Chris Hedges's Blog, page 562

Activists in New York Rally as Disaster Capitalists Circle Puerto Rico (Photo Essay)

Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City was the setting Wednesday for an at-capacity discussion on the subject of Naomi Klein’s new book, “The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists.”

Presented by Our Power Puerto Rico, UPROSE, Climate Justice Alliance, The Intercept and Haymarket Books, the “Battle for Paradise” event drew hundreds of people concerned about an ongoing crisis that has become more critical since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017.

PHOTO ESSAY | 15 photosClick here to view photos from both events.

The panel, introduced by The Intercept Editor-In-Chief Betsy Reed, included Klein, UPROSE Executive Director Elizabeth Yeampierre, “Democracy Now!” co-host Juan González, Puerto Rican environmental activist Katia Avilés-Vázquez and Edwin Morales, vice president of the Puerto Rico Teachers Federation. The audience was told that royalties from book sales for the evening would be donated to Junta Gente (“The People Together”), a consortium of community groups on the island.

Conversation addressed concerns that FEMA’s evacuation of residents from Puerto Rico, rather than facilitating necessary rebuilding efforts, will instead set the stage for a massive land-grab, further enabling privatization and leading to eventual destruction of the island as the residents have known it.

“We forget that Puerto Rico is the question when it comes to national oppression and to colonialism right here in this country,” González said. “We can often talk about what’s going on [with] the Rohingya in Myanmar, with the Irish versus the U.K., with what China is doing to Tibet, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but here in the United States, it is Puerto Rico that is our colony,” he said, adding that it is “the one colony that the American people have the most ability to have an impact on.”

Morales detailed the effect of the disaster on Puerto Rico’s education system. “The secretary of education [Betsy DeVos] made an announcement right after the hurricane, that this was the best opportunity to build to another education system and reshape the institution in favor of the corporate interests,” he said. “By that time, she tried to close many schools. … [T]here [were] bigger plans to transform education using the natural disaster in a way to control people.” He continued, “They imposed charter school models and vouchers. We never had this before. Puerto Rico has a long history of fighting against charter schools and they imposed it using all of the trauma in Puerto Rico as a way to shock people and continue to reshape the island in favor of the wealthy.”

Morales’ views about the U.S. government’s long-term plans for Puerto Rico resonate with Klein’s own, first introduced in her book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” In Hurricane Maria’s wake, Klein, who is also a senior correspondent for The Intercept, traveled to the island to research and produce a short documentary, which was shown at Cooper Union and provided the basis for her follow-up book, “The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists.”

Klein laid out her argument in a June 6 interview with “Democracy Now!” “It’s state-sponsored mass killing,” she said. “That’s what we’re talking about here, because maybe there wasn’t the intent to kill, but there was the [government’s] knowledge that the infrastructure was being destroyed.”

Hurricane Maria is estimated to have caused more than $90 billion in damage in Puerto Rico alone. Though President Donald Trump’s administration claimed the catastrophic storm caused 64 deaths on the island, a study by Harvard University estimated that the death toll could actually climb as high as 4,645—70 times the official total.

Wednesday’s panel was just one in a series of events in New York to raise awareness, as well as alarm, about Puerto Rico’s future. Last weekend, throngs of protesters gathered near the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan to demand an accurate accounting of Puerto Rican deaths resulting from Hurricane Maria. That demonstration kicked off a week of actions by activists and allies that will conclude Sunday with the popular National Puerto Rican Day parade.

Yeampierre was on the scene at the weekend protest, telling the crowd, “It should be a horror to the world that 5,000 people died under a government that didn’t care enough to find out people were burying family members in their backyard!”

Also in attendance was Jonathan Soto, associate vice president of strategic initiatives at Union Theological Seminary. “What we’ve witnessed is a public crucifixion of our people in Puerto Rico,” he said.

Several of the rally’s speakers pointed to their families and roots in Puerto Rico and noted that hundreds of people have left the island and resettled in New York since the disaster.

According to the Harvard study, the average household in Puerto Rico endured approximately 84 days without electricity, 68 days without water and 41 days without cell phone service following the hurricane.

Watch a recording of Wednesday’s event (via The Intercept) below:

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Activists in New York Put Spotlight on Puerto Rico (Photo Essay)

Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City was the setting Wednesday for an at-capacity discussion on the subject of Naomi Klein’s new book, “The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists.”

Co-hosted by The Intercept and Haymarket Books and taped by Democracy Now!, the “Battle for Paradise” event drew hundreds of people concerned about an ongoing crisis that has become more critical since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017.

PHOTO ESSAY | 15 photosClick here to view photos from both events.

The panel, introduced by The Intercept Editor-In-Chief Betsy Reed, included Klein, UPROSE Executive Director Elizabeth Yeampierre, “Democracy Now!” co-host Juan González, Puerto Rican environmental activist Katia Avilés-Vázquez and Edwin Morales, vice president of the Puerto Rico Teachers Federation. The audience was told that royalties from book sales for the evening would be donated to Junta Gente (“The People Together”), a consortium of community groups on the island.

Conversation addressed concerns that FEMA’s evacuation of residents from Puerto Rico, rather than facilitating necessary rebuilding efforts, will instead set the stage for a massive land-grab, further enabling privatization and leading to eventual destruction of the island as the residents have known it.

