Chris Hedges's Blog, page 309

Has the U.S. Alliance With Israel Finally Run Its Course?

This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com. 

Blindly backing Israel has become an article of faith, a civic religion even, for mainstream American politicians. Rarely do any dare publicly question the costs and benefits of this decades-old relationship. Such hesitancy is understandable. After all, to criticize Israeli policy, however mildly, is to risk near certain rebuke and reflexive charges of anti-semitism. Denouncing Israel’s current right-wing government or its ongoing, half-century-long occupation of Palestinian Territories is all risk and no reward – it’s a potential career-ender or, at least, a ticket to the margins of polite political discourse. Israel/Palestine is, as I’ve long said, the veritable “third-rail” of U.S. foreign policy debate.

Nonetheless, regarding the U.S.-Israel nexus, the time is now for reassessment and realignment. For far too long, Washington’s bipartisan, reflexive backing of Israel has damaged America’s good name on the Arab (or Muslim) “street,” and inflicted substantial strategic costs in the Greater Middle East. As President Trump, ostensibly, gears up to withdraw the US military from a series of regional quagmires, he should simultaneously address one root of America’s long-term “beef” with average Muslims – Washington’s no-strings-attached support for Israel.

He won’t, naturally. Though Trump sometimes displays admirable instincts to ditch military liabilities in the Mideast, he has only ratcheted up America’s iron-alliance with Israel. In a staggering, and internationally isolated, move, he even moved the US embassy to Israel into the heart of Jerusalem – recognizing the contested city as the singular capital of the Jewish state. Look, Israel – like our other nefarious frenemy, Saudi Arabia – buys tons of American weapons, and Trump-the-businessman absolutely loves that. Besides, Trump and (recently indicted) Prime Minister Netanyahu are political peas in a pod – both face potential corruption charges and rely on fear-mongering to whip up support from their right wing bases.

The (not so) dirty little secret is that the American president could care less about the plight of brown-skinned foreigners, whether along the US southern border or in Gaza and West Bank refugee camps. Trump doesn’t want to recalibrate America’s relationship with the Muslim world, he simply wants to (rightfully) cut the sunk costs of aimless US military interventions in the region. Cynicism, even when the man is right – remains the name of the proverbial game.

Unfortunately, here in the real world, nuance often prevails. As such, virulent hatred for the US, and Islamist terrorist plots, will not meaningfully decrease until Washington at least begins to address the roots of the problem and rebalances its one-sided relationship with Israel. First off, it’s the right thing to do, and recognizing Palestinian plight would improve America’s ethical image worldwide, which – like it or not – still matters. Second, a pivot away from Israel’s more unhinged policies in the occupied territories is strategically sound, rendering American soldiers and citizens safer.

To wit, this former army officer received countless “ear-fulls” about U.S.-Israel policy from angry moderates in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Decorating dingy Baghdad apartments and Kandahar hovels with pictures of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was quite common – these people cared about average Palestinians, even if their cynical national leaders did not. Even former CIA Director and then General David Petraeus – not exactly a liberal snowflake – recognized way back in 2010 that US favoritism towards Israel and a stalled peace process in the region endangered his troops across the Greater Middle East. He was, predictably, lambasted by the powerful US Israel lobby – but that didn’t make him wrong! Want to genuinely protect the homeland and “the troops” from Islamist-inspired violence? Then insist that Washington demonstrate some sense of equity and justice in Israel/Palestine.

And, as Israeli military atrocities and congressional lobbying clout reach a fever pitch, now is the time to raise the alarm. Recent events indicate the moral and strategic drift of Israeli policy and its unyielding defenders here in the US A recent United Nations Human Rights Committee report absolutely eviscerated the Israeli Army’s heavy-handed response last year to (generally) peaceful Palestinian protests along the Gaza border. The casualty statistics were absurdly one-sided, raising serious questions about Israel’s respect for proportionality. Some 130 unarmed Gazans were killed by military gunfire – including 35 children – and 6,000 others were wounded, as opposed to just two Israeli fatalities. Netanyahu’s government, of course, simply dismissedthe report outright.

Netanyahu, and his increasingly right-leaning administration, face their own problems. Israel’s Attorney General has recommended that “King Bibi” be criminally indicted in three separate corruption cases, this coming just before the prime minister’s reelection campaign. Bibi is a liability for the US; he’s politically fragile and his intransigent militarism is increasingly unhinged. Moreover, in years past, Netanyahu has proven willing to meddle in Americanpolitics – addressing the US Congress in the midst of previous election campaigns – which would most certainly be publicly decried if the perpetrator was Russian!

Unfortunately, Netanyahu’s shenanigans and Israel’s transgressions receive little criticism here in the “land of the free.” The Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) lobbying organization still exerts significant power in Congress. Need proof? Consider that rather than debating allegations of Israeli military aggression or Netanyahu’s unceasing – if illegal – settlement enterprise in Palestinian territory, the US Senate instead passed an unprecedented violation of Americans’ free speech. This bill makes it illegal for US citizens and groups to “boycott” Israeli institutions or otherwise actively support the growing worldwide BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement intended to pressure Israel to end its half-century-long occupation of Palestinian lands.

Nor is this some sort of partisan, Republican scheme hatched in a right-wing think tank. Mainstream Democratic Party leaders – think Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer – more than displayed their (literal and figurative) investment in Netanyahu’s audacious cause recently when they publicly rebuked freshman congresswoman (and Muslim) Ilhan Omar after she mildly criticized Israeli policy and its American lobbyists’ power in Washington. It appears that free speech only qualifies as a constitutional right so long as Israel is not the subject!

Ethics aside for a moment, Israel – by occupying much of the West Bank, blockading Gaza, and maintaining growing Jewish settlements in the Palestinian Territories – is in violation of international law. UN Resolutions 191 (protecting the right of return of Palestinian refugees) and 242 (requiring Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders) remain in effect, and as such – regardless of the nature of sometimes violent Palestinian resistance – Israel maintains an extralegal rogue occupation of foreign territory.

As the US continues to wail about Iranian, North Korean, and Chinese transgressions on the world scene, Washington demonstrates its hypocrisy by ignoring Israeli violations. There appear to be two standards of international behavior: one that applies to the “protected class” of American partners, and another for everyone else. And make no mistake, global Muslims take notice and Islamist terror organizations cheer their resultant recruiting windfall.

Additionally, if Trump is serious about extracting the US military from the Mid East, Israel seems far from a supportive partner in that endeavor. Indeed, Netanyahu and his entrenched policymakers would like nothing more than for the American Armed Forces to do Israel’s bidding in Iran, Yemen, and Syria. It’s the same old story: American blood for Israeli power, as the Netanyahu tail deftly wags the Washington dog. It has to stop, lest the US blunder its way into a new Iraq-style-quagmire in the region.

