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Khashoggi Case Puts Light on Yemen’s Plight

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of its Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who are dedicated to pursuing truth within their countries and elsewhere.

The murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October ironically put the spotlight on millions of Yemenis who have suffered throughout a four-year bloody and destructive war.

In particular, the U.S. media has boosted its scrutiny of Saudi and Emirati atrocities in Yemen. The media—as well as U.S. think tanks—have placed the murder in the overall context of Mohammed bin Salman’s excesses in the Middle East.

Media attention played a significant role in the rebuke the U.S. Senate recently delivered to President Trump, whose policy is to stand by the Saudis. The Senate passed a resolution Dec. 13 to end U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen and also blamed Salman, the Saudi crown prince, for the killing of Khashoggi.

The Senate resolution isn’t expected to pass in the House, but the vote was still welcome news to many in Yemen. “This is an overdue vote,” says Sarah Ahmed, a humanitarian worker in the capital city of Sana’a. “It’s been absolutely cruel for President Trump’s administration to assist a military operation, despite all evidence of the humanitarian catastrophe and war crimes committed in Yemen.”

Following mounting media pressure, top Trump administration officials also called for a cease-fire in the conflict, and Yemen peace talks commenced in Sweden. The talks addressed humanitarian concerns, and some steps such as a prisoner exchange were agreed upon, but the parties failed to reach accord on economic and political issues. Another round of peace talks is scheduled for the end of next month.

Khashoggi, the Tipping Point

The war in Yemen has created what the U.N. secretary-general called the “worst humanitarian crisis” in the world today. The conflict began in 2015 as a civil war between the incoming Yemeni government and the Houthi militia group. Saudi Arabia intervened with deadly airstrikes, leading an international coalition into the battle. According to a recent report, the violence killed an estimated 60,000 Yemenis in the last two years. An additional 85,000 may have starved to death, and millions more could face that fate.

During the Obama and Trump administrations, the U.S. has supported the Saudi-led coalition, providing intelligence assistance, selling billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and, until last month, refueling Saudi aircraft during bombing raids. Reports by groups such as Human Rights Watch suggest that if war crimes are committed using these U.S.-supplied weapons—and if the Trump administration doesn’t investigate that issue—the U.S. risks complicity in the crimes. The United Kingdom also has been a key supporter of the Saudi-led coalition and has assisted it with sizable arms sales.

Yet before the Khashoggi killing, the media in the U.S. published only limited coverage of the conflict. “I remember in the very beginning the press used to occasionally cover it and rarely mention the U.S. role,” says Alex Emmons, an Intercept reporter who covers Yemen on Capitol Hill. “I actually used to think every time a terrible Saudi-led airstrike attack would happen that this attack would definitely get huge attention and wouldn’t be swept under the rug, but eventually I would get disappointed and things would tend to be overlooked.”

Critics pointed to some U.S. media outlets for inadequate reporting of the conflict. MSNBC didn’t mention the U.S. role in Yemen once during the course of a year, and “60 Minutes” aired a 13-minute segment on the human cost and devastation of the war but failed to mention U.S. support of Saudi Arabia.

Things changed after Khashoggi’s murder, with The New York Times taking the lead. The Times stepped up its coverage of the Yemen conflict, dedicating prominent space on its front page for the first time since the war began and featuring a photo of a skeletal Yemeni girl who later died of starvation.

In past years, Saudi restrictions had added to the dearth of international media coverage—for example, Saudi Arabia closed the Sana’a airport and refused entry to journalists.

“(Being) denied access by the Saudi-led coalition to Yemen has always been a problem for me and other journalists in the U.S., but the murder of Khashoggi has made everybody more skeptical of Saudi Arabia and more interested in scrutinizing Saudi Arabia’s actions,” said award-winning New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof when this reporter interviewed him at the U.N. “The media’s interest in Yemen (also) stems from the U.N. warnings about losing the fight against famine in Yemen. The Times’ photos were clear and devastating proof.”

In recent months, The Washington Post has produced extensive coverage of Khashoggi’s murder and of atrocities committed by Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Following Khashoggi’s death, the Post also published a controversial op-ed written by Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, head of the Houthi militia’s supreme revolutionary committee. In the op-ed, Houthi condemned Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen and the Khashoggi murder.

Critics then condemned the Post for providing space to someone who himself has committed war crimes. “Mohammed Ali al-Houthi ‘met the designation criteria’ to be sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council,” wrote Gregory Johnsen, former member of a U.N. panel of experts on Yemen. “In other words, he is someone who has committed documented violations and crimes.”

Al-Houthi also has been responsible for the imprisonment of Yemeni journalists, another critical factor that has limited coverage of the conflict. The Houthis’ war on media groups began when the militia leader Abdelmalek al-Houthi, cousin of Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, said in 2016 that “the media workers are more dangerous to our country (Yemen) than the nationalist and warring mercenaries.”

Dozens of Yemeni journalists have been detained in Houthi-run prisons, but international agencies often do not recognize them as captives because the Houthis are a rebel group and not a government. “If the Houthis were considered a governing authority, Yemen would have the fifth highest number of journalists in jail in the world,” according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Karen Attiah, global opinions editor at The Washington Post, didn’t respond to an email inquiring about the reasons for publishing Al-Houthi’s op-ed. However, she said in a tweet that “We have given space to … all sides of many of these debates roiling the region. And yes, including the abusive ones.”

Other observers agree that all voices in the Yemen conflict should be heard. “Media is supposed to cover what is, not what ought to be,” says Nabeel Khoury, a former U.S. diplomat to Yemen. “The Washington Post owes its readers the facts about the actors on the ground in any conflict—what they want, what their strategies are, etc.”

However, media outlets “should be careful not to overdo it, thereby turning their coverage into a platform for any combatant’s propaganda,” Khoury says. “In that vein, Saudi Arabia and the UAE [United Arab Emirates] buy influence via pages in major papers and grants to think tanks. The Houthis don’t have as much cash to throw around.”

Yemen and U.S. Think Tanks

The think tanks Khoury mentioned have played a critical role in providing information about the war in Yemen, but many of these institutes are financially backed by Persian Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia. Leading think tanks such as the Brookings Institution and the Middle East Institute are among those that have received full or partial funding from the Middle East.

“For many years, in D.C.’s think tank world, there has been a general unwillingness to come down (as) hard on Saudi Arabia as they do on other countries,” Emmons says. “That’s probably because so many think tank organizations receive generous donations from Saudi Arabia.”

Think tanks often recruit scholars and analysts (including people who formerly worked in influential political positions) who produce policy papers that not only reflect an institutional bias but also favor the perspective of their donors. The analysts then appear on U.S. cable news shows as expert commentators. Given journalists’ lack of access to Yemen, these commentators serve as a replacement and a news source.

Whether through op-eds, television interviews or panel discussions, the think tanks have played a significant role in shaping public perception of the Middle East. Investigative reports have shown how the UAE and Saudi Arabia have bought influence, which has allowed those countries’ perspectives to dominate U.S. media and policymaking.

In the wake of the Khashoggi case, however, some think tanks are reconsidering their financial ties with Gulf countries. For instance, Brookings recently terminated a research grant funded by Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East Institute has stopped accepting Saudi funding pending the investigation into Khashoggi’s death.

The Role of Advocacy Groups

Since the beginning of the war, nongovernmental organizations have played a critical role as advocates and reporters in Yemen. Their informational reports and interviews have been covered by the U.S. media and have presented compelling, on-the-ground content.

“NGOs’ role could be helpful, since we have more access to Yemen than journalists do, and we could bring out more information (about) political events than think-tankers do,” says Will Picard, executive director of Yemen Peace Project (YPP), a nonprofit advocacy group. “Nonetheless, we are sometimes accused of not having objectivity.”

Picard was referring to an incident in 2017 in which the Yemeni Embassy in the U.S. accused YPP of hosting an event that had “a political agenda tied to the Houthi rebels.” YPP defended its neutrality, saying it had documented abuses by both sides in the conflict. Foreign Policy magazine supported the nonprofit, calling the embassy accusation an “unusual step betraying Sanaa’s acute sensitivity to criticism.”

In the end, instead of undermining YPP’s credibility, the attack provided free publicity to the organization—something the small group wouldn’t have been able to afford on its own.

