Chris Hedges's Blog, page 633

Whistleblower: Facebook Data Likely Used for Brexit

LONDON—The computer expert who alleges a trove of Facebook data was improperly used to help Donald Trump’s White House bid said Tuesday that he strongly believes the information was also used by the Brexit movement that persuaded Britain to quit the European Union.

In a 3½-hour hearing, Chris Wylie told the House of Commons media committee that he believes the breach exceeded the 50 million Facebook users reported earlier — though he didn’t give an exact figure. And he said the data compiled by the political consulting business Cambridge Analytica was available to other firms with links to it.

“All kinds of people had access to the data,” said Wylie, who helped develop Cambridge Analytica’s methods for using the information to target and persuade voters. “It was everywhere.”

Among the companies that had access to the data was AggregateIQ, a Canadian political consultant that did work for Vote Leave, the official campaign backing Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, Wylie said.

Wylie described Cambridge Analytica as just one arm of a global company, SCL Group, that gets most of its income from military contracts but is also a political gun-for-hire, often in countries where democratic institutions are weak. He suggested the company combines computer algorithms and dirty tricks to help candidates win regardless of the cost.

The 28-year-old Canadian with a swath of pink hair says he helped set up Cambridge Analytica in 2013. He left the next year.

Wylie has previously alleged that Cambridge Analytica used personal data improperly collected from Facebook users to help Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Cambridge Analytica says none of the Facebook data was used in its work on the Trump campaign. It denies any wrongdoing.

Cambridge Analytica’s acting CEO, Alexander Tayler, said in a statement that Wylie was a part-time contractor who “has no direct knowledge of our work or practices” since he left the company.

Wylie said he “absolutely” believes AggregateIQ drew on Cambridge Analytica’s databases for its work on the Brexit campaign. In the closely fought referendum in 2016, 51.9 percent of voters backed Britain’s departure from the EU.

“I think it is incredibly reasonable to say that AIQ played a very significant role in Leave winning,” Wylie said.

He testified that AggregateIQ was formed when Cambridge Analytica sought to expand but Canadians he wanted to bring into the business didn’t want to relocate to Britain. The two firms shared underlying technology and worked so closely together that Cambridge Analytica staff often referred to the Canadian firm as a “department,” he said.

Because of the links between the two companies, Vote Leave got the “the next best thing” to Cambridge Analytica when it hired AggregateIQ, “a company that can do virtually everything that (Cambridge Analytica) can do but with a different billing name,” Wylie said.

AggregateIQ, based in Victoria, British Columbia, issued a statement saying it has never been part of Cambridge Analytica or SCL.

“AggregateIQ works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements in all jurisdictions where it operates,” the company said. “All work AggregateIQ does for each client is kept separate from every other client.”

Wylie’s testimony came a day after Wylie and two other former insiders presented 50 pages of documents that they said proved Vote Leave violated election finance rules during the referendum campaign.

They allege that Vote Leave circumvented spending limits by donating 625,000 pounds ($888,000) to the pro-Brexit student group BeLeave, which then sent the money directly to AggregateIQ.

Vote Leave denies breaking any campaign finance regulations. Dominic Cummings, the Vote Leave strategist, called Wylie a “fantasist-charlatan.”

Our Criminal Justice System Serves to Protect the Villains

Recently, a hero got sentenced to three years in jail. I’m not talking a traditional hero who gets saluted during halftime shows because when he was 18, he went to a country he’d never heard of, to shoot at people he’d never heard of (who we’re not even technically at war with), and he did it all to get enough money to attend college, because college is too fucking expensive. We all know that’s a real hero. No, I’m talking about a climate activism hero.

Michael Foster is one of five climate activists who broke through a chain-link fence and, in a grotesquely criminal act, shut off TransCanada’s oil flow for a few hours. For stopping the oil, he got three years in jail. However, for actually drilling that oil and destroying our environment, polluting the land and water and risking our future—the heads of these oil companies get “sentenced” to zero years in jail. They instead get billions of dollars and private jets. But I bet the cocktail parties you have to attend if you’re that rich are boring as sin, so the joke’s on you, billionaire oil tycoons. You have boring dinners.

This proves our society is backward. The actions that are illegal versus legal are inverted from what they should be in an evolved culture. A few weeks ago, nine activists with the organization No More Deaths were arrested for leaving jugs of water in the desert to help migrants dying of thirst. That’s illegal. They were charged, basically, with littering. But it’s not illegal to buy up all our clean water, even near Flint, Mich. Soon, Nestlé is going to have it all, and we’re going to have to bathe in Coca-Cola because there will be no water left. We’ll have to fill our water beds with small stones, and that’s not comfortable.

What does illegal even mean anymore? In our land of the free, it’s illegal to feed the homeless in some states. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, between 2013 and 2015, “over 26 cities and communities passed laws restricting the distribution of food to the homeless, and the number is growing every year.” That’s right, a 90-year-old was taken down to the station for the crime of handing out baked beans. You may think this is ridiculous, but if you don’t stop him now, what’s next? Refried beans? Then, before you know it, you’re involved in a pico de gallo situation. And pico de gallo leads to guacamole, and guac opens the gates to cheese, rice and cilantro. You thought you were going to be the cool cop, look the other way, let a few beans slide, and before you know it, you’re dealing with burritos, enchiladas, fajitas. And now the salsa is on your hands, too.

Also illegal is housing the homeless. Earlier this year, according to Splinter News, “police arrived at [a Chicago man’s] house with a warrant and threatened to condemn his property unless he closed his ‘unlawful basement sleeping area.’ ” Not illegal is taking blankets away from the homeless, as the Denver police were caught doing. Also not illegal: destroying tiny homes built for the homeless. Cops did that, too. Banks foreclose on millions of homes, making millions of families homeless. That’s not illegal. We throw out 40 percent of all food. That’s not illegal.

And this isn’t just a “What’s the matter with us?” kind of situation. It’s also a question of freedom. If I were truly free, wouldn’t I be free to give somebody whatever I want? Shouldn’t I be free to give away food, drinks, my Star Wars figurines, two broken umbrellas, three nose-hair trimmers, my virginity and my award-winning collection of scabs from around the globe? Shouldn’t I be allowed to give away anything I want?

