Chris Hedges's Blog, page 554

How Iran Outmaneuvered the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli Axis

Donald Trump allegedly complained to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that after the 2015 nuclear deal, Iranians “think they can do anything they want.” Presumably Trump was referring to Iran’s geopolitical reach in the Middle East, where it had gathered up allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

It is likely that Trump’s violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal signed between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, was intended to set the stage for a push to contain Iran.

The push against Iran would involve again subjecting it to severe economic sanctions, in hopes of bankrupting it and depriving it of the means with which to continue to play a role in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Boycotts on oil states are not usually effective, since they can usually find a way to sell their oil lucratively nevertheless and use the proceeds to cushion the country’s elect.

One corner of the attempt at rollback involves Iraq. When a reconstruction conference took place last February in Kuwait, the Trump administration refused to make any contribution at all to rebuilding the country that the U.S. destroyed. At the same time, the U.S. encouraged Iraq to take aid from Saudi Arabia as a quid pro quo for moving away from Iran.

The continued tone-deafness in Washington about Middle East politics, after all these years of being deeply immersed in it, is baffling. The Shiite majority in Iraq isn’t necessarily opposed to better relations with Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. People are more pragmatic than the “clash of civilizations” or “Sunni-Shiite conflict” theses might lead one to expect.

But that the Shiite-majority government of Iraq would turn its back on Iran in favor of an alignment with Saudi Arabia (which does not like Shiites very much) is a daft proposition.

Another sign of Iran Derangement Syndrome in Washington was the unrealistic hopes expressed by right-wing pundits that the Iraqi parliamentary election would signal a turn of Iraq away from Iran. The biggest vote-getters were followers of the hard line Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who had quixotically allied with the small Communist movement.

Al-Sadr is known for resenting Iranian domination of Iraqi Shiism. His father, an Iraqi Arab, had been a contender for the position of chief Iraqi Shiite authority or clerical Exemplar in Najaf before he was assassinated by the Saddam Hussein regime in 1998. His father’s rival, who rose to the top, is Ali Sistani, from a town near Mashhad in eastern Iran, who came to Iraq in 1952. Not only is Sistani the leading religious authority for Iraqi Shiites but Iran’s clerical Leader, Ali Khamenei, also has influence.

Al-Sadr, however, has just announced that he will form a post-election coalition with Hadi al-Ameri, the leader of a heavily pro-Iranian political list, Fatah, that comprises party-militias backed by Iran, which played a major role in defeated the hard-line Sunni Islamic State terrorist group that took over northern and western Iraq in 2014-2017.

Al-Ameri is head of the Badr Corps, a Shiite militia that began as an offshoot of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Trump’s bete noire.

Moreover, the idea that al-Sadr is anti-Iran is overblown. He once dedicated his militia, then known as the Mahdi Army, to defending Iran from anyone who might attack it. When Gen. David Petraeus forced al-Sadr out of Iraq in 2007, Muqatada took refuge in Qom in Iran, where he pursued seminary studies before eventually returning to his country. And after the parliamentary elections of 2010 returned four major blocs, al-Sadr allowed his arm to be twisted by Iran [to such a degree] that he allied with pro-Iranian factions to form a government, locking the Sunnis out of power.

Baghdad looks to have close and warm relations with Iran under the government now being formed. It is being joined by Massoud Barzani’s Kurds, who also have traditionally good relations with Tehran, despite tensions over Iranian Kurdistan (Iran has some 4 million mostly Sunni Kurds, who are sometimes restive).

In fact, the prominence of al-Ameri in the proposed new government raises questions about how welcome the some 6,000 U.S. troops in Baghdad will remain now that Islamic State is largely defeated.

The May elections in Lebanon also returned a government thick with Christian and Shiite allies of Iran, and in which the position of the pro-Iranian Shiite party-militia, Hizbullah, improved over that of the last election in 2009.

In Syria, president Bashar al-Assad is openly speaking of offering Iran hardened bases in his country. Trump is talking about pulling out U.S. troops from Syria by October, and if that happens (a big if), there would be nothing to stop plans for formal Iranian bases from moving forward.

So far, the new alliance of Trump, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel against Iran formed in spring of 2017 has had no successes at all. If anything, in the last year Iran’s hand has been strengthened in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. While the Houthi rebels in Yemen may ultimately be defeated by the Saudi-UAE axis, which is now attacking the Red Sea port of Hodeida, Iran is only marginally involved in Yemen—contrary to what Saudi propaganda would have us believe.

On the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, Iranian relations with Qatar have warmed up substantially, after Iran helped thwart a Saudi-UAE plot to overthrow Qatar’s government and subject it to themselves. In fact, the Saudi-UAE push on Qatar has destroyed the Gulf Cooperation Council, which used to group Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, and which was formed in 1981 to combat Iranian hegemony in the Gulf. The collapse of the GCC inevitably strengthens Iran’s hand. Oman and Kuwait have stood by Qatar, and both have fair relations with Tehran.

Some 18 months into the Trump administration, Trump hasn’t laid a finger on Tehran, which is still in the catbird seat in the eastern stretches of the Middle East.

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Ruling on Nonvoters in Ohio May Embolden Other States

In a 5-4 decision released June 11, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Ohio law that provides for the removal of infrequent voters from the state’s election rolls.

On the surface, the court’s majority opinion in Husted v. A. Phillip Randolph Institute is a highly technical analysis of whether Ohio’s so-called “Supplemental Process” law runs afoul of the federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The court’s decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the court’s other Republican appointees, concluded that it did not.

According to Alito, the Ohio law, which dates back to 1994 but in recent years has been more strictly enforced, is simply meant to keep “the State’s voting lists up to date by removing the names of those who have moved out of the district where they are registered.”

Here’s how the “Supplemental Process” works: Voters who have failed to cast a ballot for two consecutive years (the equivalent of one federal election cycle) are mailed a pre-addressed, postage prepaid card asking them to verify that they still reside at the same address. Those who do not return the card and fail to vote in any election for four more years are presumed to have moved and are removed from the rolls.

As Alito and the court’s Republican majority view voting rights, there is no textual inconsistency between the Ohio law and the right to vote, as protected by various federal statutes and the Constitution. All that a resident need do to avoid disenfranchisement is return the postcard sent by the state or vote within an overall six-year period.

Alito’s reasoning seems at first clear enough, and on its face apolitical. Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissenting opinion, joined by the court’s four Democratic appointees, is based largely on differing statutory interpretations.

But, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in a separate dissent, Alito’s majority opinion is in reality an exercise of disenfranchisement that “entirely ignores the history of voter suppression” in America and will disproportionately affect minority, homeless, low-income, and disabled voters—who, not coincidentally, tend to vote Democratic.

“Our democracy rests on the ability of all individuals, regardless of race, income, or status, to exercise their right to vote,” Sotomayor wrote, stressing that while most states have a variety of processes in place to maintain the accuracy of their voting lists, only Ohio presently triggers voting-roll purges based solely on an individual’s failure to vote in a single election cycle.

As one instance of the Supplemental Process’ racially disproportionate impact, Sotomayor cited figures compiled by the NAACP for Ohio’s Hamilton County. These showed that African American-majority neighborhoods in downtown Cincinnati have seen 10 percent of their voters removed due to inactivity since 2012, as compared to only 4 percent of voters in an adjacent suburban, majority-white neighborhood.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Husted upholding the Supplemental Process isn’t just bad news for voters in the Buckeye State. It’s bad news for the nation as a whole, as other Republican-dominated states can be expected to enact similar measures.

The full reach of such measures could be truly staggering. As the League of Women Voters and the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice noted in an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief jointly filed in Husted, there are tens of millions of registered voters nationally who do not regularly vote.

In 2016, the brief notes, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission counted almost 74 million registered voters across the country (37.02 percent of those eligible) who did not cast a ballot in the general election. The vast majority failed to turn up at the polls either because they were turned off by the two major party candidates or for other reasons like transportation problems, illness, disability, or inconvenient polling locations. At most, said the brief, drawing from Census Bureau data, 4.4 percent failed to vote because they had moved from their districts.

But under Alito’s majority opinion, each and every one of the 74 million could be sent a postcard that may or may not be successfully delivered by the post office, resulting in their deregistration for future elections.

“The right to vote is not ‘use it or lose it,’ ” said League President Chris Carson in response to the Husted ruling. “This decision will fuel the fire of voter suppressors across the country who want to make sure their chosen candidates win reelection—no matter what the voters say.”

Notwithstanding the landmark advances achieved in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the adoption in 1920 of the 19th Amendment affording women the right to vote in federal elections, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, voter suppression has been the norm for much of our nation’s history. This dates back to the original disenfranchisement of black slaves and women and to the early exclusions of white men without property.

More recently, suppression techniques including voter ID laws and restrictions on early voting and same-day registration have proliferated in many states. And the Supreme Court has made challenging voter suppression more difficult with its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which dramatically weakened the Voting Rights Act.

Today’s suppression methods may be less obvious than the poll taxes, whites-only primaries and literacy tests of yesteryear, but they are driven by the same purpose of undermining genuine majority rule and deflecting potential threats to the established order.

Current suppression schemes are especially dangerous due to a series of Supreme Court decisions (Citizens United and its progeny) that have unleashed the power of corporations and the wealthy to spend unlimited money on elections. Other recent decisions restrict the right of public-sector unions—an important source of funding for liberal causes and candidates—to collect “fair-share” fees from non-union members that are used to support collective bargaining, and which help to free up other union funds for political expenditures.

By the conclusion of its current term at the end of this month, the court may well outlaw fair-share fees altogether when it decides Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31.

Viewed in context and in conjunction with these developments, the Husteddecision bodes ill for the future of American election law. Above all, it demonstrates that, far from abating, voter suppression is alive and well at the nation’s highest judicial body.