Many important issues in Yemen aren’t receiving adequate media coverage, according to representatives of other humanitarian groups. “When you look at the media coverage on Yemen, a lot of it—and fairly so—is on the humanitarian crisis and Saudi-led airstrikes,” says Kristine Beckerle, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Both these issues absolutely need to be covered, but things that get a lot less attention (include) UAE detention, Houthi abuses, complicated political maps like in Taiz.” (Beckerle was referring to abuses in secret prisons run by the UAE and to Taiz, a war-torn city located between the capital cities of the warring Yemeni factions.) This lack of coverage has not only impacted public understanding, but has also skewed international policies regarding Yemen.

In the wake of the Khashoggi murder, observers believe expanded U.S. media coverage of Yemen may lead to concrete change. “The coverage makes things more at stake for predators when they bomb or starve civilians, and it also embarrasses … governments like the U.S. and U.K. that are implicated, so it puts pressure on them to change policies,” Kristof says. “I think this is exactly what is going to happen here.”

Report: Number of Journalists Killed in Retaliation Nearly Doubles in 2018

NEW YORK—The number of journalists killed in retaliation for their work nearly doubled this year, according to a report released Wednesday by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The New York-based organization found that at least 34 journalists were targeted and killed for their work as of Dec. 14. In all, at least 53 died while doing dangerous work. That compares with 18 retaliation killings out of 47 deaths documented by the committee in 2017.

The committee also said the imprisonment of journalists has been on the rise.

“The context for the crisis is varied and complex, and closely tied to changes in technology that have allowed more people to practice journalism even as it has made journalists expendable to the political and criminal groups who once needed the news media to spread their message,” the committee said in its annual report.

The report came a day after the media freedom group Reporters Without Borders issued its own tally, saying the U.S. was among the top five deadliest countries for journalists this year for the first time, with six dead. Four of those were journalists killed by a gunman in a June attack on the newspaper Capital Gazette in Maryland. In addition, another two journalists died while covering a storm.

The shooting, in which another newspaper employee was also killed, was the deadliest single attack on the media in recent U.S. history.

The Paris-based group documented 63 professional journalists worldwide who died in 2018.

Both organizations investigate and verify the circumstances of every journalist death before listing it in their tallies, but they differ in what circumstances they include. For instance, Reporters Without Borders included the two journalists who died covering the storm. The committee, in addition to retaliation killings, lists journalists who have died in combat, crossfire or on other dangerous assignments.

The Committee to Protect Journalists report includes the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a native of Saudi Arabia fiercely critical of its royal regime. His Oct. 2 death inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has reverberated on the global political scene amid allegations that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was involved.

Khashoggi lived in self-imposed exile in the United States, and had gone to the Saudi consulate to formalize his divorce. He was strangled and dismembered — allegedly by Saudi agents.

Saudi Arabia denies Prince Mohammed was involved, but the kingdom did acknowledge after international pressure that the plot was masterminded by Saudi agents close to the prince.

Asked whether he believed the crown prince had ordered Khashoggi’s murder, President Donald Trump said last month, “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.” While the president condemned the violence against journalists, the committee noted in the report that he has called members of the media “enemies of the people.”

Time magazine last week recognized jailed and killed journalists as its “person of the year,” including Khashoggi, Maria Ressa imprisoned in the Philippines, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo imprisoned in Myanmar, and staff at the Capital Gazette.

The deadliest country for journalists this year has been Afghanistan, the committee found. Thirteen journalists were killed there, some in back-to-back blasts staged by suicide bombers and claimed by the militant Islamic State group.

In Syria and Yemen, two of the worst civil-war decimated countries, the fewest journalists were killed since 2011. Three died in Yemen, and in Syria, the committee recorded nine deaths compared to a high of 31 in 2012. However, the drop may be due to limited access or extreme risks that discourage media visits, the committee said.

Why Is a Major University Housing Priests Accused of Sex Abuse?

This story was produced in partnership with the Northwest News Network.

On the surface, Father James Poole seemed like the cool priest in Nome, Alaska. He founded a Catholic mission radio station that broadcast his Jesuit sermons alongside contemporary pop hits. A 1978 story in People magazine called Poole “Western Alaska’s Hippest DJ … Comin’ at Ya with Rock’n’Roll ’n’ Religion.”

Behind the radio station’s closed doors, Poole was a serial sexual predator. He abused at least 20 women and girls, according to court documents. At least one was 6 years old. One Alaska Native woman says he impregnated her when she was 16, then forced her to get an abortion and blame her father for raping her. Her father went to prison.

Like so many other Catholic priests around the country, Poole’s inappropriate conduct with young girls was well-known to his superiors. A Jesuit supervisor once warned a church official that Poole “has a fixation on sex; an obsession; some sort of mental aberration that makes him see sex everywhere.”

But the last chapter in his story reveals a new twist in the Catholic abuse scandal: Poole was sent to live out his retirement years on Gonzaga University’s campus in Spokane, Washington.

For more than three decades, Cardinal Bea House on Gonzaga’s campus served as a retirement repository for at least 20 Jesuit priests accused of sexual misconduct that predominantly took place in small, isolated Alaska Native villages and on Indian reservations across the Northwest, an investigation by the Northwest News Network and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

A trove of internal Jesuit correspondence shows a longstanding pattern of Jesuit officials in the Oregon Province—an administrative area that included Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho and Alaska—privately acknowledging issues of inappropriate sexual behavior, but not releasing that information to the public, which avoided scandal and protected the perpetrators from prosecution.

When abuse was discovered, the priests would be reassigned, sometimes to another Native community.

Once the abusive priests reached retirement age, the Jesuits moved them to Cardinal Bea House on Gonzaga’s campus or another Jesuit residence, to comfortably spend the rest of their lives in relative peace and safety. The university administration did not respond to requests for an interview to answer whether the administration or student body were aware of the presence of known sexual offenders on campus.

The last known abusive priest was moved out of Cardinal Bea House in 2016, Jesuit records show. 

Father John Whitney, the former leader of the Oregon Province who ordered Poole to move into Cardinal Bea House, said the Jesuit order is obligated to provide for priests in retirement. He said it was the only facility in the province where past offenders like Poole, then in his 80s, could be contained effectively while also receiving necessary medical care. 

Poole resided at Cardinal Bea House from 2003 to 2015. If he had been allowed to live independently, without church oversight, he surely would have abused more people, even at his advanced age, Whitney said in an interview.

The house, Whitney said, was “a retirement community where he could be monitored.”

In a pair of depositions in 2005, Whitney said he did not inform Gonzaga administrators or police in Spokane about Poole’s history after moving him into Cardinal Bea House. A Spokane Police Department spokesperson said they had not received any reports, either from Gonzaga or the Jesuit order, about allegations against any residents of Cardinal Bea House.

Non-abusing Jesuits also lived at Cardinal Bea House, but there were specific “safety plans” for abusers that banned sexually abusive priests from commingling with students. The Oregon Province would not release copies of the plans. While we learned of no reports of residents abusing Gonzaga students, the restrictions were not rigorously enforced. 

In a deposition in one of the several lawsuits filed against him, Poole said he regularly went to the school library and basketball games. Poole said he met with a female student alone in the living room of Cardinal Bea House when she came to interview him for a report on Alaska. Student journalists and filmmakers in 2010 and 2011 were also permitted to interview residents, including Joseph Obersinner, who worked in Native communities in Montana, Washington and Idaho. He was accused of sexual misconduct against a minor.

“We love being right in the middle of campus,” Obersinner told the school’s student newspaper. “It’s a blessing to see the active energy and happiness of youth every day.”

Cardinal Bea House is a modest low-rise brick building, with large windows in front and a small carport behind. It resembles an unremarkable office building, save for the white statue of an angel-winged saint standing guard over the front entrance. On a recent crisp autumn day, a prankster had slipped a hand-rolled cigarette between the statue’s fingers.

While the building appears on campus maps and is listed in the campus directory, it’s not officially part of the private Jesuit university. Cardinal Bea House is owned by the Jesuit order of the Catholic Church.

Poole was joined at Cardinal Bea House by other priests whose abuse was known, often for years, by the Jesuit order.

