Chris Hedges's Blog, page 644

Spotlight on Sexual Assault Among Children at Military Bases

Congress reacted Thursday to an Associated Press investigation into sexual assault among children on U.S. military bases by demanding the Defense and Justice departments explain how they will solve the problem.

The House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, said it had begun its own examination of the issue. And a top Democrat on the committee said she would call a hearing within six months.

Four senators, including the veteran head of the Senate Armed Services Committee and two others who’ve made sexual assault a keynote issue, sent letters to the Pentagon and Justice Department with questions about sex assault among the military’s children.

AP’s investigation revealed that reports of sexual violence among kids on U.S. military bases at home and abroad often die on the desks of prosecutors, even when an attacker confesses. Other cases are shelved by criminal investigators despite requirements they be pursued. Many cases get lost in a dead zone of justice, AP found, with neither victim nor offender receiving help.

“The report reveals an inscrutable system that fails these children at every level,” wrote Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat.

In a letter to U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, asked that the Pentagon’s inspector general begin a “comprehensive assessment” of department policies related to sexual assault among military children in schools and elsewhere on base.

“It disturbs us to learn that the department’s policies and procedures may prevent efforts to help child victims of misconduct … and to rehabilitate and hold child offenders accountable,” they wrote.

Separately, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, wrote the Justice Department’s inspector general requesting a “comprehensive investigation” into how many child sex assault cases have been prosecuted and why the majority have been declined.

Inspector general offices are independent entities within federal departments charged with investigating potential problems within agencies. They do not have to accept requests for action from Capitol Hill.

A Pentagon spokesman would not comment on the day’s developments. “Alleged conversations between Secretary Mattis and other officials are private and will remain as such,” Maj. Dave Eastburn said in an email.

The Pentagon and Justice Department’s inspectors general also did not comment, nor did a spokesman for the Justice Department.

Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, called AP’s finding of nearly 600 reports of sexual assault among children on bases since 2007 “a national disgrace and a military scandal.”

The top Democrat on a House Armed Services subcommittee that deals with military personnel said she was demanding information from the Pentagon in anticipation of holding a public hearing within six months.

“You cannot have an environment in which children aren’t protected, regardless of whether they’re on a base or in a public school classroom. So we’ve got to change the law,” Speier said in an interview.

A spokesman for Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee said staff had already begun “an independent examination of cooperation between” the departments of Defense and Justice and how they handle military child-on-child sexual assault. Issues they would examine include support for victims and the Pentagon’s data.

Records the military initially released omitted a third of the cases AP later identified through interviews with prosecutors, military investigators, family members and whistleblowers as well as data that officials later provided.

“This is clearly a serious matter,” spokesman Claude Chafin said of AP’s findings.

The tens of thousands of kids who live on U.S. bases are not covered by military law. The Justice Department, which handles civilian crimes on many bases, isn’t equipped or inclined to take on juvenile cases, AP found.

This legal and bureaucratic netherworld also extends to the Pentagon’s worldwide network of schools, which afford students fewer protections than public schools if they are sexually attacked by a classmate on campus. The federal law that offers help to victims of student-on-student sexual assault, known as Title IX, does not apply to federal education programs, such as those run by the military.

In a separate letter to Mattis on Thursday, Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate education committee, demanded answers by early April to a long list of questions about how the Department of Defense Education Activity handles assaults on its campuses.

The military school system that educates some 71,000 children has no specific policy to respond to student-on-student sexual violence and doesn’t accurately track the incidents, AP found. More than 150 cases weren’t disclosed by schools in reports that are meant to alert headquarters to serious incidents.

“As a mother and grandmother, I cannot tolerate the thought that our military children are not receiving the protection and support they deserve,” Murray wrote. “I trust you share my outrage.”

Responding to AP’s findings prior to publication, the Pentagon said it “takes seriously any incident impacting the well-being of our service members and their families” and promised “appropriate actions” to help juveniles involved in sex assaults.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense also told AP it considered child-on-child sexual assault to be “an emerging issue” — a characterization that prompted an angry response from Murray.

“What is ’emerging’ about 600 sexual assault cases in 10 years?” Murray said in her letter to Mattis, who was traveling back from the Middle East on Thursday. “We owe our military families — the children of the personnel who are fighting our wars — safety and support.”

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Pritchard reported from Los Angeles and Dunklin from Dallas.

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If you have a tip, comment or story to share about child-on-child sexual assault on U.S. military bases, please email: schoolhousesexassault@ap.org. See AP’s entire package of stories here: https://www.apnews.com/tag/HiddenVictims

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Contact the reporters on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lalanewsman or https://twitter.com/ReeseDunklin

U.S. Gets Tougher on Russia With New Sanctions, Accusations

WASHINGTON—In its toughest challenge to Russia to date, the Trump administration accused Moscow on Thursday of an elaborate plot to penetrate America’s electric grid, factories, water supply and even air travel through cyber hacking. The U.S. also hit targeted Russians with sanctions for alleged election meddling for the first time since President Donald Trump took office.

The list of Russians being punished includes all 13 indicted last month by special counsel Robert Mueller, a tacit acknowledgement by the administration that at least some of Mueller’s Russia-related probe has merit.

Trump has repeatedly sought to discredit Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election, but the sanctions appeared to rely on the special counsel’s legal conclusions in deciding who should be named. The sanctions freeze any assets the individuals may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bar Americans from doing business with them.

The named Russians — 19 in all — are unlikely to have any assets in the United States that would be covered, making the move largely symbolic. But it could help inoculate the president from persistent claims he’s afraid or unwilling to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin or to fight back against efforts to undermine America’s democracy and domestic affairs.