Finally, and embarrassingly, the United States is simply on the wrong side of history here. Mark my words. Though there are meaningful distinctions, Israel today maintains a South African-style apartheid regime both within its borders and in the occupied territories. Palestinians live under endless military occupation, lack basic civil and political rights, and suffer gradual land theft courtesy of Israeli settlers.

Brown Palestinians are modern day black South Africans. It is not coincidental – if unsurprising – that during the height of the 1980s international castigation of apartheid, it was the United States and Israel (almost alone) that reliably backed racist white South Africa. Though that embarrassing tidbit of America’s historical dishonor is oft-forgotten, Washington’s current shameful behavior in the Israel/Palestine conflict will prove far more pricey.

We count the cost in American bodies, dollars, and credibility.

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Russia Mocks U.S. Collusion Probe Ahead of Mueller Report

MOSCOW — U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller has yet to release his report about Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but the Kremlin has been rehearsing its response for months.

The narrative, shared by President Vladimir Putin, his top lieutenants and state television, is strikingly similar to U.S. President Donald Trump’s description of the investigation as a “witch hunt:” They say the whole process is about the Democrats’ stubborn refusal to admit that they lost the election.

“They don’t want to acknowledge his victory and do everything to delegitimize the president,” Putin said at his annual news conference in December.

Mueller has been looking into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia and whether the president obstructed the investigation.

Trump has been widely criticized for failing to publicly denounce Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election and appearing to accept Putin’s denials of such activity. Trump’s relationship with Putin has long been the source of intrigue, both at home and in world capitals. He has repeatedly praised his authoritarian peer while straining ties with many of Washington’s closest allies.

In one indictment, Mueller has accused Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU of hacking into the Democratic campaign and releasing the stolen emails through WikiLeaks. Another has charged employees of a Russian troll farm allegedly controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman dubbed “Putin’s chef” for his ties to the Kremlin, with spreading disinformation on social media in a bid to bolster support for Trump and disparage his rival, Hillary Clinton.

The Kremlin has rejected those charges.

Last week, Russian state television stations jumped at the relatively mild sentence handed to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort as proof that Mueller’s investigations have failed to hit their target.

“The mountain gave birth to a mouse,” the state-controlled Rossiya television snapped while reporting on Manafort, who was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for tax and bank fraud related to his work advising Ukrainian politicians — much less than what was called for under sentencing guidelines.

Another state-controlled nationwide channel, NTV, described the sentence as a blow to Mueller. “It was a slap in the face for special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into the Russian collusion that has found no collusion whatsoever,” it said.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has also described the Russia investigation as “an exclusively domestic political story for the United States.”

Zakharova went on to say that Russia-U.S. relations have fallen hostage to the U.S. political infighting, and contributed to sanctions against Moscow and “incinerated” bilateral ties.

The U.S. and the EU sanctions have slapped an array of sanctions on Russia ever since the country’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, its subsequent support for separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine as well as the perceived meddling in the U.S. election. The sanctions have spooked investors and weighed on growth.

Some lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are pushing for more punishing sanctions, including those targeting Russia’s top state banks.

Putin has denounced the sanctions as an attempt by the U.S. and its allies to weaken and punish Russia for its independent stance and vowed that the pressure wouldn’t force Moscow to change its course. While the Kremlin has sought to put on a brave face while talking about the sanctions, it has recognized that further restrictions would raise new challenges.

Russian media have pointed at the growing number of congressional investigations into Trump’s campaign as part of a multi-pronged attack by the Democrats.

The Rossiya station said a new probe launched by the House Judiciary Committee into possible obstruction, corruption and abuse of power by Trump, is a partisan effort by the newly empowered Democrats, who have won back control of the House of Representatives. A report on the channel carried Trump’s statement denouncing the probes as “a disgrace for our country.”

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov took a familiar jaded tone.

“There have been a great number of such probes, helping erode their significance,” he said. “It has nothing to do with us. It’s entirely the business of the U.S.”

It’s the Green New Deal or Else

I suppose we all owe UCLA economist and Hoover Institution senior fellow Lee Ohanian a debt of gratitude for telling us how it is. The “free market” propagandist recently took to the pages of The Hill, a Washington, D.C., journal for political insiders, to explain that the holy laws of economics dictate that humanity must consent to its own extermination. In a piece titled “The Green New Deal is a Pipe Dream,” Ohanian drowned climate activists’ overheated dreams of ecological salvation in the icy waters of bourgeois reality, arguing that the proposed legislation’s advocates are, in fact, nefarious, big-government “command-and-control” zealots—eco-Stalinists—who want “to impose their social and economic preferences on others at an extravagantly high economic cost.”

Ohanian described the Green New Deal’s goal of net-zero U.S. carbon emissions in 10 years as an “infeasible” aim that demonstrates a failure “to understand basic cost-benefit analysis.” If that weren’t enough, the Hoover fellow noted that “the GND would be extremely expensive” and that America lacks “the technological know-how” to reach zero carbon emissions. Ohanian further pleased the Hoover Institution’s big-business sponsors by adding his judgment that the Green New Deal’s promise of a living wage will make workers lazy and unproductive. No such promise can be fulfilled today, “when jobs can be easily offshored, outsourced, and automated,” he pronounced.

Now that we understand these economic realities, we can prepare—without rebellion, with calm acceptance and within the limits of our stagnant incomes—for our coming extinction. Onward with the coming macroeconomic ecocide.

Except, wait. Hold on. Maybe Ohanian is full of petroligarchic crap. Maybe there’s still hope for the species after all.

He is, and there is.

It’s simply not true that we lack the technological expertise to achieve zero carbon emissions. Writing for Scientific American, Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson and University of California at Davis research scientist Mark Delucchi have shown repeatedly over the last decade that humanity could convert to a completely renewable energy-based system by 2030 if nations employ technologies vetted by scientists rather than those championed by private industry.

In their state-level analysis, which focuses on New York and California, Jacobson and Delucchi conclude that wind turbines, water machines, solar installations and other green technologies are affordable and available for rapid utilization. “The main obstacles are political and social—getting politicians onboard,” Jacobson told a leading science reporter six years ago. “There are always naysayers who think it’s pie in the sky, that we’ll never get there. And there are people who are tied into a certain industry who push back the most.”

The Green New Deal would cost a lot of money, Ohanian insists. What, like the giant tax breaks that Donald Trump and Congress gave the richest 10th of the 1 percent and their corporate allies, adding $2.2 trillion to the national debt (equal to $17,500 per household)? Like our subsidies for the military-industrial complex, which costs taxpayers $700 billion today and is projected to cost $972 billion by 2024, despite having the largest carbon footprint of any single institution on earth? Like the $204 billion spent on advertising in the U.S. last year to push a maddening surfeit of consumer products, many, if not most, designed in accord with the ecocidal principle of built-in obsolescence?

From 2014 through 2018, the global capitalist system spent $2.72 trillion on advertising alone. Imagine where we’d be on the path to slowing climate change if all that money had been spent on wind turbines, water machines, solar installations, sustainable agriculture, reforestation and green retrofitting, infrastructure and regional planning. There’s more than enough money to fund training to close the skilled heating, ventilation and air-conditioning-worker gap.