The real reason we can’t have people helping the homeless, giving out food and housing, is because it threatens to give a good example, to show another way forward. As “Act Out!” host Eleanor Goldfield wrote: “Filling the gaping chasms purposefully carved by capitalism and its keepers raises people’s awareness; it forces them to reckon with the system they live in and ask whether or not it’s worth protecting—or fighting against.”

Also illegal: having cocaine or heroin or selling marijuana in most states. Not illegal: making billions of dollars from the opioid crisis that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people. According to the CDC, “On average, 115 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.” You know how many died from smoking marijuana over the past year? One. A guy accidentally lit his sleeve on fire while he was trying to take a bong hit. Then, as he was trying to put it out, he knocked over a lamp that hit the dog. While driving the dog to an animal hospital, he drove into a mailbox and died. Marijuana: The Silent Killer.

Illegal: Living off the grid. In most areas of our “Land of the Free,” there are a myriad of regulations designed to make it nearly impossible to live off the grid. In fact, a lot of states consider living off the grid to be “camping.” And in most places throughout the U.S., it is not legal to camp on your own land for more than two weeks. That’s right, on your own land. What does that even mean? What if I set up a tent in my living room? Would that be camping? What if I’m not camping, I just happen to be an alcoholic and pass out in my yard nightly? So much so that I start leaving a pillow and blanket and jammies out there. You may call it camping, but I call it “a regularly scheduled blackout.”

It’s illegal to camp in this country, yet it’s legal for our military to camp out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Niger, Syria, Germany, Cuba, Djibouti, South Korea. We fucking love camping out all over the world. We have military bases in 70 percent of the world’s countries. And those very assholes have the nerve to tell me I can’t get a piece of land and live however the hell I want? If I decide I want to live on a 40-foot plot of dirt, wearing underwear on my head, sleeping in the grass, plugging my phone and George Foreman grill into a fecal-matter-powered generator, what does it matter to you?

Illegal: The crime of secretly filming a slaughterhouse. Yes, in some states people were arrested for filming the abuse of farm animals. Not illegal: abusing farm animals.

Also not illegal: filming every human being in this country at all times. Cameras are on every lamppost, stop light and storefront. Soon, those cameras will have facial recognition software. Our government spies on us constantly at all hours on all our devices and says it’s perfectly legal. But you bring home a tape of a piglet getting flat-out tortured, and that’s not permissible because it might harm the profits of the factory farm corporations.

Same goes for war crimes. You reveal war crimes, as Chelsea Manning did, and they’re going to lock you up for a good long time. You commit war crimes, as our military does on a daily basis, you can become the secretary of defense. James Mattis bombed a wedding party and then bragged he didn’t lose any sleep over that decision. If only he’d bombed a daycare center, he could be president by now. Come on, Gen. Mattis, believe in yourself.

Illegal: Laughing at Jeff Sessions during a Senate hearing. Because that type of free speech is “dangerous.” On the other hand, it’s completely legal to spout full-on propaganda daily like CNN or Fox News or MSNBC does. You can push for endless war while being funded by weapons contractors, and it ain’t no thing. But you chuckle at an elfish-looking racist under oath saying how much he loves black people, and you get the cuffs slapped on.

Illegal: To stage a die-in protest to call attention to people murdered by police. Legal: For police to murder people. And our police do it far more than any other country. U.S. police kill more people in a day than Iceland police have killed in the past 70 years. (Iceland police have killed one person in the past 70 years.)

I could go on with how backward our justice system is for hours, but here’s one last one. I was in a plane recently flying over the middle of the U.S., and I saw something out my window that stretched for miles. As far as the eye could see, something had torn apart the earth in a gruesome and systematic manner. And then I figured out what I was looking at: fracking. From an aerial view, fracking looks like a virus on the planet. It’s like the globe got smallpox. Our system is a plague on spaceship earth. And if you try to stop the virus, you’re arrested, maligned and repressed.

At the end of the Bush administration, climate activist Tim DeChristopher tried to stop stuff like fracking. He went to an auction, posed as a bidder and “bought” 22,000 acres of land in Utah’s pristine red rock country to stop oil and gas companies from getting it, even though he couldn’t pay for it. He succeeded at stopping them. He’s a genuine hero. And for faking those energy lease bids, he spent two years in jail and was fined $10,000. The parasitic rich are now above the law, and those trying to fix the system are sentenced to years in jail. This is the moral collapse of our culture and our criminal justice system. When sociopathic rulers are this powerful, they use the courts—traditionally used to stop pillaging—to continue their takeover of land and extraction of resources. They have captured the fail-safe mechanisms meant to defend against exactly this type of moral inversion.

Chris Hedges explained in February: “Oligarchs cynically view laws as mechanisms to legalize their fraud and plunder.” They also use the captured courts to arrest those who try to stop them. While in a Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” We should all seek to be illegal now.

So get out there and stop the pipelines, reveal the war crimes and let the pico de gallo run free.

Protesters Demand Officials’ Ouster in Russian Mall Fire

MOSCOW — Fuming with anger, thousands of Russians rallied for more than 10 hours Tuesday in a Siberian city, demanding the ouster of regional officials for a shopping mall fire that killed at least 64 people.

President Vladimir Putin, on a trip to the eastern city of Kemerovo, scolded officials for neglecting safety rules that could have prevented the tragedy.

The blaze engulfed the Winter Cherry mall in Kemerovo on Sunday, the first weekend of the school recess, trapping dozens of parents and children inside. Witnesses reported that fire alarms were silent and many doors were locked. Many of the victims were children who died in a locked movie theater after making desperate calls for help.

Putin arrived early Tuesday, laying flowers at the makeshift memorial to the victims outside the mall and meeting with officials. He did not show up at the protest in front of the regional government’s headquarters, but met with some demonstrators at the city’s morgue.

“Hearing about so many children who died fills you with a desire to not simply cry but to wail,” the somber-faced Putin said. “We lost so many people because of criminal negligence and sloppiness.”

Putin noted the highly combustible materials used to convert the mall from a Soviet-era confectionary factory and the absence of a functioning fire safety system, saying that investigators will track down all those responsible.

Emergency officials reported that 58 bodies have been recovered and that rescue workers were still searching for six more in the city that is 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) east of Moscow. They said 41 of the victims were children.

One protester at the rally, Igor Vostrikov, addressed deputy governor Sergei Tsivilyov, saying the families of the victims think the death toll is much higher than authorities have stated because the entire movie theater burnt down.