“We’re going to be tough on Russia until they decide to change their behavior,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders. At the same time, she left open the possibility of better U.S.-Russia cooperation, arguing that “if we can work together to combat world threats on things like North Korea, then we should.”

U.S. national security officials said the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and intelligence agencies determined Russian intelligence and others were behind a broad range of cyberattacks starting a year ago. Russian hackers infiltrated the networks that run the basic services an Americans rely on each day: nuclear, water and manufacturing facilities like factories.

The officials said the hackers chose their targets methodically, obtained access to computer systems, conducted “network reconnaissance” and then attempted to cover their tracks by deleting evidence of the intrusions. The U.S. government has helped the industries expel the Russians from all systems known to have been penetrated, but additional breaches could be discovered, said the officials, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security information.

The officials described Russia’s operation as ongoing.

The U.S. accusations and accompanying sanctions mark a stepped-up attempt by Trump’s administration to show it’s adequately confronting Russia over hacking, election meddling and general efforts to compromise Western democracies and infrastructure. Trump on Thursday also joined the leaders of Britain, France and Germany in blaming Moscow for the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy who was living in England.

The sanctions prompted a swift threat of retaliation from Russia’s government, which said a response was already being prepared. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov suggested the Trump administration had timed the action to taint this weekend’s presidential election in Russia, in which President Vladimir Putin is expected to win an overwhelming victory.

“It is tied to U.S. internal disorder, tied of course to our electoral calendar,” Ryabkov was quoted as saying by the Russian state news agency Tass.

Altogether, 19 Russians were cited. Also sanctioned were five Russian companies, including the Internet Research Agency, which is accused of orchestrating a mass online disinformation campaign to affect the U.S. presidential election result.

The U.S. Treasury Department announced the sanctions amid withering criticism in the U.S. accusing Trump and his administration of failing to use its congressionally mandated authority to punish Russia. The sanction targets include officials working for the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.

The sanctions are the first use of the new powers that Congress passed last year to punish Moscow for interfering in the election that Trump won over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Yet Russia hawks in Congress deemed it too little, too late.

“Even more must be done,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona called the action “overdue.”

And Democrats homed in on the fact that the list of Russians hit with sanctions included all of those indicted by Mueller. That shows the administration believes the investigation is legitimate, they argued.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the sanctions prove that Mueller’s “investigation is not a ‘witch hunt’ as the president and his allies have claimed.” He said, “It’s more clear than ever that the president must not interfere with the special counsel’s investigation in any way.”

The Treasury Department said the GRU and Russia’s military both interfered in the 2016 election and were “directly responsible” for the NotPetya cyberattack that hit businesses across Europe in June 2017, causing billions of dollars in damage by disrupting global shipping, trade and medicine production. Treasury said that the attack caused several U.S. hospitals to be unable to create electronic medical records for more than a week.

Among those affected were Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is known as “Putin’s chef” and who ran the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, and 12 of the agency’s employees. They were included in Mueller’s indictment last month.

The Russian agency “tampered with, altered or caused a misappropriation of information with the purpose or effect of interfering with or undermining election processes and institutions,” specifically the 2016 U.S. presidential race, the U.S. said.

Have We Learned Anything From My Lai?

My Lai. The images of women and children clinging together in their last living moments on that March day, a half century ago, still sear our collective memory. While we harbor no doubts that My Lai was a crime, there has been no accountability for the atrocity, or a national reckoning for the wider holocaust that was Vietnam.

On March 16, 1968, 504 women, children and old men were shot at point-blank range by American soldiers over the course of a few hours in Son My village—407 were killed in the “My Lai 4” hamlet and another 97 were slaughtered in the hamlet known on U.S. military maps as “My Khe 4,” about a mile from My Lai. The soldiers’ mission: to “search and destroy.”

It would take another 20 months for news of the atrocity and subsequent cover-up to reach the public, after exposure by journalist Seymour Hersh.

Calls for war crimes trials for My Lai and for the broader war exploded in the public arena. One such call came from New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, remembered recently in Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” for his role in the release of the Pentagon Papers, which resulted in a landmark Supreme Court decision on prior restraint of the press after President Nixon tried to enjoin publication.

While his work would garner two Pulitzers, Sheehan’s exploration of war crimes culpability in a 1971 piece titled “Should We Have War Crimes Trials?” and his review of 25 pieces of then-current literature has been largely forgotten. The content of those works remains explosive and timely. There is, after all, no statute of limitations on war crimes.

Sheehan opened with his own journey, from a journalist who dismissed the charges of young demonstrators who queried “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” as “just too much” to one who had to conclude that “if you credit as factual only a fraction of the information assembled here about what happened in Vietnam, and if you apply the laws of war to American conduct there, then the leaders of the United States for the past six years at least … may well be guilty of war crimes. There is the stuff of five Dreyfus affairs in that thought.” Then, he proceeded to cover the substance of the charges.

A wealth of newer books on the subject have been written since, but those written as events were unfolding catch the moment in history as nothing else can. So let’s take a look at a few of the works offered in 1971 to consider the broad and devastating implications of that horrific March day.

The War for Quang Ngai, Jonathan Schell and Richard Falk

Context is everything.

Jonathan Schell’s reporting for “The Military Half” occurred just months before My Lai. Schell spent a month in Quang Ngai, the province where My Lai is located and that is known for its resistance against both the French and the Americans. He flew daily missions with pilots in forward air control planes designed to guide bombers to their strike targets and in what he described as “bubble” helicopters that could fly within the landscape at altitudes as low as six or eight feet. He used that unique vantage point to methodically survey the land beneath him, shading destroyed areas on military maps and corroborating his findings with ground commanders.