Meanwhile, Ohanian’s classist notion that workers will become indolent and inefficient if they are guaranteed a living wage is a Dickensian old wives’ tale. Productivity positively—not negatively—correlates with a living wage. And how does Ohanian think workers are supposed to lead dignified lives without one? Are millions of young adults supposed to live with their parents indefinitely or rely on food pantries and homeless shelters to get by while working full-time jobs?

Outsourcing, offshoring and automation are not without solutions, such as government and union restrictions; capital controls; green government jobs programs to absorb technically displaced workers; international efforts to raise wages and labor standards abroad; and guaranteed national incomes. Much of this is addressed in economist Robert Pollin’s important book, “Greening the Global Economy,” which advances “just transition” polices that include “solid pension protections, re-employment guarantees, as well as retraining and relocation support for individual workers, and community-support initiatives” for communities negatively affected by the suspension of fossil fuel extraction and burning.

Here’s a true pipe dream (maybe we should call it a “pipeline dream”): the continuation of a decent human existence even for rich nations comparatively sheltered from the worst consequences of climate change.

In 2008, James Hansen, then head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and seven other leading climate scientists reported that we would see “practically irreversible ice sheet and species loss” if the planet’s average temperature rose above 1 degree Celsius (1.8 F), thanks to carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere reaching 450 parts per million (ppm).

When the report was published, CO2 levels were at 385—“already in the dangerous zone” according to Hansen and his team. They warned that deadly, self-reinforcing “feedbacks” could be triggered at that level. The dire prospects they warned of included “ice sheet disintegration, vegetation migration, and [greenhouse gas] release from soils, tundra, or ocean sediments.”

The only way to assure a livable climate, Hansen and his colleagues warned, was to cut CO2 to at least 350 ppm.

Here we are, 11 years later, having blown past Hansen’s 1 degree Celsius red line since 2015. We currently stand at 410 ppm, the highest level of CO2 saturation in 800,000 years. The latest climate report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reflects the consensus opinion of the world’s leading climate scientists. It tells us that we are headed to a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F) in the next 12 years. Failure to dramatically slash emissions between now and 2030 is certain to set off catastrophic developments for hundreds of millions of people, the report warns.

The IPCC finds that at our current pace, we are headed for a 3- to 4-degree Celsius (5.4 F to 7.2 F) temperature increase by the end of century. That will mean a planet that is mostly unlivable.

It gets worse. Numerous climate scientists have indicated that the IPCC’s findings are excessively conservative. That’s because the institute deletes and downplays research demonstrating the likelihood that irreversible climatological tipping points could arrive sooner than expected. Among the reports pointing to these conclusions is a recent NASA-funded study warning that the unexpectedly abrupt thawing of permafrost could release massive volumes of CO2  and methane within a few decades.

Earth, biological and social scientists are increasingly raising the specter of climate-driven human extinction in the not-so-distant future. In vast swaths of the world, across much of sub-Saharan Africa, India, the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia, climate catastrophe is already underway.

Conservative though it may be, the U.N. report is no whitewash. It gives us 12 years to drastically slash greenhouse gas emissions or face catastrophic consequences. It also calls for “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to drop global CO2  emissions 45 percent below 2010 levels and 60 percent below 2015 levels by 2030. We need to hit zero by the midcentury point, the IPCC says, and we cannot do that without radically and rapidly reducing our energy consumption.

Cost-benefit analysis? The Green New Deal is, if anything, insufficiently radical. It does not go to the full class-rule taproot of the many deadly ecological rifts (the climate crisis is only the most urgent) opened by capitalism’s relentless, totalitarian drive to commodify everything on earth. Progressive-Democrat Green New Deal advocates have yet to join serious ecosocialists in calling for green investments to be garnered from massive reductions in the U.S. military budget, which eats up more than half of federal discretionary spending and sustains a global military empire that is the world’s single largest institutional carbon emitter. The Green New Deal’s sponsors have yet to call (as they will have to if they are serious about environmental reconversion) for their program to be funded and protected from capital flight by the nationalization of the United States’ leading financial institutions.

Still, at least Green New Dealers are talking seriously about the benefit of a livable earth. It seems like society might want to be ready to absorb significant costs to achieve the continuation of the species. Professor Ohanian should write the environmentalists’ maxim 500 times on a UCLA chalkboard: “There are no jobs on a dead planet. There is no economy on a dead planet.”

Zero carbon emissions by 2030 (or even 2040) is a grandiose goal. But guess what? Now is precisely the time to aim sky high on ecology and way low on carbon release. How much are we willing to pay for human survival? Do environmental calamity and the real risk of extinction count as “extravagantly high costs”? When might we be willing to achieve the not-so-fringe benefit of continued existence by confronting the totalitarian “command and control” imposed on all of us by big carbon capital’s social and economic preference for short-term private accumulation and profit over the longer-term common good—over any kind of decent future for human beings and other living things?

2 Ex-Cops Arrested in Killing of Brazilian Politician

RIO DE JANEIRO — Authorities arrested two former police officers Tuesday in the killing of Rio de Janeiro councilwoman Marielle Franco and her driver, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests in several countries.

The arrests in Rio came two days before the anniversary of the 2018 killings. While police had questioned many people, before Tuesday nobody had been arrested or charged in the shooting of Franco, a prominent activist for Afro-Brazilian and LGBT rights.

“It was a crime against a lawmaker, a woman, exercising her democratic function who had her life taken away in an unacceptable, criminal way,” Rio de Janeiro state Gov. Wilson Witzel told reporters.

While Witzel praised police and investigators for the arrests, the case highlighted deep corruption in Brazil’s police forces, including connections to militias and paramilitary groups that control large swaths of the state.

The suspects were identified as Ronnie Lessa, 48, a retired military police officer, and Elcio Vieira de Queiroz, 46, who was fired from a police force in 2015 for reasons that authorities did not release. Lawyers for both men denied their involvement in the assassination.

Lessa was arrested at his residence in the same Rio condominium complex where President Jair Bolsonaro has his home, authorities said.

Lessa is alleged to have shot Franco and De Queiroz to have driven a car involved in the attack. The car was hit with 14 bullets, four shots hit Franco in the head and three hit her driver, Anderson Gomes, in the back.

Police and prosecutors detailed a “practically perfect crime” that demonstrated “knowledge of the legal and judicial system,” which added to the complexity of solving the crime.

They showed CCTV footage to reporters that tracked the car in which prosecutors said Lessa and De Queiroz drove from the wealthy suburbs of western Rio across the city to downtown, where the suspects waited for two hours outside a meeting that Franco was attending about empowering black women.

Prosecutors said they were able to identify Lessa as the shooter through an image of the shooter’s arm, where they could see the outline of dark parts of a tattoo through a sleeve.