“We’re not calling for blood,” he said. “The children are dead, you can’t give them back. We need justice.”

When Tsivilyov dismissed the comments as “a PR stunt,” Vostrikov shouted that he has lost his wife, sister and three daughters, aged 2, 5 and 7, in the fire.

“They died because they were locked in a movie theater,” Vostrikov told the Dozhd television station. “They were calling from there, asking for help: ‘We’re locked in, we’re suffocating!’ No one helped because when the blaze broke out, everyone ran away.”

The impromptu protest reflected residents’ deep frustration with the official response to the tragedy. The local governor has still not visited the site of the fire or met with the relatives, and Putin waited a day before traveling to Kemerovo and declaring nationwide mourning.

Facing public outrage, the Kremlin issued a statement Tuesday, declaring Wednesday a day of mourning.

Another deputy governor, Vladimir Chernov, told the rally in Kemerovo that unconfirmed reports of hundreds of deaths at the mall were untrue and said he was ready to resign if people wanted him to.

“Resign, resign!” the crowd chanted back.

Kemerovo’s mayor asked the rally to nominate representatives to visit the morgue to check for themselves that the authorities were not hiding the truth about the deaths. A dozen protesters did so, and Putin met with them in the lobby, telling them to “not even doubt” that the culprits will be punished.

Responding to their calls to oust longtime Kemerovo regional Governor Aman Tuleyev, Putin said he would make a decision following a probe conducted by a team of 100 federal investigators.

“The investigators will check the entire chain, starting from those who issued permissions and ending with those who were responsible for safety,” Putin said in remarks broadcast by state TV stations.

In an apparent attempt to deflect Putin’s anger, Tuleyev blamed “the opposition” and “local busybodies” for fomenting the protest in Kemerovo.

In Moscow, St. Petersburg and many other cities across Russia, tens of thousands were bringing flowers and soft toys to makeshift memorials to the fire victims.

“I mourn together with all the people,” said the 28-year old computer expert Alexei Ivanov in St. Petersburg. “I think the reason for that tragedy is irresponsibility and corruption.”

Russian state television on Tuesday showed footage from inside the charred movie theater, where the roof had entirely collapsed. Investigators said emergency exits were blocked and a security guard turned off the public announcement system when he received a call about the blaze.

The victims included six fifth-graders from the town of Treshchevsky outside Kemerovo who were watching the Peter Rabbit computer-animated film and found the doors at the movie theater locked.

One of the trapped girls, Vika Pochankina, called her aunt saying they can’t get out and asking to tell her mom that she loved her.

Yevgeniya Oganisyan, aunt of young fire victim Viktoria Pochankina, wrote on her page in the Russian social network VKontakte that she was “waiting for a miracle but it didn’t happen.”

“Why did this torment happen to you, our angel? You deserved a happy, joyful life,” she wrote.

Alexander Bastrykin, chief of the Investigative Committee, the country’s top criminal investigation agency, told Putin on Tuesday that the fire alarm had not been operational for two weeks and a security guard who failed to activate a parallel warning system couldn’t provide a “reasonable” explanation for his actions.

He said investigators believe the blaze could have been sparked by a short circuit or an fire.

Investigators arrested the mall’s director and four others who were responsible for fire safety. The director, Nadezhda Suddenok, told the court that she believed that the fire was caused by arson. She said one of her employees said flames first erupted in the children’s game room, quickly engulfing the rubber foam gear.

The Investigative Committee is probing a Ukrainian blogger, Yevgeny Volnov, who posted his prank call to Kemerovo’s morgue on YouTube, in which he was posing as an emergency official claiming that 300 people died in the fire.

___

Irina Titova in St. Petersburg contributed to this report.

Officers Won’t Be Charged in Alton Sterling Shooting

BATON ROUGE, La. — Louisiana’s attorney general ruled out criminal charges Tuesday against two white Baton Rouge police officers in the fatal shooting of a black man during a struggle outside a convenience store.

Attorney General Jeff Landry’s decision came nearly 11 months after the Justice Department ruled out federal criminal charges in Alton Sterling’s July 2016 death.

Landry made the announcement at a news conference after meeting with family members of Sterling.

Veda Washington-Abusaleh, Sterling’s aunt, was in tears after meeting with Landry.

“They said they didn’t find anything,” she said. “They said it was justifiable, what happened to Alton was justifiable.”

Landry said his office reviewed all of the evidence compiled by the Justice Department, including opinions issued by independent experts, and also conducted its own interviews of eyewitnesses to the shooting. He said he is “always mindful of the human element” in the case beyond his review of the facts and applicable laws.

“I know the Sterling family is hurting,” Landry told reporters. “I know that they may not agree with the decision.”

Citing a toxicology report, Landry also said Sterling had illegal drugs in his system at the time of the confrontation. It was “reasonable” to conclude Sterling was under the influence of drugs during the struggle with the officers “and that contributed to his non-compliance,” Landry said.

Landry did not take any questions from reporters after his statement. His spokeswoman, Ruth Wisher, would not say if they planned to release the body camera footage and surveillance video that hasn’t been made public.

State Rep. C. Denise Marcelle, a Baton Rouge Democrat who has been involved with the case since Sterling was killed, said Landry’s decision means the family will not get any justice.

“It’s a sad day for Baton Rouge,” she said after word spread that the officers wouldn’t be charged.

Officer Blane Salamoni shot and killed Sterling during a struggle outside a convenience store where the 37-year-old black man was selling homemade CDs. Officer Howie Lake II helped wrestle Sterling to the ground, but Lake didn’t fire his gun.

The shooting came amid increased scrutiny of fatal encounters between police and black men. Two cellphone videos of the shooting quickly spread on social media, leading to protests during which nearly 200 people were arrested. The officers’ body cameras and a store surveillance camera also recorded the encounter, but those videos have not been released.

Federal authorities opened a civil rights investigation immediately after the shooting and released their findings in May 2017. They said Salamoni yelled that Sterling was reaching for a gun in his pocket before shooting him three times, and then fired three more shots into Sterling’s back when he began to sit up and move.

The officers recovered a loaded revolver from Sterling’s pocket. As a convicted felon, Sterling could not legally carry a gun. Sterling had pleaded guilty in 2011 to being a felon in possession of a firearm and illegally carrying a weapon and was arrested in May 2009 after an officer confronted him outside another store where he was selling CDs, court records show.