Father James Jacobson, sent there in the mid-2000s, was accused of sexual abuse by members of the Alaska Native community of Nelson Island. He claimed he never forced anyone to have sex, saying in a deposition that he had consensual sex with seven Native women. He admitted to fathering four children and using church funds to hire prostitutes in Anchorage and Fairbanks when he was principal of a Jesuit boarding school in Glennallen.

Another priest, Henry Hargreaves, accused of sexually assaulting young boys, was sent to Cardinal Bea House by 2003, and subsequently allowed to lead prayer services in at least four Native American communities on two reservations in Washington state.

The abusive Jesuits at Cardinal Bea House were part of the Oregon Province’s outsized problem with sexual misconduct. The province had 92 Jesuits accused of sexual abuse, by far the most of any province in the country, according to data we compiled from church records, a database maintained by advocates for sex abuse victims, and information released earlier this month by the Jesuits. In addition, about 80 percent of accused abusers worked in Native communities in the Oregon Province.

Poole has been described as charismatic, outgoing and narcissistic, so he was perfectly suited for his role as the voice of KNOM, the radio station he founded in 1971. Elsie Boudreau, an Alaska Native, was a station volunteer and one of Poole’s victims. From the time she was 10 until she was 16, she volunteered at KNOM.

Boudreau said in an interview that when she was 11 or 12, during a Saturday music request show in which they were alone in the studio, Poole would kiss her on the lips and fondle her, something she didn’t realize was wrong until she was much older. He also made her sit on his lap and lie on top of his body.

For Boudreau, it was a slap in the face that Poole lived out his retirement comfortably until he died early this year. “To me, what that says is they are taken care of,” Boudreau said. “They are protected by the Catholic Church, when the victims were never protected.”

The Jesuits’ deep roots in Native communities

The Catholic Church was deeply embedded in the Native communities of Alaska and Indian reservations in the Northwest. In the early 1900s, the Jesuits had established a school and an orphanage in Elsie Boudreau’s hometown, the predominantly Alaska Native community of St. Mary’s in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Jesuits, officially called the Society of Jesus, are a Catholic religious order founded in the 1500s. While Jesuits can work in various roles from parish priests to teachers, the order is known for its academic and socially conscious bent. There are more than 100 Jesuit high schools, colleges and universities in North America.

Jesuit priests were formidable figures in small Native villages, presiding over daily life from Mass to marriages, baptisms to burials; even teaching catechism lessons, where some of the abuse of the youngest victims took place. Boudreau said she viewed her Catholicism as more central to her identity than being Yup’ik. That religious identity was shattered by her abuse.

“The whole premise behind the Catholic Church and their mission with the Native people, with indigenous people, was to strip them of their identity,” Boudreau said. “And so sexual abuse was one way. I think it’s intentional when you have an institution that is aware of problem priests, perpetrator priests, and moves them to places where they believe that people are ‘less than,’ where they believed the people there would not speak out.”

In 2002, two other abuse victims in Boudreau’s community filed a lawsuit against the church. Learning of the suit from a news story, Boudreau, then in her early 30s, had a shock of recognition. She, too, had suffered abuse, and no longer wanted to remain silent.

Boudreau reported her abuse and was deeply unsatisfied with the response. The region’s presiding bishop eventually invited her to a meeting, but Boudreau said he didn’t seem to understand how the abuse had affected her life.

“It was very clear he didn’t care about what happened to me,” Boudreau said. “He didn’t acknowledge that little girl who was hurt and say, ‘I’m sorry this happened to you, what can I do?’ Instead, I became a liability.”

Yet, Jesuit leadership had known about James Poole’s behavior for longer than Boudreau had been alive. In a 1960 letter to a Jesuit official, local Jesuit leader Segundo Llorente fretted over Poole’s conduct. Poole regularly had long, one-on-one conversations with young girls about sex, Llorente wrote. Llorente’s letter speculated that Poole, “has a fixation on sex; an obsession; some sort of mental aberration that makes him see sex everywhere. Some think that may be (sic) he is projecting outwardly what is eating him inwardly … he is deliberately placing himself at all times in dangerous situations.”

There might have been some personal insight in those words. The names of both Llorente and the Alaska church official with whom he was corresponding, Father Paul O’Connor, appeared on a list released by the Fairbanks Diocese in 2009 of priests accused of sexual misconduct.

Despite Llorente’s warning, Poole’s abuse of minors and young women in Alaska went on for decades, according to attorneys who represented clients, as well as letters from church officials and other court documents. At least one victim accused him of rape.

In another letter from 1986, which has not previously been made public, Bishop Michael Kaniecki of Fairbanks wrote to Archbishop Francis Thomas Hurley of Anchorage: “Hopefully, my letter will nip this mess in the bud. Tried to cover all bases, and yet not admit anything.”

In 1988, Poole was removed from his position at KNOM after young women who had volunteered at the station wrote letters to the bishop in which they accused Poole of sexual misconduct.

The following year, Father Frank Case, the head of the Oregon Province, endorsed Poole for a new position. Case is currently vice president at Gonzaga, an adviser to the school’s president, and chaplain for the school’s nationally ranked men’s basketball team, the Bulldogs.

He wrote a letter to the Catholic chaplains association backing Poole’s application to become a chaplain at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington.

“(Poole) is a Jesuit priest in very good standing, and it is my strong expectation that he will serve in such a ministry in a manner that is both generous and effective,” Case wrote. Poole got the job, working at the hospital until 2003.

In a 2008 deposition, Case said he did not review Poole’s personnel file before writing the letter because he had no indication of misconduct. In a statement through Gonzaga University’s public relations office, Case said he did not have access to Poole’s personnel file.

It wasn’t until 1997, 37 years after Llorente’s letter of caution, that church officials finally came to see their Poole problem as critical. That December, the bishop of Fairbanks sent a letter to the head of the Oregon Province, at least the third provincial to deal with Poole’s sexual misconduct. “Unfortunately, more skeletons keep falling out of the closet … if we do not make a clean cut with Poole, it could jump up and bite us,” he wrote, noting a potential whistleblower was threatening to publicly expose the extent of Poole’s wrongdoings.

The following year, the bishop sent another letter to the province head urging Poole’s old sermons and ministerial messages be removed from the KNOM’s airwaves entirely. “(We could) end up with a public scandal and a possible law suit (sic),” the letter reads. “It is my fear … that if the wrong person hears Jim’s voice anywhere, it might just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

Those fears were prescient. In 2003, the same year Poole was forced to retire to Cardinal Bea House, Boudreau became the first person to sue Poole and the church and not withhold her name from the public.

It was Boudreau’s only avenue of redress since the statute of limitations had run out on prosecuting her claim in criminal court. At the time, Alaska had a five-year time frame for prosecuting sexual abuse of minors. She’s one of over 300 Alaska Native victims of child sex abuse by clergy.

In a deposition for the lawsuit, Poole admitted abusing Boudreau. He denied ever raping anyone. He justified his actions with Boudreau and other victims because they fell short of sexual intercourse. “I thought I was bringing love into the life of other persons,” he said.

Boudreau’s suit was settled in 2005 for $1 million. It was followed by at least five other lawsuits specifically naming Poole and accusing him of widespread abuse.

Hundreds of other suits followed, naming dozens of other sexually abusive priests active in the Oregon Province. The Jesuits settled all of this litigation for a reported $166 million, the costs of which forced the province to declare bankruptcy in 2009. It was the third-largest settlementin Catholic Church history.

Stories like Poole’s echo across Alaska Native communities. St. Mary’s has just 500 residents, but at least 15 priests accused of sexual abuse were stationed there between 1927 and 1998. It was so pervasive that Boudreau says at least two of her seven siblings and two of her cousins were also sexually assaulted by Jesuit clergy.

The names of religious and lay people accused of abuse who lived in Alaska at some point in their tenure with the church must be listed and published every year by the Fairbanks Diocese as part of the 2010 bankruptcy settlement. As of late October, the diocese listed 46 people.

One man on the list is the aforementioned Father James Jacobson, accused of abuse in 1967 by members of the Alaska Native community of Nelson Island. In a letter at the time, the Jesuit superior in Alaska, Jules Convert, said he wasn’t sure of the veracity of the allegations against Jacobson because the people of Nelson Island “are not yet advanced enough to give impartial and true testimony.”

Jacobson was sent into retirement at Cardinal Bea House by 2005. Convert was also accused of sexually abusing over a dozen young boys in Alaska.