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Palestine’s Feminists Are Fighting on Two Fronts

“I am here because I heard my town call me, and ask me to maintain my honor.” Fifty-seven-year-old Um Khalid Abu Mosa spoke in a strong, gravelly voice as she sat on the desert sand, a white tent protecting her from the blazing sun. “The land,” she says with determination, “is honor and dignity.”

She was near the southern Gaza Strip town of Khuza’a, the heavily fortified barrier with Israel in plain sight and well-armed Israeli soldiers just a few hundred meters away. Abu Mosa’s left arm was wrapped in a sling fashioned from a black-and-white-checkered kuffiyeh, or scarf, and a Palestinian flag. Israeli soldiers had shot her in the shoulder with live ammunition on March 30th as she approached the barrier to plant a Palestinian flag in a mound of earth. The bullet is still lodged in her collarbone. Three weeks later, however, she’s back at the Great Return March, a series of protests organized around five encampments stretching along a unilaterally imposed Israeli buffer zone on the 37-mile barrier between the Gaza Strip and Israel.

The Return March, which has just ended, was unique in recent history in Gaza for a number of reasons. Palestinians there are known for engaging in militant resistance against the Israeli occupation and also for the internal political split in their ranks between two dominant factions, Fatah and Hamas. Yet, in these weeks, the March has been characterized by a popular, predominantly nonviolent mobilization during which Gaza’s fractured political parties have demonstrated a surprising degree of unity. And perhaps most noteworthy of all, women activists have played a visibly crucial role in the protests on a scale not seen for decades, possibly indicating what the future may look like when it comes to activism in the Gaza Strip.

The Return March began on March 30th, or Land Day, commemorating the 1976 killings of six Palestinians inside Israel who had been protesting land confiscations. The March was slated to end on May 15th, the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe.” The term is used to refer to the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel and the displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians, as well as the depopulation of more than 450 Palestinian towns and villages. Seventy percent of Gaza’s blockaded population is made up of those who fled or were expelled from their lands and villages during the Nakba or their descendants. The vast majority of those participating in the Great Return March, including Abu Mosa, know those native villages only through family lore, yet their yearning to return is visceral.

During the March, 125 Palestinians were killed and a staggering 13,000 wounded. Abu Mosa saw many fellow protesters wounded or killed, especially on May 14th, the day the Trump administration opened its new embassy in Jerusalem when the protests escalated and some participants attempted to break through the barrier.

On that day alone, Israeli forces killed  and injured 2,700 more. “Don’t ask me if someone close to me has been injured or killed,” Abu Mosa says. “All the protesters are my relatives and friends. We became one family.” After the carnage of May 14th, the grassroots committee organizing the March decided that the protests had to continue. The killings continued as well. On June 1st, a 21-year old woman volunteer paramedic was, for instance, shot in the chest and killed.

For Abu Mosa, a schoolteacher and mother of six, the March centers entirely on her dream of returning to her native town of Beer Sheva. And in its wake, she insists that she will go back, “and on my way, I will plant mint and flowers.”

Much like Abu Mosa, 20-year-old Siwar Alza’anen, an activist in an organization called the Palestinian Students Labor Front, is motivated by a deep desire to return to her native village. She is also marching “to send a message to the international community that we are suffering a lot, we are living under pressure, siege, pain, poverty.”

The Great Return March and the First Intifada

A small Palestinian flag flutters on the edge of Samira Abdelalim’s desk in Rafah, the southernmost town in the Gaza Strip. Forty-four-year-old Abdelalim serves as the director of the women’s department at the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions. Her steely eyes are framed with a simple navy-blue headscarf. Abdelalim hopes the Great March of Return will peacefully achieve the right of return to her people’s villages, self-determination, and the possibility of living “in peace and freedom” — but she’s realistic, too. “I know that the occupation will not end in one day,” she says, “but by cumulative work.”

Iktimal Hamad is on the Supreme National Commission of the Return March, the only woman among the March’s 15 lead organizers. Sitting in her Gaza City office, her light brown hair pulled into a tight bun, she speaks about her own double agenda — to end the Israeli occupation, but also to promote equality for women in Gaza. “Women can play a prominent role in the liberation of Palestine, because they are integral to the Palestinian community,” she tells us.

Abdelalim leads the March’s women’s committee in Rafah, one of five with 15 members for each of the encampments. With her fellow committee members, she organizes the women in the March, arranges logistics such as water and buses, and plans youth empowerment and cultural activities.

Her own activism began during the first Palestinian Intifada (Arabic for “shaking off”) or “uprising” and she insists that the goals and methods are the same in the present set of demonstrations. The First Intifada began in 1987 and was characterized by a highly coordinated, unarmed mass-mobilization against the Israeli occupation. Widespread acts of civil disobedience included strikes, boycotts, the creation of “underground” schools, grassroots projects to develop economic independence from Israel, and mass demonstrations. Women were that uprising’s backbone.

“The masters of the field are the protestors,” Abdelalim says of both then and now. “In the First Intifada, women and men used to stand shoulder to shoulder beside each other, struggling together.”

Abu Mosa, who is typical of many women in Gaza in not having been politically active in more than 25 years, tells us that the Return March brings back her memories of that earlier period. Even the smell of tear gas makes her nostalgic. “I feel this March is the First Intifada.”

Hamad was also a young activist during the First Intifada. Now 51, she remembers how women were “the vanguard” of that uprising. “There was a unified women’s council in 1989 and this council had the responsibility of the streets,” she recalls. Women led demonstrations and sit-ins, distributed leaflets, created neighborhood committees and participated in a unified women’s council. They even worked together in remarkable unity, whatever political faction they belonged to.

Women’s Activism After the First Intifada

The First Intifada ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords, a peace agreement negotiated in secret between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Made up only of Palestinians in exile, the PLO negotiation team was all male.

The Oslo Accords led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the return of the exiled PLO leaders to the West Bank and Gaza. Many of the grassroots activists who had led the uprising were promptly marginalized in the formation of new leadership structures — and women were excluded altogether.

According to Samira Abdelalim, the trajectory of the struggle, and particularly the role of women, then shifted radically. There was now an armed, institutional Authority governing a traditional, patriarchal society. “The male societies refused to include women in the decision-making units, and denied women’s [engagement] in policies and plans,” she explains. So, rather than confronting the Israeli occupation, Palestinian women began agitating for social, political, legal, and economic rights within Palestinian society. Abdelalim and other women activists organized around the task of creating laws to protect women from honor killings — that is, the murder of a female family member when she is perceived to have brought shame upon the family — and to prevent gender-based male violence.

The Oslo process was supposed to culminate in agreements on a set of thorny “permanent status” issues between Israel and the Palestinians. These issues included Jerusalem, water rights, border delineation, settlements, and refugees. However, trust in the process continued to erode over the years and the “final” status negotiations held in the summer of 2000 collapsed, setting the stage for the , which erupted on September 29th of that year.

Though that uprising initially began with large-scale demonstrations reminiscent of the previous one, it quickly turned toward armed resistance. According to political scientist Marie Principe’s research for the United States Institute for Peace, nonviolent movements create openings for a wide range of people, including women, children, and the old, to get involved in a way that violent campaigns don’t. Due to the armed nature of the Second Intifada, the space for the involvement of women, in particular, began to shrink radically. In this period, according to Abdelalim, women activists refocused their work in the international arena, attempting to expose the violence of the occupation to the world through documentation, media reports, and international conferences.

This sort of activism, however, was predominantly open only to women from a higher socio-economic class — those, in particular, who worked for NGOs, had access to university education, andhad some ability, however restricted, to reach the outside world, whether through travel or the Internet. Many of the women who had been out on the streets during the First Intifada were left without roles to play.

In 2006, Hamas (an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) won the Palestinian legislative elections over the previously dominant Palestinian National Liberation Movement, or Fatah. Some Gaza-based leaders of Fatah then sought to oust Hamas (with U.S. backing), leading to a bloody internecine civil war on the Strip in which Hamas violently gained control in 2007.

The Hamas-Fatah divide became a new focal point for women activists in Gaza. In those years, women generally called for Palestinian unity, remembers Abdelalim, insisting that their enemy should be the Israeli occupation, not a competing Palestinian faction. The official reconciliation negotiation team (which signed multiple unity agreements starting in 2011 that were never implemented) did not include women. Abdelalim and other women activists nonetheless held weekly demonstrations to protest the internal split in Gaza, even drafting a joint statement by women on both sides of the political divide calling for national unity.

Under the Hamas regime, however, the situation of women only continued to deteriorate. “Hamas took us back decades,” says Iktimal Hamad, noting the regime’s desire to impose Islamic Sharia law in place of the Palestinian law in force on the West Bank. “Hamas doesn’t believe in equality between women and men,” she says bluntly.

Palestinian society has indeed grown ever more religiously conservative over the past decades, especially in Gaza. Siwar Alza’anen remains among a small minority of women in that imprisoned strip of land who do not cover their hair. She admits, though, that most women in Gaza have little choice but to adhere to restrictive societal norms in dress and culture. They generally can’t even leave home without the permission of a male relative. Abu Mosa remembers protesting during the First Intifada alongside women with uncovered hair who were wearing short skirts. “Now they ask girls to wear head scarves at the age of 12,” she adds with obvious disapproval, though she herself does cover.

Yet throughout those repressive years, Hamad points out, women continued to play a central role in the Palestinian struggle through family education. Women were the mothers of the martyrs, the wounded, and the prisoners. A woman, as she puts it, remains “half of the community and the community is not complete without her contribution.”

Women Begin to Reclaim Their Activist Roles

Abdelalim and Hamad are hopeful that the current protests indicate a new phase for women’s activism in Gaza and may provide a path to greater gender equality. “What happened in this Great Return March is that women reclaimed their large role in the Palestinian struggle,” Abdelalim says. As Hamad observes, the number of women involved increased each Friday. In fact, according to Abdelalim’s estimate, women made up about 40% of the protesters, a remarkable figure given the history of these last years.

Because the protests are unarmed and popular in nature, men have even supported women’s involvement. Hamad is organizing for the first time not just with men from the national secular movements but from the Islamic movements as well, and she feels respected and appreciated by them.