Federal authorities concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to prove Salamoni or Lake willfully deprived Sterling of his civil rights, or that the officers’ use of force was objectively unreasonable.

The officers encountered Sterling after responding to a report of a man with a gun outside the Triple S Food Mart. The officers told Sterling to put his hands on the hood of a car and struggled with him when he didn’t comply, the Justice Department said. Lake shocked Sterling with a stun gun before the officers wrestled him to the ground, according to federal investigators.

Attorneys for Sterling’s relatives have said federal authorities told them Salamoni pointed a gun at Sterling’s head and threatened to kill him before the struggle began. In a summary of its findings, the Justice Department said Salamoni pointed his gun at Sterling’s head but didn’t mention any verbal threats by the officer.

Salamoni and Lake have remained on paid administrative leave since the July 5, 2016, shooting.

Racial tensions were still simmering in Louisiana’s capital when Gavin Long, a 29-year-old black military veteran from Kansas City, Missouri, ambushed police officers near a car wash on July 17, 2016. Long killed three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers and wounded three others before being shot dead.

East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore recused himself from any state criminal investigation into Sterling’s death, citing his professional relationship with Salamoni’s parents, who have served as police officers in Baton Rouge. Moore’s recusal left Landry’s office to review evidence and decide whether any state charges were warranted.

In June 2017, lawyers for Sterling’s five children filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Baton Rouge, its police department and former police chief, and the two officers involved. Their suit alleges the shooting fit a pattern of racist behavior and excessive force by the Baton Rouge police. It also claims poor training and inadequate police procedures led to Sterling’s death.

Trump Urged to Withdraw Gina Haspel’s CIA Nomination

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

SUBJECT: Request to Withdraw Nomination of Gina Haspel

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

With respect, we veteran intelligence officers from CIA and other agencies urge you to withdraw the nomination of Gina Haspel for CIA director. From what is already known of her leading role in CIA torture 16 years ago, she has disqualified herself.

In 2002 Haspel supervised the first CIA “black site” for interrogation, where cruel and bizarre forms of torture were applied to suspected terrorists. And when the existence of 92 videotapes of those torture sessions was revealed, Haspel signed a cable ordering their destruction, against the advice of legal counsel at CIA and the White House.

Does Torture ‘Work?’

We are confident that if you set aside some time to read the unredacted portions of the Senate Intelligence Committee report of 2014 on the torture ordered and supervised by Haspel and other CIA managers, you will change your mind about her nomination. The five-year Senate investigation was based primarily on original CIA cables and other sensitive documents.

In addition to revealing clear violations of the UN Convention Against Torture, the Senate investigation shows that claims by senior CIA officials that torture is effective are far from true. The US Army — in which many of us have served — has been aware of the ineffectiveness of torture for decades.

General John Kimmons, head of Army Intelligence, drove home that point on September 6, 2006 — approximately an hour before President George W. Bush publicly extolled the virtues of torture methods that became known as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”  Gen. Kimmons stated: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years — hard years — tell us that.”

We believe that Defense Secretary James Mattis’ lack of enthusiasm for torture reflects lessons drawn from the historical experience of the Marine Corps, as well. Not to mention the twin reality that torture brutalizes the brutalizer, and that US use of torture puts our own troops in serious jeopardy when captured. Moreover, there is no more effective recruitment tool than torture to attract more terrorists.

International and Domestic Law

Please also be aware that many signatories to the UN Convention Against Torture take seriously their obligations under the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” which applies when those who authorize or practice torture are not brought to justice by authorities in their home countries.

George W. Bush experienced a precarious brush with this reality in 2011, when he had to abruptly cancel a visit to Geneva, Switzerland, after discovering that plans were in place to arrest him as soon as he stepped onto Swiss soil. [See “America’s Stay-at-Home Ex-President”] The widely respected European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights already has made no secret of its intention to proceed quickly against Haspel, should she set foot in Europe.

We believe that CIA’s activities and general focus have become severely unbalanced, with the lion’s share of funding and energy going to the paramilitary-prone operational side — where the potential for human rights abuses is not given sufficient consideration.

That trend has gone on steroids in more recent decades, and it is a safe bet that Gina Haspel would accelerate it. We would also observe that if most of the talent and funding goes to CIA paramilitary operations, then the by-products will necessarily include a tendency to engage in politically motivated — and therefore shabby — analysis. That means that senior policymakers like you will be poorly informed, particularly with respect to complex world issues — including biased perspectives on Russia and its newly re-elected president, Vladimir Putin.

* * *We Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) are extremely concerned at the possibility that Gina Haspel might become the next Director of the CIA. Haspel actually supervised a CIA “black site” codenamed “Cat’s Eye” in Thailand where a number of suspected terrorists were tortured. She subsequently collaborated in destroying all 92 videotapes of the torture sessions, effectively covering up what were likely serious war crimes.

There should be no question about the illegality of torture. It has been universally condemned and banned by both the Geneva Conventions and United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1988 and ratified by the Senate in 1994.

The UN Convention defines torture “as any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession…” and makes clear that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

The Convention’s Article 2 requires signatories to take effective measures to prevent torture in any territory under their jurisdiction. The complete prohibition of torture is absolute.  Under international law, officials cannot receive immunity in cases involving torture and governments that have signed the Convention are obligated to bring torturers to justice.  US domestic law was brought in line with the Convention once the US became a signatory and ratified it.

In the wake of the Abu Ghraib revelations, torture, to include its variations that have been euphemistically described as “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT), is now explicitly banned by the US military in its training manuals. A number of soldiers were tried and imprisoned in the wake of Abu Ghraib, although the “upper ranks” — in civilian as well as military spheres — who approved torture managed to escape serious consequences.

Some in the Pentagon clearly took seriously allegations of torture and were willing to file criminal charges against those involved, though Department of Defense leadership never saw fit to assume responsibility for having set up a policy environment that quite clearly condoned EIT.

There is also another significant historical and legal precedent that demonstrates that the United States government has by its own actions agreed that what is today being called “enhanced interrogation” is a war crime. In 1946-1948, Japanese officers who tortured Allied soldiers — including what is now referred to as waterboarding — were tried at the Tokyo post-war tribunals for that crime, found guilty, and executed.

Heinous

More recently, the meticulously documented unclassified 528 page Executive Summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report on the CIA’s secret Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program is remarkable for its candor. That five-year investigation was based on original CIA cables and other documents.