Authorities said they couldn’t yet fully explain the motive for the killings but pointed to signs of intolerance toward the councilwoman’s political agenda.

“It’s a reaction of repulsion to her political actions,” said Simone Sibilo, one of the prosecutors. “Marielle defended minorities, black women, LGBT and other minority causes.”

Siblio did not rule out that Lessa was ordered to commit the crime by someone else. Prosecutors said they suspect Lessa was involved in one of the militias made up of former police and military officers who run extortion and security rackets in poor neighborhoods.

“The investigations have revealed to us the possibility (of Lessa’s) participation in paramilitary activities,” Sibilo said, adding that Lessa’s “name has come up in” connection with other homicides.

Lessa’s lawyer, Fernando Santana, said his client “vehemently denies being involved in any type of assassination.”

De Queiroz’s lawyer, Luiz Carlos Azenha, denied there were any photos of him inside the car on the day of the assassination.

“Treat it as another misstep made by the police and courts,” he said.

Marcelo Freixo, a state legislator and friend of Franco, told Globo TV the arrests were an important step, but the case “has not been resolved.”

“Who sent them (to kill Franco)?” Freixo said. “We don’t accept the version that these people were motivated by passion and hate when they didn’t even really know who Marielle was.”

Family members of Franco expressed similarly mixed reactions.

Anielle Franco, the victim’s sister, said the family was glad to see movement in the case but wanted to understand the motive.

“This wasn’t some criminal on the corner,” Anielle told reporters outside the prosecutor’s office.

Franco, who was black and lesbian and grew up in one of Rio’s roughest neighborhoods, stood out in a country where most politicians are white men. She had been a frequent critic of police violence, particularly in poor neighborhoods.

Marches honoring Franco were planned for Thursday, the anniversary of her killing.

Police and politicians in the state have been under intense pressure to solve the killing, which included sophisticated planning by the assassins, right down to making sure surveillance cameras were shut off on the street where the attack happened.

Witzel, a former judge who was inaugurated Jan. 1, was criticized last year when he participated in a rally with other candidates who had broken a street sign commemorating Franco.

A close ally of Bolsonaro, Witzel ran on promises to get tough on crime and the high-profile arrests may quiet critics who argued Witzel would let the case go unsolved.

“The reality is changing,” Witzel said of the police and reforms underway.

____

Associated Press writer Mauricio Savarese in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.

Governor to Place Moratorium on Death Penalty in California

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—The 737 inmates on California’s largest-in-the-nation death row are getting a reprieve from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who plans to sign an executive order Wednesday placing a moratorium on executions.

Newsom also is withdrawing the lethal injection regulations that death penalty opponents already have tied up in courts and shuttering the new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison that has never been used.

“The intentional killing of another person is wrong and as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual,” he said in prepared remarks.

Newsom called the death penalty “a failure” that “has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or can’t afford expensive legal representation.” He also said innocent people have been wrongly convicted and sometimes put to death.

California hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor. And though voters in 2016 narrowly approved a ballot measure to speed up the punishment, no condemned inmate faced imminent execution.

Since California’s last execution, its death row population has grown to house one of every four condemned inmates in the United States. They include Scott Peterson, whose trial for killing his wife Laci riveted the country, and Richard Davis, who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas during a slumber party and strangled her.

Newsom “is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty,” said Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy (Los Angeles County) District Attorneys.

But Alison Parker, U.S. managing director at Human Rights Watch, praised Newsom’s “great courage and leadership in ending the cruel, costly, and unfair practice of executing prisoners,” calling for other states to follow California’s lead. The American Civil Liberties Union called it “a watershed moment in the fight for racial equity and equal justice for all.” Justin Brooks, director of the California Innocence Project, lauded Newsom for ending the risk of executing someone who is innocent.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which has been fighting in court to force the state to resume executions, said blocking Newsom’s move may be difficult.

“Reprieves, the governor does have the power to do that. That doesn’t make it the right thing to do,” Scheidegger said. “At this time I don’t see a legal challenge to the reprieve.” However, he said prohibiting corrections officials from preparing to carry out executions “is patently illegal” under the 2016 ballot measure.

Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager, president of the California District Attorneys Association, also criticized Newsom for circumventing the will of a majority of voters.

But he had support from Democratic lawmakers including Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco and Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego, who praised Newsom for doing “what’s right, even when it’s tough,” in Gonzalez’s words.

Aides said Newsom’s power to grant reprieves is written into the state Constitution and that he is not altering any convictions or allowing any condemned inmate a chance at an early release.

A governor needs approval from the state Supreme Court to pardon or commute the sentence of anyone twice convicted of a felony, and the justices last year blocked several clemency requests by former Gov. Jerry Brown that did not involve condemned inmates.

Other governors also have enacted moratoriums. Republican Illinois Gov. George Ryan was the first in 2000 and later was followed by Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon. Illinois ultimately outlawed executions, as did Washington.

Newsom said the death penalty isn’t a deterrent, wastes taxpayer dollars and is flawed because it is “irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error.” It’s also costly — California has spent $5 billion since 1978 on its death row, he said.

More than six in 10 condemned California inmates are minorities, which his office cited as proof of racial disparities in who is sentenced to die. Since 1973, five California inmates who were sentenced to death were later exonerated, his office said.

Brown also opposed the death penalty, but his administration moved to restart executions after voters acted in 2016 to allow the use of a single lethal injection and speed up appeals. His administration’s regulations are stalled by challenges in both state and federal court, though those lawsuits may be halted now that Newsom is officially withdrawing the regulations.

Brown said he was satisfied with his record number of pardons and commutations, though he never attempted to commute a death sentence. He had focused on sweeping changes to criminal penalties and reducing the prison population.

“I’ve done what I want to do,” Brown said shortly before leaving office, defending his decision not to endorse death penalty repeal efforts in 2012 and 2016. “I’ve carved out my piece of all this.”

Democratic Assemblyman Marc Levine of Greenbrae plans to seek the two-thirds vote the Legislature requires to put another repeal measure on the 2020 ballot. Levine’s district includes San Quentin State Prison. A repeal question also was on the ballot in 2016 with the question to speed up executions. It lost by 7 points while the other question was approved by 2 points.

Newsom’s aides said it has not yet been decided what will become of the execution chamber, or whether corrections officials have been told to top preparing for executions, for instance by running drills.

Seventy-nine condemned California inmates have died of natural causes since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1978. Another 26 committed suicide. California has executed 13 inmates, while two were executed in other states.

Newsom’s office said 25 condemned inmates have exhausted all of their appeals and could have faced execution if the courts approved the state’s new lethal injection method.

___

Associated Press journalist Kathleen Ronayne contributed to this story.

Pentagon Seeks Site to House 5,000 Migrant Children

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department is reviewing a number of military bases to find a location that can house up to 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children as the U.S. braces for a surge of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border this spring.