Still, Abdelalim insists that women have never simply sat around waiting for men’s permission to act. “We’ve always claimed our role in the struggle,” she says.

Abdelalim, Hamad, Alza’anen, and Abu Mosa all spoke with pride about the unity exhibited during the Great Return March. As Hamad put it, “In spite of the internal political split, we succeeded in embodying the unified struggle.”

“No one raises the flag of their political faction,” adds Alza’anen. Instead, the chants for Palestine send a message of unity both to Palestinians and to the world.

Women’s participation in the March boosts their self-confidence, says Abdelalim. “The march broke the wall of silence between the women and [the rest of our] community,” she insists. And she’s convinced that this new sense of power will lead women to struggle to take part in decision-making on a larger scale, while becoming more courageous in demanding their rights. After marching at the border side by side with her father, her husband, her brothers, no young woman will be content to “stay at home waiting for men to give her small benefits.”

All four women hold expansive visions of what they want their national struggle to yield. Abdelalim says that she is “fighting to guarantee the best future” for her children. She wants her people to be free in their homeland. She imagines children playing with joy instead of fear and a future world lacking refugees, hunger, or war-related disabilities. “The future means young men and women singing, dancing, building their homeland,” she muses.

For Abu Mosa, “the future is hope and love for the homeland.” In her dream of the future, she describes an old man, right of return fulfilled, wiping away his tears so many years later. Her vision also has space for non-Palestinians. “I have no problem with Jews. If they visit me, I will host them in my house, and they can live in my country.” But, she adds, she will not tolerate the presence of the Zionists who displaced her family.

Alza’anen hopes the losses sustained during the March will not be in vain. The killings “motivate us to keep walking in the same direction, that our determination and intention will not collapse.”

Hamad is convinced that the liberation of Palestinian women is dependent on the national liberation that the Great Return March embodied. “Women,” she says, “will always be in the front lines of our national struggle.”

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.

Test the DNA of Kevin Cooper, Says Kim Kardashian West to Jerry Brown

Kim Kardashian West, coming off her ​recent ​success in getting President Trump to pardon a grandmother serving a life sentence, has taken to Twitter to ask California Gov. Jerry Brown to give San Quentin death row inmate Kevin Cooper the DNA tests he has been denied, tests that could prove his innocence.

​Cooper has been imprisoned for 34 years for a ​savage crime he insists he did not commit—the 1983 slaughter of chiropractors and Arabian horse breeders Doug and Peggy Ryen, both 47, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes. Christopher was a friend of Joshua Ryen, 8 years old at the time, who was attacked and left for dead.

Though Cooper has lost all his appeals, in 2009 five judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals asserted he was framed by the San Bernardino, Calif., Sheriff’s Department. The judges were joined by six colleagues in asking for a hearing to prove his innocence. ​Cooper’s attorneys continue to gather new evidence that he did not commit the crime.

What separates execution and exoneration in the case are modern DNA tests that Cooper’s attorneys claim could prove he was framed. They are being fought by the San Bernardino district attorney’s office and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who say enough DNA testing has been done and no more is needed. The tests could be ordered by the governor, but he has made no public move to do so. Brown has been sitting on Cooper’s clemency petition, which details numerous examples of law enforcement misconduct in the case, for almost two and a half years.

​Following a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof about Cooper, California Sens. Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein urged Brown to let the tests proceed. The tests could clear Cooper or confirm his guilt and could possibly identify the actual killers, initially described by the sole eyewitness, Joshua Ryen, as three white men. Cooper is African-American.

Cooper’s attorneys have focused attention for years on a white man who was implicated in the murders by his girlfriend, who called deputies after he came home the night of the murders wearing bloody coveralls, which she handed over to a deputy sheriff. She told the deputy her boyfriend was a convicted murderer of a 17-year-old girl and he had been out of prison less than a year. She also reported that the tan T-shirt he was wearing the day of the murders exactly matched a bloody shirt that was found and his missing hatchet resembled the bloody hatchet found near the crime scene.

No one from the sheriff’s homicide division ever called her, as she requested, or picked up the coveralls from the deputy. They were never tested for the victims’ blood, and they were thrown into a dumpster on the order of a sheriff’s department supervisor six months later, at the start of Cooper’s preliminary hearing. Eleven months after the murders, when the girlfriend called the sheriff’s department to find out why she had never been interviewed, the boyfriend was interviewed by two homicide detectives. He denied owning the coveralls and said his girlfriend thought the killers had stopped by her house during their escape and dropped off the coveralls, which were left in his bedroom closet. When asked if he would take a polygraph test, he said yes. However, the detectives changed their minds and said it would not be necessary.

​Kevin Cooper is a Truthdig contributor. His clemency petition and other documents in his case can be found here.

Journalist Narda Zacchino has been investigating this case for over a year. Her next story on Kevin Cooper’s bid for exoneration will appear on Truthdig soon.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the  Poor People’s Campaign . Please help us by  making a donation .

Kim Kardashian West to Jerry Brown: Test the DNA of Kevin Cooper

Kim Kardashian West, coming off her ​recent ​success in getting President Trump to pardon a grandmother serving a life sentence, has taken to Twitter to ask California Gov. Jerry Brown to give San Quentin death row inmate Kevin Cooper the DNA tests he has been denied, tests that could prove his innocence.

​Cooper has been imprisoned for 34 years for a ​savage crime he insists he did not commit—the 1983 slaughter of chiropractors and Arabian horse breeders Doug and Peggy Ryen, both 47, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes. Christopher was a friend of Joshua Ryen, 8, who was attacked and left for dead.

Though Cooper has lost all his appeals, in 2009 five judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals asserted he was framed by the San Bernardino, Calif., Sheriff’s Department. The judges were joined by six colleagues in asking for a hearing to prove his innocence. ​Cooper’s attorneys continue to gather new evidence that he did not commit the crime.

What separates execution and exoneration in the case are modern DNA tests that Cooper’s attorneys claim could prove he was framed. They are being fought by the San Bernardino district attorney’s office and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who say enough DNA testing has been done and no more is needed. The tests could be ordered by the governor, but he has made no public move to do so. Brown has been sitting on Cooper’s clemency petition, which details numerous examples of law enforcement misconduct in the case, for almost two and a half years.

​Following a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof about Cooper, California Sens. Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein urged Brown to let the tests proceed. The DNA tests could not only clear Cooper but also point to the original suspects, one of whom, the convicted murderer of a 17-year-old girl, was interviewed by the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department after the murders and agreed to take a polygraph test. However, the detectives changed their minds and decided one would not be necessary.

​Kevin Cooper is a Truthdig contributor. His clemency petition and other documents in his case can be found here.

Journalist Narda Zacchino has been investigating this case for over a year. Her next story on Kevin Cooper’s bid for exoneration will appear on Truthdig next week.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the  Poor People’s Campaign . Please help us by  making a donation .

Pope: Abortion Is ‘White Glove’ Equivalent to Nazi Crimes

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis denounced abortion on Saturday as the “white glove” equivalent of the Nazi-era eugenics program and urged families to accept the children that God gives them.

Francis spoke off-the-cuff to a meeting of an Italian family association, ditching his prepared remarks to speak from the heart about families and the trials they undergo. He lamented how some couples choose not to have any children, while others resort to pre-natal testing to see if their baby has any malformations or genetic problems.

“The first proposal in such a case is, ‘Do we get rid of it?'” Francis said. “The murder of children. To have an easy life, they get rid of an innocent.”

Francis recalled that as a child he was horrified to hear stories from his teacher about children “thrown from the mountain” if they were born with malformations.

“Today we do the same thing,” he said.

“Last century, the whole world was scandalized by what the Nazis did to purify the race. Today, we do the same thing but with white gloves,” Francis said.

The pope urged families to accept children “as God gives them to us.”

Francis has repeated the strict anti-abortion stance of his predecessors and integrated it into his broader condemnation of what he calls today’s “throw-away culture.” He has frequently lamented how the sick, the poor, the elderly and the unborn are considered unworthy of protection and dignity by a society that prizes instead individual prowess.

He has also decried how women are often considered part of this “throw-away culture,” sometimes forced to prostitute themselves.

“How many of you pray for these women who are thrown away, for these women who are used, for these girls who have to sell their own dignity to have a job?” Francis asked during his morning homily Friday.

Francis has dedicated much of his pontificate to preaching about families, marriage and the problems that families today encounter. He is expected to highlight these issues during his August trip to Ireland where he’ll close out the Catholic Church’s big family rally.

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.

Eon McLeary and Manuel Ruiz on Documentary ‘The Work’ and Mental Health in Prison (Audio and Transcript)

In this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer discusses the new documentary “The Work” with producer Eon McLeary and with Manuel “Manny” Ruiz, one of the subjects. The documentary follows members of a group therapy program at Folsom State Prison created by the Inside Circle Foundation, which brings together inmates and non-inmates to work through mental health issues. It’s a rare view into the reality of life for the 2.3 million Americans currently behind bars.

Ruiz describes how the program helped all the participants learn to understand and express their feelings, to not fear being vulnerable. “The last thing I would ever show anybody is what I considered being vulnerable or weak,” he tells Scheer, “or what anybody else would say: ‘That guy’s, you know, kind of soft or weak, or that’s easy prey.’ ”

McLeary discusses why he wanted to make this documentary, the impact of the program, how it’s helped inmates avoid conflict when they’re released, and his personal connection to the program.

Listen to the interview in the player above and read the transcript below. Find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, a pretentious title, but the intelligence comes from my guests, not from me. And we have to, like to have a wide-range of guests with different life experience. And what I like about the guests today, they’re involved with a film called “The Work,” which does not convey, really, the excitement of the film. But it’s a chance to see inside this huge population of 2.3 million people in one kind of incarceration or another in the United States. And for most people, they’re kind of a throwaway population; out of sight, out of mind; the assumption that they’re criminals, that they’re not, cannot be rehabilitated.