In blunt language, the Senate report describes the horrors of the black site secret prisons and the efforts that were made to get terrorist suspects to talk. It demonstrates that the interrogations were brutal — worse than anyone had been led to believe — and also that they did not produce any information that might not have been developed otherwise or, in many cases, any actionable intelligence whatsoever. The full classified text of the report — which names names of the actual torture perpetrators redacted in the summary — runs to almost 7,000 pages.

Moreover, coercive interrogation frequently produced misleading or fabricated intelligence that wasted resources by having to be meticulously checked before being used.  This conclusion was also arrived at by former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan — who deplored CIA methods — as well as by a review conducted by CIA’s then-Inspector General (IG), John Helgerson, in 2004. The “Helgerson Report” condemned both CIA leadership and Langley’s on-the-ground management of questionable programs driven by “analytical assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence” — programs which quickly became abusive.

It is our collective judgment that the loathsome physical abuses that included beatings, repeated waterboardings and anal violations referred to as “rectal feeding” — as well as physical threats to family members — cannot be whitewashed with the convenient euphemism of “enhanced interrogation.” All of those are acts of torture — plain and simple.

And while there are undoubtedly many good moral arguments against torture, there are practical considerations as well. Despite what the media would have Americans believe, torture does not work.

We recall the unambiguous remarks of then-commander of Army intelligence, Gen. John Kimmons, who held a Pentagon press conference on Sept. 6, 2006 — the same day President George W. Bush announced what he called “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation (which later morphed into the term “enhanced interrogation techniques”). Anticipating that Bush would claim the EITS to be necessary and effective, Gen. Kimmons told the media: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years — hard years —tells us that.”

Colin Powell Mousetrapped by ‘Intelligence’ From Torture

Worse still, intelligence officials have used information, which they knew was gained from torture, to mislead the most senior US officials on issues of war and peace. One of the signatories below was eyewitness to how CIA Director George Tenet persuaded Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the UN of a “sinister nexus” between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Tenet did not tell Powell that this “intelligence” came from a source, Abu Yahya al-Libi, who had been “rendered” to, and waterboarded by, Egyptian intelligence. The Defense Intelligence Agency had deemed this intelligence unreliable, but Tenet chose to ignore DIA and never informed Powell. Al-Libi recanted less than a year later, admitting that he fabricated the story about Saddam and al-Qaeda in order to stop his torture.

Moreover, when you wink at torture, you motivate enemies of the United States to do the same to captured US soldiers, diplomats and travelers while also providing a propaganda bonanza for terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Indeed, the only reason why CIA torturers have not been tried and sentenced to prison for the damage they have done to the nation is that an intimidated President Barack Obama — who once proclaimed that “nobody is above the law” — balked at allowing the judicial process to run its course, thereby whitewashing the Bush Administration’s many crimes related to the so-called “global war on terror.” Obama attempted to justify his inaction as looking forward rather than backward, but it is more likely that he feared opening up a Pandora’s Box of shameful government secrets that no doubt would have emerged.

Promoting Haspel in spite of her tainted record would send a message to both intelligence and military personnel that embracing practices like torture — indisputably a war crime — can be a path to promotion.

Haspel’s involvement with torture began when she accepted the assignment to go to Thailand — which she could have turned down — to run the “black site” where the interrogations were being conducted. She was, at the time, the deputy in CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center (CTC), working for Jose Rodriguez.

She was in charge of the secret Thailand base in late 2002 while Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and possibly more suspects were being tortured in a process that included slamming victims’ heads against walls, subjecting them to painful stress positions, regularly depriving them of sleep, confining them to small, coffin-like boxes, and waterboarding.

The “confinement boxes” were of two types; one was coffin-sized, and the other was smaller and less than waist-high. Both had strong claustrophobic effects. A prisoner would be forced into the smaller box as an extreme form of stress positioning, creating excruciating pain. To maximize psychological distress and exploit phobias, insects were sometimes placed in the pitch-black “coffin” alongside the victim.

Destroying the Evidence

In 2005, after returning to CIA headquarters at Langley, she acted on instructions from Rodriguez and drafted the order to destroy the 92 videotapes that had been made of the interrogations. It has been reported that she was a “strong advocate” for the destruction. This was contrary to instructions provided by CIA Counsel John Rizzo and the White House.  Thus, her act may have constituted destruction of evidence — a felony.

Jose Rodriguez was investigated for destruction of evidence by a Special Prosecutor who eventually ruled against charging him. An aide to CIA Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo later revealed Rodriguez’s rationale for shredding the tapes, writing in an email that “the heat from destroying [them] is nothing compared with what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain – he [Rodriguez] said that they would make us look terrible; it would be devastating to us.” Gina Haspel ensured that these tapes — important, damning evidence of US government torture — would never see the light of day.

Haspel’s defenders claim that she was not the creator of the torture program and only served as a willing executor of a government initiative that she believed to be legal. That may be true as no one has access to the CTC documents that might prove otherwise. Nevertheless, it does not provide her a free pass under international law, where it is generally referred to as the “Nuremberg Defense” — a thoroughly discredited “defense” that harkens back to the era of Nazi atrocities and those who attempted to justify them by claiming perpetrators were “just following orders.”

‘Nuremberg Defense’ Didn’t Work at Nuremberg

Several former CIA leaders have supported her, saying that she was “implementing the legal orders of the president,” but many of them may be concerned about their own reputations or questionable decisions they may have made in the name of the “war on terror.” And the UN’s International Law Commission says something quite different in its codification of the legal options surrounding torture, writing that “the fact that a person acted pursuant to an order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

It is also claimed that Gina Haspel was working for the CIA Chief of Station (COS) in Bangkok and acting under the COS’s orders, but those of us who have worked in and led CIA bases would dispute that that type of tight control was common, particularly since in this case, she was reporting directly to the Counterterrorism Center at Langley. Haspel would have been the boss and would have had independence in the field in executing directives from CIA Headquarters and the Counterterrorism Center — some of which she herself had a hand in drafting.

If Haspel is confirmed and wishes to travel abroad, she may have to restrict herself to countries not party to the UN Convention Against Torture because of her widely known involvement in the “black site” in Thailand. The 42 countries that have signed and ratified the Convention include the US and most of its allies. All take on a legal obligation to enforce the prohibition against torture, based on the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” when necessary.  In other words, they are empowered to act when the accused’s home country refuses to do so.