The Department of Health and Human Services submitted the request for space late last week, as Homeland Security leaders warned that tens of thousands of families are crossing the border each month. That flow, said Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, will grow worse this spring as the weather gets better.

Meanwhile, HHS Secretary Alex Azar told lawmakers at a House budget hearing Tuesday that he had had no advance knowledge of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which resulted in hundreds of migrant children being separated from their parents and placed in his department’s custody last spring. Had he known, Azar said he hopes he would have raised concerns.

The Pentagon last summer approved the use of Goodfellow Air Force Base near San Angelo, Texas, for an HHS request to accommodate up to 20,000 children. Legal and environmental requirements were finalized, but HHS never came back with a formal request to actually use the base. Officials said that the extra spaced wasn’t needed, and there also were concerns that HHS didn’t have the money to construct needed housing and other support facilities at the base.

Army Lt. Col. Jamie Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday that since this HHS request is smaller than last year’s, the department is doing another review. It’s unclear if the Pentagon will once again propose Goodfellow as the location or if there is another military base that may already have facilities that could accommodate the smaller-sized group.

HHS is now asking for $1.3 billion in the 2020 fiscal year budget and the creation of a contingency fund of up to $2 billion.

“We have requested quite a lot, but at the rate we are going with the kids coming across the border, it is quite a burden financially,” Azar told the House Energy & Commerce Committee.

Under questioning from Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., Azar told lawmakers that he was not consulted about last year’s “zero tolerance” policy that resulted in immigration authorities separating several thousand migrant children from their parents. Once the families were separated, the children were considered “unaccompanied.”

HHS has traditionally been responsible for providing temporary shelter to unaccompanied migrant children crossing the border.

“I was not aware that that policy was under consideration when the attorney general announced it,” Azar said. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions made the announcement in early April of last year.

Azar said he hopes he would have raised “significant child welfare issues” had he been consulted.

His comments shed light on a chaotic period during which President Donald Trump was forced to roll back the family separation policy in the face of strong public disapproval. A few days later, a federal judge ordered families reunited, and it fell to HHS to attempt to carry out the judge’s directive reuniting families.

Congressional investigators have previously found that other government departments and agencies were surprised by the “zero tolerance” decision, but Azar has not generally discussed his own role in public. He said it took a while to “connect the dots” and realize the impact on his department.

Much of his early information came from following press reports, Azar said. “I was very disturbed by it,” he said.

Under questioning from Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., Azar said he was disheartened that senior officials in his department who apparently had an early inkling that migrant families were being separated did not immediately alert him.

“I’m disappointed I did not know that,” he said.

____

Associated Press writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed to this report.

Humans Are Robbing Other Species of Space

There is only one Earth, but human growth is ensuring that it carries steadily more passengers. And that leaves less and less room for humanity’s companions on board the planet.

The Nile lechwe is an antelope that lives in the swamps of Ethiopia and South Sudan. Its Linnaean name is Kobus megaceros and it stands a metre high at the shoulders so you couldn’t miss it. Except that you could.

That is because it is one of at least 1,700 species identified by biologists to be at risk from human action: quite simply, as humans take an ever-greater share of animal living space, the animals’ chances of survival dwindle rapidly.

So the Nile lechwe joins the Lombok cross frog of Indonesia (Oreophryne monticola) and the curve-billed reedhaunter (Limnornis curvirostris) that lives in the marshes of north-east Argentina to be at risk of extinction by 2070, simply because humankind will intrude on at least half of their geographic ranges.

“It is often the far-away demand that drives these losses – think tropical hardwoods, palm oil or soybeans …”

Biologists, conservationists and climate scientists have been warning for decades that the dangerous combination of human population growth and climate change driven by human-induced global warming puts whole ecosystems at risk, and will hasten the extinction of many species that are already shrinking in numbers.

These include many that underwrite the provision of food,  medicine, fabric for the world’s cities and air and water purification systems on which human civilisation is founded.

Most such warnings have been based on projections of economic growth, urban demand and climate change. US researchers approached the challenge in a different way.

They report in Nature Climate Change that they collected data on the geographic distributions of 19,400 species and combined this with four different projections of future changes in land use – a euphemism for scorched or felled forest, drained swamp, ploughed grassland and so on − in the next 50 years.

Shared responsibility

And they identified 1,700 species that, even with moderate changes in land use, will lose roughly a third to a half of their present habitat by 2070. This total includes 886 species of amphibian, 436 kinds of bird and 376 mammals. And this loss of living space accentuates the hazard to their lives and futures.

Many animal citizens of Central and East Africa, Mesoamerica, South America and Southeast Asia are particularly at risk. And, the authors warn, even though such losses would happen in national territories and involve species with limited range, the responsibility for their loss would be global.

“Losses in species populations can irreversibly hamper the functioning of ecosystems and human quality of life,” said Walter Jetz, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Yale University in Connecticut, one of the authors.

“While biodiversity erosion in far-away parts of the planet may not seem to affect us directly, its consequences for human livelihood can reverberate globally. It is also often the far-away demand that drives these losses – think tropical hardwoods, palm oil or soybeans – thus making us all co-responsible.”

The Link Between School Shootings and Drone Wars

In the wake of the February 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 students and staff members, a teacher said the school looked “like a war zone.” And to many young Americans, that’s exactly what it felt like. But this shooting was different. Refusing to be victims, Parkland survivors disrupted the “thoughts and prayers” cycle by immediately rallying student activists and adults across the country, mobilizing them around such tragedies and the weapons of war that often facilitate them.

Recent history suggested that such a movement, sure to be unable to keep the public’s attention or exert significant pressure on lawmakers, would collapse almost instantly. Yet, miraculously enough, the same fear — of their school being next — that had kept young Americans paralyzed for almost 20 years was what drove these newly impassioned activists not to back down.

Let me say that, much as I admire them, I look at their remarkable movement from an odd perspective. You see, I grew up in the “school-shooting era” and now work for a non-profit called ReThink Media tracking coverage of the American drone war that has been going on for 17 years.

To me, the U.S. military and CIA drones that hover constantly over eight countries across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and regularly terrorize, maim, and kill civilians, including children, are the equivalents of the disturbed shooters in American schools. But that story is hard to find anywhere in this country. What reports Americans do read about those drone strikes usually focus on successes (a major terrorist taken out in a distant land), not the “collateral damage.”

With that in mind, let me return to those teenage activists against gun violence who quickly grasped three crucial things. The first was that such violence can’t be dealt with by focusing on gun control alone. You also have to confront the other endemic problems exacerbating the gun violence epidemic, including inadequate mental health resources, systemic racism and police brutality, and the depth of economic inequality. As Parkland teen organizer Edna Chavez explained, “Instead of police officers we should have a department specializing in restorative justice. We need to tackle the root causes of the issues we face and come to an understanding of how to resolve them.”

The second was that, no matter how much you shouted, you had to be aware of the privilege of being heard. In other words, when you shouted, you had to do so not just for yourself but for all those voices so regularly drowned out in this country. After all, black Americans represent the majority of gun homicide victims. Black children are 10 times as likely to die by gun and yet their activism on the subject has been largely demonized or overlooked even as support for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students rolled in.