‘I have to take responsibility for this’

In 2002, John Whitney was  as the leader of the Oregon Province. He had to deal with a flood of accusations against priests in the province, starting days after taking the position. It was a situation, he said, for which his prior training had not adequately prepared him.

A year later, Elsie Boudreau filed her lawsuit, and Whitney took action against James Poole. He immediately ordered Poole to stop celebrating Mass and sent him directly to Cardinal Bea House. “You are not to have any unsupervised contact with any minors nor are you to meet alone with any women,” Whitney wrote.

Whitney said Cardinal Bea House was the only place where Poole could be monitored, but Poole moved freely throughout campus and, at least on one occasion, met alone with a female student.

Whitney told us in a recent interview that the order didn’t contact the local police department because Poole, and other priests with accusations against them, had not been criminally charged.

Gonzaga University wouldn’t answer questions about whether top officials knew about abusive priests at Cardinal Bea House. University officials declined multiple requests for interviews over a six-week period. Several top university officials, however, held leadership roles in the Jesuits’ Oregon Province as the sex abuse scandal unfolded.

Now a self-described “simple parish priest” in Seattle, Whitney is still processing his role in the crisis.

“I think some of the people deserved to be in jail,” Whitney said. “We knew we couldn’t put them in jail. I felt we had a responsibility to watch over them and that’s what we tried to do. Now, were sometimes the jailers overly beneficent, overly kind? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s hard to be a jailer.”

Whitney was candid about what he owed to survivors and their families. “I have to take responsibility for this, personally. It can’t be something that is delegated to someone else,” he said. “They deserved to confront me.”

Asked if he thinks Poole is in hell, Whitney said he believes Poole is in a sort of purgatory. “What I believe purgatory to be is that we all have to be purged of the things we hold onto,” Whitney said. “In being purged of those things, we have to experience what we put others through.”

Whitney said the church needs to come to a public reckoning, an opening up of the archives to show it is serious about stamping out abuse. The recent grand jury report out of Pennsylvania, which showed decades of abuse kept hidden from public view by the church, is work that should have been done by the church itself, he said.

Earlier this month, Jesuits West, the new province created with the 2017 merger of the Oregon and California provinces, voluntarily released the names of priests accused of sexual misconduct with minors or “vulnerable adults.” But the new list omits at least 13 priests previously accused publicly in lawsuits and bankruptcy documents.

Tracey Primrose, a spokeswoman for Jesuits West, said more names could be added in the future after an external review due to be completed by spring, but did not explain the omissions.

The Jesuits have a new place to send abusers

There are no longer any known abusive priests at Cardinal Bea House. In the past couple of years, they have been relocated south to the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center in Los Gatos, California.

Sacred Heart is a former training school, where some of the abusive priests began their preparation for Jesuit life decades ago. The facility is hidden behind a hilltop winery, which also used to be owned by the Jesuits and was used to produce Communion wine. The order stopped its wine production in 1986 and the winery is now operated by a secular company.

The goal of the reshuffling, John Whitney said, was to place the priests in a more secure and isolated location. Since many of the offending Jesuits are older and declining in health, Sacred Heart was also a place where they could receive better medical care.

But Sacred Heart has problems of its own. By moving admitted sexual offenders into a facility that also services vulnerable people, it created an environment where predators had space to commit abuse.

In 2002, two mentally disabled men working as dishwashers at the facility received a combined $7.5 million settlement from the order for decades of sexual abuse by Jesuit priest Edward Thomas Burke and Brother Charles Leonard Connor. After a friend of one of the victims went to police, both men were convicted and required to register as sex offenders.

The Jesuits also settled a separate lawsuit for $1.6 million after an abused priest, James Chevedden, killed himself.

He, too, was sexually abused by Connor when he was sent to Sacred Heart after suffering a mental breakdown. When Chevedden learned Connor was returning to Sacred Heart, and that other abusive clergy were going to be sent there, he asked to be moved. When his request was denied, he killed himself, according to the lawsuit filed by Chevedden’s father.

California’s database of sex offenders only lists one person residing at Sacred Heart, Gary Uhlenkott, a Jesuit priest and former Gonzaga University music professor who was sentenced to six months in jail in May after pleading guilty to possessing child pornography. However, the list released earlier this month of priests accused of sexually abusing minors shows at least seven currently living at Sacred Heart.

James Poole died in March at Sacred Heart. His remains were sent back to Spokane, where they were inurned at the Jesuits’ grassy cemetery on the outskirts of town.

While he was stationed at Cardinal Bea House, Poole’s sole responsibility was to maintain the cemetery grounds.

There, Poole’s remains rest amid 54 other Jesuits who were also accused of sexual abuse. They’re outside the gate of a K-12 school.

The carefree voices of children the same age as Elsie Boudreau when she was abused float over the grounds during recess.

U.S. to Withdraw All American Troops in Syria, Official Says

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration will soon withdraw all of the approximately 2,000 American troops from Syria, a U.S. official said Wednesday as President Donald Trump declared victory in the mission to defeat Islamic State militants there.

Planning for the pullout has begun and troops will begin leaving as soon as possible, said the official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss military planning and spoke on condition of anonymity.

On Wednesday, as Vice President Mike Pence met with top military leaders in the Pentagon, Trump tweeted: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”

That declaration of victory is far from unanimous, and the withdrawal decision immediately triggered demands from Congress—including Republicans —for more information and a formal briefing on the matter. Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who just returned from Afghanistan, said he was meeting with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis late in the day.

The decision will fulfill Trump’s long-stated goal of bringing troops home from Syria, but military leaders have pushed back, arguing that the IS group remains a threat and could regroup as it battles in Syria’s long-running civil war.

Trump has argued for the withdrawal since he was a presidential candidate. But the decision underscores the division between him and his military advisers, who have said in recent weeks that pockets of IS militants remain and U.S. policy has been to keep troops in place until the extremists are eradicated.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who remains concerned about Iranian efforts in the area, reacted in noncommittal fashion after talking with Trump by telephone.

“This is, of course, an American decision,” he said. Israel will learn of the timetable and manner of withdrawal, he said, and no matter what “we will safeguard the security of Israel and protect ourselves from this arena.”

Leading Republican senators reacted with displeasure to the news.

Graham, typically a Trump backer, said he was “blindsided” by the report and called the decision “a disaster in the making.” He said, “The biggest winners in this are ISIS and Iran.”

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said the withdrawal would be a “grave error with broader implications” beyond the fight against IS.

Just last week, the U.S. special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, Brett McGurk, said U.S. troops would remain in Syria even after the Islamic State was driven from its strongholds.

“I think it’s fair to say Americans will remain on the ground after the physical defeat of the caliphate, until we have the pieces in place to ensure that that defeat is enduring,” McGurk told reporters on Dec. 11. “Nobody is declaring a mission accomplished. Defeating a physical caliphate is one phase of a much longer-term campaign.”

And two weeks ago Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. still has a long way to go in training local Syrian forces to prevent a resurgence of IS and stabilize the country. He said it will take 35,000 to 40,000 local troops in northeastern Syria to maintain security over the long term, but only about 20 percent of them have been trained.

Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said in September that the U.S. would keep a military presence in Syria as long as Iran is active there. “We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders and that includes Iranian proxies and militias,” he said.

James Stavridis, a former Navy admiral who served as top NATO commander, tweeted Wednesday that “Pulling troops out of Syria in an ongoing fight is a big mistake. Like walking away from a forest fire that is still smoldering underfoot. Big winner is Iran, then Russia, than Assad. Wrong move.”

The withdrawal decision, however, is likely to be viewed positively by U.S. ally Turkey, and comes following several conversations between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the past several weeks. The two spoke at the G-20 summit in Argentina and in a phone call last Friday. The Turks have targeted U.S.-backed Kurdish troops along the Syria-Turkey border, which Turkey considers an insurgent threat. A U.S. withdrawal — including the end of joint U.S. and Turkish patrols along the border — could open the door for more Turkish operations against the Syrian rebels.

Erdogan said Monday he had gotten “positive answers” from Trump on the situation in northeast Syria where he has been threatening a new operation against American-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters.