And what this movie does is it visits a program that I think has been in existence for 17 years, which comes from the opposite way: it says, you know, these are important human beings; they have souls, they have feelings, they have experience; and they can be rehabilitated. And it’s a program that’s been successful, at least for 40 human beings, who, not one has returned, I gathered those statistics. So let me begin by introducing my guests, because you come from opposite sides of this.

First of all, we have one of the filmmakers, Eon McLeary, right here, who made the film. And then we have one of the stars, in a way, of the film; because the film centers on a program of confrontation that goes on twice a year for four days, and builds on a weekly program of self-examination and criticism, and kind of a 12-step program that takes place in Folsom Prison. Made famous by Johnny Cash, but also one of the big maximum-security prisons in California. And we have Manuel “Manny” Ruiz, who was there for, how long were you in Folsom, and you were also in Pelican Bay, probably the most fearsome prison in the country, or one of them.

Manuel Ruiz: I was incarcerated for a total of 21 years, and four of those years were spent in Pelican Bay. I was in Folsom two separate times, once in the early nineties–I’d say when I first came to prison, ‘92, I was there for a short term, and then I came back in ‘97.

RS: And you were 16, 17 when you–

MR: I was 18, I had just turned 18 when I was arrested for this crime. I committed my crime when I was 17 years old.

RS: And what was that crime?

MR: Attempted murder for a gang shooting, where I shot three men.

RS: And here in Southern California, or–?

MR: Yeah, right here in Southern California, in front of my neighborhood.

RS: You want to tell us about that?

MR: I grew up in San Gabriel Valley, I grew up in La Puente. As a teen, I was very high energy, and didn’t know how to direct my energy. And I had my friends, and we started being mischievous as youngsters. And that just led on to being more than mischievous, and I got into gangs. And in my teenage years, when I was 17, I got confronted by rival gang members, and it’s like during the early nineties there was a lot of drive-bys, a lot of shootings, and the gang problem was really taking off, and I was a part of it.

RS: And you’re also one of the stars in this film. Because the film involves, twice a year at Folsom, they admit people from outside, and they meet with people in the prison population who have been going through these weekly sessions. And there’s, it’s a confrontation going both ways. And in the film, you’re actually at one point with the person who’s come in, and these people are also looking for answers, and questions, and also maybe they could end up in prison if their life had gone a different way or goes a different way.

And what struck me about this film, every time I visit this subject, either through a documentary or what have you, or interviewing people, we’re reminded that, you know, the people in prison can be very smart, can be very complex, have been through a struggle. And they are us. And so watching this documentary, you are actually one of the leaders bringing sanity, including for the people who came in as outsiders, because they have a breakdown. And you spot that at the beginning, you say wait a minute, we’re not the only patients here; these outsiders are coming in because they, too, need this kind of treatment.

MR: Well, to me, I recognize that there’s a, in myself, when I got into the group, I was not in touch with my emotions. That’s the gist of it for me. I was out of touch with how I felt. I didn’t know how to deal with how I felt, and I suppressed a lot of what I felt. And that informed my behavior, and informed my decision-making. And the more I worked, doing the weekly groups where I was modeled by other men who had been doing this type of work, how to be in integrity, how to know what it is that I’m feeling and how to respond appropriately with the emotions that come up, I got better at it. And I worked with other men; we all learned how to be emotionally literate, and to work with our feelings.

Then, seeing other people, whether other prisoners or people from the outside who do not know how to deal with their emotions, and just go through life with a mask–just like we would do inside prison, walk the yard and put on a mask. But nobody knows who I really am. Most times I don’t even know who I really am, unless I do that introspective work. Seeing people from the outside who aren’t in touch with themselves, it was easy to spot. And they might not be making the mistakes like, or the bad decisions like I did, or the people that I was doing time with. But they may not be that happy with themselves, and they may not be that happy with their lives and where they’re at. And that was something I definitely spotted with the guy that I was with. He wasn’t happy with his life and his place in it. That was obvious.

RS: OK. I want to ask you to tell me, what is it like to be in a maximum security prison. And you’ve been in some of the worst; I mean, you were at Pelican Bay and so forth. To me it’s almost incomprehensible; I’ve been in jail for maybe 24 hours or something, I mean I’ve been, you know, not always under good circumstances, but there’s been awareness there’s other people outside getting me out, that I have a good case, and so forth. And even that was terrifying, I have to admit. And then when I interview someone who’s been in for year after year after year, and in your case, when you first went in, you know, you didn’t even know if you’d be getting out.

MR: Yeah, I believed I wasn’t getting out of prison. And honestly, I was afraid when I was inside of prison. But I would never show that to anybody. The last thing I would ever show anybody is what I considered being vulnerable or weak, or what anybody else would say: That guy’s, you know, kind of soft or weak, or that’s easy prey. And so when I talked about people wearing masks, you know, on the outside–inside prison, we were all putting on masks, every time we stepped out of our cell doors. And yeah, Pelican Bay was a scary place to be; Folsom was a very scary place to be. But I did my best not to let that fear come up.

And I had to compensate, overcompensate to battle that fear. So I would, I would hurt other people. Yeah, that’s–it’s the best way for me to put it, just–I was so afraid, I would rather hurt other people than get hurt. And so I did. I got in trouble, I was involved with a lot of violence. And not because I was angry with anybody, not because I had anything against anybody else, but I would rather not be taken advantage of, and if people were afraid of me, then the better.

RS: Well, and in this movie, “The Work”–and why is that the title, by the way? Let me ask the filmmaker, Eon McLeary.

Eon McLeary: The reason that it’s the title, I mean, we kind of wrestled with what the title would be. But that’s, like, a colloquialism of sort of the organization, when you are sort of confronting whatever that place of pain is, or whatever that thing is you’re trying to avoid, it’s work. That is what your work is, and the whole package of what you will have to do to untangle all that, that’s your work. When [unclear] at the end, he’s sitting in the circle, he’s the one with the red shirt, you know, and he ties it all together and says, “This is the work.” You know, “This is the work, y’all.” And so we’re like, OK, that’s the title.

RS: By the way, this film is going to be available on, well, it is available by the time we broadcast this, on Topic.com. So with this conversation, my goal here is to get you interested, people listening to this. And you got to watch this. Because it challenges the basic mythology of the “lock ‘em up, throw away the key” mentality, which is being challenged across the country now. You meet human beings who, as you say, on the yard or previously, could be at each other’s throats. You got the white racist, you know, and you got the Native American talking about his mythology and history, and you got the most varied group of people in this film, in this little session where they’re going to be together for four days, but they meet weekly.

And they’re doing the thing that other people think you can’t do. And one reason I’m very sympathetic to this movie is over the years, I spent a lot of time paying attention to a group called Delancey Street. And that’s not the group involved here, but they do very similar kind of programs and break down your resistance and think about it a different way. So let’s talk a little bit about the group that you feature in this movie, that brought you together, the Inside Circle Foundation. I think your father–I’m talking to the filmmaker, Eon McLeary; I have to remind myself I’m on radio, I’m not doing video–but your father was involved with this group.

EM: Yeah, my dad, he’s a different kind of guy, and he has done this kind of work, really, all over the world. And in the late nineties he bumped into somebody–

RS: What’s his name?

EM: James McLeary, Dr. James McLeary. He bumped into someone doing something like this on the outside, and that gentleman was in Folsom at one point, or in prison, incarcerated at one point. And he said, if we can do this in prison, in Folsom Prison, will you help? And my dad said yes, not expecting that that would ever come to pass; you know, why would an administration allow sort of all this infrastructure, you know, to come into the prison. But he called my dad up about six months later and said: It’s on. So my dad, he showed up, he didn’t know what he was getting himself into; I don’t think anyone did. They did a pilot program over old Folsom, which is a level two. And the warden said, if you can get it done on level two with no problem, you can bring it to the level four, which is on the same grounds.

RS: And just tell people what the difference is between these levels.

EM: Yeah. So the levels in California, it goes from one to four, and four being the most severe.

MR: Maximum security.

EM: Yeah, maximum security.

MR: So they’re security levels. So you have minimum security, medium security, maximum security, and then, like, supermax, they can’t go any further unless they shoot you to space. But basically, that’s what the level fours are, is maximum security.

RS: And that’s what the new Folsom is.

EM: Correct.

RS: And that’s what the film is based on.

EM: Correct.

RS: So you got the hardest of the hard here, OK.

EM: Correct. Yeah, they basically wanted to see, before they brought it in to the volatile sort of container, they wanted to see if it could go smoothly in the level two.

RS: And just for people who might think this is a nice, pie-in-the-sky idea that’s going nowhere, you’ve been, they’ve been doing it for 17 years.

EM: Yes, they’ve been doing it for 17 years.

RS: OK, so it’s real, and it works, to the degree that the people who’ve gotten out don’t come back.

EM: I mean, honestly, it’s not even just, I mean, from my personal perspective, it’s not even just that it works, they don’t come back. It’s, I’ve spoken with some of these men who’ve been on the outside, and they tell me a sequence of events where there was a conflict that was going to end badly for the other person involved, and if they had not done this training, maybe that person wouldn’t, other person wouldn’t be here. So it’s, it is, it basically just sort of removes the trigger–or it slows the time between the trigger and reaction. And it’s effective.

RS: Well, it’s–let me ask Manny, because you were one of the prisoners. When you look across, and I’ll describe you–well, tell me about your background. You’re–

MR: I’m Hispanic. I grew up in San Gabriel Valley. And like I said, my days of gangs were proliferate. I went to Catholic–I went to Catholic school. I was an altar boy when I was in the third or fourth grade. [Laughs] My family was, I had my mom and my dad until they separated when I was in third or fourth grade. I had a very nuclear family life where we sat around the table, prayed, pass the peas, how was your day at school. And I have that background, but I also have my friends that I grew up with, and we all got in trouble the same way as we got older.

