Chris Hedges's Blog, page 526

Trump-Kim Deal Overpromised on Return of War Remains

WASHINGTON—More than a month after North Korea pledged to immediately return some American war dead, the promise is unfulfilled.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who traveled to Pyongyang this month to press the North Koreans further, said Wednesday the return could begin “in the next couple of weeks.” But it could take months or years to positively identify the bones as those of specific American servicemen.

In a joint statement at their Singapore summit, President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un committed to recovering the remains of prisoners of war and those missing in action decades after the Korean War — “including the immediate repatriation of those already identified.”

That was more than a month ago, on June 12. Although Trump said eight days later that the repatriation had happened, it had not. It still has not. So, it was not “immediate,” though the Stars and Stripes newspaper reported from South Korea on Tuesday that the North has agreed to transfer as many as 55 sets of remains next week. The Pentagon and the State Department declined to comment on any specifics promised by the North.

“We’re making progress along the border to get the return of remains, a very important issue for those families,” Pompeo said Wednesday at the White House. “I think in the next couple of weeks we’ll have the first remains returned, that’s the commitment, so progress certainly being made there.”

Likely also to prove untrue is the part of the Trump-Kim statement that said the North had war remains “already identified.” It apparently has bones and perhaps associated personal effects, but history shows that any remains handed over by the North are likely to be difficult to identify. In recent days the State Department has changed that phrase to “already collected,” suggesting it realized the remains have not been identified.

“There are no missing Americans who have been ‘already identified’ by the DPRK (North Korea) to be repatriated,” says Paul Cole, who has researched POW-MIA issues from the Korean War for decades and served for four years as a scientific fellow at the Pentagon’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. He said this element of the Singapore statement “reflects a near total ignorance of the role of science” in accounting for war dead.

There is even some doubt that any remains turned over would be of Americans. Trump admitted as much in a CBS News interview July 14.

“You know, remains are complicated,” he said. “Some of the remains, they don’t even know if they are remains.”

That’s a big step back from his false assertion June 20 in Duluth, Minnesota: “We got back our great fallen heroes, the remains sent back today, already 200 got sent back.”

Richard Downes, whose father, Air Force Lt. Hal Downes, is among the Korean War missing, says hopes may have been raised too quickly.

“Yes, the Singapore statement overpromised,” he said, “exacerbated by our hope that it was accurate.”

Hope has long sustained Downes and thousands of other Americans who seek closure after decades of uncertainty about a relative missing from the war. The Pentagon says 7,699 U.S. servicemen are missing from Korea, including about 5,300 believed to be in the North. Downes, 70, was 3½ when his father’s B-26 Invader went down on Jan. 13, 1952, northeast of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. His family was left to wonder about his fate. Downes is now executive director of the Coalition of Families of Korean and Cold War POW/MIAs, which advocates for remains recovery.

The Singapore statement may yet prove to be an important breakthrough. Bringing its promise to fruition, however, is proving harder than Trump made it seem.

As Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies put it in a web essay last week, “What was supposed to be the easiest item on the United States-North Korea negotiations agenda — the return of Korean War soldiers’ remains — is proving to be yet another sticking point.”

Beyond the promised initial return of remains that the North may have been holding in storage for years, the State Department said Sunday the two sides have agreed to restart searches for burial locations of U.S. war remains in North Korea. That effort was suspended by the U.S. in 2005. This raises another delicate issue to be negotiated: how much the U.S. would pay the North for this access. In the past it has paid millions, saying the money was “fair and reasonable compensation” for the North’s help, not payment for bones or information.

In Fitzpatrick’s view, the North has dangled the promise of war remains as bait to attain political objectives such as progress toward a peace treaty to replace the armistice agreement that ended the fighting on the Korean Peninsula in July 1953. The North sees this political objective as an essential element of ending what it calls Washington’s hostile policy toward the North, which in turn is linked to its willingness to give up its nuclear weapons.

The Singapore summit was mainly about Trump’s push to rid North Korea of its nuclear weapons. He said afterward there was no longer a nuclear threat from the North, though Kim agreed only to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” and no detailed plan has been worked out. On Tuesday, Trump seemed to reveal his own doubts about timing. He told reporters, “We have no rush for speed,” adding, “We’re just going through the process.”

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Associated Press writer Ken Thomas contributed to this report.

Confront Digital Oligarchs and Defend Net Neutrality

Imagine if Comcast or Verizon or AT&T, or any other “internet service providers” (ISPs), had the authority to decide what websites you could visit, or what video chat program you must use to call friends or family. Imagine if they manipulated the speed that websites load, giving preference to content providers that paid extra to be in an internet “fast lane.” Imagine if they prevented you from watching videos on any site except YouTube, or barred you from using Skype. These ISPs provide the connection to the internet, but they shouldn’t be able to control how you use the internet. This core quality of the internet, that it is open, is called “net neutrality.”

Current internet regulations just put in place by the Trump administration do away with net neutrality.

One of President Donald Trump’s key policy objectives, as stated by former White House adviser Stephen Bannon, is to “deconstruct the administrative state.” At the Federal Communications Commission, Chairman Ajit Pai has been busily eliminating regulations that govern the U.S. media system, including Obama-era net neutrality protections. Pai replaced those with his own, Orwellian-sounding “Restoring Internet Freedom” regulations, empowering the big ISPs to do just the opposite.

In May, responding to a groundswell of opposition to the net neutrality rollback, the U.S. Senate passed a “resolution of disapproval” under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to override regulations put forth by federal agencies. Such resolutions need to pass the Senate, the House, and then be signed by the president in order to become law. Three Senate Republicans joined all 49 Senate Democrats in passing the resolution. Now the resolution must pass in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. This week, the House effort, initiated by Democrats, picked up its first, crucial House Republican co-signer, Mike Coffman, R-Colo. Net neutrality proponents see his newfound support as evidence that grass-roots organizing is working, and vow to step up the pressure on others.

“Coffman indicated his support came from constituent pressure,” said Craig Aaron, president and CEO of Free Press, after hearing of Coffman’s decision. “More members of Congress are going to be hearing from people in the weeks ahead. We’re working with our partners to organize in-district drop-ins, local rallies and meetings with small businesspeople who care about the open internet.”