“We forget that Puerto Rico is the question when it comes to national oppression and to colonialism right here in this country,” González said. “We can often talk about what’s going on [with] the Rohingya in Myanmar, with the Irish versus the U.K., with what China is doing to Tibet, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but here in the United States, it is Puerto Rico that is our colony,” he said, adding that it is “the one colony that the American people have the most ability to have an impact on.”

Morales detailed the effect of the disaster on Puerto Rico’s education system. “The secretary of education [Betsy DeVos] made an announcement right after the hurricane, that this was the best opportunity to build to another education system and reshape the institution in favor of the corporate interests,” he said. “By that time, she tried to close many schools. … [T]here [were] bigger plans to transform education using the natural disaster in a way to control people.” He continued, “They imposed charter school models and vouchers. We never had this before. Puerto Rico has a long history of fighting against charter schools and they imposed it using all of the trauma in Puerto Rico as a way to shock people and continue to reshape the island in favor of the wealthy.”

Morales’ views about the U.S. government’s long-term plans for Puerto Rico resonate with Klein’s own, first introduced in her book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” In Hurricane Maria’s wake, Klein, who is also a senior correspondent for The Intercept, traveled to the island to research and produce a short documentary, which was shown at Cooper Union and provided the basis for her follow-up book, “The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists.”

Klein laid out her argument in a June 6 interview with “Democracy Now!” “It’s state-sponsored mass killing,” she said. “That’s what we’re talking about here, because maybe there wasn’t the intent to kill, but there was the [government’s] knowledge that the infrastructure was being destroyed.”

Hurricane Maria is estimated to have caused more than $90 billion in damage in Puerto Rico alone. Though President Donald Trump’s administration claimed the catastrophic storm caused 64 deaths on the island, a study by Harvard University estimated that the death toll could actually climb as high as 4,645—70 times the official total.

Wednesday’s panel was just one in a series of events in New York to raise awareness, as well as alarm, about Puerto Rico’s future. Last weekend, throngs of protesters gathered near the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan to demand an accurate accounting of Puerto Rican deaths resulting from Hurricane Maria. That demonstration kicked off a week of actions by activists and allies that will conclude Sunday with the popular National Puerto Rican Day parade.

Yeampierre was on the scene at the weekend protest, telling the crowd, “It should be a horror to the world that 5,000 people died under a government that didn’t care enough to find out people were burying family members in their backyard!”

Also in attendance was Jonathan Soto, associate vice president of strategic initiatives at Union Theological Seminary. “What we’ve witnessed is a public crucifixion of our people in Puerto Rico,” he said.

Several of the rally’s speakers pointed to their families and roots in Puerto Rico and noted that hundreds of people have left the island and resettled in New York since the disaster.

According to the Harvard study, the average household in Puerto Rico endured approximately 84 days without electricity, 68 days without water and 41 days without cell phone service following the hurricane.

Watch a recording of Wednesday’s event (via The Intercept) below:

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

Beware the Democrats and Their Good Billionaires

When I was 16 or 17, I used to drive to Pittsburgh from the small town where I lived to pretend to shop in Shadyside, a neighborhood with a relatively ritzy little shopping district, and, more importantly, to sit for at least an hour in the Starbucks on Copeland Street, where the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen worked. He was thin and had close-cropped hair and was probably a freshman in college—deliriously and seductively older to a high school kid like me. Half the time he wasn’t even there, and I’d just sit nursing a drink and hoping he’d somehow materialize to start a shift. We spoke exactly once: I was feigning interest in the shelf of whole beans and bric-a-brac for sale, and he asked if I needed assistance. I can’t imagine what I choked out in response before I fled in panic.

So I have a certain personal affection for Starbucks, whose accessibly mediocre products have overtaken a national culture that less than two decades ago could sneer at latte-sipping coastal elites and in which coal miners and long-haul truckers and whatever other folks are the most current Real Americans now can suck down fruity coffee desserts at highway rest stops from ocean to ocean. Truly, less divides us than we think.

It is fair to say that, without ever resorting to the gimmickry of Google’s erstwhile “Don’t be evil” slogan, Starbucks has managed to be relatively less evil than many giant corporations. Its supply chain is somewhat less horrible than most mass purchasers of global agricultural commodities, and it somehow manages to give its employees dental coverage, if grudgingly. It may not be a worker’s paradise, but compared with the chain-gang conditions of an Amazon “fulfillment center,” the company can at least claim to be adjacent to humane.

Its founder, former CEO and recently resigned Executive Chairman Howard Schultz, spun this modest straw into gold, fashioning for himself a shining reputation as a moral capitalist, the kind of reg-uh-lur nice guy who thinks us gays are just great and makes appreciative noises about protecting the natural world. As a result, he’s become that favored species of Democratic Party hacks: the Good Billionaire. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban held a similar position a few years back, during the election, because he said that Donald Trump was a big dumb-dumb. (We later discovered that the front office of the  Mavericks was a Grand Guignol of sexual harassment and misogyny.) Business magnate Warren Buffett was revered for saying that he’d give away all of his money and for pretending to live in a split-level house. And so on.