He saw airstrikes in real time and observed from the air as troops burned villages to the ground in zippo raids. The settled portions of Quang Ngai were not in danger of future destruction, he said, but had in fact already been nearly totally destroyed. Seventy percent of the homes in the province were completely decimated by late 1967, along with the normal fabric of Vietnamese life. Quang Ngai was being emptied, its inhabitants resettled in refugee camps as part of what was termed “the civilian half,” or “pacification,” as it was euphemistically called. The American command thought it had to empty the sea (the population base) to deny sustenance to the fish (the Viet Cong). Once emptied, the villages became “free-fire” zones, where U.S. forces were instructed to shoot “anything that moved.”

But the resettlement camps proved unable to absorb the influx of refugees. Part-way through his Quang Ngai reporting stint, Schell observed that commanders were told to stop generating refugees, even as they continued destruction of the villages. Schell recounted one air operation—Operation Benton—where out of a population of approximately 17,000 people, only 115 were evacuated. The airstrikes went forward, omitting the evacuation step mandated in prior raids. Benton, like the other air operations Schell witnessed, was carried out in the absence of ground combat.

Finally, at the end of “The Military Half,” Schell revealed that (based on a report from a Quang Ngai-based civilian physician) an estimated 50,000 people had been killed in Quang Ngai each year since American troops first arrived. This is the terrible context of My Lai.

Destruction of the civilian population from the air was routine, with non-combatants the intended targets of an unprecedented array of weaponry. Sheehan cited the air war as perhaps the gravest war crime of all, deeming it a “distinct weapon of terror [used] to empty the countryside.” My Lai can be differentiated from other crimes only in that it involved the face-to-face massacre of hundreds of civilians over the course of a few hours.

As international law expert Richard Falk testified before Congress in 1970 and as recorded in “War Crimes and the American Conscience” (another title in the bibliography), Vietnam was characterized by “battlefield policies that openly deny the significance of any distinction between civilians and combatants, between military and non-military targets. The most spectacular of these practices are the B-52 pattern raids against undefended villages and populated areas, free-fire zones, harassment and interdiction fire, Operation Phoenix, search and destroy missions, massive crop destruction and defoliation, and forcible transfer of the civilian population.”

Indeed, he said, “the wrongdoers at My Lai, whether or not they were carrying out specific command decisions, were fulfilling the basic and persistent United States war policies in South Vietnam.”

“Nuremberg and Vietnam,” Telford Taylor

No one exerted more authority on the subject of war crimes than the chief prosecutor and co-author of the trial rules for Nuremberg, Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor, author of “Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson had opened Nuremberg with the declaration that theirs would not be a victor’s justice; that the imposition of the rules of war would thereafter be equally applicable to the victor and the vanquished. Jackson and his fellow prosecutors thought application of the Nuremberg principles would usher in a new era of world peace, as world leaders were called to account for their actions. That the U.S. would prove unwilling to adjudicate its own later conduct constituted a tragedy for the Nuremberg prosecutor, considering our country’s role in Vietnam.

The exposure of My Lai had forced a semblance of accountability. Twenty-four officers and soldiers were charged for the massacre or its cover-up. Just two of them faced courts-martial. Only one, Lt. William L. Calley, would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison, only to have his sentence commuted after serving just three months in jail.

Taylor didn’t know the trial’s outcome as he wrote his treatise on the applicability of Nuremberg and Tokyo (the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, 1945-1948) to Vietnam. Offering a legal matrix for decision, Taylor thought the burden of superior orders mitigated the responsibility of low-level soldiers facing charges for My Lai and shifted responsibility up the chain of command.

In perhaps the most telling case Taylor cited as precedent, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Japanese army commander in the Philippines, was prosecuted by a U.S. Military Commission for atrocities committed against civilians and prisoners of war, despite the fact that he had not ordered the atrocities and there was no evidence that he even had direct knowledge they had occurred. In a verdict upheld by Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. Supreme Court, Yamashita was found guilty for failing to “provide effective control of his troops” and sentenced to hang.

Civilian leaders were also liable under Nuremberg and Tokyo, placing American presidents and cabinet members alike at risk of prosecution if the same terms were applied to Vietnam.

Taylor declined to name names of potential civilian defendants for a war crimes trial, arguing that the extent of their knowledge of the war’s effect on civilians was still too speculative. (Presumably, Taylor, who had cited “The Military Half” in his own work, didn’t know that Schell had reported his findings on Quang Ngai to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara late in 1967 and had given him a copy of his notes. Schell agreed to keep their meeting off the record, an agreement he upheld until McNamara’s death.)

Taylor had no such reticence about naming military leaders. His list of potential defendants included Gen. William Westmoreland and the chain of command leading as high as the chiefs of staff in Washington. He would later go on the record, naming both Presidents Johnson and Nixon as potentially culpable for war crimes.

The Aggression Test

Most damning then, and 50 years hence, is that Taylor’s treatise raised the specter of the gravest of war crimes: aggression.

The “crime against peace” had never before been prosecuted. But the Nazis’ undisputed aggression in Europe and Japan’s in Asia made it central to Nuremberg and Tokyo. It was American jurists’ conviction that German and Japanese aggression could be proven that secured their leadership of the tribunals. With the “aggression test” applied, self-defense became the only legitimate basis for war.

While the legal standard endured, application of the aggression test would prove challenging. Taylor noted its prominence in the dueling narratives of the Vietnam era—the Johnson and Nixon administrations both claimed North Vietnamese aggression, while the Vietnamese insurgents and American anti-war protesters claimed American aggression. The official U.S. narrative has proven the most persistent and continues to stymie analysis of the war.

U.S. war planners framed Vietnam as a war that pitted “North” against “South,” with the U.S. bringing its weight to bear in support of a democratic South Vietnam. North Vietnamese invasion and aggression was key to the official narrative. Aggression had to be demonstrated to make a legal case for war.