Immediately after President Barack Obama’s FCC passed the net neutrality rules in 2015, the telecom industry sued in federal court to get rid of them. The D.C. Court of Appeals ultimately upheld the regulations. That important ruling included a dissent written by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the man Trump just nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In that dissent, Kavanaugh made the extraordinary claim that net neutrality violates the First Amendment rights of the ISPs. “The threshold question,” he wrote in his dissent, “is whether the First Amendment applies to Internet service providers when they exercise editorial discretion and choose what content to carry and not to carry. The answer is yes.” Corporations are not people. Kavanaugh’s views on net neutrality should definitely be a focus at his Senate confirmation hearing.

“Net neutrality rules protect everyone’s right to a free and open internet,” Free Press Action Fund Policy Director Matt Wood said. “They safeguard free expression, entrepreneurship and education, especially for people of color, LGBTQIA communities, immigrants, dissidents, artists and upstart businesses most likely to face discrimination based on the political and commercial whims of broadband providers. The repeal of these rights … is a loss for our democracy and our country, but one we will fight to set right by winning them back.”

People are looking for alternative sources of information in this complex world. They are getting savvier at pursuing the news sources they want, when and how they want it — on websites, through audio and video podcasting, and on mobile platforms. They critique, share, excerpt and repost the content they appreciate, adding their insights and running circles around the old networks while building their own trusted online communities. Many contribute reporting, joining the global ranks of the increasingly important citizen (and noncitizen) journalists.

All this was enabled because the internet has been free and unfettered, driven by net neutrality, making web sources like democracynow.org as readily available as the sites of the major media corporations. These large ISP corporations, however, are trying to control the internet, to restrict the free flow of information, to restore their historical role of for-profit arbiter of what we can and cannot read, watch or hear. Preserving net neutrality will thwart the digital oligarchs, keeping the internet open and free.

 

At an Awkward Age, Finding Grace

An extraordinary movie about an ordinary girl named Kayla, “Eighth Grade” follows her through a final week of middle school. The film, like its heroine, is equal parts cringeworthy and inspirational.

Kayla has the misfortune of being a 13-year-old in an era when teenagers live their lives online, one in which how you look matters and who you are does not. But she has the fortune of being deeply, unconditionally loved by her father (), even though they are rarely on the same wavelength.

So vividly played by that more than once I had to remind myself that “Eighth Grade” is not a documentary, Kayla is not unattractive. But she is majorly awkward, shuffling down corridors, her blue eyes glued to leaden feet as if the universe judges her as wanting. Actually, Kayla is more ignored than she is judged.

At school, her distinction is to be voted “Most Quiet.” At home she makes chatty, affirmational videos on subjects such as “Be Yourself.” And in one of the film’s affectionate contradictions, the next morning she gets up, slathers on makeup, arranges her hair, and returns to bed to take a just-woke-up-like-this selfie.

In his directorial debut, filmmaker Bo Burnham, himself a onetime YouTube phenom, comes not to bury the internet and e-communications but to understand them as social tools that can be used for ill as well as to connect the disconnected. At best, social media can help lost souls like Kayla find their tribe, or at least text to potential tribe members.

While there is a lot of social anxiety in “Eighth Grade,” for the most part it is a low-key film that invites the audience to empathize with and embrace Kayla and her apprehensive father. And much of it affirms writer John Ciardi’s observation that “[y]ou don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.”

Spoiler alert: The film is as much a cautionary tale for parents as it is a portrait of a supercharged transition moment for teens.

To my surprise, the film made me look differently at phenomena I opposed as a parent of teenagers. It persuaded me that the cellphone is not necessarily a crutch, but a kind of night light for adolescents. That time spent on YouTube videos—such as Kayla’s about projecting confidence—is not just a way of avoiding homework, but also a way to think out new ideas and rehearse for real-life encounters.

As I watched “Eighth Grade,” not only did I relive my adolescence, but those of both my daughters. What made it all worth it was Kayla’s supreme resilience and optimism. She never catastrophizes, nor does she take the dirt road into Negativetown. In the belief that the arc of teenage life bends toward gladness, she soldiers on and finds that belief justified. At an awkward age, Kayla finds a kind of grace.

But for its R rating (for a fusillade of the F-word, the mention of “blow job” and for the fact that teenagers differentiate themselves by not seeing films their parents invite them to), I would recommend “Eighth Grade” for parents and their teens. Because middle-schoolers can’t see the film without an adult, go with them—but don’t sit near them.

 

Syrian Forces’ Bombing Intensifies in Southern Rebel Holdout

BEIRUT — Syrian government forces determined to retake the largest opposition holdout in the country’s southwest unleashed an intense bombing campaign, killing at least a dozen people and wounding over 100 in a densely populated town, activists and rescuers said Wednesday.

The aerial bombardment of the town of Nawa came after talks to cede the town failed on Tuesday, triggering the heavy bombardment.

Separately, some 7,000 civilians were expected to be evacuated from two pro-government villages in northwestern Syria as part of a negotiated deal with insurgents who have besieged them for three years.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said “frenzied” overnight bombing in Nawa and the town’s surroundings continued into Wednesday, with at least 350 missiles launched. The Observatory said at least 12 people were killed as rescuers struggled to get to the casualties.

Khaled Solh, head of the local Syria Civil Defense known as White Helmets, said they have documented 14 people killed while Nawa’s only hospital was bombed and rendered non-operational late Tuesday. Only one ambulance was able to get to the town and civilians relied on their cars to bring out at least 150 wounded. He said one of the last orthopedists in the town was killed in the strikes.

The government has stepped up its military offensive on the remaining opposition pockets in the southwestern region, which includes the Daraa and Quneitra provinces that straddle the border with Jordan and the frontier with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. In recent days, Syrian forces have turned to the last opposition pockets near the frontier with Israel.

Images from across the frontier in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights showed large plumes of smoke rising over the Nawa area, as the bombing continued Wednesday.

Hundreds of civilians were seen taking cover in shelters along the frontier, apparently seeking safety in the de-militarized zone between the two countries. Israel has occupied the Golan Heights since 1967, and a cease-fire deal was reached in 1974.