Just hours before the withdrawal decision became public, the State Department announced late Tuesday that it had approved the sale of a $3.5 billion Patriot missile defense system to Turkey. The Turks had complained that the U.S. was slow walking requests for air defenses and had signed a deal with Russia to buy a sophisticated system in a deal that Washington and Ankara’s other NATO partners strongly opposed.

Completion of the deal with Russia for the S-400 system would have opened up Turkey to possible U.S. sanctions and driven a major wedge between the allies. It was not immediately clear if there was a connection between the Patriot sale and the decision on U.S. troops.

Although the withdrawal decision doesn’t signal an end to the American-led coalition’s fight against the Islamic State, it also will likely erode U.S. leadership of that 31-nation effort. The administration had been preparing to host a meeting of coalition foreign ministers at the State Department early next year.

The decision to withdraw was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria expert at the Institute for the Study of War, said the withdrawal is likely to create new problems.

“The bottom line is that the American withdrawal from eastern Syria will create a power vacuum that will lead to a new phase of international conflict in Syria,” she said in a telephone interview. She predicted that the Russians, the Iranians, Syrian President Bashar Assad and the Turks will compete for the terrain and resources previously under U.S. control “at the expense of” the Syrian Kurds who have partnered with U.S. forces against IS.

The U.S. first launched airstrikes against IS fighters in Syria in 2014. In the years that followed, the U.S. began partnering with Syrian ground forces to fight the extremists.

The Pentagon recently said that IS now controls just 1 percent of the territory it originally held.

Hikmat Habib, a Syrian Kurdish, said he has not yet seen any evidence of a withdrawal, but added that the move is “part of the disagreement between influential states in Syria: American-Turkish disagreements, American-Russian disagreements.” He said the U.S. also wants to end the Iranian presence in Syria and prevent it from spreading.

“We may see a new phase in the Syrian crisis in the coming days, and its features will be shown as Daesh is now limited to specific areas,” he said, using another name for IS. “There may be a new mechanism for resolving the Syrian crisis” based on political processes and U.N. resolutions.

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Associated Press writers Robert Burns and Matthew Lee contributed to this report.

Stocks Skid to 15-Month Low After Fed Raises Rates Again

NEW YORK—Stocks gave up a big rally and took a dive in afternoon trading Wednesday after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates again and said it plans to keep raising them next year. The market finished at its lowest level since September 2017.

The U.S. central bank said it expects to increase interest rates at a slightly slower pace next year, and also said it isn’t planning any changes in the gradual shrinking of its large bond portfolio. Investors appeared to hope the Fed would unveil a sharper slowdown in interest rate hikes and other credit tightening policies because economic growth is likely to slow down.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 351 points and lost 513 points at its lowest point. Before the Fed’s decision was announced at 2 p.m. Eastern Time, it was up 381 points.

Bond prices rose, sending yields sharply lower. Bond yields are benchmarks for many kinds of long-term loans including mortgages.

The Fed raised its short-term interest rate for the fourth time this year, to a range of 2.25 percent to 2.5 percent. The Fed’s benchmark rate is at its highest point since 2008, which means higher borrowing costs for many consumers and businesses.

The Fed is now forecasting two increases in rates in 2019 instead of three. The central bank expects the long-term level of its main interest rate will be 2.8 percent, down from an earlier projection of 3 percent.

Bond prices rose following the Fed’s announcement. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.78 percent from 2.84 percent immediately before the Fed’s announcement and 2.82 late Tuesday. That’s a substantial move for that benchmark lending rate.

The yo-yo movements for the stock market were a result of markets trying to parse Powell’s comments, which essentially were: The economy is strong enough to warrant a rate increase now, but not so strong to need three rate increases, as the Fed had indicated a few months ago.

“Chairman Powell was threading the needle today,” said Frances Donald, head of macroeconomic strategy at Manulife Asset Management. “He had to say that the economic picture is not as good as three months ago, while also saying that the pillars of the economy remain intact. And markets have to react, live, to that ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ that Powell has to play in this economy.”

Internet, technology and consumer-focused companies dropped. Facebook fell sharply after the New York Times reported that the social media network gave companies more access to users’ personal data than it has previously said. The report said Facebook had arrangements with more than 150 companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify and Netflix that let different companies read, write and delete users’ private messages, see the names of a user’s friends or their news feeds without their consent.

Separately, the District of Columbia sued Facebook for allowing Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining firm working for the Trump campaign, to improperly access data from as many as 87 million Facebook users.

Facebook lost 7.2 percent to $133.25. It’s down 39 percent since late July on concerns about a slowdown in user growth, multiple privacy and safety scandals, as well as the possibility of increased regulation in the future.

FedEx plunged after saying international shipping, especially in Europe, fell in the latest quarter. FedEx also said the U.S.-China trade dispute is affecting its business. The shipping company posted a smaller profit than analysts expected and said it will cut spending and offer buyouts to some workers to help make up for the shaky results.

FedEx stock lost 12.2 percent to $162.51. It has dropped 35 percent this year. Rival UPS lost 3 percent to $94.32 and has slumped 21 percent in 2018.

The Dow fell 1.5 percent to 23,323.66. The S&P 500 skidded 39.20 points, or 1.5 percent, to 2,506.96. It’s tumbled 14.5 percent in the last three months, including a loss of 9.2 percent so far in December.

The Nasdaq composite gave up 147.08 points, or 2.2 percent, to 6,636.83. The Russell 2000 index, which has suffered broader declines than the rest of the market, fell 27.95 points, or 2 percent, to 1,349.23.

Despite the losses, David Kelly, the chief global strategist for JPMorgan Funds, said the market will ultimately react to the health of the economy. He said the Fed’s moves Wednesday made sense and could prolong the already long-lasting growth in the U.S.

“The Fed behaving in a very prudent, balanced way increases the possibility of a very balanced expansion” continuing, he said.

Oil prices turned higher after plunging a day earlier on worries about rising supplies and weakening global growth, which could weigh on demand.

Benchmark U.S. crude climbed 2.1 percent to $47.20 a barrel in New York. It dropped 7 percent Tuesday and closed at a 16-month low, and has fallen almost 40 percent since Oct. 3. Brent crude, used to price international oils, rose 1.7 percent to $57.24 a barrel in London.

Wholesale gasoline rose 2.7 percent to $1.39 a gallon and heating oil added 2.9 percent to $1.81 a gallon. Natural gas lost 2.9 percent to $3.73 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Energy company stocks fell again. They’re trading at their lowest levels since early 2016.

The dollar was down for the day and recovered slightly after the Fed’s move. The dollar slipped to 112.36 yen from 112.53 yen. The euro rose to $1.1368 from $1.1357 and the British pound dipped to $1.2621 from $1.2639.

European stocks rose after Italy’s government reached an agreement with the European Commission on its budget plans. The Italian FTSE MIB jumped 1.6 percent. Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 1 percent while Germany’s DAX added 0.2 percent and the CAC 40 in France rose 0.5 percent.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 index fell 0.6 percent and while South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.8 percent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was 0.2 percent higher.

Gold rose 0.2 percent to $1,256.40 an ounce. Silver added 0.8 percent to $14.82 an ounce. Copper climbed 1.9 percent to $2.72 a pound.

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Business Writer Stan Choe contributed to this story from New York.

Bernie Sanders Is a 2020 Favorite

The frenzied, two-year countdown to the 2020 presidential election has begun amid photo ops and speculation from cable news talking heads. On the left, support is growing for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a career progressive who has pushed for the rights of the working poor through policies such as Medicare for All and a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

“Voters trust Sanders because he has maintained the same class-struggle message for 40 years,” Ben Beckett wrote in Jacobin. “And this leads to the most important reason Sanders must run and the Left must support him: no other candidate has either the desire or the ability to polarize the country along class lines.”

“For those of us who believe in radically transformative political change, the choice is already clear – Bernie Sanders is the only viable option,” Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, wrote in the Guardian.

Sanders’ potential competition includes establishment Democrats like Joe Biden—who has been criticized for his treatment of Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings in 1991—and Sen. Kamala Harris, who defended the death penalty as California state attorney general. Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke broke a pledge not to accept campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies when he took money from oil and gas executives.

“No other Democrat so consistently names the capitalist class (‘the millionaires and billionaires’) as the root of the country’s problems. While most Democrats take thousands of dollars from big corporations, Sanders not only refuses, but goes out of his way to use his fame to bully them into treating their workers better,” Beckett wrote.