Schultz has political ambitions, perhaps presidential ones. He almost certainly would have been Hillary Clinton’s secretary of labor. He co-wrote a book about how much he just loves The Troops, with precisely the sort of understated, patriotic cover design you’d expect in a campaign book that no one will ever read. And let’s be honest: The psychopathic acquisitiveness required to actively hoard $3 billion is a close relative of the titanic self-regard and absolute megalomania that drive most presidential candidates. He wandered almost directly from announcing his resignation from Starbucks into the studios of CNBC, one of the many made-for-airport cable channels on which stock prices race across the screen like the opening credits of “Goodfellas” and men and women not quite attractive enough for CNN perform apoplectic divinations about the immediate near future of this company or that.

On CNBC, Schultz worried that the Democratic Party has drifted too far to the left, which is to say somewhat to the right of the mainstream conservative parties in Europe. He worried that we won’t be able to pay for nice things—health care, jobs guarantees, higher education—and identified the national debt as the great crisis of our time. Long-term debt is a normal part of the capital structure of any big corporation, and government debt is as much a feature of the modern nation-state as bad Olympics outfits, but our CEO didn’t venture into that territory. How can we afford anything?, he worried aloud. There you have it: the bold new progressive vision of Tory austerity, but with a few rainbow flags and diversity seminars. America’s shining, post-Trumpian future.

Schultz probably killed his chances of even making it to Iowa with these remarks, but who knows? Ed Rendell, Pennsylvania’s Tor Johnson-like ex-governor, followed Schultz onto cable to tell an obviously incredulous host that America secretly longs for a candidate who will look it square in the eye and “tell the truth”—that truth being, in effect, that all future possibilities are foreclosed to us, that we must live within our means, a diminished society of part-time baristas with a quarter-million dollars in student debt hoping desperately to squirrel away five bucks a month for a high-fee 401(k), God willing and if the creek don’t rise.

Poor Howard, imperial dreams dashed, will just have to live out his days in the ignominy of sitting atop his pile of booty doling out piecemeal challenge grants via a tax-exempt family foundation, but there’s no denying that his genre of bogus, austere responsibility lives on in the party he wants to court. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has already promised to bring back “pay-go,” the budget rule that requires new spending to be offset by either new revenues or spending cuts elsewhere. Because there are never new revenues, all this means is converting more of the few remaining programs of social insurance and public investment in America into more zillion-dollar fighter jets that can’t take off in the rain. Even if they lose the Congress, Republicans will happily join so-called centrist Democrats in passing the rule, which Democrats will faithfully uphold and the GOP will immediately blow up with a comically large stick of dynamite the moment it returns to power.

In the end, Democratic Party politics at the national level are structured and designed to be unresponsive to the desires of the Democrats’ electoral base. The real question is not whether the party will retake at least one chamber in this off-year, but whether some measure of control can be wrenched from the hands of the people who look at billionaires as friends, as allies, as candidates, rather than as piggy banks just waiting to be cracked open for the benefit of everyone else.

Humans Put Conservation Areas at Increasing Risk

Many of the world’s conservation reserves, intended to safeguard species at risk of survival, are increasingly unable to provide effective refuge.

At least one third of all the forests, grasslands, wetlands and mangroves notionally protected by laws to safeguard the wild things that evolved with them are under intense human pressure, according to the first detailed study for 25 years.

Major road systems criss-cross African wildlife reserves, cities have grown up in national park areas, and farmland and buildings blight landscapes supposedly reserved for endemic species at hazard from extinction. Altogether 6 million square kilometres (2.3m square miles) of protected land, researchers say, are “under intense human pressure.”

Since the global Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was agreed in 1992, the area of the world declared as protected has doubled in size, and more than 202,000 patches of conservation area and national park cover 14.7% of the Earth’s land surface.

Some of these areas are strictly for conservation of biodiversity; some permit limited human exploitation but are still intended mainly to provide habitat for the wild creatures.

Australian and Canadian scientists report in the journal Science that they examined what they call “human footprint” maps of the globe to make their assessment. The human footprint metric incorporates built environments, intensive agriculture, pasture lands, human population density, night-time lights, roads, railways and navigable waterways.

The scientists found that only 42% of these lands were free of measurable human pressure. But 32.8%, an area of more than 6m sq km – almost twice the size of India – counted as under intense pressure.

What worried the scientists most was what happened to some landscapes that were intact and in a natural state when declared as protected: since 1993, around 280,000 square kilometres of such wilderness had shifted from low disturbance to intense human pressure: this is an area almost as large as Italy.

Complete Human Dependence

Almost three fourths of the world’s nations – that is, 137 countries – have 50% of their protected land under intense human pressure. “If one assumes that protected land under intense human pressure does not contribute towards conservation targets,” the scientists write, “we show that 74 of 111 nations that have reached a level of 17% protected coverage would drop out of that list.”

Almost all human resources – including food and drink, fabrics and medicines – are derived from the planet’s biodiversity: even the coal, natural gas and petrol that drives the human economy was once wild forest and reed bed. Researchers have repeatedly stressed the importance of biodiversity to all human economic activity – they call it natural capital – and warned that continued loss of wild native plants and animals could have catastrophic consequences. The authors of the Science study warn that if human pressure increases, the goals of the CBD will be severely undermined.

“A well-run protected area network is essential in saving species,” said Kendall Jones of the University of Queensland. “If we allow our protected area network to be degraded there is no doubt biodiversity losses will be exacerbated.”