In less than a month, Syrian government forces backed by Russian air power have been able to seize control of most of southwestern Daraa province, including the provincial capital of the same name. The city of Daraa was the cradle of the uprising against President Bashar Assad more than seven years ago.

Alongside the military offensive, the government has struck “reconciliation” deals, essentially a negotiated capitulation in a number of villages that have been in rebel hands for years, to restore government control there.

Talks to hand over Nawa, one of the most densely populated towns in Daraa province, have been ongoing for a couple of days. That has encouraged displaced civilians to return to Nawa, said a local activist who goes by the name Selma Mohammed.

But the talks faltered, triggering the overnight onslaught and a new wave of displacement, with hundreds leaving the town again.

On Wednesday, the bombing focused on towns and villages surrounding Nawa, making the road in and out of town deadly, Mohammed said.

The Observatory said warplanes and ground forces have also targeted the southern tip of the region, which is held by militants affiliated with the Islamic State group.

The government offensive has displaced more than 230,000 people, many of them on the run in the open. Jordan said it will not take in new refugees and Israeli soldiers have shooed away dozens of protesters who had approached the frontier Tuesday, demanding protection.

Meanwhile, about 7,000 Syrians were expected to be evacuated from two pro-government villages in northwestern Syria, ending a three-year siege by insurgents who control the surrounding area. Dozens of buses arrived in the Foua and Kfraya villages to transport the evacuees on Wednesday, Syrian state media said.

Evacuation deals have been criticized by the United Nations as forced displacement.

A negotiated deal to evacuate Foua and Kfraya villagers earlier this year faltered after the evacuation of only 40 people from a third village. The evacuees’ first stop is the government-controlled city of Aleppo.

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Associated Press writer Shlomo Mor in Tal Fares in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights contributed to this report.

EU Fines Google a Record $5 Billion Over Mobile Practices

BRUSSELS — The European Union fined Google a record $5 billion Wednesday for forcing cellphone makers that use the company’s hugely popular Android operating system to install Google apps.

The EU said the practice restricts competition and reduces choices for consumers.

The fine, which caps a three-year investigation, is the biggest ever imposed on a company by the EU for anticompetitive behavior.

It is likely to stoke tensions between Europe and the U.S., which regulates the tech industry with a lighter hand and has complained that the EU is singling out American companies for punishment.

Google immediately said it will appeal. Android has “created more choice for everyone, not less,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai tweeted.

In its ruling, the EU said Google broke the rules when it required mobile phone makers to pre-install the Google Search and browser apps if they wanted to use Google’s app store. Google also paid big producers to exclusively pre-install the Google Search app.

EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said “companies must compete on their merits,” playing by rules that favor consumers and open markets, and not restrict competition.

Vestager said that given the size of the company, the 4.34 billion euro fine is not disproportionate. The penalty is on top of 2.42 billion euro fine ($2.8 billion) that regulators imposed on Google a year ago for favoring its shopping listings in search results.

The latest fine is well within Google’s means. Its parent company, Alphabet, made $9.4 billion in profit in the first three months of the year and reportedly had over $100 billion in cash reserves.

But the EU’s insistence that Google change its practices could have a bigger impact than the fine itself.

“The important thing is not to be distracted by the size of the fine. What is important is that Google has to change its abusive behavior,” Rich Stables, CEO of the rival search engine Kelkoo, told The Associated Press.

Android is an open-source operating system that Google lets cellphone makers use for free. As a result, it is the most widely used system, beating even Apple’s iOS. The EU says Google has market share exceeding 90 percent in most European countries.

The EU wants to ensure that phone makers are free to pre-install apps of their choosing and allow for competition in services such as internet searches. It also wants cellphone makers to be able to more easily use altered versions of Android.

Google argues that could hurt its ability to provide Android for free, as its main way of making money from the operating system is through advertising and the sale of content and apps. Its main rival in mobile systems, Apple, makes most of its money from the sale of devices.

Giving phone makers more freedom to use altered versions of Android could also hurt Google. Samsung, a hugely popular maker of Android devices through its Galaxy line, could break off and take much of the Android system with it.

If Google’s business activities are too harshly constrained, the argument follows, it might no longer be able to provide Android for free to cellphone manufacturers.

Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington, said the ruling “is a blow to innovative, open-source business models.”

The EU’s clash with Google is reminiscent of the bloc’s battle with Microsoft. In that case, the EU said Microsoft used the market dominance of its Windows operating system to lead consumers to use Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer. Microsoft was fined and in the end was forced to give users a more explicit choice of browsers.

As technology’s impact in modern life spreads, European regulators have set the pace in shaping rules for the industry. European governments tend to want to exert more control than the U.S.

The difference in approach was highlighted after a scandal over the misuse of millions of Facebook users’ personal data in political campaigns, including the 2016 White House contest. European regulators had already been working on tougher privacy regulation and in May enforced new rules that are influencing the way some companies operate outside of the region as well.

The Google crackdown comes at a sensitive time for trans-Atlantic relations, with President Donald Trump lambasting the EU as a “foe” only last week. The U.S. imposed tariffs on EU steel and aluminum this year, and the EU responded with import duties on American goods. The U.S. is now also considering taxes on imports of European cars.

The U.S. has also complained that the EU has mainly targeted American companies — including also Apple and Amazon — for breaking competition or tax rules.

“We have to protect consumers and competition to make sure consumers get the best of fair competition,” Vestager said. “We will continue to do it, no matter the political context.”

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Ryan Nakashima in Menlo Park, California, contributed to this report.

The Global Growth of U.S. Special Operations Forces

Early last month, at a tiny military post near the tumbledown town of Jamaame in Somalia, small arms fire began to ring out as mortar shells crashed down. When the attack was over, one Somali soldier had been wounded — and had that been the extent of the casualties, you undoubtedly would never have heard about it.

As it happened, however, American commandos were also operating from that outpost and four of them were wounded, three badly enough to be evacuated for further medical care. Another special operator, Staff Sergeant Alexander Conrad, a member of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces (also known as the Green Berets), was killed.