Early polls indicate Sanders has a wide support base. Among 1,015 people surveyed in a recent CNN poll, he had approval from 58 percent of non-white voters, 74 percent of people who disapproved of Trump, and 57 percent of respondents age 18 to 34. A poll by progressive PAC Democracy for America found Sanders had the majority of support at 36.14 percent among 94,163 members.

A survey of women of color in politics by advocacy group She the People placed Harris as the top 2020 candidate with 71.1 percent of support. Sanders had 12.1 percent of the respondents’ support. But only 256 women responded to the survey, and nearly half of the women surveyed were campaign donors—in other words, insiders who might not buy into Sanders’ anti-establishment message. Other women surveyed included current and former elected officials, campaign managers and women who run political organizations.

Nearly half of women who responded to the survey identified as African-American and nearly 40 percent identified as Latinx. A viral tweet by Sanders critic Clara Jeffery, editor-in-chief of the magazine named for famed labor organizer Mother Jones, incorrectly identified the survey as one only among black women.

Robinson argued that while Sanders is not flawless, myths persist throughout the Democratic  Party about the demographics of his support base. Robinson wrote:

Attempts to portray Sanders as the candidate of white ‘Bernie Bros’ ignore the facts—Sanders has higher favorability ratings among people of color than any other Democratic politician. It’s obvious that he’s the party’s best shot. He has a formidable team of experienced organizers, national popularity and name recognition, and a clear, bold agenda that can win over working-class people of all genders and races.

As pundits and voters alike learned in 2016, polls, like Meyers-Briggs tests, horoscopes and tea leaf readings, only project an illusion of certainty in a chaotic world. The 2020 race is nowhere near finished.

 

Trump Suffers Another Big Defeat on Immigration

President Donald Trump has just lost another political battle on immigration, having been forced to back down on his threat to initiate a partial government shutdown over funding for his symbolic border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Early on Tuesday, he was busy pushing on Twitter anti-immigrant propaganda, claiming without evidence that “Illegal immigration costs the United States more than 200 Billion Dollars a year. How was this allowed to happen?”

But soon after, the first indications of a political concession came from White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who suggested on Fox News that there might be other ways to obtain funding for Trump’s border wall than by threatening a partial government shutdown. Only a week earlier, Trump had met Democratic congressional leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer in a televised meeting in which he assumed responsibility for a government shutdown if it were to happen, going as far as saying, “I am proud to shut down the government for border security.”

Perhaps Huffington Post‘s S.V. Date was spot-on when he speculated on Monday that if Trump made good on his threat to shut down the government, he could play golf over the holidays with Secret Service agents going along without pay to protect him. Trump is scheduled to fly on Friday to his Florida golf resort for a 16-day vacation, and Secret Service staffers are among those whose paychecks are on the line over Trump’s threat to bring the federal government to a standstill.

Just as Trump had to backpedal on his formal policy of family separation this summer, he seems to have lost the fight over funding his beloved wall. As long as Democrats hold firm and reject Republican counteroffers, the most likely scenario will entail a continuing resolution to fund the government until Democrats take power in the House next year. This is a major victory for immigrant rights.

In matters of life and death, however, immigrants are still suffering, particularly new arrivals. The recent death of a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl named Jakelin Caal Maquin is evidence of the horrors being visited upon undocumented people. Maquin died within a few hours of being apprehended by Border Patrol agents at a remote section of the U.S.-Mexico border. She was traveling with her father, who insists she was fed and hydrated, contradicting Homeland Security spokespeople who are instead claiming she was starving and dehydrated before being taken into custody.

Immigrant advocates point out the Trump administration policy of placing border sentries on bridges at international ports has forced migrants to cross at more remote and dangerous parts of the border. When asked to respond to Maquin’s death, Trump administration officials are blaming the immigrants themselves. Trump advisor Stephen Miller — considered to be the architect of the -resident’s harshest anti-immigrant policies—said Sunday on “Face The Nation,” in response to a direct question about Maquin’s death, “In fact, Border Patrol saves about 4,000 lives every single year. Unfortunately, hundreds die on the dangerous trek up.” In effect, Miller blamed Maquin and her father for her death. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen echoed Miller’s sentiment in an interview on “Fox and Friends,” saying, “This is just a very sad example of the dangers of this journey. This family chose to cross illegally.”

Given the cruel treatment the Trump administration has visited upon undocumented people since 2017, Maquin’s death should not surprise us, nor should the despicable talking point echoed by officials blaming her death on her family’s decision to migrate.

Additionally, children like Maquin continue to be housed in cages in the United States. A number of Democratic lawmakers traveled to Tornillo, Texas, last weekend to draw attention to the conditions in which a “concentration-camp”-like detention center is housing thousands of undocumented teens. Democratic members of Congress such as Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas and Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii called attention to the administration’s policy of keeping children in detention for as long as possible and criticized Trump and his aides for empowering authorities to go after any adults that might show up to sponsor the kids. Hirono explained the background checks that are required are “creating tremendous delay in approving these sponsors.” She added, “And I think it has a chilling effect on sponsors coming forward because this information, and many of the sponsors are undocumented, is shared with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and what ICE does is deport people.”

In other words, just as Trump’s policy of pushing migrants toward more dangerous routes endangers their lives, his entrapment of undocumented sponsors results in lengthy detention periods for thousands of undocumented minors.

The road to undoing Trump’s anti-immigrant cruelty is going to be a long one. The outrage this past summer over family separation that forced the government to backtrack, along with the coming concession on the border wall funding, constitute two major victories that ought to be just the beginning in the fight for the dignity for undocumented people. Democrats are vowing more oversight of the Tornillo facility’s detention of children, and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are demanding an independent investigation into Maquin’s death.

If and when there is a greater reshaping of political power in Washington, Democrats ought to go even further in ensuring the architecture of immigration enforcement and mechanisms for legalizations are just and fair. For far too long they have been reactive in their approach to immigration in spite of broad public support for the rights of immigrants. Americans understand this is a moral issue.

Therese Patricia Okoumou, a Congolese American who scaled the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July as an act of civil disobedience, powerfully articulated that moral position when she spoke outside a New York courthouse this week: “[M]igrant children … simply came to this country, like our ancestors did, to seek happiness, freedom and liberation. Instead of welcoming them like Lady Liberty symbolizes, instead of treating them with kindness, what we showed them is cages.”

Okoumou, who put her own body on the line for her principles and was found guilty on a number of federal charges, including trespassing, added, “So if I go in a cage with them, I am on the right side of history.”

 

 

Facebook Bombshell Reignites Calls for Zuckerberg’s Resignation

Just hours after civil rights groups called on Facebook’s top executives to step down from the company’s board for allowing “viral propaganda” and “bigoted campaigns” to spread on the platform, demands for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to resign intensified after a bombshell New York Times report late Tuesday detailed a “special arrangement” the social media behemoth had with tech corporations that gave them access to users’ data and private messages without consent.

“An incredibly damning indictment of Facebook, every single paragraph,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wrote of the Times report, which is the latest in a long line of recent revelations about Facebook’s intrusive—and possibly illegal—data practices.

Citing hundreds of pages of internal company records and interviews with dozens of former employees, the Times reported that “Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent” and “gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”

Additionally, the Times found, Facebook “permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.”

“Facebook is a public trust that has broken our trust,” wrote author and NBC political analyst Anand Giridharadas in response to the Times report. “Mark Zuckerberg must resign now.”

The New Republic‘s Jeet Heer added, “Facebook is evil, folks.”

In addition to being invasive, former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) officials to the Times that Facebook’s data-sharing “partnerships” with other corporate giants may also violate federal law.

“This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” said David Vladeck, former head of the FTC’s consumer protection bureau. “I don’t understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.”

Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, wholeheartedly agreed, declaring, “I don’t believe it is legitimate to enter into data-sharing partnerships where there is not prior informed consent from the user.”

“No one should trust Facebook until they change their business model,” McNamee concluded.

Corporatists Brought Us to the Brink of This Catastrophe

You know the story: the globalists want your guns. They want your democracy. They’re hovering just beyond the horizon in those black helicopters. They control the media and Wall Street. They’ve burrowed into a deep state that stretches like a vast tectonic plate beneath America’s fragile government institutions. They want to replace the United States with the United Nations, erase national borders, and create one huge, malevolent international order.