And his co-author James Watson of the World Conservation Society said: “Most importantly, we’ve got to recognise that these jewels in the crown need support – there are some protected areas that are safeguarding nature and that still haven’t got any evidence of human encroachment in them. We must ensure these values are maintained.”

Facebook Shared User Data With Select Companies

SAN FRANCISCO—Facebook shared personal information culled from its users’ profiles with other companies after the date when executives have said the social network prevented third-party developers from gaining access to the data, the company confirmed Friday.

The records included information about the friends of Facebook users, including phone numbers and breakdowns analyzing the degrees of separation between people on the social networks, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Facebook confirmed the report, acknowledging the information was given to a “small number” of companies including RBC Capital Markets and Nissan Motor Co., advertisers and other business partners.

The companies had access to the data during a stretch of time in 2015 after Facebook had locked out most developers who build apps that work on its social network. Facebook gave select “whitelisted” companies extensions before they were also blocked from getting its users’ personal information.

Those extensions expired before the end of 2015, Facebook said. The company believes the previously unreported extensions with a select group of companies is consistent with previous statements that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made, including in testimony to Congress, about shielding its users’ personal information from third parties since 2015.

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U.S. Soldier Dead, 4 Wounded in Somalia Attack

WASHINGTON—One U.S. special operations soldier was killed and four U.S. service members wounded in an “enemy attack” Friday in Somalia, the U.S. military said — casualties that are likely to put renewed scrutiny on America’s counterterror operations in Africa.

It’s the first public announcement of a U.S. military combat death on the continent since four U.S. service members were killed in a militant ambush in the west African nation of Niger in October.

U.S. Africa Command said in a statement that U.S. troops with Somali and Kenyan forces came under mortar and small-arms fire in Jubaland, Somalia, at around 2.45 p.m. local time.

One member of the “partner forces” was wounded. One of the wounded U.S. service members received sufficient medical care in the field, and the other three were medically evacuated for additional treatment.

The statement did not identify the attackers but said a larger force of about 800 Somali and Kenyan troops were conducting a multi-day operation against al-Shabab militants about 350 kilometers (217 miles) southwest of the capital, Mogadishu, when the attack occurred. The operation aimed to clear the Somalia-based extremist group al-Shabab from contested areas. The U.S. provided advice, assistance and aerial surveillance during the mission, the statement said.

Al-Shabab claimed credit for the attack, the SITE Intelligence Group said in a statement Friday.

The U.S. has about 1,000 special operations personnel in Africa. The last killing of a U.S. service member in Somalia was in May 2017 during an operation about 40 miles (64 kilometers) west of Mogadishu.

The U.S. had pulled out of the Horn of Africa nation after 1993, when two helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu and bodies of Americans were dragged through the streets.

But President Donald Trump in early 2017 approved expanded military operations against al-Shabab, leading to an increase in U.S. military personnel to more than 500 and the launch of dozens of drone strikes. Al-Shabab has been blamed for the October truck bombing in Mogadishu that killed more than 500 people.

Al-Shabab, linked to al-Qaida, seeks to establish an Islamic state in Somalia. It was pushed out of Mogadishu in recent years but continues to control rural areas in the south and central regions. Its fighters continue to attack the bases of a multinational African Union force that remains largely responsible for security as Somalia’s fragile central government tries to recover from decades of chaos.

The U.S. military and others have expressed concern about the 21,000-strong AU force’s plan to withdraw by 2020 and hand over security responsibilities to Somali forces, saying the local troops are not ready.

Late last year U.S. drone strikes also began targeting a small presence of fighters linked to the Islamic State group in Somalia’s north.

Somali officials have said civilians have been killed in more than one joint U.S. military operation with Somali forces. Earlier Friday, the U.S. Africa Command issued a statement in response to allegations that civilians had been killed in a May 9 operation, saying a “thorough review” found the allegations to be “not credible.”

The October attack in Niger raised questions in Washington about the U.S. military presence across Africa as the Trump administration focuses counterterror efforts on a range of groups linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.

A Pentagon investigation into the Niger attack, parts of which were made public last month, found multiple failures but none that directly caused the ambush by Islamic State group-linked fighters.

The investigation has already triggered changes in the way military activities are carried out in Niger and elsewhere in Africa, including giving teams the option to use heavily armored vehicles and beefed-up firepower.

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Ex-Senate Aide Indicted on Charges of Lying to FBI

WASHINGTON—A former employee of the Senate intelligence committee appeared before a federal court in Maryland Friday after being arrested for lying to the FBI about contacts with multiple reporters.

James A. Wolfe, the longtime director of security for the committee — one of multiple congressional panels investigating potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign — was indicted on three false statement counts Thursday evening after prosecutors say he misled agents about his relationships with reporters. He made a brief appearance in federal court in Baltimore Friday, where U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Mark Coulson released him from custody and ordered him to appear at the federal courthouse in Washington next week.

Wolfe did not answer questions from reporters as he left the hearing.

Though Wolfe is not charged with disclosing classified information, prosecutors say he was in regular contact with multiple journalists who covered the committee, including meeting them at restaurants, in bars, private residences and in a Senate office building. He is also accused of maintaining a yearslong personal relationship with one reporter, which prosecutors say he lied about until being confronted with a photograph of him and the journalist.