If the story sounds vaguely familiar — combat by U.S. commandos in African wars that America is technically not fighting — it should. Last December, Green Berets operating alongside local forces in Niger killed 11 Islamic State militants in a firefight. Two months earlier, in October, an ambush by an Islamic State terror group in that same country, where few Americans (including members of Congress) even knew U.S. special operators were stationed, left four U.S. soldiers dead — Green Berets among them. (The military first described that mission as providing “advice and assistance” to local forces, then as a “reconnaissance patrol” as part of a broader “train, advise, and assist” mission, before it was finally exposed as a kill or capture operation.) Last May, a Navy SEAL was killed and two other U.S. personnel were wounded in a raid in Somalia that the Pentagon described as an “advise, assist, and accompany” mission. And a month earlier, a U.S. commando reportedly killed a member of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a brutal militia that has terrorized parts of Central Africa for decades.

And there had been, as the New York Times noted in March, at least 10 other previously unreported attacks on American troops in West Africa between 2015 and 2017. Little wonder since, for at least five years, as Politico recently reported, Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and other commandos, operating under a little-understood legal authority known as Section 127e, have been involved in reconnaissance and “direct action” combat raids with African special operators in Somalia, Cameroon, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Tunisia.

None of this should be surprising, since in Africa and across the rest of the planet America’s Special Operations forces (SOF) are regularly engaged in a wide-ranging set of missions including special reconnaissance and small-scale offensive actions, unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, hostage rescue, and security force assistance (that is, organizing, training, equipping, and advising foreign troops). And every day, almost everywhere, U.S. commandos are involved in various kinds of training.

Unless they end in disaster, most missions remain in the shadows, unknown to all but a few Americans. And yet last year alone, U.S. commandos deployed to 149 countries — about 75% of the nations on the planet. At the halfway mark of this year, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or SOCOM), America’s most elite troops have already carried out missions in 133 countries. That’s nearly as many deployments as occurred during the last year of the Obama administration and more than double those of the final days of George W. Bush’s White House.

Going Commando

“USSOCOM plays an integral role in opposing today’s threats to our nation, to protecting the American people, to securing our homeland, and in maintaining favorable regional balances of power,” General Raymond Thomas, the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, told members of the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year. “However, as we focus on today’s operations we must be equally focused on required future transformation. SOF must adapt, develop, procure, and field new capabilities in the interest of continuing to be a unique, lethal, and agile part of the Joint Force of tomorrow.”

Special Operations forces have actually been in a state of transformation ever since September 11, 2001. In the years since, they have grown in every possible way — from their budget to their size, to their pace of operations, to the geographic sweep of their missions. In 2001, for example, an average of 2,900 commandos were deployed overseas in any given week. That number has now soared to 8,300, according to SOCOM spokesman Ken McGraw. At the same time, the number of “authorized military positions” — the active-duty troops, reservists, and National Guardsmen that are part of SOCOM — has jumped from 42,800 in 2001 to 63,500 today. While each of the military service branches — the so-called parent services — provides funding, including pay, benefits, and some equipment to their elite forces, “Special Operations-specific funding,” at $3.1 billion in 2001, is now at $12.3 billion. (The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps also provide their special operations units with about $8 billion annually.)

All this means that, on any given day, more than 8,000 exceptionally well-equipped and well-funded special operators from a command numbering roughly 70,000 active-duty personnel, reservists, and National Guardsmen as well as civilians are deployed in approximately 90 countries. Most of those troops are Green Berets, Rangers, or other Army Special Operations personnel. According to Lieutenant General Kenneth Tovo, head of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command until his retirement last month, that branch provides more than 51% of all Special Operations forces and accounts for more than 60% of their overseas deployments. On any given day, just the Army’s elite soldiers are operating in around 70 countries.

In February, for instance, Army Rangers carried out several weeks of winter warfare training in Germany, while Green Berets practiced missions involving snowmobiles in Sweden. In April, Green Berets took part in the annual Flintlock multinational Special Operations forces training exercise conducted in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Senegal that involved Nigerien, Burkinabe, Malian, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese troops, among others.

While most missions involve training, instruction, or war games, Special Forces soldiers are also regularly involved in combat operations across America’s expansive global war zones. A month after Flintlock, for example, Green Berets accompanied local commandos on a nighttime air assault raid in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, during which a senior ISIS operative was reportedly “eliminated.” In May, a post-deployment awards ceremony for members of the 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group, who had just returned from six months advising and assisting Afghan commandos, offered some indication of the kinds of missions being undertaken in that country. Those Green Berets received more than 60 decorations for valor — including 20 Bronze Star Medals and four Silver Star Medals (the third-highest military combat decoration).

For its part, the Navy, according to Rear Admiral Tim Szymanski, chief of Naval Special Warfare Command, has about 1,000 SEALs or other personnel deployed to more than 35 countries each day. In February, Naval Special Warfare forces and soldiers from Army Special Operations Aviation Command conducted training aboard a French amphibious assault ship in the Arabian Gulf. That same month, Navy SEALs joined elite U.S. Air Force personnel in training alongside Royal Thai Naval Special Warfare operators during Cobra Gold, an annual exercise in Thailand.

The troops from U.S. Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, or MARSOC, deploy primarily to the Middle East, Africa, and the Indo-Pacific regions on six-month rotations. At any time, on average, about 400 “Raiders” are engaged in missions across 18 countries.

Air Force Special Operations Command, which fields a force of 19,500 active, reserve, and civilian personnel, conducted 78 joint-training exercises and events with partner nations in 2017, according to Lieutenant General Marshall Webb, chief of Air Force Special Operations Command. In February, for example, Air Force commandos conducted Arctic training — ski maneuvers and free-fall air operations — in Sweden, but such training missions are only part of the story. Air Force special operators were, for instance, recently deployed to aid the attempt to rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped deep inside a cave in Thailand. The Air Force also has three active duty special operations wings assigned to Air Force Special Operations Command, including the 24th Special Operations Wing, a “special tactics” unit that integrates air and ground forces for “precision-strike” and personnel-recovery missions. At a change of command ceremony in March, it was noted that its personnel had conducted almost 2,900 combat missions over the last two years.