Not Too Late to Do the Right Thing

If you do not withdraw the nomination of Gina Haspel and she is confirmed, this will cast a moral stain on the vast numbers of patriotic and ethically upright Americans who serve their country in the field of national security. It will also be a continuation of the steady erosion of human rights standards and rule of law post-9/11.

Apparent widespread support for torture among the US public — enabled largely by the false message of Hollywood, the media and the Cheney family that it “works” — is deplorable. It might have been headed off by the prosecutions of Haspel, Rodriguez and others by former President Obama, together with graphic exposure of the evidence. You have an opportunity to reverse this wrong.

Withdrawing Haspel’s nomination now would be a step in the right direction. Confirming her as Director of CIA would signal that Washington embraces what then-Vice President Dick Cheney referred to as the “dark side.” Regrettably, torture was once part of US policy. Indeed, one of this Memorandum’s signatories spent nearly two years in federal prison because he revealed that.  But torture cannot be relied upon to yield accurate intelligence. It remains an internationally condemned malignancy that must be excised, never to return.

* * *For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

Jean Maria Arrigo, PhD, member of 2005 American Psychological Association task force evaluating the role of psychologists in U.S. intelligence and military interrogations of detainees (associate VIPS)

William Binney, former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (ret.)

Richard H. Black, Senator of Virginia, 13th District; Colonel US Army (ret.); Former Chief, Criminal Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, the Pentagon (associate VIPS)

Bogdan Dzakovic, former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)

George Hunsinger, Professor, Princeton Theological Seminary; Founder, National Religious Campaign Against Torture (associate VIPS)

Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF (ret.), Intelligence Officer & ex-Master SERE Instructor

John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Karen Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col., USAF (ret.)

Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Edward Loomis, NSA Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)

David MacMichael, Ph.D., former senior estimates officer, National Intelligence Council (ret.)

Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)

Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & CIA political analyst (ret.)

Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)

Valerie Plame, former operations officer, CIA (associate VIPS)

Diane Roark, Republican Professional Staff, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 1985-2002 (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)

Greg Thielmann, former Director, Office of Strategic, Political, and Military Affairs, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, State Department; Former staff member, Senate Intelligence Committee

Peter Van Buren, US Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)

Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel, US Army (ret.), former Chief of Staff for Secretary of State; Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary (associate VIPS)

Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)

Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)

Ann Wright, Colonel, US Army (ret.); also Foreign Service Officer who resigned in opposition to the US war on Iraq

University Official Linked to the Imprisoned Dr. Nassar Is Arrested

LANSING, Mich.—A Michigan State University official who oversaw Larry Nassar was arrested Monday amid an investigation into the handling of complaints against the former sport doctor, who is in prison for sexually assaulting patients under the guise of treatment.

William Strampel was in jail pending an arraignment Tuesday, Ingham County Sheriff Scott Wriggelsworth told The Associated Press. He declined to say what charges Strampel was facing because the probe is being led by the Michigan attorney general’s office.

A spokeswoman for Attorney General Bill Schuette declined to comment. A news conference was scheduled for Tuesday, two months after Schuette appointed a special assistant attorney general to investigate.

Strampel, 70, is the first person besides Nassar to be charged in connection with the worst sexual abuse case in sports history. Nassar pleaded guilty to molesting patients and possessing child pornography. Strampel’s arrest was first reported by the Detroit Free Press, and WILX-TV earlier reported that state police were seen outside Strampel’s Lansing-area home.

Strampel was the dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, which includes the sports medicine clinic, until he announced a leave of absence for medical reasons in December. He told police last year that he never followed up after ordering Nassar in 2014 to have a third person present when providing treatment to “anything close to a sensitive area.” In letting Nassar resume seeing patients, he also said any skin-to-skin contact should be minimal and needed to be explained in detail.

Nassar was fired in 2016 for violating the rule. His dismissal came less than a month after former gymnast Rachael Denhollander filed a criminal complaint saying Nassar had sexually assaulted her with his hands while treating her for back pain years earlier.

Strampel told a campus detective and FBI agent in 2017 that he did not check to see if Nassar was following the guidance because Nassar had been “exonerated” in an investigation of a patient’s complaint and the imposed guidelines were “health care 101.” At least 12 reported assaults occurred after the probe ended, including many during which Nassar made ungloved skin-to-skin contact when no chaperone was present, according to a university police report.

The school has also come under scrutiny for not sharing the full conclusions of the Title IX investigation with Amanda Thomashow, the woman who complained. A campus police probe of Nassar that occurred at the same time resulted in no charges being filed. And a teen’s 2004 complaint to Meridian Township police also led to no charges after Nassar offered an aggressive defense and insisted he was using a legitimate medical technique.

In February, interim Michigan State President John Engler announced plans to fire Strampel, who still has tenure that protects his employment as a faculty member.

More than 250 girls and women have sued Michigan State, Strampel and other current and former university officials, USA Gymnastics — where Nassar also worked — and others. Roughly 200 women gave statements in two courtrooms over 10 day of proceedings.

A message seeking comment was left Monday night with Strampel’s civil attorneys.

John Manly, a lawyer for many of the victims, said his clients were encouraged by the development.

“It demonstrates that (Schuette) is serious about investigating the systemic misconduct at MSU that led to the largest child sex abuse scandal in history and holding the responsible parties accountable,” he said.

A Michigan State spokeswoman said the university would continue cooperating with any investigations and pointed to Engler’s past statements.

“William Strampel did not act with the level of professionalism we expect from individuals who hold senior leadership positions, particularly in a position that involves student and patient safety,” Engler said last month.

___

Follow David Eggert on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DavidEggert00. His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/David%20Eggert.

Grandmother of Slain Sacramento Man Calls for Police Changes

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The grandmother of an unarmed black man killed by Sacramento police called Monday for changes in the way police confront suspects, such as sending in a police dog, using a Taser, or aiming for an arm or leg when shots are fired.

Sequita Thompson said at an emotional news conference that police didn’t need to shoot at 22-year-old Stephon Clark 20 times, killing him in her darkened backyard March 18.

“They didn’t have to kill him like that, they didn’t have to shoot him that many times,” she said through sobs, recounting the night of his slaying. She believes Clark was in the backyard trying to get into the house he shared with his grandparents and other family members when he was shot.