On Friday morning, President Donald Trump said the Justice Department had caught “a very important leaker” and said it could be a “terrific thing.” He said he was still getting details on the case.

“I’m a big, big believer in freedom of the press,” Trump told reporters before departing for a trip to Canada. “But I’m also a believer in classified information. Has to remain classified.”

Wolfe’s indictment was announced soon after The New York Times revealed that the Justice Department had secretly seized the phone records and emails of one of its journalists, Ali Watkins, as part of the leak investigation involving Wolfe. The newspaper said Watkins was approached by the FBI about a three-year relationship she had had with Wolfe when she worked at other publications. The newspaper also said that Watkins said Wolfe was not a source of classified information for her during their relationship.

In a statement Thursday night, Watkins’ attorney, Mark MacDougall, said: “It’s always disconcerting when a journalist’s telephone records are obtained by the Justice Department — through a grand jury subpoena or other legal process. Whether it was really necessary here will depend on the nature of the investigation and the scope of any charges.”

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Wolfe, 57, of Ellicott City, Maryland, had a lawyer.

Each false statement count is punishable by up to five years in prison, though if convicted, Wolfe would almost certainly face only a fraction of that time.

The criminal case arises from a December 2017 FBI interview with Wolfe in which he denied having relationships with journalists or discussing committee business with them.

At one point, he was presented with a news article containing classified information and was asked, in a written questionnaire, if he had had contact with any of the piece’s three authors. He checked “no” even though records obtained by the government show that he had been in communication with one of them.

He also said that though he saw journalists every day as part of his job, he never spoke to them about anything related to the committee.

In a separate instance, the indictment said that Wolfe used the encrypted messaging app Signal to inform a female journalist he had served a person with a subpoena in the Russia investigation, the government said. After the journalist published a story about the subpoena, the indictment says that Wolfe texted back to say, “Good job!” and “I’m glad you got the scoop.”

Wolfe informed the journalist that the witness would appear privately before the committee that week, prompting the witness to complain to the committee that details of his appearance had been leaked, according to the indictment. Neither the reporter nor the person who was subpoenaed is named in the indictment.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr and the top Democrat on the committee, Sen. Mark Warner, said in a joint statement that they were troubled by the charges. Wolfe had worked for the committee for roughly 30 years, and his position as security director meant that he had access to classified information provided to the panel by the executive branch.

“While the charges do not appear to include anything related to the mishandling of classified information, the committee takes this matter extremely seriously,” the senators said. “We were made aware of the investigation late last year, and have fully cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice since then.”

The prosecution comes amid a Trump administration crackdown on leaks of classified information. Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have decried such disclosures, with Sessions saying in August that the number of leaks of criminal leak probes had more than tripled in the early months of the Trump administration.

The Obama administration had its own repeated tangles with journalists, including secretly subpoenaing phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors during a 2012 leak investigation into a story about a bomb plot. The Justice Department amended its media guidelines in 2015 to make it more onerous for prosecutors to subpoena journalists for their sources, though officials in the past year have said they are reviewing those policies.

Lauren Easton, director of media relations for the AP, said Friday, “The Associated Press opposes any government overreach that jeopardizes the ability of journalists to freely and safely do their jobs and undermines the vital distinction between the government and the press.”

___

Witte reported from Baltimore, Maryland. Associated Press writers Chad Day and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

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How Racial Profiling Goes Unchecked in Immigration Enforcement

This story was co-published with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

When immigration officers raided a rural Pennsylvania poultry transport company early last year, a lawyer for five undocumented men arrested saw plenty of evidence their rights had been violated.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had no warrant to drive past the company’s “No Trespassing” signs and block the exits with their vans, or to demand documentation on the workers’ legal status. According to witnesses, the officers seemed to target workers solely based on their ethnicity: They lined up Latinos for questioning and asked white employees to lead them to more Latino workers.

In a ruling last month, a Philadelphia immigration judge, John Carle, found there was a strong argument that the ICE officers had “egregiously violated” the Constitution. He noted that the agency presented no evidence to counter allegations of racial profiling.

If the case had played out in criminal court, such a finding might well have resulted in the men going free.

In immigration courts, however, there’s a higher bar, both for proving officers violated defendants’ rights and for getting cases thrown out as a result. Even when immigrants manage to meet this standard, they can get deported anyway.

The system is backed up by decades-old court rulings that consider undocumented immigrants to be in continuous violation of the law, regardless of how they are arrested, and that give officers extra latitude to factor in their targets’ physical appearance when making immigration arrests.

“Even if you were to suppress the evidence because you didn’t have proper consent … that doesn’t matter,” said Claude Arnold, a former ICE special agent. “The fact remains that the person is here illegally.”

ICE says its agents are forbidden from racial profiling, and are refreshed on training every six months.

But advocates for immigrants and some judges say that the logic governing immigration rulings only emboldens officers to trample over constitutional rights.

“It gives a huge incentive to do intentionally illegal searches, because they have a huge way to take advantage of it,” said Rex Chen, an attorney at Safe Passages Project.

In the case involving the Lancaster County poultry workers, the racial-profiling argument has done little to derail ICE’s deportation efforts.

After arresting the workers, ICE officials looked them up in a database and found that four of them had overstayed their visas. Since this information did not stem from their arrests, but was obtained separately, Carle decided their deportation cases could proceed.