The third was that apathy is the enemy of progress, which means that to make change you have to give people a sense of engagement and empowerment. As one of the Parkland students, Emma Gonzalez, put it: “What matters is that the majority of American people have become complacent in a senseless injustice that occurs all around them.”

Washington’s Expanding Drone Wars

Here’s the irony, though: while those teenagers continue to talk about the repeated killing of innocents in this country, their broader message could easily be applied to another type of violence that, in all these years, Americans have paid next to no attention to: the U.S. drone war.

Unlike school shootings, drone strikes killing civilians in distant lands rarely make the news here, much less the headlines. Most of us at least now know what it means to live in a country where school shootings are an almost weekly news story. Drones are another matter entirely, and beyond the innocents they so regularly slaughter, there are long-term effects on the communities they are attacking.

As Veterans for Peace put it, “Here at home, deaths of students and others killed in mass shootings and gun violence, including suicide gun deaths, are said to be the price of freedom to bear arms. Civilian casualties in war are written off as ‘collateral damage,’ the price of freedom and U.S. security.”

And yet, after 17 years, three presidents, and little transparency, America’s drone wars have never truly made it into the national conversation. Regularly marketed over those years as “precise” and “surgical,” drones have always been seen by lawmakers as a “sexy,” casualty-free solution to fighting the bad guys, while protecting American blood and treasure.

According to reports, President Trump actually expanded the U.S. global drone war, while removing the last shreds of transparency about what those drones are doing — and even who’s launching them. One of his first orders on entering the Oval Office was to secretly reinstate the CIA’s ability to launch drone strikes that are, in most cases, not even officially acknowledged. And since then, it’s only gotten worse. Just last week, he revoked an Obama-era executive order that required the director of national intelligence to release an annual report on civilian and combatant casualties caused by CIA drones and other lethal operations. Now, not only are the rules of engagement — whom you can strike and under what circumstances — secret, but the Pentagon no longer even reveals when drones have been used, no less when civilians die from them. Because of this purposeful opaqueness, even an estimate of the drone death toll no longer exists.

Still, in the data available on all U.S. airstrikes since Trump was elected, an alarming trend is discernible: there are more of them, more casualties from them, and ever less accountability about them. In Iraq and Syria alone, the monitoring group Airwars believes that the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS is responsible for between 7,468 and 11,841 civilian deaths, around 2,000 of whom were children. (The U.S.-led coalition, however, only admits to killing 1,139 civilians.)

In Afghanistan, the U.N. recently found that U.S. airstrikes (including drone strikes) had killed approximately the same number of Afghan civilians in 2018 as in the previous three years put together. In response to this report, the U.S.-led NATO mission there claimed that “all feasible precautions” were being taken to limit civilian casualties and that it investigates all allegations of their occurrence. According to such NATO investigations, airstrikes by foreign forces caused 117 civilian casualties last year, including 62 deaths — about a fifth of the U.N. tally.

And those are only the numbers for places where Washington is officially at war. In Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya, even less information is available on the number of civilians the U.S. has killed. Experts who track drone strikes in such gray areas of conflict, however, place that number in the thousands, though there is no way to confirm them, as even our military acknowledges. U.S. Army Colonel Thomas Veale, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, put it this way last year: “As far as how do we know how many civilians were killed, I am just being honest, no one will ever know. Anyone who claims they will know is lying, and there’s no possible way.”

After a U.S. strike killed or injured an entire Afghan family, the trauma surgeon treating a four-year-old survivor told NBC, “I am sad. A young boy with such big injuries. No eyes, brain out. What will be his future?”

In other words, while America’s teenagers fight in the most public way possible for their right to live, a world away Afghanistan’s teenagers are marching for the same thing — except instead of gun control, in that heavily armed land, they want peace.

Trauma Is Trauma Is Trauma

Gun violence — and school shootings in particular — have become the preeminent fear of American teenagers. A Pew poll taken last year found that 57% of teens are worried about a shooting at their school. (One in four are “very worried.”) This is even truer of nonwhite teens, with roughly two-thirds of them expressing such fear.

As one student told Teen Vogue: “How could you not feel a little bit terrified knowing that it happens so randomly and so often?” And she’s not exaggerating. More than 150,000 students in the U.S have experienced a shooting on campus since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, considered the first modern mass school shooting.

And in such anticipatory anxiety, American students have much in common with victims of drone warfare. Speaking to researchers from Stanford University, Haroon Quddoos, a Pakistani taxi driver who survived two U.S. drone strikes, explained it this way:

“No matter what we are doing, that fear is always inculcated in us. Because whether we are driving a car, or we are working on a farm, or we are sitting home playing… cards — no matter what we are doing, we are always thinking the drone will strike us. So we are scared to do anything, no matter what.”

Similar symptoms of post-traumatic stress, trauma, and anxiety are commonplace emotions in countries where U.S. drones are active, just as in American communities like Parkland that have lived through a mass shooting. Visiting communities in Yemen that experienced drone strikes, forensic psychologist Peter Schaapveld found that 92% of their inhabitants were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, with children the most significantly affected. Psychologists have come up with similar figures when studying both survivors of school shootings and children who have been psychologically affected by school-lockdown drills, by the media’s focus on violence, and by the culture of fear that has developed in response to mass shootings.

The Voices Left Out of the Conversation

The Parkland students have created a coherent movement that brings together an incredibly diverse group united around a common goal and a belief that all gun violence victims, not just those who have experienced a mass shooting, need to be heard. As one Parkland survivor and leader of the March For Our Lives movement, David Hogg, put it, the goal isn’t to talk for different communities, but to let them “speak for themselves and ask them how we can help.”

The Parkland survivors have essentially created an echo chamber, amplifying the previously unheard voices of young African-Americans and Latinos in particular. At last year’s March For Our Lives, for instance, 11-year-old Naomi Wadler started her speech this way: “I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African-American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead the evening news.”

In 2016, there were nearly 39,000 gun deaths, more than 14,000 of them homicides and almost 23,000 suicides. Such routine gun violence disproportionately affects black Americans. Mass shootings accounted for only about 1.2% of all gun deaths that year. Yet the Parkland students made headlines and gained praise for their activism — Oprah Winfrey even donated $500,000 to the movement — while black communities that had been fighting gun violence for years never received anything similar.

As someone who spends a lot of her time engrossed in the undercovered news of drone strikes, I can’t help but notice the parallels. Stories about U.S. drone strikes taking out dangerous terrorists proliferate, while reports on U.S.-caused civilian casualties disappear into the void. For example, in January, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command claimed that a precision drone strike finally killed Jamel Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi, the alleged mastermind behind the deadly October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Within a day, more than 24 media outlets had covered the story.