But the official narrative fails the truth test—and the aggression test—as amply documented by the Pentagon’s own historians.

Another legal treatise on the bibliography, “Vietnam and International Law,” by the Lawyers Committee on American Policy Towards Vietnam, put the facts simply: “[a] separate state or nation of ‘South Vietnam’ has never existed.”

Vietnam’s division at the 17th parallel had only endured past 1956 because the U.S. supported a client state in the south that thwarted the popular election slated by the Geneva Accords to reunify the country.

The problem as the U.S. saw it—and as documented in the Pentagon Papers—was that Ho Chi Minh would have handily won the election, putting all of Vietnam under Communist control.

The Eisenhower administration chose instead to throw its support behind Ngo Dinh Diem, a nationalist who was thought to represent a “third force” in South Vietnam, but who quickly demonstrated his willingness to crush his political opposition through mass incarceration and extermination. In the months before the Geneva-mandated election, Diem’s regime jailed as many as 50,000 people and killed 12,000. Then, “abetted” (the term used by the Lawyer’s Committee) by the U.S., Diem refused to participate in the elections.

Popular opposition to Diem overwhelmed his usefulness, and he was deposed seven years later in a CIA-backed coup. John F. Kennedy had sanctioned the coup, but he had not anticipated Diem’s assassination. Just three weeks later, Kennedy would meet the same fate, passing responsibility for Vietnam to Lyndon Johnson.

In a successful bid to demonstrate North Vietnamese aggression, the Johnson administration used the Tonkin Gulf Incident—also debunked in the Pentagon Papers—to create a pretext for war. Congress complied with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving Johnson a congressional blank check. Tonkin would be one in a stream of North Vietnamese aggression tales that flowed unrelentingly throughout the course of the war.

Reports of North Vietnamese aggression were belied by the Pentagon’s own research that the insurrection was “southern bred” and that the Viet Cong were the popular favorite and de facto government in most of the rural south.

The North Vietnamese aggression narrative evaporates once we’ve dispensed with the myth of two Vietnams and the ensuing illusion of the U.S. as protector of a democratic South Vietnam. The evidence points to the other narrative—that the U.S. was the aggressor.

In that light, the Vietnamese insurgents—southern bred, with help from the north—become freedom fighters, not aggressors.

This is not to deny war crimes on both sides. Hue is often mentioned as the most notable atrocity committed by Vietnamese insurgents.

But Nuremberg held that by breaking the peace, aggression acts as a precursor crime, creating the conditions for other war crimes. As such, aggression is the ultimate offense. Atrocities like My Lai and Hue all too likely result.

Calls for Inquiry

Richard Falk, who has several offerings on Sheehan’s list, offered the legal opinion that if Vietnam was found to have been an illegal war—and, thus, by definition an aggressive war—the policymakers who initiated and prosecuted the war were liable.

Taylor thought litigation of the aggression charge impossible in 1970 since the secret papers that might have documented the decision-making behind the Vietnam War were unavailable. After release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971—which debunked the Tonkin Gulf Incident and documented U.S. planners’ knowledge that Ho Chi Minh would have won the thwarted democratic elections—Taylor called publicly for a high-level inquiry.

Sheehan also called for an inquiry. His bibliography represented, he thought, “the beginnings of what promises to be a long and painful inquest.”

That inquest never occurred.

While we can’t quantify the ramifications of that failure, theorists like Robert Jay Lifton foretold the psychic toll our war crimes complicity might take on America. Lifton testified before Congress in 1970 (“War Crimes and the American Conscience”) that our denial of guilt and accountability had involved America in “a malignant spiral of self-deception, brutalization and numbing” that reverberated back to the States. He thought it might take decades for America to recover, if we could recover at all.

If only his words weren’t so prophetic.

The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of My Lai this month offers an opportunity to take stock of the wider implications of that disastrous March day and American culpability for the gravest of crimes.

The Iraq Death Toll 15 Years After the U.S. Invasion

March 19 marks 15 years since the U.S.-U.K invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the American people have no idea of the enormity of the calamity the invasion unleashed. The U.S. military has refused to keep a tally of Iraqi deaths. General Tommy Franks, the man in charge of the initial invasion, bluntly told reporters, “We don’t do body counts.” One survey found that most Americans thought Iraqi deaths were in the tens of thousands. But our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion.

The number of Iraqi casualties is not just a historical dispute, because the killing is still going on today. Since several major cities in Iraq and Syria fell to Islamic State in 2014, the U.S. has led the heaviest bombing campaign since the American War in Vietnam, dropping 105,000 bombs and missiles and reducing most of Mosul and other contested Iraqi and Syrian cities to rubble.

An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that at least 40,000 civilians were killed in the bombardment of Mosul alone, with many more bodies still buried in the rubble. A recent project to remove rubble and recover bodies in just one neighborhood found 3,353 more bodies, of whom only 20 percent were identified as ISIS fighters and 80 percent as civilians. Another 11,000 people in Mosul are still reported missing by their families.

Of the countries where the U.S. and its allies have been waging war since 2001, Iraq is the only one where epidemiologists have actually conducted comprehensive mortality studies based on the best practices that they have developed in war zones such as Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. In all these countries, as in Iraq, the results of comprehensive epidemiological studies revealed 5 to 20 times more deaths than previously published figures based on “passive” reporting by journalists, NGOs or governments.

Two such reports on Iraq came out in the prestigious The Lancet medical journal, first in 2004 and then in 2006. The 2006 study estimated that about 600,000 Iraqis were killed in the first 40 months of war and occupation in Iraq, along with 54,000 nonviolent but still war-related deaths.