RS: So when you were in this, in the film, and at Topic.com some people can see what we’re talking about, you’re one of the stars. And you’re looking across, you know, a small group–what, how many, about 12 in the groups?

EM: Twelve, 15, something like that.

MR: Yeah.

RS: And there’s a whole series of these groups. You’re looking over at a guy who is avowedly a white racist, right?

MR: Oh, crossing the lines inside the group was a big, big thing. Because I’m Hispanic, and inside prison, racial lines are, to this day, are, they’re what we live by. So the whites hang out with the whites, the blacks hang out with the blacks, the Mexicans hang out with the Mexicans, you know what I’m saying. That’s how it is inside prison. The whole culture of racial boundaries inside prison is a bizarre world; it’s not like it is out here in the streets, but that’s how we live inside prison. So to go into a chapel, take off that mask, that yard mask, and to sit across somebody of a different race was a huge thing for me to do, from the first day that I went into the circle. I was the only Hispanic in that circle, Hispanic gang member in that circle. I didn’t have any of my peers around me; I had some white men, some black men, some Native American men. And I thought, well, it’s easier for me to say what I want to say and do what I want to do, because once we step outside, we are not going to talk to each other [Laughs] on the yard. I don’t have to worry about ‘em.

RS: But you’re showing vulnerability, I mean–

MR: Well, what I got from the first day that I walked into that circle was, these men were vulnerable. And there were older men; I was in my twenties, still, when I started going to this group.

RS: How old are you now?

MR: I’m going to be 45. So I was in my twenties, I had been incarcerated for five years. The thing, I was a part of that group from 1997 until I paroled–well, ‘til I left, in 2011. So like 14 years, I was going to circles once a week. And like I said, when I first started and I saw blacks and whites and Native American men right there, they were all in their forties. They had some stature, they had been around the, you know, prisons for a while, and they had some respect. And most of them were, if not all of them, were life prisoners, they were lifers; they were never going to get out. So seeing that, seeing older men, lifers, having some respect and carrying themselves in a different way, and speaking about themselves, speaking about what they thought and what they felt, blew me away. So the line, that racial line, was evaporated then and there. Because now it’s a human connection. I’m feeling my feelings, which I was afraid of; I didn’t know who to share them with, and I didn’t know what to do with them; I’m finding other men who feel the same way.

RS: Yeah, but in the movie, you make a–there’s a lot made about betrayal, when are you betrayed in life, and so forth. Didn’t you have that feeling, that when you get back out on the yard, they’re going to use your vulnerability against you, or you’re gonna–?

MR: Well, the thing about this group is that we built that trust up. We built trust with each other by–one of the greatest metaphors that we used, one of our mentors, one of my mentors, says: Well, if I’m sitting around guys that I don’t know, I’m not going to put my ace card or my king card up on the table; I might put a 2. I’ll put a 3, and see how it’s taken, see how people react. And if nothing bad happens, I’ll be like, OK, I’ll pull my hand back; then next time I’ll put a 4, or maybe a 6. You see, that’s how that trust–and we were all doing that with each other from the early days. So we were together for a long–there was like a group of men who were long-term members, and this trust got built up over time.

RS: When you say members, people should know we’re talking about the Inside Circle Foundation, which kind of convened all of this. And let me ask you about the role of religion. You talk about your own religious background. And to the degree I know anything about the effort to have rehabilitation in the prisons, it mostly is coming from religious organizations, particularly in the South, or you know, at least there’s the recognition that all of us have a soul. Does that come up in this at all?

MR: You hear “spirit” all the time. And so that’s a generic term, but it’s a capital “S” spirit, because I do rely on spirit; it’s that thing within myself, it could be whatever religious background a person comes from. Everyone uses and feels that term, because there is something happening when we come together with this intention, and we’re coming broken men with broken hearts. But when we do our work, there’s some healing going on; that’s spirit.

RS: It’s really interesting. Because you know, right now, the conversation has even been coarsened by our president, Trump, you know. And he refers very casually to “animals,” you know, anybody who was in a gang, they’re “animals,” and lock them up, we don’t want, we’re not hurting regular people, we’re hurting animals, you know. And that word would apply to some of the people that you’re in your circle with; I mean, they did, some of them, heinous crimes, they’re not claiming innocence, and so forth. And yet their humanity–and this is what’s powerful about this film to me–you can’t deny their humanity.

MR: Once their humanity–I love that word, I love that–is recognized and acknowledged by other people, if somebody else sees it in me, I’ll start feeling it in myself. But definitely that disconnect between my own humanity is what caused me to commit my crime in the first place. When I was 17 years old, if I didn’t care about myself, if I didn’t feel in touch with that, I could do anything to anybody without giving it much thought.

RS: [omission for station break] Our guests are “Manny” Manuel Ruiz, who was in prison for I guess 21 years, and Eon McLeary, who made this, was one of two directors, along with his brother, made this film, which is available on Topic.com. I want to switch the discussion a little bit about what’s happening with our prisons. And when we were talking before, the prison industrial complex has become a big industry. And you were mentioning, when you first went into the prisons they were gang-run, and you can describe that. And then they become a great source of–and we’re talking here in California, in case people are listening elsewhere, where Folsom prison is, where this was documented. But if you drive up the state, you know, on Highway 5, 99 and so forth, you go through one prison after another. And those prisons are now central to the economy of those communities, you know. And those are where the guards come from and so forth, you know. And you were describing kind of, well, now the guards have taken over, and they’re politically very powerful.

MR: I was talking about how they run the prisons. And so the emphasis is on, from my observations when I was inside, is that, what I’m saying, they run the prisons. The prisoners don’t have much choice anymore. What they say is what goes. And they have their finger on the button to let a person out the cell, or not let them out the cell. If there’s programs to help prisoners, it’s up to them to say yes or no. That’s a little bit of what I was referring to, how we used to have, prisoners used to have some control about how they ran their life inside prison. Not anymore; it’s very controlled. It’s very controlled from the top down, as a management, as a way of managing the prison population. As long as they’re managing it, it doesn’t matter if people are getting healed or if people are rehabilitating, or if people are learning job skills, education, so they don’t come back–that’s not an important thing anymore when, according to management, we just gotta keep everybody safe.

RS: You mentioned being in Pelican Bay, and the federal courts came down hard on Pelican Bay and said, no, this is cruel and unusual punishment, keeping people in solitary for very long periods of time, and so forth; I’m sure there’s some of that in Folsom, the new Folsom, also. But it’s interesting, if it becomes and industry and you’re in that industry, well, your product is getting more of these prisoners.

MR: In Pelican Bay, one of the famous things they say is, “This is the worst of the worst. These prisoners are the worst of the worst.” We talked earlier about how one loses touch with their humanity, how I felt I was lost, I didn’t feel I was in touch with my humanity. I didn’t think this when I was there for those four years, that I was the worst of the worst; I didn’t think I was that type of person. I didn’t think I was an animal, or anything like that. I wasn’t, you know, just a lost soul. I didn’t believe that about myself. But over those years of being treated as “worst of the worst,” when I was released, I had an inclination to hurt the man next to me just because they took the handcuffs off me.

Inside Pelican Bay, you’re always handcuffed. You’re shackled when you go to the law library, to anywhere–when you come out your cell, you are held in a restraint so that you cannot touch another person. So after just, I was only there for four years, remove the handcuffs from me, and the inclination comes up, says–you just let out a caged beast! Let me hurt the person next to me–for no reason! That struck me in my mind. It happened two times, within the first two weeks I was released, when it was just the physical thing of releasing the cuffs off my wrists–inside of me says, “Hurt somebody.” You know, act like a caged, an animal uncaged, a beast uncaged. That was, and I didn’t have that thought in my mind, yet that happened. And looking outside of myself, I said, woah–treating somebody as the “worst of the worst” starts to have an effect on them.

RS: Were you ever in solitary?

MR: I wasn’t in solitary, no. But I was in the secured housing unit, SHU, in Pelican Bay. And that’s where it’s you and your cellmate are the–you’re the only person you’re communicating and talking to and have contact with. So the whole thing of even having physical contact, if it’s just you and your celly, and every other time you’re outside your cell you’re just in shackles, has a psychological effect. And I didn’t know it, but it happened. And it is real; like I said, losing touch with your humanity–treat ‘em that way, and guess what happens.

RS: So let me ask you a question–I’ll turn to Eon McLeary, who, you’ve never been in prison, right?

EM: No.

RS: And so, but, talking to the two of you, I can’t distinguish between you, OK? That, to my mind, is actually a fairly startling revelation. Because the “animal” description is somebody who’s going to explode and punch you right away or kill you, or whatever, you know. You found yourself in this situation where you’re suddenly hanging out with people who are in that prison.

EM: Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I, I mean, didn’t grow–I grew up in an affluent neighborhood, kind of affectionately called the land of John Hughes movies, because all of John Hughes’s movies were actually filmed in my town–

RS: Which is where?

EM: Northfield, Winnetka, the North Shore of Chicago.

RS: Oh.

EM: And so it’s sort of an idyllic place. So my only interfacing with the police is from TP’ing people’s houses, getting caught drinking at parties when their parents were out of town. And so I had no connection with this whatsoever until my father, he came back from Folsom the first time that he went on kind of like a proto-training at a lower-level prison. He went there, he came back, he said “It blew my mind, do you want to come?” And I just said, yes. Because when–I mean, it obviously was kind of from a voyeuristic standpoint of, like, when will I ever be able to go into a level four, maximum security prison under these conditions? Because there’s no guards in the room, there’s no surveillance cameras or anything; you’re just in there sort of one-on-one. And it’s absolutely terrifying. I physically couldn’t stop shaking once I got in there. Like, I just had to give voice to that once, soon as I got there and I was talking to them, like, “I’m terrified.” You know, and the guy who I was kind of paired up with, he says, “I’m terrified too, I just can’t show it, ‘cause I’ll get killed in here.” You know.