He’s the latest prominent face of young black men killed by police nationwide, said the family’s renowned civil rights attorney, Benjamin Crump. He called it an “execution” of a man who “chose nonviolence” and was found with only a cellphone and not the handgun police thought he was aiming in their direction.

Members of the Sacramento Kings and Boston Celtics NBA teams took up his cause Sunday, wearing Clark’s name on black warm-up T-shirts three days after protesters formed a human chain blocking entrances to the Kings’ Golden1 Center and prevented all but about 1,500 fans from entering.

Police said they were pursuing a suspect who had broken at least three car windows and a neighbor’s sliding glass door. They say the suspect fled from two responding officers and ignored commands to stop and show his hands. Video and audio recordings released by the department last week show the officers appear to genuinely believe Clark had a gun, and independent experts said they are unlikely to face criminal charges.

Leaders of the NAACP want the Sacramento police department to change its foot pursuit policy to allow for options like waiting for backup, sending in a police dog, backing off and maintaining surveillance or using less-than-lethal force like Tasers during confrontations.

“We’re always open to the conversation about how we can do things differently or better and this case is no different,” said Detective Eddie Macaulay, a department spokesman.

The NAACP also called for an independent investigation but said the two officers should be criminally charged. State NAACP President Alice Huffman said the organization has asked the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division to investigate the killing. The group also wants California to create an inspector general to investigate police-involved shootings.

It is rare for police officers to even be charged following a shooting and rarer still for them to be convicted. Often times it’s because of the doctrine of reasonable fear: if prosecutors or jurors believe that officers have a reason to fear for their safety, they can use force up to and including lethal force.

Moreover, officers are trained to keep firing until they believe the threat has been eliminated, rather than aiming to wound a suspect who then might still be able to attack them.

Crump said the family planned Monday to view Clark’s body in preparation for an independent autopsy. A wake is planned for Wednesday night and his funeral is Thursday, said NAACP Sacramento Branch President Betty Williams. Clark’s brother, Stevante Clark, in brief remarks with his voice cracking thanked former Kings player DeMarcus Cousins for helping to cover the funeral expenses and for the national and international outpouring of support for his family.

“No family should have to endure this pain and suffering,” Crump, who represented the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, said at a news conference interrupted by shouts of “amen,” ”enough is enough” and the chanting of Clark’s name.

Thompson recounted in a barely audible voice how she was watching a video of a granddaughter dancing when, “all I heard is boom, boom, boom.”

She crawled to where her 7-year-old granddaughter was sleeping on the couch and pulled her to the floor, then crawled to her husband and told him to call 911. Her husband said he’d heard someone come to the backdoor and ask to be let in.

“It had to be our grandson,” Thompson said, wailing.

Homicide detectives later told her not to look outside where she would see the body of Clark, the father of two young sons.

“Now my great-grandbabies don’t have their daddy,” she said. “Why didn’t they just shoot him in the arm, shoot him in the leg? Send a dog? Send a Taser? Why? Ya’ll didn’t have to do that.

“I want justice for my baby,” she said before sobbing on Crump’s shoulders and being led away. “I want justice for Stephon Clark.”

A Steady Diet of War Hawks, Spies and Liars

When the “War on Terror” was launched in 2001, mainstream media—especially cable TV news—started a parade. It was a narrow parade of hawkish retired military and intelligence brass promoting war as the response to the crime of 9/11, predicting success and identifying foreign enemies to attack.

We can look back at this parade and laugh at the total nonsense dispensed. But the more human response is to cry—over the toll, still mounting, of hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond, and violent instability across the region, including countries that were relatively stable and prosperous on Sept. 10, 2001. (Not to mention militarization and loss of civil liberties at home.)

I witnessed the parade of disinformation from inside cable news, where I worked as an on-air contributor at Fox News and MSNBC at the beginning of the War on Terror. In fact, this parade eventually knocked me off the air—and out of my job at MSNBC, three weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

It’s now the 15th anniversary of the tragic invasion of Iraq. The huge mainstream media failure in the run-up to the invasion is taught in college journalism courses, including mine.

Who can forget CNN’s Chief News Executive boasting that, before the Iraq invasion, he’d sought prior approval and received “a big thumbs up” from the Pentagon on the ex-generals that CNN featured as allegedly independent analysts?

Who can forget David Barstow’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning expose for The New York Times—based on 8,000 pages of internal Pentagon emails and transcripts—showing that network TV’s hawkish retired generals were not only being paid by big military contractors, but were being spoon-fed talking points and spin by the Pentagon month after month as they paraded on TV?

Who can forget that NBC/MSNBC’s top military analyst, ex-Gen. Barry McCaffrey, relentlessly pushed for war based on falsehoods (“thousands of gallons of mustard agents, sarin, nerve agent VX still in Iraq”), offered continuously ridiculous punditry (like praising Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s advance-planning of the Iraq occupation), and famously crowed on MSNBC, “Thank God for the Abrams tank and the Bradley fighting vehicle”—without mentioning his role at military contractor IDT that made millions for doing God’s work on the Abrams and Bradley?

Who can forget all these things?

MSNBC, apparently.

I turned on the “progressive” news channel a few nights ago to see Chris Hayes politely interviewing Gen. McCaffrey. Did Hayes—during the week marking the 15th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq—press McCaffrey on his role in that disaster? Perhaps demand an explanation or an apology? No. The topic was Trump’s weird attraction to Putin. That’s a worthy topic. But Barry McCaffrey as expert and arbiter! Still?

Just as they did in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, MSNBC and CNN now serve up a steady parade of war-hawks, spies and liars, presenting them as credible and almost heroic as long as they criticize the despicable man in the White House.

I’d turned to MSNBC that night after disgustedly turning off Anderson Cooper softly interviewing a CNN contributor who seems to appear every hour: ex-National Intelligence Director James Clapper. You remember Clapper? Five years ago this month, Clapper famously perjured himself before the U.S. Senate by denying NSA bulk surveillance. His perjury is not a topic that CNN asks Clapper about—while he discusses the lack of ethics and honesty in Team Trump.

When it comes to Trump critics, CNN and MSNBC regularly serve up a basket of elite deplorables from the military/intelligence establishment—for example, the appalling ex-CIA Director John Brennan and horrific former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin. The hollowness of their Trump critique on “liberal cable news” was on display last week when both men endorsed Trump’s choice for CIA chief, torture-overseer Gina Haspel.