“All they did instead was basically almost say, ‘Nanny-nanny, boo-boo, we got you anyway,’” said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, a lawyer at the Legal Aid Justice Center who has worked on similar cases. “Like, so what if we violated constitutional rights? We have this other piece of evidence, and that’s it, you’re done for.”

It’s Harder for Immigrants to Prove an Unlawful Search

Unlike criminal defendants, immigrants must demonstrate not only that officers acted unconstitutionally, but that their violations were egregious, or represented a widespread pattern, when filing a motion to suppress evidence as the poultry workers did.

This higher bar dates back to Supreme Court guidance from 1984, when the court concluded that allowing motions to suppress in deportation cases would compel courts to release people who would then “immediately resume their commission of a crime through their continuing, unlawful presence in this country.”

At the time, almost all of those arrested for immigration violations agreed to leave the country without a formal hearing, the justices wrote, so challenges to the legality of immigration officers’ actions virtually never came up and wouldn’t deter them.

The justices also trusted that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the precursor to ICE, had “its own comprehensive scheme for deterring Fourth Amendment violations by its agents.”

Its conclusions “might change,” the justices wrote, “if there developed good reason to believe that Fourth Amendment violations by INS officers were widespread.”

A lot has changed since then. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, immigration enforcement moved under the Department of Homeland Security and greatly widened in scope. Now, most immigrants choose to fight their deportations, as the mammoth 680,000-plus case backlog can attest.

Accusations of racial profiling abound — committed by cops on highways, Border Patrol agents on buses and ICE on neighborhood streets — though motions to suppress are still rare and filed by the most aggressive lawyers.

Few cases will have enough evidence to prove an egregious violation.

“The best indicators of racial profiling are comments,” said Sandoval-Moshenberg. “We have one case in which the ICE agent said, ‘Hey, are any other Spanish families living on the block?’ … Otherwise, it’s very difficult to prove racial profiling. The officer always has some other reason on why he stopped your client and no one else.”

One of those reasons could legitimately be “Mexican appearance,” thanks to another Supreme Court ruling.

In that 1975 case, a U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican descent was stopped by Border Patrol agents. Two undocumented people were passengers in the car. The agents said their only reason for the stop was that the car’s occupants looked Mexican.

The court found that “Mexican appearance” alone could not justify an immigration stop, but ruled that a list of examples, used together, could. They included: “characteristic appearance of persons who live in Mexico, relying on such factors as the mode of dress and haircut”; “facts in light of [the officer’s] experience in detecting illegal entry and smuggling”; “driver’s behavior,” such as “erratic driving” or “obvious attempts to evade officers”; and “characteristics of the area in which they encounter a vehicle.”

“All those give an awful lot of discretion to rely on race,” said Kevin R. Johnson, a law professor at University of California-Davis. “Even if they say, ‘Well, he’s wearing working clothes’ or ‘He’s wearing clothes typical of an immigrant from Mexico,’ or something like that, there’s an awful lot of leeway there.”

When confronted with public outcry about profiling, ICE and the Border Patrol usually respond that agents used “a multitude of indicators that, when put together, raise a reasonable suspicion of illegal alienage.”

For example, in an Oregon case caught on video by a legal observer for the ACLU of Oregon last year, Isidro Andrade-Taffolla, a U.S. citizen, alleged racial profiling after he was questioned as he left a county courthouse. ICE officers in plainclothes had approached him with a picture of another man and asked for his identification, but Andrade-Taffolla said the picture looked nothing like him except for his skin color.

ICE officials said the questioning was in line with their policies. “Physical appearance wasn’t the only thing in common between the person questioned and the actual target,” Matthew Bourke, a spokesman for ICE, told ProPublica. “ICE officers had information that the target would be at the courthouse, and that — combined with a similar physical match — was why ICE officers asked for identification.”

Peter Schuck, a Yale law professor, argues that some reliance on profiling may be necessary for officers to act quickly and efficiently.

“It’s hard to see how immigration enforcement could occur without some kind of stereotyping and generalization,” he said. “It stands to reason that they don’t know much about the people they are seeking, so they have to rely on inferences, and those inferences are generally supported by some stereotypes.”

Arnold, the former ICE agent, said officers use observations about a person’s “manner and demeanor” to assess whether they could be here illegally. According to him, these can include noticing when people speak only Spanish or appear nervous when encountered by an immigration officer.

“Maybe a bunch of people are running,” he said. “Maybe the five white employees are just standing there; they aren’t running. It has nothing to do with their skin color, but I know clearly they are not afraid of ICE. … That is an indicator to me that they might be legal.”

Proving Profiling May Not Be Enough to Get an Arrest Tossed

ProPublica and the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the Lancaster County poultry workers’ arrest in a series this spring about ICE’s aggressive enforcement in Pennsylvania, an effort not completely supported by local communities.

Luke Brubaker, a prominent dairy farmer, mentioned the workers’ arrest in a meeting between President Trump and agriculture-industry representatives. Brubaker said he told the president that ICE had been arresting essential workers in Pennsylvania agriculture.

According to the workers’ motion to suppress evidence, filed in October, ICE officers came onto the property on April 5, 2017, with a photo of a man they were looking for. His name was “Alix,” and he worked for a company called MainJoy Unlimited.