The U.S. and U.K. governments dismissed the report, saying that the methodology was not credible and that the numbers were hugely exaggerated. In countries where Western military forces have not been involved, however, similar studies have been accepted and widely cited without question or controversy. Based on advice from their scientific advisers, British government officials privately admitted that the 2006 Lancet report was “likely to be right,” but precisely because of its legal and political implications, the U.S. and British governments led a cynical campaign to discredit it.

A 2015 report by Physicians for Social Responsibility, Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the “War on Terror”, found the 2006 Lancet study more reliable than other mortality studies conducted in Iraq, citing its robust study design, the experience and independence of the research team, the short time elapsed since the deaths it documented and its consistency with other measures of violence in occupied Iraq.

The Lancet study was conducted over 11 years ago, after only 40 months of war and occupation. Tragically, that was nowhere near the end of the deadly consequences of the Iraq invasion.

In June 2007, a British polling firm, Opinion Research Business (ORB), conducted a further study and estimated that 1,033,000 Iraqis had been killed by then.

While the figure of a million people killed was shocking, the Lancet study had documented steadily increasing violence in occupied Iraq between 2003 and 2006, with 328,000 deaths in the final year it covered. ORB’s finding that another 430,000 Iraqis were killed in the following year was consistent with other evidence of escalating violence through late 2006 and early 2007.

Just Foreign Policy’s “Iraqi Death Estimator” updated the Lancet study’s estimate by multiplying passively reported deaths compiled by British NGO Iraq Body Count by the same ratio found in 2006. This project was discontinued in September 2011, with its estimate of Iraqi deaths standing at 1.45 million.

Taking ORB’s estimate of 1.033 million killed by June 2007, then applying a variation of Just Foreign Policy’s methodology from July 2007 to the present using revised figures from Iraq Body Count, we estimate that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003 as a result of our country’s illegal invasion, with a minimum of 1.5 million and a maximum of 3.4 million.

These calculations cannot possibly be as accurate or reliable as a rigorous up-to-date mortality study, which is urgently needed in Iraq and in each of the countries afflicted by war since 2001. But in our judgment, it is important to make the most accurate estimate we can.

Numbers are numbing, especially numbers that rise into the millions. Please remember that each person killed represents someone’s loved one. These are mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sons, daughters. One death impacts an entire community; collectively, they impact  an entire nation.

As we begin the 16th year of the Iraq war, the American public must come to terms with the scale of the violence and chaos we have unleashed in Iraq. Only then may we find the political will to bring this horrific cycle of violence to an end, to replace war with diplomacy and hostility with friendship, as we have begun to do with Iran and as the people of North and South Korea are trying to do to avoid meeting a similar fate to that of Iraq.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of Code Pink for Peace, and author of several books, including “Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.” Nicolas J. S. Davies is a writer for Consortiumnews and a researcher with Code Pink, and the author of “Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.”

Ways the Democrats Could Screw Up the Midterms

OK, Democrats, settle down. Drop the confetti and back away from the champagne. Stop punching each other in the arm, making with the whoop-whoop noises. Straighten your tie. These celebrations need to be put on hold. They are as premature as counting your chickens before they cross the road to a bridge that hasn’t been burned yet.

Sure, you might have had a few encouraging outcomes in some special elections and early midterm primaries, but those are as fleeting as the New York City Ballet dreams of an overweight third-grader in her first pair of toe shoes.

Do not be deceived into thinking that reclaiming the House of Representatives in November is a fast-break slam dunk because if anybody could blow a lead this late in the game, it’s you. And, the Atlanta Falcons, of course.

President Donald Trump’s approval rating could sink lower than the pressure-release screw on the bottom of a submarine sewer hose, and Democrats still couldn’t stir the electorate with a crowbar the size of Chile.

You are the kings and queens of tying your shoelaces together and tripping over your own feet. Have the killer instinct of mud. Possess the uncanny ability to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory through the tiniest dental window. Hold the Guinness book record for accidentally rolling over on the self-destruct button and blowing everything you stand for to smithereens. On that rare occasion you take a stand.

And right now, multitudes of ways to throw a monkey wrench into the midterms remain within your grasp. It may be over a half a year away. But to you do-gooder, pooch-screwing, over-thinkers, it’s a lifetime.

The following is not just the tip of the iceberg of ugly scenarios that are possible but the crust on the nostrils of the dead donkey curled around the tip of the iceberg of ugly scenarios that are possible.

Ways the Democrats Could Screw Up the Midterms

Lousy candidates. As we’ve seen in the past, your bench is full of them.

Horrible timing. You people would wear Yankees hats to Fenway Park on Nickel Beer Night.

Dearth of issues. You attempt to paint yourself as Republicans with a brain and a heart. Failing to realize that lacking a brain and a heart is the GOP’s base appeal.

Trusting the media. Yes, many reporters and correspondents are smart liberals. But most of their bosses are smarter conservatives. Who love Donald J. Trump for being a dumpster fire that attracts eyeballs.

Getting drunk at the prom and wrecking daddy’s T-Bird again.

Barbra Streisand. At the last minute she tries to help.

Hillary Clinton. Writes another book.

Exhibit Fear. Don’t ever forget the electorate can smell it.

Stormy Daniels. Entices Bill Clinton and/or Anthony Weiner into being pen pals.

Trivial stuff. Huge ugly public fights over whether the latest presidential rebuke should be printed with black or blue ink.

Eating your own. Does the term Al Franken have any meaning here?

Nancy Pelosi. She talks for another eight hours causing people to remember, “Oh yeah, she’s still the Head Dem, right?”

Two words. Bernie freaking Sanders.

Underestimating Donald Trump. Especially his allure to that segment of America that believes professional wrestling is legitimate.

And finally: Two more words. Elizabeth freaking Warren.

