-border legal assistance.

The association also called for the setting up of an independent commission to investigate the June 12 violence, including whatever guidelines existed on the use of force by police against demonstrators.

Amnesty International went a step further, saying police must “end the unlawful use of force against peaceful protesters,” and issuing a report documenting 14 incidents of apparent police violence on June 12.

Officers appeared “out of control, placing peaceful protesters who posed no threat in danger of serious injury,” Man-kei Tam, the group’s Hong Kong director, said in a statement.

“The Hong Kong authorities should send a clear message that these failures in policing will not be tolerated. A thorough, independent and effective investigation needs to take place and any officers found responsible must face justice, at any level of the chain of command,” Tam said.