I’m worried about anti-Trump activists, even some quite progressive, who’ve come to see corporate news channels like CNN and MSNBC as their saviors. It’s a dangerous illusion.

A few points to consider:

Not all foes of Trump are allies of progressives—especially the hawks, spooks and perjurers who parade across CNN and MSNBC every night.

Progressives should be wary of the growing alliance between Clintonite/MSNBC-style liberals and neo-con militarists forever in search of the next enemy—an alliance that began before the Trump campaign and will likely continue after Trump is deposed (hopefully soon).

Trump is doing enormous damage to our country and the world—but you won’t see most of it on MSNBC or any mainstream outlet that covers the Trump White House as a TV soap opera.

When you hear nightly on CNN and MSNBC about Putin’s “attack on our democracy,” let’s not forget that—whatever impact Russia had on the 2016 election (evidence so far suggests it was small)—“our democracy” has been under attack for decades by internal enemies: big money control of both major parties, corporate media dominance, Democratic subservience to Wall Street, Republican suppression of voters of color and youth, an archaic election system protected by both parties, etc.

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I would like to see even 10 percent of MSNBC’s “Russiagate” coverage diverted to any of the above issues, but I’m not holding my breath. Nor am I waiting for the Comcast-owned channel to offer thorough coverage of Trump’s biggest threat to the First Amendment: ending Net Neutrality.

All progressives should agree that an essential job is to end Republican control of Congress and depose Trump.

Yet the fight for justice and democracy will also require battles against powerful and oppressive institutions that may now seem to be anti-Trump: certain media conglomerates and the military-industrial-surveillance complex.

Parkland: Speaking With One Voice (Photos)

“This is why I march” were the words that ended nearly every speech at Parkland, Fla., on Saturday. A reverential crowd of tens of thousands gathered there at 10 a.m., with long lines waiting to enter Pine Trails Park, located about a mile from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It was a racially and age-diverse crowd that drew from Parkland and surrounding towns, and—if the signs carried were an indicator—also a politically diverse one.

The students of Stoneman Douglas called out their determination to stay the course in the fight for gun safety: “We speak for the ones who can’t.” They also expressed their determination to use the ballot box: “They have the money, we have the votes” went a popular chant.

Tony Montalto, the father of Gina Montalto, who was 14 when she was killed, took the stage with his son Anthony, who held a sign almost as wide as he was tall that read: “My sister could not make it here today. I’m here for her.” Mr. Montalto thanked the Parkland community for its support and called for compromise and legislative action, starting with limitations on the capacity of semi-automatic magazines.

“Gina was a smart kid with a kind heart,” he said. “We felt she was destined to change the world. Through this movement, she might do just that.”

Max Schachter, whose 14-year-old son Alex also was killed, told of the meeting he arranged of the 17 victims’ families and the leaders of the March for Our Lives movement. The students, he said, “inspired him to his core” and had won the families’ full support.

“It was just a beautiful thing to watch all the families congratulate them,” he said of the student activists. “Tell them that we love them, tell them that they are fighting for all of us, and we all have their backs.” And he said that legislators in Washington had told him they were making progress because of the students’ determination and because the 17 families were speaking “with one voice.”

Then the assembled crowd marched a mile to the high school, beginning the first lap of the marathon that the MSD students say they have started.

If one cry from the marchers summed up the day, it was a familiar one: “This is what democracy looks like.”

And that is indeed how it felt.

View an exclusive photo essay of the march in Parkland, Fla., here.

Dow Surges 669, Clawing Back Lost Ground

NEW YORK — The latest on developments in financial markets (all times local):

4 p.m.

The Dow Jones industrial average surged nearly 670 points, erasing nearly half the ground it lost last week and marking the biggest gain since August 2015.

The broad gains Monday were led by technology stocks and banks, which took some of the biggest losses last week as trade tensions flared between the U.S. and China.

Investors were encouraged by signs Washington and Beijing are open to negotiating on trade.

Microsoft jumped 7.6 percent and Bank of America climbed 4.4 percent.

The Dow rose 669 points, or 2.8 percent, to 24,202.

The S&P 500 climbed 70 points, or 2.7 percent, to 2,658. The Nasdaq climbed 227 points, or 3.3 percent, to 7,220.

Bond prices fell. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 2.84 percent.

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3:20 p.m.

Stocks are surging as the market recovers more of its huge losses from a week earlier.

Technology stocks and banks, which took some of the worst losses last week, powered higher Monday. Microsoft jumped 7 percent and Bank of America climbed 4.4 percent.

Investors were encouraged by signs that the U.S. and China are open to negotiating to avert a trade dispute.

Facebook fell another 2.2 percent after the Federal Trade Commission said it was investigating the company’s privacy practices.

The Dow Jones industrials jumped 618 points, or 2.7 percent, to 24,158. They lost more than 1,400 points last week.

The S&P 500 climbed 63 points, or 2.5 percent, to 2,651, on track for its biggest gain in two years. The Nasdaq climbed 195 points, or 2.8 percent, to 7,188.

___

11:45 a.m.

Strong gains in technology companies and banks are leading stocks higher as the market recoups some of its huge losses from last week.

Microsoft jumped 5.6 percent in midday trading and Bank of America rose 2.8 percent.

Facebook fell another 2.9 percent after the Federal Trade Commission said it was investigating the company’s privacy practices.

Investors are encouraged by signs that the U.S. and China are open to negotiating to avert a trade dispute.

The Dow Jones industrial average was up 325 points, or 1.4 percent, at 23,856. It lost more than 1,400 points last week as traders worried that trade tensions between China and the U.S. would escalate.

The S&P 500 rose 27 points, or 1.1 percent, to 2,615. The Nasdaq climbed 84 points, or 1.2 percent, to 7,076.

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9:35 a.m.

Stocks are surging in early trading on Wall Street as the market makes up some of its huge losses from last week.

The Dow Jones industrial average gained more than 450 points early Monday, after losing more than 1,400 last week.

Traders are hoping that negotiations between China and the U.S. will ease tensions over trade.

Technology companies and banks, which took some of the biggest losses last week, were up the most. Microsoft jumped 5.4 percent.

The Dow industrials were up 486 points, or 2.1 percent, at 24,022.

The S&P 500 rose 46 points, or 1.8 percent, to 2,635. The Nasdaq climbed 143 points, or 2.1 percent, to 7,136.