Addition Through Subtraction

For years, U.S. Special Operations forces have been in a state of seemingly unrestrained expansion. Nowhere has that been more evident than in Africa. In 2006, just 1% of all American commandos deployed overseas were operating on that continent. By 2016, that number had jumped above 17%. By then, there were more special operations personnel devoted to Africa — 1,700 special operators spread out across 20 countries — than anywhere else except the Middle East.

Recently, however, the New York Times reported that a “sweeping Pentagon review” of special ops missions on that continent may soon result in drastic cuts in the number of commandos operating there. (“We do not comment on what tasks the secretary of defense or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff may or may not have given USSOCOM,” spokesman Ken McGraw told me when I inquired about the review.) U.S. Africa Command has apparently been asked to consider what effect cutting commandos there by 25% over 18 months and 50% over three years would have on its counterterrorism missions. In the end, only about 700 elite troops — roughly the same number as were stationed in Africa in 2014 — would be left there.

Coming on the heels of the October 2017 debacle in Niger that left those four Americans dead and apparent orders from the commander of United States Special Operations forces in Africa that its commandos “plan missions to stay out of direct combat or do not go,” a number of experts suggested that such a review signaled a reappraisal of military engagement on the continent. The proposed cuts also seemed to fit with the Pentagon’s latest national defense strategy that highlighted a coming shift from a focus on counterterrorism to the threats of near-peer competitors like Russia and China. “We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists,” said Secretary of Defense James Mattis in January, “but great power competition — not terrorism — is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.”

A wide range of analysts questioned or criticized the proposed troop reduction. Mu Xiaoming, from China’s National Defense University of the People’s Liberation Army, likened such a reduction in elite U.S. forces to the Obama administration’s drawdown of troops in Afghanistan in 2014 and noted the possibility of “terrorism making a comeback in Africa.” A former chief of U.S. commandos on the continent, Donald Bolduc, unsurprisingly echoed these same fears. “Without the presence that we have there now,” he told Voice of America, “we’re just going to increase the effectiveness of the violent extremist organizations over time and we are going to lose trust and credibility in this area and destabilize it even further.” David Meijer, a security analyst based in Amsterdam, lamented that, as Africa was growing in geostrategic importance and China is strengthening its ties there, “it’s ironic that Washington is set to reduce its already minimal engagement on the continent.”

This is hardly a foregone conclusion, however. For years, members of SOCOM, as well as supporters in Congress, at think tanks, and elsewhere, have been loudly complaining about the soaring operations tempo for America’s elite troops and the resulting strains on them. “Most SOF units are employed to their sustainable limit,” General Thomas, the SOCOM chief, told members of Congress last spring. “Despite growing demand for SOF, we must prioritize the sourcing of these demands as we face a rapidly changing security environment.” Given how much clout SOCOM wields, such incessant gripes were certain to lead to changes in policy.

Last year, in fact, Secretary of Defense Mattis noted that the lines between U.S. Special Operations forces and conventional troops were blurring and that the latter would likely be taking on missions previously shouldered by the commandos, particularly in Africa. “So the general purpose forces can do a lot of the kind of work that you see going on and, in fact, are now,” he said. “By and large, for example inTrans-Sahel [in northwest Africa], many of those forces down there supporting the French-led effort are not Special Forces. So we’ll continue to expand the general purpose forces where it’s appropriate. I would… anticipate more use of them.”

Earlier this year, Owen West, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, referred toMattis’s comments while telling members of the House Armed Services Committee about the “need to look at the line that separates conventional operating forces from SOF and seek to take greater advantage of the ‘common capabilities’ of our exceptional conventional forces.” He particularly highlighted the Army’s Security Force Assistance Brigades, recently created to conduct advise-and-assist missions. This spring, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recommended that one of those units be dedicated to Africa.

Substituting forces in this way is precisely what Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, an Iraq War veteran and member of the Armed Services Committee, has also been advocating. Late last year, in fact, her press secretary, Leigh Claffey, told TomDispatch that the senator believed “instead of such heavy reliance on Special Forces, we should also be engaging our conventional forces to take over missions when appropriate, as well as turning over operations to capable indigenous forces.” Chances are that U.S. commandos will continue carrying out their shadowy Section 127e raids alongside local forces across the African continent while leaving more conventional training and advising tasks to rank-and-file troops. In other words, the number of commandos in Africa may be cut, but the total number of American troops may not — with covert combat operations possibly continuing at the present pace.

If anything, U.S. Special Operations forces are likely to expand, not contract, next year. SOCOM’s 2019 budget request calls for adding about 1,000 personnel to what would then be a force of 71,000. In April, at a meeting of the Senate Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities chaired by Ernst, New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich noted that SOCOM was on track to “grow by approximately 2,000 personnel” in the coming years. The command is also poised to make 2018 another historic year in global reach. If Washington’s special operators deploy to just 17 more countries by the end of the fiscal year, they will exceed last year’s record-breaking total.

“USSOCOM continues to recruit, assess, and select the very best. We then train and empower our teammates to solve the most daunting national security problems,” SOCOM commander General Thomas told the House Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities earlier this year. Why Green Berets and Navy SEALs need to solve national security problems — strategic issues that ought to be addressed by policymakers — is a question that has long gone unanswered. It may be one of the reasons why, since Green Berets “liberated” Afghanistan in 2001, the United States has been involved in combat there and, as the years have passed, a plethora of other forever-war fronts including Cameroon, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen.

“The creativity, initiative and spirit of the people who comprise the Special Operations Force cannot be overstated. They are our greatest asset,” said Thomas. And it’s likely that such assets will grow in 2019.

In Hawaii, an End of Innocence

A 6.9 earthquake that struck Hawaii’s Big Island on May 4 was just the beginning of an ordeal that still continues for the people of Puna, a semirural district on the eastern slopes of the island’s Kilauea volcano.

The previous day, the ground split open in the verdant community of Leilani Estates and a series of fissures began spewing fountains of magma and emitting poisonous gases. Leilani’s 1,800 residents were evacuated. More than 700 homes and farms were lost in subsequent weeks as a lava river flowed to the Pacific Ocean and consumed more residential areas.