The only thing that stands in their way is — take your pick — the Second Amendment, Twitter, or Donald Trump.

Conspiracy theorists have, in fact, been warning about just such a New World Order for decades, going all the way back to the isolationist critics of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to fears about the United Nations in the post-World War II moment. During the Cold War, the John Birch Society and fringe elements of the Republican Party nurtured just such anti-globalist sentiments, but they never made much headway in the mainstream world. As the Cold War ended, however, the anti-globalist virus began to spread again, this time more rapidly, and it’s threatening to become a pandemic.

The Agenda 21 Dystopia

On September 11, 1990, just after Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait and just before the reunification of Germany, George H.W. Bush spoke of a “new world order” that would unite all countries in defense of the rule of law and thwart the Iraqi autocrat’s regional ambitions. The phrase was meant as a rallying cry, not an actual plan, but that didn’t stop the president’s America First critics from reading all manner of mayhem into his speech.

The elder Bush, who had long toiled in the shadow of Ronald Reagan, was in some ways a curious target for those who feared the end of U.S. sovereignty. As recent posthumous assessments revealed, he was an early champion of states’ rights (against civil rights), supported prayer in school and the NRA, made a U-turn as a presidential candidate to oppose abortion, launched wars in Panama and the Persian Gulf, and presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anti-globalists, however, focused on a different part of Bush’s résumé: he’d gone to Yale, later belonged to a wealthy elite of Texas oil barons, served as ambassador to the United Nations, and was a card-carrying member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and that most elite of global agenda-setting outfits, the Trilateral Commission.

Such characteristics made him particularly vulnerable to attacks from the far right. Preacher Pat Robertson, for instance, disliked Bush’s staid Episcopalianism and resented losing to the future president in the 1988 Republican primaries. In his 1991 bestseller, The New World Order, Robertson refocused all his ire on the president’s presumed global ambitions. “Is George Bush merely an idealist or are there now plans underway to merge the interests of the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the United Nations?” he asked rhetorically and then, of course, provided the answer:

“A single thread runs from the White House to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission to secret societies to extreme New Agers. There must be a new world order… There must be world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all.”

Though that 1991 book is largely forgotten, the televangelist’s attacks on Bush’s “globalism” resurfaced again and again in different forms. Beginning in 1994, for instance, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series spun Robertson’s dire predictions of a one-world government into 16 novels and several dreadful movies. Just to ensure that readers wouldn’t miss their point, they even installed the anti-Christ as the head of the United Nations. More recently, Donald Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton’s elitism echoed some of the very themes Robertson had sounded almost three decades earlier.

Oddly, though, Bush and Robertson agreed on one thing, on which they even found common ground with former Vice President Al Gore: the importance of addressing climate change.

As president, Bush pushed a number of environmental initiatives related to air quality, ozone depletion, and climate change more generally. In 1992, his administration even endorsed a tepid “action plan,” Agenda 21, that came out of that year’s global environmental meeting in Rio de Janeiro. In reality, it was just another of an endless stream of documents produced by such environmental conferences. For some Americans, however, those two words came to evoke the most terrifying aspect of the Bush era, proof positive that he was covertly constructing the very New World Order that he had invoked.

Perhaps the leading proponent of Agenda 21 conspiracy theories has been TV and radio personality Glenn Beck. In 2012, he even published a dystopian novel called (you won’t be surprised to learn) Agenda 21. In it, he and co-author Harriet Parke fingered environmentalists as the true agents of the coming apocalypse and issued dire warnings about climate change becoming the lever a future global authority would use to eradicate national sovereignty and enslave Americans to a collective vision. “Just a generation ago, this place was called America,” Beck and Parke wrote. “Now, after the worldwide implementation of a UN-led program called Agenda 21, it’s simply known as ‘the Republic.’ There is no president. No Congress. No Supreme Court. No freedom.”

Once you start looking for Agenda 21, it pops up in all sorts of strange places. Newt Gingrich ran for president in 2012 with a pledge to rescind the “plan.” Ted Cruz linked it to — you guessed it — George Soros and warned that its implementation would deprive Americans of their right to play golf (no joke). Most recently, YouTube and Twitter have lit up with contrived reports that Agenda 21, not climate change, was somehow responsible for the latest California wildfires.

And here’s the truly bizarre part: while Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, and the rest of them were nattering on about an obscure, non-binding U.N. document, they were missing the real story. A nightmarish New World Order was indeed being constructed around them. It’s global, malevolent, aimed at destroying ever more American lives, and — according to a recent Trump administration report — getting worse by the minute.

The Real New World Order

A significant number of Americans believe that they’re still relatively safe behind the walls of Donald Trump’s Fortress America. Homeland Security protects them from international terrorists. Border patrol agents block caravans of refugees and asylum-seekers. By refusing to ratify membership in institutions like the International Criminal Court, Congress keeps the U.S. safe from foreign influences. President Trump has only reinforced such feelings by pulling the United States out of international pacts like the Paris climate accord and global bodies like the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Because the world keeps knocking on America’s door, the present wave of nationalist politicians has added a few more locks for safety’s sake. All such precautions, however, have done nothing to prevent the establishment of an actual New World Order on American soil. Yes, it’s happened, even if the conspiracy mongers haven’t cared to notice.

There is indeed a new global order. It’s called climate change and, unlike the scenarios imagined by the anti-globalists, it’s wreaking havoc not in some dystopian future but right in the here and now: the prairie fires that struck Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Texas panhandle in the spring of 2017, killing seven people and destroying an area equivalent to three Rhode Islands; Hurricane Maria that devastated large areas of Puerto Rico that fall, leaving nearly 3,000 people dead; Hurricane Michael that swept through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia with unprecedented winds and flooding this October, killing 45 and causing $30 billion in damage; and the wildfires that raged across California in November, killing more than 80 people and destroying nearly 14,000 homes. And that’s just to begin a list of weather catastrophes in this country.

Global warming did not, of course, create the weather itself. It’s only intensifying it. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently put it, “A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration, and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events.” This summer, for instance, saw record-high temperatures in the United States and around the world. Large stretches of the South and West experienced near-record droughts in 2018, while other parts of the country suffered from historic levels of rainfall. (North Carolina recently endured an astounding years’ worth of snow in barely more than 24 hours. Both the number and the severity of Atlantic hurricanes are also on the rise.

And according to a Trump administration report released last month that the president himself rejects, it’s going to get a lot worse fast. That Fourth National Climate Assessment paints a dire picture of plummeting agricultural yields, declining dairy and seafood production, spreading wildfires, shrinking water resources in the interior of the country, and flooded areas on the coasts before century’s end. Extreme weather events since 1980 have already cost the United States more than $1 trillion. By 2100, the assessment projects, the costs of climate change will absorb as much as 10% of this country’s annual gross domestic product. Meanwhile, any hopes that global carbon emissions had begun to flatline in recent years, thanks to efforts to move toward renewable sources of energy, were dashed this month with reports that the output will actually grow by a projected 2.7% in 2018, a larger percentage than the previous year, on the way to the highest levels on record.

Americans can blame state governments or Washington for failing to respond in a timely manner to these disasters, but such intensifying weather patterns aren’t a local or even a national phenomenon. What’s happening in the United States is happening everywhere. The New World Order of climate change connects people abandoning their homes to rising tides in Florida and Bangladesh, dying from drought-related fires in California and Australia, being swept away by huge storms in the Carolinas and the Philippines, or losing their livelihoods in Nebraska and Honduras. It’s an order defined by a terrifying new rulebook in which more carbon emissions translate directly into less polar ice, an increase in sea levels, and more extreme weather.

Climate change doesn’t care about borders. It thumbs its nose at laws and legislation. It is unaffected by the size or destructive capabilities of even the mightiest militaries. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this particular New World Order, at least in the United States, is that many of those most affected by it refuse to acknowledge its existence.

Interviewing people affected by last year’s prairie fires in the Midwest, for instance, the New Yorker’s Ian Frazier encountered an extraordinary level of denial:

“No one I talked to in Kansas told me that he believed in climate change. Prevailing opinion holds that nothing about the recent extreme weather here is much different from what’s always been. People say that Native Americans sometimes used prairie fires as an environmental tool.”