No Cards Left to Play but the Threat of Armageddon

There is no mystery to the ideological collapse of U.S. ruling class politics under late stage capitalism and imperial decline. Simply put, the corporate duopoly parties have nothing to offer the masses of people except unrelenting austerity at home and endless wars abroad. A shrunken and privatized Detroit serves as the model for U.S. urban policy; Libya and Syria are the scorched-earth footprints of a demented and dying empire. The lengthening shadow of economic eclipse by the East leaves the U.S. Lords of Capital with no cards left to play but the threat of Armageddon.

As China reclaims its historic place at the center of the earth, alongside the huge and heavily armed landmass of Russia, Washington flails about in a frenzy of firewall-building, buying time with the blood of millions, hoping to somehow preserve its doomed hegemony. But the “exceptional” superpower has no Marshall Plan to rescue itself from the throes of systemic decay, and all that it can offer to the emerging nations of the world is a bad example and the threat of annihilation. Its own people tire of the “Great Game,” finally realizing that they are the ones who have been played.

George Bush drawled the “last hurrah” of empire with his declaration of “Mission Accomplished,” 15 years ago—and was quickly contradicted. With the failure in Iraq, the pretense of “spreading democracy” came ingloriously undone. A refurbishing of the imperial brand was attempted, with a bright and shiny new face—a Black-ish one—plus a new logo to justify invasion and regime-change: “humanitarian” intervention. But Obama’s assault on Syria revealed that the U.S. and its junior partners could only project power in the region through an alliance with Islamic jihadist terror. The architects of the War on Terror were, in fact, the godfathers of al Qaida.

“Do you realize now what you’ve done?” Vladimir Putin demanded of the Americans, at the United Nations, in 2015. “It is hypocritical and irresponsible to make loud declarations about the threat of international terrorism while turning a blind eye to the channels of financing and supporting terrorists, including the process of trafficking and illicit trade in oil and arms. It would be equally irresponsible to try to manipulate extremist groups and place them at one’s service in order to achieve one’s own political goals in the hope of later dealing with them or, in other words, liquidating them.”

Washington’s jihadist strategy has rapidly unraveled ever since. The empire was unmasked in the world’s most public forum, revealing the utter depravity of U.S. policy and, more importantly, the weakness of Washington’s position in the region. The mighty fortress of global capital, the self-appointed defender of the world economic “order,” was revealed as, not just in collusion with head-chopping, women-enslaving, sectarian mass-murdering terrorists, but militarily dependent on the very forces it claims to wage a twilight, “generational” battle to destroy. The U.S. has been spouting The Mother of All Lies, and most of humanity knows it. Deep down, most Americans suspect as much, too.

With its intervention in Syria as a stalwart foe of jihadism and in defense of the principle of national sovereignty, Russia spoke the language of international law and morality, presenting a fundamental challenge to U.S. imperial exceptionalism. By deploying his forces against Washington’s jihadist proxies, in a region infested with American bases, Putin put muscle behind his call for a “multi-polar” world order.

China understands clearly that the ultimate U.S. aim is to block China’s access to the region’s energy and markets, at will. Beijing has praised Russia’s military role in the war, and stood with Moscow in vetoing western Security Council resolutions targeting Damascus. China routinely joins with Russia—and most other nations on the planet—in pursuit of a more “multi-polar world.”

The U.S. now uses the desperate Kurdish militia as surrogates in Syria, in an attempt to justify its presence in the country, while continuing to arm, finance and train other “rebel” groups, reportedly including former ISIS fighters. The U.S. has always avoided targeting the al Qaida affiliate in Syria, formerly known as the al Nusra Front—which, with ISIS on the run, remains the most effective anti-government force in the country.

The Trump administration declares that it will remain in Syria for the foreseeable future—without even a fig leaf of legal cover. Although there is now no possibility for a jihadist victory, Washington seems intent on drawing out the war as long as possible. The truth is, Washington doesn’t know how to extricate itself, because to do so would amount to yet another admission of defeat, and lead quickly to the dissolution of the jihadist networks the Pentagon has so long cultivated.

Withdrawal from Syria—and, sooner rather than later, from Iraq, whose parliament this month called for a timetable for U.S. forces to vacate the country—would totally unravel U.S. strategy to dominate events in the oil-rich region. Obama launched the jihadist war against the Syrian government in 2011 to force his way into the country. ISIS’s seizure of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, gave the U.S. the opportunity to return to that country, militarily. There will be no third chances, in Syria or Iraq.

The American people will not stand for another such adventure. They feel tainted by the experience in both Syria and Iraq, and don’t trust what their government says about the “good guys” and the “bad guys” in the Arab world. If only for reasons of racism, they want out.

Everyone smells U.S. defeat, inside and outside the empire. It is a stink that only Americans that were conscious in the Vietnam era can remember. It makes folks anxious—like the loss of a cocoon. Just as whites reaped a “psychological wage” from Jim Crow privileges, according to W.E.B. Dubois, even if they were poor, so do citizens of empire feel psychological benefits, even when the cost of the war machine is impoverishing the country. U.S. politics in the era of imperial decline will be nasty, stupid, petty and racist—just as we are already experiencing. There must be scapegoats for the national de-exceptionalization. The Russians fit the bill, for now, and so does anybody that talks like a Russian, or a Chinese—for example, people that would like to live in a “multi-polar world.”

Do not expect the Republicans or the Democrats to make any sense of a world of diminishing empire. The duopolists are incapable of seeing any future beyond their rich patrons’ vision—and the rich have no vision beyond continued accumulation of wealth, which requires a harsher and harsher austerity.

Most dangerous, they cannot imagine a world in which they are not on top. We will have to fight to keep them from blowing us all up, in rich man’s despair.