A volcanic cone has grown to almost 200 feet tall in the middle of the Leilani community as the vigorous eruption continues for the 11th week. Earthquakes triggered by volcanic explosions rock the summit of Kilauea daily, damaging roads and buildings in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and forcing its indefinite closure. The southeast coastline of the Big Island is forever altered as lava meets the ocean along a two-mile front.

Thousands of people remain displaced. Hundreds are still in evacuation shelters, others are staying with friends or relatives or have moved to neighboring Hawaiian islands or the mainland.

Another blow to Hawaiians came July 11, when a Puna charter school, three more homes in Leilani and a popular beach park were inundated.

Sara Simone Wagner’s Leilani home still stands, but she remains evacuated, staying with friends in Hilo, the Big Island’s largest city. She has touched the hearts of many traumatized Hawaiians with a poem she published on the neighborhood social network. The poem speaks to her love of the land, the sometimes terrifying power of nature and, as she puts it, “the end of our innocence.”  Truthdig is pleased to reprint it here.

Sweet Leilani

By Sara Simone Wagner

May, a month of promise and beauty

gentle showers

fruiting trees

budding flowers

calming seas

Rolling shakes wake Puna’s slumber

draining caldera

exploding methane

mounting hysteria

we’re never the same

Fissures appear stage left—and stage right

performance fire

once-verdant plains

landscapes mired

sulphuric stains

Subtle cracks, soon gaping chasms

shifting rift zones

explosive night

mounting cinder cones

nature’s might

Alexander palms against a red night sky

terrain shifting

burning Makamae

pahoehoe drifting

scorching Kahukai

Bolders fly through pressured cracks

tephra covered pain

breaks on Alapai

toxic poison rain

missing pets on Pomaikai

Cruel slow burn and acrid air

seizes homes and structures

collateral damage

civil defense lectures

interrupted lives to manage

Kilauea unrelents with ashy plumes

fingers of lava

hot unwanted embrace

like too-hot java

burns at the taste

Moku gashed open like a battle scar

lava hits sizzling ocean

new land will avow

painful emotions

deep as Halemaumau

Evening curfews with midnight looters

gas masks tightened

tears escalations

anxiety heightened

forced evacuations

Hissing bay with dangerous laze

lava articulates

homes burn slow

caldera again deflates

We mourn Kapoho

Power outages and scorching air

crimson glows at night

our reminder you see

of Pele’s might

in our sweet, sweet Leilani

(Makamae, Kahukai, Alapai, Pomaikai and Moku are the names of streets in Leilani Estates. Pahoehoe is a lava formation that looks like rope strands. Tephra is the name for rock fragments and particles ejected in an eruption. Halemaumau is the collapsing crater at the Kilauea summit. Laze is toxic haze formed when lava enters the ocean. Kapoho is another community that was lost to the current flow. Pele is the Hawaiian goddess of fire, respected as creator and destroyer of the island chain.)

The Human Cost of Getting Used to Trump

It’s well documented that federal immigration detention centers are a living hell. What’s makes them more dehumanizing is the racism poisoning our country, both inside and outside the detention center walls.

President Donald Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Republican members of Congress are spreading the poison with inflammatory words appealing to the deep prejudices of the GOP voting base.

Trump has long appealed to racism. He aims his attacks at immigrants, mostly those with darker skin.

He stirs deep fears. He has said undocumented immigrants trying to cross the southern border “could be murderers and thieves and so much else.” The United States, he said, “will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility. … We can’t allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch.”

To Sessions, immigrants are “more likely to be convicted of sexual assault, robbery, and driving under the influence. They’re more than twice as likely to be convicted of murder.”

The Trump-Sessions border crisis is fiction.

That’s the takeaway from a May 2018 study published in the journal Criminology by scholars Michael T. Light of the University of Wisconsin and Ty Miller of Purdue University titled “Does Undocumented Immigration Increase Violent Crime?”

The researchers wrote:

In reference to public policy, at the most basic level, our study calls into question one of the primary justifications for the immigration enforcement build‐up. Debates about the proper role of undocumented immigrants in U.S. society will no doubt continue, but they should do so in light of the available evidence. For this reason, any set of immigration policies moving forward should be crafted with the empirical understanding that undocumented immigration does not seem to have increased violent crime.

Acknowledging there are “substantial differences in official reporting rates,” they concluded that “as undocumented immigration increased in recent decades, there was a significant, concomitant decrease in each measure of violent crime.” For the years 1990 to 2014, when undocumented immigration sharply increased, the authors said, “Our findings suggest that undocumented immigration over this period is generally associated with decreasing violent crime.”

The phoniness of the administration’s claim of a huge wave of immigrants overwhelming the border is shown in the latest report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the respected independent organization that compiles data on immigration.

The organization, known as TRAC, reports that the number of adults apprehended at the border for illegal immigration has actually declined this year by 14.5 percent from 2017. The number of unaccompanied children also is down.

Just about a quarter of the immigrants arrive with children, and several hundred have been sent back to their homelands without their children, which explains the hundreds of tragic family separations that are shaming the country.

Sessions excuses the separations on the grounds that a family member is found to be a criminal and must be imprisoned. That’s not true. TRAC found only one such family member in April. That leaves the federal government no excuse for the cruel practice of separating children from their parents, some of whom they may never see again.

“Sessions and his group of fellow racists know very well that their actions violate the Constitution and the laws of our country governing both conditions for detention and reasons for detention,” retired Immigration Judge Paul Wickham Schmidt wrote in his blog, immigrationcourtside.com. “Yet, they walk free and smugly give press conferences at which they continue to lie about their actions. Their victims, on the other hand, largely languish in substandard prisons or are being removed to the dangerous situations they fled in their home countries without any pretense of Due Process or fundamental fairness.”

Conditions in the detention centers—prisons, actually—are likely to get worse. That’s because Attorney General Sessions has made it difficult, if not impossible, for undocumented immigrants to seek sanctuary from dangerous conditions in their homelands in Central America and other regions.

Sessions issued a policy memorandum this month that forbids immigration officials from granting asylum to immigrants fleeing domestic abuse, death threats from gangs or other fears of violence and crime.