Yet the recent fires were both unprecedented and part of a longer-term transformation of the Great Plains from irrigated farmland into what will someday be a spreading desert thanks to rising temperatures and extreme weather above ground and the disappearing Ogallala aquifer beneath it. And this time, the dispossessed Midwesterners are unlikely to be able to relocate to California, as they did when dust storms hit in the 1930s, because the West Coast will have major problems supporting even its existing agriculture.

If all the death and destruction connected to this New World Order were simply the result of periodic shifts in the life cycle of the planet — as some climate-change deniers maintain — then humans could just prepare for the inevitable, dinosaur-style extinction to come. But that’s hardly the case. Climate change is the direct result of human action — and some humans are so much more responsible than others.

Blame the Globalists

From 2006 through 2016, before he served briefly as secretary of state, Rex Tillerson was the head of ExxonMobil. He was supposed to be a cleaner, greener Big Energy CEO, but during his tenure he never altered the company’s basic DNA of drill, drill, drill. He entered into murky energy deals with Russia, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Saudi Arabia. Worse, he attempted to profit off climate change by, among other things, expanding operations into a rapidly warming Arctic. Even though he publicly acknowledged global warming — with plenty of caveats and misstatements — he also helped funnel millions of dollars to climate denial groups and suitably climate-denying politicians.

Not much changed when Tillerson became Trump’s first secretary of state. He failed to prevent the president from withdrawing from the Paris climate accord. He dutifully implemented new rules to facilitate the international funding of coal-fired power plants. And he presided over a gutting of the State Department meant to hamper its ability to address global issues like climate change.

Through it all, however, Rex Tillerson remained just the kind of globalist that Donald Trump had railed against as a presidential candidate. While head of Exxon, he had, for instance, been a regular participant at the World Economic Forum at Davos as well as in the Clinton Global Initiative. Ultimately, Trump criticized his secretary of state for having “totally establishment” views on foreign policy before unceremoniously firing him by tweet.

But there’s the establishment Trump likes and the establishment he doesn’t.  Despite their very public falling out, the president has always admired establishment types in the Tillerson mold, those who belong to the international network of fossil fuel execs (oil, gas, and coal) chiefly responsible for building the New World Order of climate change. Rockefeller, Hunt, Getty, Mellon, Drake, Buffet, Koch, and Icahn: these are the globalists who set in motion the transformation of our world in which a growing dependency on fossil fuels morphed into an economic system geared to ever-expanding exploitation of such resources, and finally to an ecosystem on the verge of catastrophe.

Keep in mind that this is exactly what Donald Trump grew up with in fossil-fueled New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s what he’s still nostalgicfor. Hence, his push for the United States to become “energy dominant” by extracting every last drop of fossil fuel from land, sea, and ice. Hence, his close relationships with petro-autocrats, especially Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This is, in short, his kind of globalism, and it’s now fully embedded in the White House, his administration, and Washington.

The U.N.? Environmentalists? George Soros? Peanuts compared to the real globalists, the ones who have controlled the supply and pricing of energy for more than a century and now have a representative sitting in the Oval Office. Think of it as a magician’s classic misdirection trick: look over there at Agenda 21 while the real globalists pick your pocket and poison your world. As environmentalist Bill McKibben has pointed out, the latest generation of fossil-fuel globalists knew exactly what they were doing (and what the consequences would be) when they devoted immense amounts of money to emphasizing “the uncertainty” of the science of climate change.

The magician David Copperfield once created the illusion that the Statue of Liberty had disappeared. The present crew of magical globalists have done him one better. They have been surprisingly successful in creating the illusion that the New World Order of climate change doesn’t exist when the proof is increasingly all around us.

There’s no conspiracy, no weather mafia, but the United States is nonetheless firmly in the grip of a New World Order. Many thousands have already lost their lives, their liberty, or their ability to pursue happiness thanks to the global forces now being loosed on our planet — and the more the United States has asserted its exceptionalism in recent years, the more it has proven to be no exception to the rules of climate change.

Here’s the rub: it’s long past the warning stage. Metaphorically speaking, the black helicopters have already landed on the White House lawn (and probably in your own backyard as well). A New World Order is indeed beginning to tyrannize America and Donald Trump is encouraging the globalists responsible to do even more of the same. The only way to address this ultimate threat is through the sort of international cooperation that the anti-globalists fear the most,a linking of arms across the rising seas to defeat a malign global force and the powerful elite that maintains it.

This challenge requires the equivalent of war against something as evil as totalitarianism. Anything less would be like trying to put out a wildfire with gasoline or like spitting into a (Category 5) hurricane. Anything less would be an epoch fail.

There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Global Warming Pause’

Yet another team of researchers has concluded that the much-debated global warming ‘pause’ which preoccupied climate science around the turn of the century simply did not happen.

If their work continues to win support from other researchers, it will leave those who have argued that the pause was real with some explaining to do.

Some scientists have argued that there was a pause, or hiatus, in the rate of global warming recorded from 1998 to 2013, and that this cast doubt on the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the available evidence showed the world had continued to warm.

Other researchers said variously that the pause had never started, or blamed changes in the trade winds. Many said the pause (or its absence) were anyway irrelevant, because the long-term global warming trend was continuing unabated.

“Global warming did not pause, but we need to understand how and why scientists came to believe it had, to avoid future episodes like this”

Some argued that the “missing” heat had been absorbed by oceans, a few that volcanic discharges might have masked sunlight, some that it was simply evidence of a natural cycle, others that in a longer time series the apparent slowdown became invisible.

Now an international team of climate researchers, after re-analysing existing data and studies, says there has never been a statistically significant pause.

This conclusion holds, they say, whether considering the supposed pause as a change in the rate of warming in observations, or as a mismatch in rate between observations and expectations from climate models. Their findings are published in two papers in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

In other words, they say, there is no reason to doubt that warming continued as mainstream climate scientists argued it would, nor to doubt the methods they used, including climate modelling. But there are reasons to ask why the non-existent pause was so enthusiastically promoted by some scientists and others.

Unsupported by data

Dr James Risbey, from CSIRO Australia, is the lead author of one of the studies, which reassessed the data and put it into historical context.

He said: “Our findings show there is little or no statistical evidence for a ‘pause’ in GMST [global mean surface temperature] rise. Neither the current data nor the historical data support it … there was never enough evidence to reasonably draw any other conclusion.

“Global warming did not pause, but we need to understand how and why scientists came to believe it had, to avoid future episodes like this. The climate-research community’s acceptance of a ‘pause’ in global warming caused confusion for the public and policy system about the pace and urgency of climate change.

“That confusion in turn might have contributed to reduced impetus for action to prevent greenhouse climate change. The risks are substantial.”

Biassed interpretation

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, from the University of Bristol, UK, is the lead author of the companion study, which looks at the alleged mismatch between the rate of global warming in observations and climate models.

He said: “We found the impression of a divergence – that is, a divergence between the rate of actual global warming and the model projections – was caused by various biases in the model interpretation and in the observations. It was unsupported by robust statistics.”

Despite this, the authors point out that by the end of 2017, the ‘pause’ was the subject of more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles. Many of these articles do not give any reason for their choice of start year for the ‘pause’, and the range spans 1995 to 2004.

Professor Lewandowsky said: “This broad range may indicate a lack of formal or scientific procedures to establish the onset of the ‘pause’. Moreover, each instance of the presumed onset was not randomly chosen but chosen specifically because of the low subsequent warming. We describe this as selection bias … some of the biases that affect the datasets and projections were known, or knowable, at the time.”

Contrarian pressure

When the researchers re-analysed the data, accounting for the selection bias problem, they found that no evidence for a divergence between models and observations existed at any time in the last decade.

They offer several possible reasons why some scientists believed climate warming lagged behind modelled warming. One co-author, Professor Naomi Oreskes, from Harvard University, US, said: “An explanation lies in the constant public and political pressure from climate contrarians.

“This may have caused scientists to feel the need to explain what was occurring, which led them inadvertently to accept and reinforce the contrarian framework.”

Dr Dann Mitchell, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol, who was not involved with either study, said: “Given the fast pace of increasing climate change understanding, the conclusions of this paper will be very relevant for the inevitable future ‘apparent’ climate contradictions that emerge over time.”