Few, however, focused on the fact that the U.S. command only claimed al-Badawi’s death was “likely,” despite similar reports about such terrorists that have repeatedly been proven wrong. The British human rights group Reprieve found back in 2014 that even when drone operators end up successfully targeting specific individuals like al-Badawi, they regularly kill vastly more people than their chosen targets. Attempts to kill 41 terror figures, Reprieve reported, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people. That was five years ago, but there’s no reason to believe anything has changed.

In contrast, when a U.S. airstrike — it’s not clear whether it was a drone or a manned aircraft — killed at least 20 civilians in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in December, 2018, only four American media outlets (Reuters, the Associated Press, Voice of America, and the New York Times) covered the story and none followed up with a report on those civilians and their families. That has largely been the norm since the war on terror began with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. In the Trump years so far, while headlines scream about mass school shootings and other slaughters of civilians here, the civilian casualties of America’s wars and the drone strikes that often go with them are, if anything, even more strikingly missing in action in the media.

When Safa al-Ahmad, a journalist for PBS’s Frontline, was asked why she thought it was important to hear from Yemenis experiencing American drone strikes, she responded:

“I think if you’re going to talk about people, you should go talk to them. It’s just basic respect for other human beings. It really bothered me that everyone was just talking about the Americans… The other civilians, they weren’t given any names, they weren’t given any details. It was like an aside to the story… This is part of the struggle when you construct stories on foreign countries, when it comes to the American public. I think we’ve done [Americans] a disservice, by not doing more of this… We impact the world, we should understand it. An informed public is the only way there can be a functioning democracy. That is our duty as a democracy, to be informed.”

This one-sided view of America’s never-ending air wars fails everyone, from the people being asked to carry out Washington’s decisions in those lands to ordinary Americans who have little idea what’s being done in their name to the many people living under those drones. Americans should know that, to them, it’s we who seem like the school shooters of the planet.

Waking Up An Apathetic Nation

For the better part of two decades, young Americans have been trapped in a cycle of violence at home and abroad with little way to speak out. Gun violence in this country was a headline-grabbing given. School shootings, like so many other mass killings here, were deemed “tragic” and worthy of thoughts, prayers, and much fervid media attention, but little else.

Until Parkland.

What changed? Well, a new cohort, Generation Z, came on the scene and, unlike their millennial predecessors, many of them are refusing to accept the status quo, especially when it comes to issues like gun violence.

Every time there was a mass shooting, millennials would hold their breath, wondering if today would be the day the country finally woke up. After Newtown. After San Bernadino. After Las Vegas. And each time, it wasn’t. Parkland could have been the same, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids. Having witnessed the dangers of apathy, Gen-Z seems increasingly to be about movement and action. In fact, in a Vice youth survey, 71% of respondents reported feeling “capable” of enacting change around global warming and 85% felt the same about social problems. And that’s new.

For so long, gun violence seemed like an unstoppable, incurable plague. Fed up with the “adults in the room,” however, these young activists have begun to take matters into their own hands, giving those particularly at risk of gun violence, children, a sense of newfound power — the power to determine their own futures. Whether it’s testifying in front of Congress in the first hearing on gun violence since 2011, protesting at the stores and offices of gun manufacturers, or participating in “die-ins,” these kids are making their voices heard.

Since the Parkland massacre, there has been actual movement on gun control, something that America has not seen for a long time. Under pressure, the Justice Department moved to ban the bump stocks that can make semi-automatic weapons fire almost like machine guns, Florida signed a $400 million bill to tighten the state’s gun laws, companies began to cut ties with the National Rifle Association, and public support grew for stricter gun control laws.

Although the new Gen Z activists have focused on issues close to home, sooner or later they may start to look beyond the water’s edge and find themselves in touch with their counterparts across the globe, who are showing every day how dedicated they are to changing the world they live in, with or without anyone’s help. And if they do, they will find that, in its endless wars, America has been the true school shooter on this planet, terrorizing the global classroom with a remarkable lack of consequences.

In March 2018, according to Human Rights Watch, American planes bombed a school that housed displaced people in Syria, killing dozens of them, including children. Similarly, in Yemen that August, a Saudi plane, using a Pentagon-supplied laser-guided bomb, blew away a school bus, killing 40 schoolchildren. Just as at home, it’s not only about the weaponry like those planes or drones. Activists will find that they have to focus their attention as well on the root causes of such violence and the scars they leave behind in the communities of survivors.

More tolerant, more diverse, less trustful of major institutions and less inclined to believe in American exceptionalism than any generation before them, Generation Z may be primed to care about what their country is doing in their name from Afghanistan to Syria, Yemen to Libya. But first they have to know it’s happening.

America’s Long History of Hysteria About Women’s Veils

Fox far right wing propagandist Jeanine Pirro came after Ilhan Omar for veiling, saying it is unconstitutional for her to follow the sharia and accusing her, horror of horrors, of dual loyalty.

Pirro says that the Qur’an requires women to cover their heads. Many Muslims do believe this, but it isn’t in fact clear. The Qur’an says women should cover their pretty parts, which I suspect refers to the general state of undress common in seventh century Arabia. It doesn’t explicitly mention the head. Indeed, when I lived in the Middle East in the 1970s as a young person, I would guess that 5% of urban women wore headscarves or veiled. During the past 40 years there has been a women’s veiling revolution in Egypt and Iran, for instance. Not so much in Tunisia and Turkey still. In any case, outside of ideological states like Iran and Saudi Arabia, the practice is universally admitted to be a personal choice. In Egypt it is common to see veiled and unveiled friends walking together. I can’t see what it has to do with the Constitution.

For the nth time, Muslim sharia is equivalent to Catholic canon law or Jewish halakha and for a believer to put themselves under this discipline is hardly disloyal to the United States. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson and the Founding generation wanted people to be free to practice their various religions and religious laws, which is why they put the First Amendment into the Constitution. Jefferson said it did not matter to him whether his neighbor believed in a thousand gods or none. It did not, he said, pick his pocket or break his leg.

The far right wing American project of making a fetish of Muslim canon law is itself unconstitutional. And it contains a severe danger of fostering anti-Semitism, since Jewish halakha is very similar in most respects to Muslim law. If the one makes an American disloyal, doesn’t the other?

Here’s something for Pirro to consider: Orthodox Jewish women often feel that only their husbands should see their hair. The NYT notes,

“While some women chose merely to cover their hair with a cloth or sheitel, or wig, the most zealous shave their heads beneath to ensure that their hair is never seen by others.”

Orthodox Judaism is a small but vital American religious tradition with a long history on the North American continent.

Pirro is herself Catholic, and should be more sensitive to the long discrimination suffered by Catholic women in orders in Protestant America for their veiling.

In fact, nothing is more American historically than veiling and debates on veiling. Most Christians until recently following St. Paul’s dictum that women should cover their heads in church. But many women have gone far beyond that in American history.