But after those four days of being in there, it really was, I mean, you were speaking about humanity earlier, and that’s always the way I’ve described it, that it’s really the purest sort of interface with humanity that I’ve really experienced on that kind of scale. And so that’s sort of what kept bringing me back, and that was also sort of the impetus for the film. Because we would come back to, my brothers and I, to school or to work. And our girlfriends or our friends would, like–“Where were you? On your prison, you know, you were in prison for your vacation in California?” Because we were living in Chicago at the time. And we would try to explain it, and it just was a very, very difficult sort of thing to explain; it always sort of came down to this thing about humanity. That’s why I kept going, and I would say maybe one person out of every 10 persons who I would tell, they would say, “I want to go.” And that’s really how the program works.

RS: To remind people, the film is about, twice a year–there’s these weekly sessions, work sessions, and consciousness-raising, and thought-provoking–and then twice a year, people from the outside can come in, and they have a fairly large group, about 40 people come in or something like that?

EM: It’s about 40 inmates and 40 guys from the outside.

RS: Yeah, and they’re broken up into smaller groups, and they’re together for four days, basically. You know, and there’s confrontation, there’s breakdown, there’s a lot of crying. And I do want to mention, there’s one common theme that runs through the film, and that is the failure of the father. That, most of the people say, you know. And there’s one poignant one, I forget who says it, but the father gets out of jail and he shows up with some toy, and the kid doesn’t know, you’re my father–and the guy doesn’t know, you’re my father and you want me to play with a toy–no, I don’t even want to talk to you, I don’t know who you are. And then the father starts to abuse his son, who–

EM: From the military, yeah.

RS: Oh, he got out of the military.

EM: Yeah, it was the father came home from, he was like in the, he was in the Navy–

RS: Oh, from the war–so he wasn’t in jail, oh, I misunderstood, I’m sorry. OK, well, that makes it even more poignant, yeah.

MR: But the point is still the same. It’s the absent father. It’s that male, especially for men, that male figure who’s influencing, who’s showing and modeling to the youngster–manhood, emotions, teaching them. If that’s not there, then like for myself–let me say, if that person’s not there, that male figure’s not there, if that father is absent, then that young man is just left to his own devices to figure things out on his own.

RS: Yeah. And so let me just say, my own criticism, not of the film, but that you got to see more than this film. Because it’s no accident that we have absent fathers in many families; it has a lot to do with poverty, it has a lot to do with programs that we don’t have. You know, the welfare program basically only rewards people if there is an absent father, and so forth. And so there are a lot of issues connected. But I must say, it was really impressive in the film that the key point, I think almost every person said there was no role model of that kind, and there was a real feeling of abandonment. So let me, we’re going to have to wrap this up now, but the film is called “The Work.” It’s about a very successful and long-running program, 17 years, the Inside Circle Foundation has done it; the centerpiece here is at the new Folsom jail, which is the maximum security, one of the maximum security prisons in California. And I must say, we don’t give enough credit for documentarians. You didn’t make any money off this film.

EM: No. [Laughter]

RS: I looked at the first week’s gross, you know, and it was like $3,600. And I thought, wait a minute, some people spend that on a dinner, you know, for their friends–

EM: Yeah, and you can imagine it cost a lot to make.

RS: Yeah. And you say that with a smile on your face [laughter], but you know, it comes out of some other pot that you’re not paying, you know, or taking care of. It really is an incredible tribute to sort of idealism, and I want to take my hat off to you; I think you and your brother did a terrific job. So I want to thank you, Eon McLeary, and Manuel Ruiz, who plays a really central role in this film. So that’s it for another edition of Scheer Intelligence. Our producers are Rebecca Mooney and Josh Scheer. Our engineers are Mario Diaz and Kat Yore. And see you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”

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Despite Cancer, McCain Maintains His Maverick Ways

PHOENIX — Sen. John McCain’s legacy was thrust into focus nearly one year ago when he announced his brain cancer diagnosis. The six-term Senator and decorated Vietnam War veteran is now fighting the illness from his beloved Arizona, and filling the role of one of the few Congressional Republican voices to publicly rebuke Trump administration decisions.

Yet the question of what happens if McCain steps down from office before 2022 is a lingering one, casting an uncomfortable haze around the future of a seat that can’t quite ever be filled.

“John McCain is a one-of-a-kind politician, and there’s no replacing him,” said Stan Barnes, an Arizona Republican consultant. “No one serving in political office today remembers a time when John McCain was not representing us in Washington.”

Some Arizona Republicans have criticized conversations about the future of McCain’s seat as inappropriate. But reflections around the 81-year-old statesman’s life, legacy and status as a national political figure have resurfaced via a new HBO documentary, “John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and his new memoir, “The Restless Wave.”

The McCains have a family retreat south of Sedona, Arizona, along tree-lined Oak Creek. Daughter Meghan McCain was married there.

She said on KTAR’s Mac and Gaydos radio show Tuesday that she’s been trying to visit her father every other weekend. She said he’s strong, walking, talking and hanging in there.

“Everybody’s just dealing with it the best they can,” Meghan McCain said.

Following a decorated military career that included spending more than five years in prison camps, McCain entered the political arena in the early 1980s. He went from the House of Representatives to being elected to the Senate in 1986, following Barry Goldwater who retired. McCain gained a reputation as a lawmaker who was willing to stick to his convictions rather than go along with party leaders. It is a streak that draws a mix of respect and ire.

Matt Salmon, a former Arizona congressman, said McCain was instrumental in his own political career —along with countless other Arizona Republicans. Much like Goldwater, McCain’s been “the godfather of Arizona politics” for decades.

Salmon said McCain exemplifies how to stand up for one’s convictions and constituents regardless of the wants of party leadership. During the late 1990s, Salmon drove a successful effort to remove Newt Gingrich as Speaker.

“I don’t know that I would’ve had the courage to go do something like that without a maverick like John McCain paving the way,” he said.

When Salmon was elected to Congress, McCain, as a mentor, was supportive, loyal and quick to share his dry sense of humor.

“He said to me, ‘Congratulations Matt, now you’re part of the problem,'” Salmon said.

McCain’s maverick ways have pressed on in the era of President Donald Trump. He continues to release statements and tweets from Arizona. Following Trump’s decision to not endorse a G7 statement with other global trade leaders, McCain tweeted a message to U.S. allies that said in part “Americans stand with you, even if our president doesn’t.”

Sen. Jeff Flake, Arizona’s junior senator who is not running for re-election, said McCain’s mantra of “country before party” sets him apart from other senators. Flake praised his honesty and transparency, as witnessed in the recent documentary.

“He was open about his mistakes, and his failings, and that’s part of what’s so endearing about him,” he said.

Flake said during a recent visit with McCain at his home, the two sat on the deck for about an hour and talked about what they miss about Arizona politics, the kind that put party and partisanship aside. Flake said he’s concerned that Arizona voters may miss out on having an independent voice that they’ve grown accustomed to when McCain is no longer in office.

“Today’s politics kind of reward those who stick with the crowd,” Flake said. “The incentives are not here to be independent and it takes a strong personality, like John, kind of an outsized personality, to pull that off.”

Former Arizona congressman John Shadegg said most lawmakers don’t work as hard as McCain. He cited town hall meetings in Arizona that McCain held in non-campaign years. One time at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport, Shadegg was speaking with McCain but had to cut the conversation short when “about a hundred people” came over to talk to the senator.

“There’s a personal side to John McCain, which is very different than the public John McCain, and one that you can’t help but like and respect,” Shadegg said.

Some of the state’s Republican voters have been critical of McCain for not being conservative enough. In 2016, primary challenger Kelli Ward came within 11 percentage points in a four-way race after running as a more conservative alternative. A few years before that, a censure effort from the state party called out McCain for campaigning as a conservative but voting more moderate.

On the flip side, McCain’s service and his ability to stick to his convictions have earned him respect from Democrats. McCain’s vote against a repeal of the Affordable Care Act shortly after he announced his diagnosis further endeared him to those who might disagree with him on other policies, Democratic consultant DJ Quinlan said.

“He did have his high profile moments where he was really willing to stick it to his party,” Quinlan said.

In the event McCain steps down from his Senate seat before 2022, state law requires the governor to fill a vacancy with an appointee of the same political party who will serve until the next general election. Republican Gov. Doug Ducey hasn’t been keen on speculating. He and his wife Angela visited John and Cindy McCain about two weeks ago.

“To anyone who uses this as an opportunity to speculate or fan the rumor mill: Washington DC’s obsession with this when there is no issue to be discussed is disgraceful,” Ducey spokesman Daniel Scarpinato said in a statement.

Yet rumors abound, with names being suggested as possibilities to fill the seat as an appointee, such as Cindy McCain, former Sen. Jon Kyl and former state attorney general Grant Woods.

Republican consultant Barnes called replacement rumors “desperate barbershop gossip,” though he said he understands the uncertainty some might have about the exit of such a dominant figure from the political stage.

“That particular Senate seat has been an outsized, powerful voice on the floor of the United States Senate, and you just can’t overstate the importance of that phenomenon,” Barnes said.

Some had wondered whether McCain’s seat would be up this year if he left office before May 30, the deadline for candidates to file signatures to get on the ballot. That opportunity is likely closed — meaning the next general election where a candidate could run for the seat would be 2020 instead of 2018. Secretary of State Michele Reagan’s office has said her office won’t speculate on responses to possible vacancies, and will make any decisions once a vacancy becomes available.

Salmon said he doesn’t think anyone can fill McCain’s shoes. He recalled a trip to Vietnam where he saw a monument to McCain.

“His voice is not just an Arizona voice,” he said. “It’s a world voice.”

He said many are wishing McCain well and hoping for the best.

“He’s one of the toughest guys I’ve gotten to know,” Salmon said. “It’s not a disease that most people diagnosed with are successful at fighting. But they’re not John McCain. He’s a fighter.”

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Use of DNA Database to Solve Cold Cases Stirs Controversy

SALT LAKE CITY—A microscopic thread of DNA evidence in a public genealogy database led California authorities to declare this spring they had caught the Golden State Killer, the rapist and murderer who had eluded authorities for decades.