“The mere fact that a country has civil strife or anarchy resulting in displaced persons or that it has problems effectively policing certain crimes, like domestic violence or gang-related activities, or that certain populations are or are more likely to become victims of crimes or violence, cannot, by itself, establish eligibility for asylum or refugee status,” Sessions wrote.

Sessions also raised the possibility of an almost blanket denial of amnesty to those from countries where violence is widespread. These would be societies, he said, “where virtually everyone is at risk of crime—or broad swaths of society are at risk of crime. …” Does this mean the very fact that refugees come from a crime-ridden country makes them ineligible for asylum?

It certainly means there will be an increase of undocumented immigrants put into detention centers while immigration officials sort out their cases.

A report by the nonprofit organization Freedom for Immigrants explores how the Trump rhetoric is making conditions more difficult in the centers, which are already notorious for poor medical care and denial of visiting privileges, including access to lawyers.

After interviewing prisoners in centers around the country, Freedom for Immigrants said:

The president’s vile rhetoric encourages U.S. Immigration and Customs (ICE) officers and immigrant prison guards to respond to immigrants in their custody with the same type of hateful behavior.

Since January 20, 2017, when Donald Trump became the President of the United States, Freedom for Immigrants has documented at least 800 complaints of abuse motivated by hate or bias in 34 immigration detention jails and prisons. These complaints were collected through visits and other forms of direct communication with people in U.S. immigration detention. The affected individuals come from 62 countries speaking 22 languages. The majority of complaints came from men (71.01 percent), while 28.4 percent from women.

With Trump leading the way, hate and bias are becoming accepted parts of the national dialogue. This thoroughly disrespectful man is making such attitudes respectable. We’re getting used to Trump. We’re accepting the way vast segments of America—Latinos, African-Americans, Muslims of all ethnicities, Asians of all religions—are being subjected to scorn and hatred, just as Japanese-Americans were during World War II. “A Jap is a Jap,” Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, commander of the U.S. Army’s Western Command, said in 1942. “The Japanese race is an enemy race.”

Michiko Kakutani, who was senior book critic for The New York Times, wrote in her former paper last week about those days, when her family was separated and incarcerated in distant parts of the country. She compared it to today: “Once again national safety is invoked to justify the roundup of whole groups of people. Once again racist stereotypes are being used by politicians to ramp up fear and hatred. And once again lies are being used to justify actions that violate the most fundamental American ideals of freedom, equality and tolerance.”

Immigration, as I’ve written here before, offers the true window on Donald Trump and his racist, authoritarian administration.

In the detention centers, and among the cruelly separated parents and children and the thousands denied sanctuary, we can see how the fragile protections of the Constitution and the courts are being whittled away day by day by a president who has no respect for them. That’s not speculation. That’s not anti-Trump rhetoric. Those are facts. Trump can’t hide them with more lies. We can’t afford to ignore this hate-filled behavior and abandonment of our country’s ideals.

EU, U.S. Relations Sink Further After Divisive Trump Tour

BRUSSELS — After a week of the worst barrage of insults yet from U.S. President Donald Trump, the European Union is looking westward toward the White House less and less.

Making it worse, Trump spent Monday cozying up to EU adversary Vladimir Putin in an extraordinary chummy summit with the Russian leader in Helsinki.

Never mind. In an age when Trump has made political optics all-important, on Tuesday the EU struck back. Key EU leaders were in the far east in Japan and China looking for the trust, friendship and cooperation they could no longer get from a century-old ally.

Trump’s embrace of Putin and the EU’s Asian outreach highlight the yawning rift, widening more by the day, in a trans-Atlantic unity that has been the bedrock of international politics for the better part of a century, as countless graves of U.S. soldiers buried in European soil bear witness to.

Trump’s abrasiveness and “America First” insistence had been a given even before he became president. Europe’s increasing resignation to letting go of the cherished link to the White House is much more recent.

After last week’s brutal NATO summit where Trump derided Europeans as freeloaders, EU chief Donald Tusk spoke on Tuesday of “the increasing darkness of international politics.”

“This Helsinki summit is above all another wake-up call for Europe,” said Manfred Weber, the German leader of the EPP center-right group in the European Parliament, the legislature’s biggest.

“We Europeans must take our fate in our own hands.”

It was a startling sentiment coming from someone who hails from the same German Christian Democrat stock as Angela Merkel, Helmut Kohl and Konrad Adenauer, staunch supporters of the trans-Atlantic link over the past three-quarters century.

There have been other signs of the growing European detachment from the White House, especially after Trump pulled out of the global climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal the EU brokered.

“With friends like that, who needs enemies?” Tusk asked two months ago.

Soon, Trump had also piled on economic punishment with punitive tariffs on European steel and aluminum.

Then came the NATO summit. Already viewed with apprehension, reality turned out to be worse.

First, Trump called Germany, the powerhouse of the European Union, “captive” to Russia. Then he suggested that Britain should “sue” the EU over Brexit terms. Finally, he finished off by calling the 28-nation bloc a trade “foe.”

“For Trump, the categories of friend, ally, partner, opponent, enemy don’t exist. For him there is only his own ego,” said the head of the German parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Norbert Roettgen.

So little wonder the EU has turned for friends elsewhere — and found one Tuesday in Japan, where the bloc said it put in place “the largest bilateral trade deal ever.”

Up to two years ago, that was supposed to be the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, trade deal between the EU and the United States. But Trump quickly let it be known that such an international agreement would not happen on his watch.

“This is an act of enormous strategic importance for the rules-based international order, at a time when some are questioning this order,” Tusk said at a joint news conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

“We are sending a clear message that we stand together against protectionism.”

Despite it all, until last week there had remained hope that on the most critical of geopolitical security issues, Trump would remain true to American ideals. Instead, he unleashed unprecedented criticism at the NATO summit.

Fully extracting itself from the United States, though, is a daunting challenge for Europe.

Militarily, with the exceptions of France and Britain, the European allies have lived under the nuclear umbrella of the United States since World War II. Defense cooperation outside of U.S-dominated NATO is only now taking off and the blocked Brexit negotiations make such a prospect fraught with uncertainty.