Glen Ford is the executive editor of Black Agenda Report. He can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

The Terror of a New Cold War

On March 1, in his annual state of the nation speech to the Russian Federal Assembly, President Vladimir Putin declared that his country has developed an “invincible” intercontinental cruise missile resistant to US missile defense systems. Putin claimed the new weapon can operate at very high speeds and has unlimited range.

Although “some experts” have suggested Putin may be bluffing, Theodore A. Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT, told Truthout, “I think he’s deadly serious.” Postol, who evaluated Moscow’s anti-ballistic missile defense while serving as adviser to the chief of naval operations in the early 1980s, said Putin’s speech “made very clear that every attempt to engage us in constructive discussion has been met with no response. He was responding to the US unwillingness to talk about missile defenses.”

U.S. Withdrawal From Treaty Escalated the Arms Race

Putin criticized George W. Bush’s 2002 withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which stated that in order to reduce offensive nuclear forces in Russia and the United States, both sides would have to agree to limit anti-ballistic missile defenses.

“Russia was categorically against [the U.S. withdrawal],” Putin said. “We saw the Soviet-US ABM Treaty signed in 1972 as the cornerstone of the international security system.”

The significance of the US withdrawal from the ABM treaty cannot be overestimated, in Postol’s opinion. “What the Russians would say, and I fully agree, is that the current escalating arms race between the United States and Russia is a direct product of US withdrawal from the ABM treaty of 1972,” he said.

As David Krieger, founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, noted at Truthdig, “The fuel for a new nuclear arms race was already on the fire, and a Russian strategic response was predictable, when the US withdrew from the ABM Treaty and began developing and emplacing missile defense systems globally. The US withdrawal and abrogation of the ABM Treaty may prove to be the greatest strategic blunder of the nuclear age.”

Likewise, Moscow correspondent Fred Weir wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, “The US withdrew unilaterally from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty … triggering Russian fears that technological advances might one day wipe out their nuclear deterrent.”

“Things have been escalating for quite a while,” Postol pointed out, adding that the U.S. is “increasing the size of its missile defenses while at the same time trying to get Russia to reduce the size of its offensive forces.” That “created a theoretical imbalance. The US has been building, in theory, a system that could be used to intercept Russian forces while those forces are being reduced.”

The escalation of the nuclear arms race continued during the Obama administration. As Reuters reporter Scot Paltrow has pointed out, “By the time Obama left office in January 2017, the risk of Armageddon hadn’t receded. Instead, Washington was well along in a modernization program that is making nearly all of its nuclear weapons more accurate and deadly.” Paltrow cited examples of lethal nuclear weapons developed on Obama’s watch.

Does Missile Defense Really Work?

Postol is skeptical about the effectiveness of missile defense systems because they have only been tested under the “most orchestrated conditions and even under those conditions, they have failed a high percentage of the time, some simply because something unexpected happened. In combat, the conditions will not be choreographed.”

Thomas S. Lee, writing for CNN, agrees that anti-ballistic missile defense systems are ineffective. Lee noted, “It is very hard to shoot down a ballistic missile. This is true even of a short-range ballistic missile with a relatively flat trajectory, much less a long-range missile with many more possible trajectories and a far greater speed.”

But Donald Trump thinks US missile defenses can be very effective, Postol observed. “In a crisis or a standoff, Trump might take actions he wouldn’t take if he thought he was defenseless. So, the potential for miscalculation is much higher when the weapons systems are not effective.”

Former Defense Secretary William Perry described the dangers of nuclear miscalculation, citing a 1983 incident in which Russian satellite nuclear warning systems mistakenly thought they detected five U.S. nuclear missiles launched at Russia, as well as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Trump’s New Policy Increases Possibility of Nuclear Weapons Use

Other signs indicate that Trump is very open to nuclear weapons use. His administration’s new Nuclear Posture Review reveals “a shift from one where the use of nuclear weapons is possible to one where the use of nuclear weapons is likely,” Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), said in a statement.

Putin alluded to the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) in his speech, noting, “Some of the provisions of the updated US nuclear strategy review, which reduces the threshold for using nuclear weapons, trigger tremendous concern. It is written in such a way that it can be used in response to a conventional weapon strike or even in response to a cyberthreat.”

This is not an exaggeration. For the first time, Trump’s NPR would allow the United States to use nuclear weapons in response to non-nuclear attacks, including cyberattacks, in “extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States, its allies and partners.”

The war in Syria, in which both the U.S. and Russia are already involved, may provide a venue for just that eventuality. Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote on Truthdig, “It doesn’t take a stretch of imagination today to paint a scenario in which American and Russian forces clash over Syria.”

“Putin’s statement makes it clear we are in a new arms race that will put us under the terror of a new Cold War, in constant fear of death at any instant,” Fihn added.

However, Postol asserted, “The United States has created the appearance that it believes it can fight and win a nuclear war against Russia.” That’s a false assumption, he said. “After nuclear weapons are used by one side, or when they are used preemptively, the other side would mount a massive attack against central strategic forces of the attacking state.”

There is no winning a nuclear war, even a limited one, as Geoff Wilson at the Ploughshares Fund wrote in The National Interest. “The reality is that planning to use nuclear weapons in a ‘limited’ way is a dangerous fantasy,” he noted. “Even the Nixon administration paid lip service to the futility of the concept by referring to its plan for limited nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union as the ‘Madman Theory.’ ”

That doesn’t even account for the incalculable devastation a nuclear explosion, or series of nuclear explosions, would wreak on the environment.

Make no mistake. The nuclear arms dealers stand to profit handily from the heightened nuclear arms race. In their recent report, ICAN and PAX, a nongovernmental peace organization, concluded that the top 10 financial institutions with the greatest investment in manufacture of nuclear weapons are U.S. companies, which account for almost half ($253 billion) of the total investment.