Emboldened by that breakthrough, a number of private investigators are spearheading a call for amateur genealogists to help solve other cold cases by contributing their own genetic information to the same public database. They say a larger array of genetic information would widen the pool to find criminals who have eluded capture.

The idea is to get people to transfer profiles compiled by commercial genealogy sites such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe onto the smaller, public open-source database created in 2010, called GEDmatch. The commercial sites require authorities to obtain search warrants for the information; the public site does not.

But the push is running up against privacy concerns.

“When these things start getting used by law enforcement, it’s very important that we ensure that to get all of the benefit of that technology we don’t end up giving up our rights,” said American Civil Liberties Union legal fellow Vera Eidelman.

She argues that when someone uploads their own DNA profile they aren’t just adding themselves — they’re adding everyone in their family, including dead relatives and those who haven’t been born yet. She also said DNA mining could lead to someone’s predisposition to mental and health issues being revealed.

“That one click between Ancestry and 23andMe and GEDmatch is actually a huge step in terms of who has access to your information,” Eidelman said.

This month, DNA testing service MyHeritage announced that a security breach revealed details about over 92 million accounts. The information did not include genetic data but nonetheless reinforced anxieties.

Nevertheless, the effort is gaining steam with some genetic genealogy experts and investigators.

The shared DNA profiles “could end up being the key to solving one of these cold cases and getting the family closure and getting someone really dangerous off the streets,” said CeCe Moore, the head of the genetic genealogy unit at the DNA company Parabon NanoLabs.

She’s uploaded her personal genetic information to the public database and wants it to become a larger repository of information for genealogy hobbyists and investigators alike. Separately, Parabon NanoLabs has also uploaded DNA data from 100 unsolved crime scenes in hopes of finding suspects.

Genetic genealogy has traditionally been used to map family histories. Labs analyze hundreds of thousands of genetic markers in an individual’s DNA, compare them with others and link up families based on similarities. The public database was created to compare family trees and genetic profiles between the commercial sites, which don’t cross-reference information.

Its potential as a police tool wasn’t broadly known until the April arrest of Golden State Killer suspect Joseph DeAngelo in northern California. Prosecutors allege DeAngelo, a former police officer, is responsible for at least a dozen murders and about 50 rapes in the 1970s and ’80s.

But the DNA-assisted hunt that led to his arrest wasn’t flawless. It initially led authorities to the wrong man whose relative shared a rare genetic marker with crime-scene evidence. A similar thing happened when authorities used a different public DNA database to investigate a nearly two-decade-old Idaho murder in 2014.

In May, Moore used the public database to help police arrest a 55-year-old Washington man linked to the 1987 killing of a young Canadian couple. She suspects the method will lead to dozens of arrests in similar cold cases.

Courts haven’t fully explored legal questions around the technique but are likely to allow it based on current law, said attorney and forensic consultant Bicka Barlow. The theory is that an individual’s right to privacy does not extend to material they’ve abandoned, whether it’s DNA or trash.

GEDmatch co-creator Curtis Rogers was initially unaware police used his site to find the suspected Golden State Killer. He’s glad it’s led to solving crimes but is worried about privacy issues. The site’s policy was updated in May and says it can’t guarantee how results will be used. Users are allowed to remove their information.

A California-based group of volunteers called the DNA Doe Project has also used the database to identify two bodies that stumped authorities for more than a decade. The group encourages its thousands of online supporters to contribute to the public database.

“It’s free, it’s like three or four clicks and a couple minutes of your time,” said co-founder Margaret Press. “It’s altruistic if you have no interest in your own family history; if you did, it’s a win-win.”

A volunteer group of investigators and attorneys called the Utah Cold Case Coalition has made a similar appeal.

The idea may be particularly appealing in Utah, co-founder Jason Jensen suspects. An interest in genealogy is especially strong in the state, because tenets of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints emphasize the importance of family relationships in the afterlife.

“Arguably that one person can post up their DNA and might potentially break a case that somebody back in Nantucket (Massachusetts) is trying to solve,” Jensen said.

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American History for Truthdiggers: The Jeffersonian Enigma (1800-1808)

Editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “Make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?

Below is the 11th installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 11 of “American History for Truthdiggers.” / See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9, Part 10.

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“The ‘revolution of 1800’ … was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of [17]76 was in its form; not effected indeed by the sword, as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.” —Thomas Jefferson in an 1819 letter to Judge Spencer Roane

We tend today, in our hyperpartisan moment, to imagine that politics have never been worse, more tribal, more contentious than they are now. But is that true? The United States was born of revolution, fought a bloody civil war and has changed time and again throughout its history. And, in 1800, the nascent republic would experience its first-ever electoral transition to a president of the opposing party. That election and its aftermath would have profound implications for the young republic and ensure some degree of Jeffersonian legacy for generations to come. Jefferson’s words—the output of his pen—were often beautiful, but some darkness lurked beneath the surface of his self-proclaimed republican, agrarian utopia.

The Revolution of 1800?: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the Partisan Rancor of an Election

The insults, untruths and outright verbal attacks during the 2016 election season shocked the American conscience and rattled the republic. Still, even the worst of the exchanges between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump hardly compare with the pejorative language slung in both directions by supporters of rivals John Adams (the sitting president, seeing re-election) and Thomas Jefferson (the sitting vice president, seeking the presidency) in the election of 1800.

Jeffersonian newspapermen called President Adams and the Federalists “loyalists,” “monarchists,” “Tories” and the “British faction.” Essentially, so the thinking went, these Federalists, led by Adams, were traitors, and loyal Republicans needed to “turn out [to vote] and save [their] country from ruin!”

Of course, the fierce rhetoric ran both ways. One Federalist paper predicted that, should Vice President Jefferson be elected president, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, and the soil will be soaked with blood.” With the ad hominem attacks running at that fever pitch, it is little wonder that the country seemed to be on the verge of civil war after the election results were so close that the matter had to be sent to the Congress for adjudication. Rumors and conspiracies flourished, and many armed themselves for the expected chaos.

In this political cartoon, an eagle prevents Jefferson from burning the  Constitution. (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.)

It never came. After dozens of tied votes in the House between Jefferson and his preferred vice president, Aaron Burr, a number of Federalists relented and handed victory to Jefferson. In the convoluted system of the day, presidential electors in the Electoral College did not designate which of the two men running on a given ticket (Federalist or Republican) was preferred as president and which as vice president. Therefore, when Jefferson bested Adams in a rather close election, both he and his running mate, Burr, had the same electoral vote count. Loathing Jefferson deeply, some Federalists threatened to throw their support behind Burr, but, after dozens of tied votes, a few Federalists—ironically under the direction of Jefferson’s sworn enemy, Alexander Hamilton—gave in and ensured Jefferson’s election.

Did this constitute a revolution? It is hard to say. Certainly Jefferson thought so, and indeed the governing theories of the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans were almost diametrically opposed. The two parties even celebrated different holidays marking the birth of the nation, with the Republicans focused on the more egalitarian celebration of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (July 4th), while the Federalists favored a celebration of Washington’s birthday. This was, truly, a country divided.

What is certain is that the United States had (just barely) survived its first peaceful transfer of elected power from an incumbent president to an opposition successor. Think of all the recent European, African and Asian countries that have struggled so mightily, and often failed, to pass that vital democratic test.

The Electoral College map of 1800.

Still, there remained something disturbing about the 1800 (and 1796) election map. The nation was clearly dividing into opposing sections. Nearly the entire South voted Republican, and absolutely all of New England went Federalist. The division was about more than the peculiar institution of slavery—though that played a part—and came down to conflicting worldviews of what republican, post-revolutionary society should be. For the Jeffersonians, the future was agrarian, expansive, ultimately dominated by the “people,” the yeomanry. Its future lay westward. The Federalists were often commercial elites, with proprietary wealth and aristocratic ambitions. They looked to the east, to the sea and to Europe for the country’s future.

It is all so bizarre in hindsight: Jefferson—a textbook planter aristocrat with some 200 slaves—sought to represent small farmers in the South and what was then considered the West, and middling artisans in the North. Adams, though a successful lawyer and proponent of powerful federal governance, owned no slaves and lacked the plantation lifestyle of Jefferson the gentlemen.

Republican Reforms: The Jeffersonian ‘Utopia’

“But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” —Jefferson’s first inaugural address, March 4, 1801

“There are no red states or blue states, just the United States. … [T]here is not a liberal and a conservative America—there is only the United States of America.” —Sen. Barack Obama, speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 2004

Ultimately, Jefferson, the wealthy planter who claimed to speak for the lowliest laborer, emerged victorious in the presidential election of 1800. Knowing how close the nation had come to civil strife, Jefferson, not half the public speaker that he was a writer, used his inaugural address as a call for unity. Not everyone bought it. Jefferson’s two terms were highly partisan, antagonistic and controversial. The Federalists could hardly stomach the man; most Republicans worshipped him. Sound familiar?

Nevertheless, whether or not his victory constituted a “revolution,” Jefferson’s America underwent profound changes, democratizing certain aspects of society and of the civic culture. Staying true, initially, to his principles, Jefferson began slashing federal spending and federal departments. Hamilton’s old Department of the Treasury was eviscerated. Jeffersonians believed in a small, unobtrusive government and sought to create one.

An early target for the Jeffersonians was the Federalist-dominated Army. Defense spending was cut, troop numbers decreased, and—somewhat counterintuitively—a new federal military academy, at West Point, was begun in 1802. But a closer look indicates that even this had political motivations. West Point was to be a training ground for Republican-inclined officers, an antidote to the many Federalist officers in the ranks.

Political changes translated to social changes as (at least white male) society democratized. In referring to those higher on the socioeconomic ladder, workers and servants ditched the titles “master” and “mistress” for “Mr.” and “Mrs.” and the more colloquial and less deferential Dutch term of “boss” often served as a substitute for “master” as well. Indeed, if, as Jefferson famously wrote, “all men were created equal,” then why adhere to any hierarchy at all? The Federalists were aghast at the comeuppance of these unfettered masses and pined, ironically, for a pre-revolutionary society.