Roger Williams (d. 1683), the Puritan minister who founded Rhode Island, favored the veiling of women, and his female followers used to wear “impenetrable veils” in the congregation as he preached. Joseph Cotton differed with him on this practice– so perhaps here we have the first big debate on American veiling!

Martin Luther wrote, “the wife should put on a veil, just as a pious wife is duty-bound to help bear her husband’s accident, illness, and misfortune on account of the evil flesh.” He also said, “Fur and head coverings are women’s most attractive and honorable and most genuine and most necessary adornment.” It is not at all clear that he was speaking only of being in church. American Lutherans are a major strain in American Protestantism and many Lutheran women wore headcoverings in church until recently.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote that a man should not cover his head, since he is in the image of God. Women, he held, however, only reflect this divine glory of men. He wrote, “Therefore she ought not to appear, but with her head veiled, as a tacit acknowledgment of it.” Although Wesley was mainly speaking of public religious services, he seems to have thought women might better veil in general, since he urged the practice “especially in a religious assembly.”

Methodism was perhaps the largest Protestant denomination in the United States in the late 19th century.

Kathleen Holscher writes that in 19th-century Protestant America, Catholic women in orders were a scandal:

“female religious orders offered antebellum Protestants a constellation of possibilities that alternately frightened and fascinated them. Catholic sisters took vows of obedience to an institution that could seem sinisterly at odds with democratic governance. They wilfully accepted imprisonment (or so it seemed) and made themselves discouragingly plain and sexless to the eyes.”

She points out that the Protestant public was nevertheless sort of obsessed with these sisters’ lives: “Their curiosity made one of these– Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery –the second bestselling title in the United States in the years before the Civil War.

Holscher says,

“Early in

Awful Disclosures

, Monk recounts her own “taking of the veil”:

“I stood waiting in my large flowing dress for the appearance of the Bishop. … I then threw myself at his feet, and asked him to confer upon me the veil. He expressed his consent, and threw it over my head, saying, “Receive the veil, O thou spouse of Jesus Christ.”

The cloth thrown over her head binds the narrator in a spurious pseudo-marriage and provides quite literally the shroud of secrecy that will drive the horrors of her memory along.”

[Kathleen Holscher, “Contesting the Veil in America: Catholic Habits and the Controversy over Religious Clothing in the United States,” Journal of Church and State; Oxford Vol. 54, Iss. 1, (Winter 2012): 57-81.]

And of course then we have the Amish, the Mennonites and other minorities.

Pirro doesn’t know the constitution, doesn’t know American history, doesn’t know her own tradition of Catholicism, and doesn’t have the slightest idea about Islam.

Once again, Fox plays the role of the 21st century American Goebbels, spreading racialized hatred and making accusations of disloyalty at the minorities it holds to pollute the body public.

What, oh what, you have to wonder, is the Fox Final Solution to this problem?

New York, Feds Join to Get 100,000 Rape Kits Tested Nationwide

NEW YORK—Languishing evidence in over 100,000 sexual assault cases around the country has been sent for DNA testing with money from a New York prosecutor and federal authorities, spurring over 1,000 arrests and hundreds of convictions in three years, officials say.

It’s estimated that another 155,000 or more sex assault evidence kits still await testing, and thousands of results have yet to be linked to suspects. Many who have been identified can’t be prosecuted because of legal time limits and other factors.

Still, the effort is a start at correcting “an absolute travesty of justice,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said Tuesday while releasing results of his $38 million investment in testing — all outside his own turf.

“That backlog not only undermined justice and the perception, and reality, of equality — it also made every woman and every American less safe,” he said.

Law enforcement and lawmakers have faced growing calls in recent years to eliminate what’s known as the rape kit backlog — swabs and samples collected in sex assault cases but never tested for DNA. Victims’ advocates see the untested kits as signs that sexual assaults weren’t taken seriously enough.

Vance, who took office after New York City cleared its own testing backlog, and the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance have worked in tandem since 2015 to help other places tackle theirs.

The two agencies have paid to send years-old kits to labs from dozens of states and communities, ranging from Flint, Michigan, to Mobile, Alabama, to Las Vegas.

One of those kits sat untested for 15 years in Tracy Rios’ case, though she’d given police the name of the then-friend she accused of luring her into a vacant apartment and sexually assaulting her in 2002 in Tempe, Arizona. Police said they couldn’t charge him based on her word, and then she underwent a rape kit exam, but the investigation soon stalled, she said.

“I lost faith in the system. I thought they didn’t care,” she said Tuesday. A message was left for Tempe police about the case.

Two years ago, she was told her rape kit had finally been tested, with money from the Manhattan DA’s office, and police were pursuing her case anew.

“It was amazing to know I was going to get justice,” said Rios, whose attacker is now serving a seven-year sentence for sexual assault.

The Associated Press generally does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they agree to be identified, as Rios did.

Some cities have mobilized on their own to test years-old rape kits.

But the big grants from Manhattan and Washington “infused this movement with resources,” says Ilse Knecht of the Joyful Heart Foundation, a sexual assault victims’ advocacy group.

The backlog built up over decades, partly due to the cost of tests that can run $1,000 or more.

But victims’ advocates also say many sex assault cases simply got sidelined over the years by police and prosecutors who unduly disbelieved or downplayed victims’ allegations.

New York City worked through a 17,000-case backlog between 2000 and 2003. Vance, a Democrat elected in 2009, offered other places money to attack their own backlogs and negotiated discount rates with labs.

His program — financed with $38 million from settlements in banking-related cases — dispatched more than 55,000 rape kits to testing labs. The results have yielded 186 arrests and 64 convictions to date, with more investigations and prosecutions still underway, according to Vance’s report.

In Battle Creek, Michigan, arrests included a suspect in the 2013 sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl.

Authorities had his name from the start — he was a family friend — but her rape kit wasn’t tested until Vance’s grant program helped Michigan wipe out a 3,400-kit backlog.

The woman, now 19, says she was initially angry when authorities told her they were ready to prosecute three years after the assault. She’d gotten on with her life, helped by counseling.

But she ultimately agreed to testify, and her attacker pleaded guilty and was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.

“I feel proud of myself” for going forward with the case, the woman said Tuesday. And she doesn’t feel scared to walk around town anymore.

Another nearly 45,000 rape kits have been sent to labs through the Justice Department program — and it’s produced nearly 899 prosecutions and 498 convictions and plea bargains, according to data the agency provided Monday to The Associated Press.

The Justice Department has put $154 million over three years into its sexual assault kit initiative, which includes other things besides testing.

DNA testing isn’t a surefire way to close cases. Only some rape kits match any profile in the FBI databank — and sometimes it’s just a match to DNA from another crime scene, with no name attached unless the person gets arrested in the future.

Even when DNA matches a known offender, prosecution is sometimes impossible because the legal time clock has run out, the suspect has died or for other reasons.

But authorities and victims’ advocates say arrests aren’t the only measure of the impact of getting the tests done.

“It means that the criminal justice system cares what happened to you,” Knecht said.