That military dimension, and the bond between Europe and the United States, have a special resonance in nations like Poland and the Baltic states, which had long been under the thumb of Moscow before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Hence, Monday’s Helsinki summit was seen with apprehension that Trump might make dramatic concessions to Putin and leave parts of Europe with too little protection. In Poland, the 1945 Yalta Conference is seen as a symbol of political treason because, without Poland’s participation and against Poland’s will, it put the country under Soviet control for decades, until 1989.

On Tuesday, there was some relief on that score. Krzysztof Szczerski, the foreign policy adviser to Polish President Andrzej Duda, said that all those who “prophesied that the Trump-Putin meeting will lead to a second Yalta were very wrong.”

Despite relations sinking to new lows almost every week, the EU will still make another attempt this month to mend fences, knowing that trade wars will hurt all. EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is to visit Trump in Washington on July 25.

___

Associated Press writers Geir Moulson in Berlin and Monika Scislowska in Warsaw contributed to this report.

Immigrant Kids Held in Second Phoenix Office Seen Bathing in Sinks

A defense contractor that held immigrant children overnight in a Phoenix office building operates a second office nearby, where a neighbor has seen immigrant children bathing themselves in bathroom sinks, Reveal has learned.

The company, MVM Inc., is the primary transportation contractor for the federal government’s court-ordered efforts to reunify families separated under President Donald Trump’s zero tolerance policy. On Sunday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement filed a plan of operations in federal court for the reunification of families whose children are ages 5 to 17. In it, the agency says it will “coordinate with MVM to dispatch” those families.

After Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting published a story about the company housing children overnight in a Phoenix office building, MVM acknowledged that it also houses minors overnight in a second office building nearby. That building is on 20th Street, less than a mile away.

From the outside, MVM’s 20th Street office shares some features with the other office on Osborn Road: a nondescript, unmarked one-level office with dark tinted windows. It’s surrounded by a concrete parking lot – with no area for outdoor play – and is on a busy street near the airport.

Bill Weaver, an insurance executive who used to lease the 20th Street space now occupied by MVM, told Reveal that for the past two years, he’s seen children from babies to teenagers come through the office.

“They operate six 12-passenger vans,” he said Monday, referring to MVM. Weaver shot several videos on his phone of the children outside the building the morning of June 11 and recently provided them to Reveal. They show about 20 boys of various ages being led by adults in front of his office window.

Weaver estimates MVM leases about 2,000 square feet of space in the building. He said that the space has no kitchen or shower but that the property’s owner offered to install showers at some point.

It also has no private bathroom. Instead, Weaver said, three office suites share a set of bathroom stalls and sinks. To bathe, he said, the children would use a pair of bathroom sinks. He said he’s seen it on multiple occasions.

“One time, I walked in and saw two kids washing themselves in their underwear in the sinks,” Weaver said. “MVM would throw away all their clothes and even throw away the brush they combed their hair with and then reclothe them in sweatsuits and Crocs.”

“That building was completely inappropriate for what they were doing,” he said.

After Reveal’s story about MVM detaining children at the Osborn Road office building, with no showers, kitchen or yard, state and local officials called for investigations into the company’s treatment of children. MVM signed a lease for the Osborn Road location in March – just before the Trump administration launched its short-lived family separation effort – and operated it for at least one month between May and June.

Over the weekend, Reveal asked an MVM spokesman whether children also were held at the second office on 20th Street.

“The statement I sent you on Wednesday is related to MVM’s entire Phoenix operations,” Joseph Arabit responded via email.

Arabit was referring to a statement the company made to Reveal last week acknowledging that children MVM transported under contract with ICE sometimes had stayed overnight at the office on Osborn Road.

Housing children overnight there violated the company’s own policies, Arabit said. A city councilwoman said the practice also violated city codes.

According to ICE, its contract with MVM allows the company to use its offices as “waiting areas” for children awaiting same-day transport. ICE has not responded to questions about whether holding children overnight violates MVM’s contract or whether those sites must be licensed as child care centers under state licensing laws.

MVM, a Virginia-based defense contractor, has received contracts worth up to $248 million to transport immigrant children since 2014, records show. The company, which once provided guards for CIA facilities in Iraq, was founded by three former Secret Service agents. One of its vice presidents is a former CIA special agent and former acting director of the U.S. Marshals Service.

The company has no child care center licenses in Arizona, and the governor has ordered a review. Any determination about whether MVM was operating an unlicensed child care center under state law would be made by the state Department of Health Services.

Phoenix police spokesman Sgt. Vincent C. Lewis told Reveal that a service call was made on the morning of June 5 from the 20th Street MVM office address and routed to the fire department. The caller said a juvenile “had reportedly passed out,” Lewis said.

Shelly Jamison, assistant chief of the Phoenix Fire Department, told Reveal that her department dispatched an engine to the office, where first-responders found a 17-year-old girl who was awake. The department spent 15 minutes on-site and didn’t transport the girl off-site.

On May 27, police responded to a call at the Osborn Road office. One of about 90 minors there that morning went missing. The MVM staffer who made the call estimated the teen’s age to be 16, but police say he is 17. The youth, who is from Honduras, was never found and is now officially a missing person, Lewis said.

MVM initially told Reveal that the Osborn Road office was used for temporary respite for children awaiting flights.

“These offices are not overnight housing facilities, per the contract with ICE,” ICE spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea said two weeks ago.

Elzea has not acknowledged that MVM detained children – some separated from their parents at the border – in its offices overnight. She’s also declined to state how many such locations the agency’s private contractors use in the transport of children.

“I have nothing further for you. I have made clear that we are looking into whether anything occurred that was outside the realm of our contract,” she told Reveal on Monday. “We will address any findings directly with the contractor.”

In interviews with Reveal, MVM has declined to say, other than these locations, whether and how many locations nationwide it operates where children are or have been detained.

On Thursday, MVM verified that it had “initiated the lease termination process” on its Osborn Road location. MVM’s office on 20th Street appears to remain in operation, and the company hasn’t commented on whether it will terminate its lease there as well.

Arabit also hasn’t told Reveal how many children MVM held overnight at either office or for how long.

Watch Reveal’s video coverage of this story below:

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.