‘Empire of Liberty’: Jefferson and the West

The Louisiana Purchase.

“We shall … add to the empire of liberty an extensive and fertile country.” —Thomas Jefferson in a letter to George Rogers Clark in 1780

“I infer that the less we say about the constitutional difficulties respecting Louisiana the better, and what is necessary for surmounting them must be done.” —Jefferson to James Madison (1803)

Suffice to say, it wasn’t exactly “street legal”—the famous Louisiana Purchase, that is. Could it really be constitutional for federal agents, appointed by the government, to purchase an immense tract of land and double the size of the country without explicit authorization from the president or Congress? The envoys were supposed to buy only New Orleans and ended up paying a bargain price for a vast continent. One would think the small-government, constitutionally constructivist Republicans would be appalled at such an expansion of federal power. And yet, Jefferson and many of his followers thought it vital and in America’s interest.

It’s ironic, really. After all, vast new territories inevitably meant a groundswell of government officials: surveyors, marshals and soldiers to garrison the frontier, Indian agents to negotiate treaties, and so on. Still, Jefferson saw the expansion of his famed “empire of liberty” as both pragmatic and idealistic. Pragmatic because the new nation had a small Army and feared the presence of French and Spanish lands to the south and west and British power to the north. Acquiring Louisiana would make America a continental power once and for all and keep Napoleon’s France from threatening the young republic.

Still, Jefferson was motivated by so much more than that. He always looked westward, was veritably obsessed with the West all his life (though he never traveled there). He was awestruck by native peoples but contributed greatly to their eventual expulsion and destruction. The Louisiana Purchase, after all, spelled disaster to the then-independent Native American nations that actually lived there. Still, Jefferson thought the extension of republican modernity would lift Indian living standards and turn Native Americans into modern, democratic farmers.

That was the point, Jefferson believed. The United States must not look to the sea or to Europe when modeling society. Europe, the Old World, remained monarchical and hierarchical to the core. For the American republic to blossom, it must remain a nation of small, independent farmers. Land ownership and self-sufficiency made for the best republican citizens. By this logic, and given the exploding America’s population, expansion was not only desirable but necessary—an existential matter, indeed.

To the end of his life, Jefferson seems to have believed he could organize and rationalize the settlement of the New West and thereby “save” Native Americans. Ultimately, however, the slipshod tide of settlement inundated the tiny federal bureaucracy, leading to squatting, overdevelopment and the stealing of native lands. Violence begot violence, and the outnumbered Indians were overwhelmed. Jefferson, perhaps the most expansion-minded president in American history, summed up the triumph thusly: “[N]o constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire [emphasis mine] and self-government.” Of course, he meant an empire and self-government for white Americans. The natives hardly stood a chance.

American Sphinx: The Unknowable Character of Thomas Jefferson

“[Jefferson], the philosophical visionary, may be ideally suited to be a college professor, but is not suited to be the leader of a great nation.” —Alexander Hamilton in an 1802 letter to Rufus King

Jefferson’s idealism regarding Indian policy was just one of many contradictions at the heart of his life and political philosophy. So much has been written about this fascinating, ingenious and deeply flawed Founder that he almost appears unknowable.

The native enthusiast who opened western land and the path to Indian expulsion. The opponent of federal power who agreed to keep the National Bank, waged a naval war with Barbary pirates, and nearly shut down the American economy through the severe restrictions of his Embargo Act (meant to gain leverage over the feuding British and French by cutting all trade with both). The lifelong critic of standing armies who funded a national military academy.

Furthermore, he was an opponent of slavery (at least in certain writings) who himself owned more than 200 human beings. The man obsessed with the supposed evils of racial mixing who himself fathered several children with his slave, Sally Hemmings. That story, more than all the others, may best personify the complexity of Jefferson the man.

Jefferson’s wife, Martha, died at age 33 after suffering difficult childbirths and several months after the birth of her last child. Jefferson, who was heartbroken, was 39 at the time. From his wife he inherited many slaves. One, the teenage Sally Hemmings, was one-fourth black and—because she was the child of Martha’s father—was Martha’s half sister. (It was common for slave owners, through rape, to impregnate women they owned.) According to some reports, Sally and Martha, sharing a father, looked alike. Jefferson would eventually father a number of children with Hemmings. These children, one-eighth black, remained enslaved on Jefferson’s plantation to the end of his life, often working in the house. Visitors to Monticello were known to remark on the resemblance of some of Jefferson’s slaves to their master.

A circa-1804 caricature showing Jefferson as a rooster and Sally Hemmings as a hen.

This was the family of Jefferson, of the man who penned “all men are created equal” and clamored about the evils of racial mixing. Though rumors of Jefferson’s miscegenation were common even at the time (see the cartoon above), most historians refused to believe the Hemmings story until in recent decades it was incontrovertibly proved, in large part through DNA testing. It seems that generations of historians, enamored by this Founding Father, second in esteem only to George Washington, could not bring themselves to accept his hypocrisies.

We’ll never know for sure, but I tend to believe that Jefferson loved Sally, that her resemblance to his dead wife comforted a grieving and lonely man. This does not excuse Jefferson’s blatant hypocrisy but does, I think, illustrate the complexity of humans, then and now.

Between Freedom and Slavery: Jefferson, Free Blacks and Republican Slaves

“The rights of human nature [are] deeply wounded by this infamous practice [of importing slaves] and the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.” —Thomas Jefferson (1774)

Jefferson was not alone in walking a tense and fine line between freedom and slavery. Indeed, the entire republic toed that line throughout the Jeffersonian era and until the Civil War. Society, especially in the North, was democratizing. Larger and larger segments of the population could vote, and they called for more rights and less social deference. In the post-revolutionary period of idealism and excitement, many—North and South—began to predict the coming end of slavery. They were horribly mistaken.

In fact, Southern plantation chattel slavery was about to enter its golden era. Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin meant that the demand for this new cash crop would explode, requiring more hands to pick and carry the valuable crop. Slavery also expanded into the new southwest territories gained in the Louisiana Purchase. Furthermore, fear—visceral white fear—drove planters to tighten the proverbial leash and institute a slave culture even more reliant on terror.

In the 1790s and 1800s, another New World possession, a former colony, became just the second country to gain its independence from colonial masters. One would imagine the United States would be thrilled to embrace this kindred spirit of a nation. But this was a black country: Haiti. The Haitian slaves and free blacks waged a brutal war of independence with France for more than a decade. There was slaughter on both sides, and many white planters were murdered or became refugees. This newly independent black republic was the absolute talk of the town, and news of its brutality spread widely.

The very existence, and example, of the Haitian overthrow of the French terrified Southern planters in the United States. They knew, though it is remarkable to imagine, that even their own slaves had heard talk of the black victory in Haiti. Thus, when a Virginia slave named Gabriel plotted a similar (though smaller) uprising in 1800, the uncovered conspirators were dealt with harshly: Dozens were hanged. Jefferson’s American republic, in fact, so feared the Haitian rebels that the U.S. would not recognize the independence of this sister republic in the Western Hemisphere until the American Civil War.

Still, due to manumission, grants and purchases of freedom, and free black immigration, a class of independent African-Americans began to grow—especially in the North. Ironically, the presence of these free, sometimes educated, blacks caused unease among Northern and Southern whites. Fears sparked by the role of free blacks in the Haitian Revolution, and by Gabriel’s conspiracy, led Northern and Southern states alike to actually move backward and further restrict the rights of free blacks. Northern states developed segregated communities, took away or banned blacks’ rights to vote, and otherwise restricted their freedom. Southern states passed “black codes” similar to those of the later Jim Crow era and eventually expelled most or all free blacks to the north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Consider the irony: Jeffersonian America, while a substantially democratizing white, male society, actually restricted the freedom of free blacks and hardened the institution of slavery (even though slavery was gradually ending in the Northern states) into its most brutal manifestation in American history. As such, a free black man in New York or Boston tended to have more rights in 1790 than in 1808—at the end of Jefferson’s second term.

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As with Jefferson the man, so it was with Jeffersonian America writ large. A mess, a mass of contradictions; a darkness lurking beneath and tottering the nation’s very foundations. Already Northern and Southern society was diverging. Already the contradictions of liberty for some (white men) and slavery or destruction for others (blacks and natives) were shaking the nation.

It was the burden of our American society to bear this inconvenient and uncomfortable fact: that our most ardently democratic Founder, with a pen of gold and ideas so beautiful they can move one to tears, was also a slave owner and signed the death warrant of many thousands of Indians and that of an entire way of life.

Still, Jefferson—for all his flaws—remains forever bound up in the fabric of America’s past and also of its present. His democratizing instincts, agrarian glamorizing and distrust of federal power are alive still in the American psyche and within the platforms of modern political parties.

Shall America be “great again”? Was it ever? Or, indeed, does the Jeffersonian revolution demonstrate the precarious foundations of a flawed and ever changing society?

Jefferson’s contradictions are America’s too. Then, and now.

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To learn more about this topic, consider the following scholarly works:

● James West Davidson, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark H. Lytle and Michael B. Stoff, “Experience History: Interpreting America’s Past,” Chapter 9: “The Early Republic, 1789-1824” (2011).

● John M. Murrin, “The Jeffersonian Triumph and American Exceptionalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 20, Number 1 (Spring 2000).

● Peter S. Onuf, “The Revolution of 1803,” The Wilson Quarterly 27, Number 1 (Winter 2003).

● Gordon Wood, “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815” (2009).

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Maj. Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He lives with his wife and four sons in Lawrence, Kan. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his new podcast, “Fortress on a Hill,” co-hosted with fellow vet Chris “Henri” Henrikson.

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

Truthdig is running a reader-funded project to document the Poor People’s Campaign. Please help us by making a donation.