Workers told them they were at the wrong company, and nobody with that name worked there. But agents immediately moved to ask for the documents of the workers who did.

“They were totally taking advantage of the language barrier and the fact that these guys didn’t know they had any rights,” Nichole Carpenter, the company’s human resources manager, told a reporter. “The three mechanics in the mechanic’s bay — white guys in their 50s — just continued to work like nothing was going on.”

Under duress, the Latino poultry workers admitted to being undocumented.

ICE used those admissions, and the workers’ lack of documentation at the time of the arrest, to try to get them deported. The men asked the judge to prohibit ICE from using that evidence, arguing they were intimidated and coercively interrogated because of their race.

They added, in the motion, that an officer physically forced one of them to sign papers and get fingerprinted. They also said an officer told them they had come to the United States to “take his jobs and invade his country.”

In December, ICE voluntarily withdrew the evidence gathered from the arrests of four of the men, saying it had found independent proof in a database that they were in the country illegally because they’d overstayed short-term visas.

The Philadelphia judge made his preliminary ruling on the motion to suppress only for the one man without a trail in the database. ICE had no record of him, presumably because he entered the country illegally. The ICE officer who ran his background check had simply written “no criminal history” and, crucially, “no migration history” on his intake form.

In court documents, ICE called the interrogation “consensual.” But the judge found that there was enough evidence to suggest ICE officers had detained him because he was “Latino-looking.” He ruled that ICE would have to prove otherwise or drop its case. If ICE decides to fight the allegations, it will do so at a hearing in October.

The judge allowed deportation proceedings to go forward against the four workers in the database. The men are out of custody, on bond, and plan to appeal Carle’s decision.

“It’s a weird situation,” said Andy Mahon, the lawyer for the workers. “Because they did things the ‘right way,’” — entered the country legally — “they are in a worse position than someone who didn’t, because now that evidence is being used against them.”

The agency declined to comment on the case, other than to say: “ICE’s enforcement actions are targeted and lead driven. ICE does not conduct sweeps or raids that target aliens indiscriminately.”

Arnold said that even if an immigrant proves an ICE officer searched him without cause or consent, it still doesn’t negate being here illegally. “The court can’t remedy that and say, ‘OK, yeah, we’ll make that person legal.’ How do they do that? The court does not have the authority,” he said.

Over the years, some judges have questioned the Supreme Court’s reasoning, seeing outcomes like this as encouragement for ICE officers to overstep in their operations, in hopes that they’ll be able to net enough deportable people.

In August 2017, the 9th Circuit in California reviewed the case of Luis Enrique Sanchez, a 45-year-old undocumented immigrant who had lived for almost three decades in California. A small boat owner, he took his friends out for a ride off Channel Islands Harbor, within territorial waters. When his boat’s engine lost power, he called the Coast Guard for help. The Coast Guard rescued the group — then immediately detained and frisked Sanchez and his friends and reported them to ICE.

When Sanchez filed a motion to suppress, ICE also found him in a database that showed his legal status had lapsed.

Unlike Judge Carle, the 9th Circuit ruled that his deportation case should be dropped. Doing otherwise “allows immigration and other law enforcement agencies to prey on migrant and working-class communities. Law enforcement officers can unconstitutionally round up migrant-looking individuals, elicit their names, and then search through government databases to discover incriminating information in preexisting immigration records,” one judge wrote.

While lower courts have issued conflicting rulings, the Supreme Court hasn’t weighed in to clarify since the 1980s, leaving the issue unsettled until the court decides to intervene again.

It’s Impossible to Tell When or if Officers Get Disciplined

ICE and Border Patrol say they investigate complaints of rights violations, including profiling, but it’s unclear what this amounts to.

Both agencies declined to release numbers on how many officers, if any, had been disciplined for racial profiling in recent years.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, which looks into complaints about immigration agencies, has never issued a report on racial profiling. Complaints and internal investigations are never aired in public.

Arnold said ICE officers are deterred from making illegal searches by the threat of lawsuits. But advocates say the system is set up to make officers feel as if they won’t face consequences for inappropriate behavior.

The lawyer for the poultry workers said he has not filed a complaint about the officers’ behavior. Like many immigration lawyers, his priority is to keep the workers in the country. He doesn’t see any benefit for his clients in complaining to the department.

“There’s next to no accountability, “ said Sandoval-Moshenberg, who has made the same decision in similar cases. “Our perception of their internal complaint mechanism is that it’s totally broken and ineffective.”

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International Court Overturns Ex-Congo Official’s War Crime Convictions

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — In a blow to prosecutors at the International Criminal Court and to victims of rape and murder in a conflict-ravaged African nation, appeals judges on Friday overturned the convictions of former Congolese Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba for atrocities committed by his forces in Central African Republic.

The reversal delivered a serious setback to ICC prosecutors by scrapping all the convictions in the court’s first trial to focus largely on sexual violence and on command responsibility — the legal principle that a commanding officer can be held responsible for crimes committed by his or her troops or for failing to prevent or punish the crimes.

“We find it regrettable and troubling,” Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said. “And I can only regret that this significant and unexplained departure from the court’s previous jurisprudence … has taken place in the most serious case of sexual and gender-based violence that has been decided upon by this court to date.”

The ruling could have implications for possible future convictions of commanding officers in other conflicts.

Bemba’s lawyer, Peter Haynes, welcomed the decision.

“It’s not some acquittal on a technicality,” he said. “They went to the very heart of a commander’s culpability, namely his responsibility to ensure that when put in the knowledge of crimes he takes steps to investigate them and punish them.”

Bemba was the most senior suspect convicted by the global court and his 18-year sentence was the highest handed down in the court’s history.

Bemba, wearing a suit and tie, showed little emotion as Presiding Judge Christine Van den Wyngaert reversed his convictions. Bemba’s supporters in the packed public gallery were not so reserved; they cheered, whistled and hugged one another for so long that Van den Wyngaert threatened to halt proceedings if order was not restored.

The appeals chamber, in a 3-2 majority ruling, said the trial chamber “erred in its evaluation of Mr. Bemba’s motivation and the measures that he could have taken in light of the limitations he faced in investigating and prosecuting crimes as a remote commander sending troops to a foreign country.”

The appeals chamber also said Bemba was wrongly convicted for crimes that were not even included in the charges against him.

The two judges who disagreed wrote a dissenting opinion in which they said the acquittals were based on “an incorrect standard of appellate review,” the court said.

Bemba was found guilty in 2016 as a military commander of two counts of crimes against humanity and three counts of war crimes for a campaign of murder, rape and pillaging by his troops, known as the Movement for the Liberation of Congo, in 2002 and 2003.

He denied responsibility for the crimes. He was sentenced in 2016 to 18 years in prison.

Bemba has been in custody at the ICC for nearly a decade after authorities in Belgium arrested him there in 2008 and sent him to The Hague.

Van den Wyngaert said Bemba would not immediately be released because a separate panel of ICC judges is still considering what sentence he should be given in a conviction for interfering with witnesses in his trial. She urged that trial panel to quickly decide whether he should be set free.

Haynes, the lawyer, was angry that Bemba was not released immediately.

“I think that is unacceptable. It is immoral and it may even be illegal,” he told reporters.

Bemba, a former Congolese senator and vice president, was the commander of the Movement for the Liberation of Congo when he was asked in 2002 and 2003 to send troops by President Ange-Felix Patasse in neighboring Central African Republic, or CAR.

At the time of his original conviction, judges said that women, girls and men were targeted by Bemba’s forces, often with multiple soldiers raping women and girls in front of family members. In one incident, a man’s wife was gang-raped and when he protested he, too, was raped at gunpoint.

Friday’s ruling does not mean those crimes did not take place, but that Bemba cannot be held criminally responsible for them.

Solomon Sacco, head of Amnesty International’s international justice team, said “the decision will be felt as a huge blow for the many victims of the ‘war against women’ waged in the Central African Republic through a horrifying campaign of rape and sexual violence.”

“5,229 survivors of Bemba’s atrocities participated in the ICC proceedings — for these brave individuals, as well as thousands of other victims in CAR, the pursuit of truth, justice and reparations will continue,” he said.

Sacco said the ICC prosecutor’s office and judicial authorities in CAR “must learn from this decision and redouble their efforts to investigate and prosecute alleged perpetrators of crimes under international law.”

Karine Bonneau of the International Federation for Human Rights slammed Friday’s decision.

“Twenty years after its creation, has the ICC just scuttled itself?” she said in a statement. “Delivering this judgment, it seems to say to the warlords: ‘As long as you are not on the scene, let your troops commit the worst crimes and the worst abominations, say that you have nothing to do with that and we will not condemn you.'”

It remains to be seen what Bemba will do once he is released. Haynes said he likely would join his family in Belgium.

Prominent Congolese opposition leader Felix Tshisekedi, speaking at an Atlantic Council event last month in Washington, said Bemba’s Movement for the Liberation of Congo was part of a new political alliance against President Joseph Kabila.

Frustration is rising in Congo against Kabila as the presidential election has been delayed since late 2016.

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New Charges Filed Against Manafort in Russia Probe

WASHINGTON — Special counsel Robert Mueller has brought additional charges against President Trump’s campaign chairman and a longtime associate, accusing them of obstructing justice.

The new charges were unsealed Friday against Paul Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik just days after prosecutors accused the two men of attempting to tamper with witnesses as Manafort awaits trial of felony charges related to his work on behalf of Ukrainian interests.

The indictment charges both men with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice related to contacts they had with two witnesses earlier this year. The witnesses, who had worked with Manafort as he represented a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine, have told the FBI that they believed Manafort and Kilimnik were trying to get them to lie about the nature of their work.

Through a spokesman, Manafort has maintained his innocence. The spokesman, Jason Maloni, said Friday that Manafort and his attorneys were reviewing the new charges.

Kilimnik has previously declined to comment on the allegations.

Prosecutors say the contacts via phone and encrypted messaging applications first occurred in February, shortly after a grand jury returned a new indictment against Manafort and while he was confined to his home. Kilimnik also reached out to witnesses in April.

The charges mark the second time since October that an indictment against Manafort has been amended to include additional allegations.

The latest charges increase Manafort’s legal jeopardy if he continues to refuse to cooperate with prosecutors, and could be an effort by Mueller to induce a guilty plea and secure the testimony of a critical campaign adviser to Trump.

Manafort is awaiting trial in federal court in Washington and Alexandria, Virginia. His co-defendant, Rick Gates, pleaded guilty in February and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

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