As Bush pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, he escalated the “global war on terror.” But, in January, Defense Secretary James Mattis stated that “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security.”

Ritter writes on Truthdig that Putin’s speech was a message not just to the Russian Federal Assembly, but also to the White House and Trump, as well as Congress, “where Russia-baiting has become a full-time occupation, and to the American people, who have been caught up in a wave of anti-Russia hysteria fueled by fantastical claims of a Russian ‘attack’ on American democracy which, when balanced against the potential of thermonuclear annihilation, pales into insignificance.”

Thomas Graham, senior director for Russia on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, thinks we are in a very dangerous period. Graham told The Washington Post, “The tension is high, higher now than it was several months ago, in part because the Russians have gotten past the phase where they thought with President Trump they would be able to move the relationship in a different direction. … This is qualitatively worse than any post-Cold War period.”

Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Leads to Divestment

On July 7, 2017, more than 120 countries adopted the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It forbids ratifying countries “never under any circumstances to develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” The treaty also prohibits the transfer of, use of, or threat to use nuclear weapons or nuclear explosive devices.

Fifty-three countries signed the treaty, and three have ratified it, making them parties to the agreement. The treaty will enter into force 90 days after 50 ratifications. But the five original nuclear-armed nations—the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China—did not participate in the treaty negotiations and have not signed it.

The treaty, however, “has created a movement towards divestment, reflected in the reduction in the number of companies investing in nuclear weapons, and an increase in financial institutions comprehensively prohibiting any investment,” according to Susi Snyder of PAX, who is a co-author of the new report. “Investments are not neutral, these companies should be congratulated for standing on the side of humanity.”

Meanwhile, in response to Putin’s March 1 invitation to enter into nuclear arms negotiations for “international security and sustainable development,” Krieger wrote, “The U.S. should take him up on this offer.”

Indeed, we should. The future of our planet is at stake.

At Least 4 Dead After Florida Bridge Falls Onto Highway

MIAMI—Florida officials said Thursday that four people have been found dead in the rubble of a collapsed South Florida pedestrian bridge where the frantic search for any survivors continued past nightfall.

Fire Chief Dave Downey said at an evening news briefing that four deceased people were found amid the chaotic scene of concrete rubble and crumpled vehicles. He said nine victims were removed “early on” and taken to hospitals but didn’t elaborate on their conditions. He said the “search and rescue mode” — deploying trained canines, search cameras and sensitive listening devices — was continuing into the night.

Gov. Rick Scott also spoke to reporters, saying “everybody is working hard to make sure we rescue anyone who can be rescued.” The Florida governor added that an exhaustive investigation now beginning will get to the bottom of “why this happened and what happened” and vowed that anyone who did anything wrong would be held accountable.

Miami-Dade police director Juan Perez praised the actions of first responders during a news conference but acknowledged the likelihood of finding more victims under the rubble was growing more difficult with the passage of time.

“We know that there’s going to be a negative outcome at the end of the day,” Perez said.

The bridge was under construction and collapsed onto a busy Miami highway Thursday, crushing at least eight vehicles under massive slabs of concrete and steel. One side of the bridge led to Florida International University, a school west of the city’s downtown.

Search-and-rescue crews drilled holes into the debris and used their highly trained dogs to look for survivors. They had to work carefully because part of the structure was still unsafe. At least 10 people were taken to hospitals. The number of fatalities was not immediately known.

The 950-ton (860-metric ton) bridge had been assembled by the side of the highway and moved into place Saturday to great fanfare. The span stretched almost 200 feet (60 meters) to connect Florida International University with the city of Sweetwater. It was expected to open to foot traffic next year.

“This bridge was about goodness, not sadness,” said FIU President Mark Rosenberg. “Now we’re feeling immense sadness, uncontrollable sadness. And our hearts go out to all those affected, their friends and their families. We’re committed to assist in all efforts necessary, and our hope is that this sadness can galvanize the entire community to stay the course, a course of goodness, of hope, of opportunity.”

Jacob Miller, a senior at FIU, was visiting a friend in a dorm when he heard sirens and horns honking. He went to a balcony and could see rubble coming down.

“I saw there were multiple cars crushed under the bridge. It was just terrible. I saw some people stopping their cars, trying to get out, trying to assess the situation to see if there is anything they could do to help,” he said.

National Transportation Safety Board chairman Robert Sumwalt III said a team of specialists was heading to Miami on Thursday night with plans to begin its investigation Friday morning.

Miami-Dade Police Director Juan Perez said his department’s homicide team would take over the investigation after rescue efforts are complete.

The exact death toll was unclear. Florida Highway Patrol Lt. Alejandro Camacho told CBS News that there were “several fatalities.” Carlie Waibel, a spokeswoman for Sen. Bill Nelson, said local officials told Nelson that people had died, but a final number had not been confirmed.

An accelerated construction method was supposed to reduce risks to workers and pedestrians and minimize traffic disruption, the university said.

Renderings showed a tall, off-center tower with cables attached to the walkway to support it. When the bridge collapsed, the main tower had not yet been installed, and it was unclear what the builders were using as temporary supports.

Robert Bea, a professor of engineering and construction management at the University of California, Berkeley, said it was too early to know exactly what happened, but the decision to use what the bridge builders called an “innovative installation” was risky, especially because the bridge spanned a heavily traveled thoroughfare.

“Innovations take a design firm into an area where they don’t have applicable experience, and then we have another unexpected failure on our hands,” Bea said after reviewing the bridge’s design and photos of the collapse.

Sweetwater police Detective Juan Llera was in a nearby meeting when the bridge collapsed.

“I heard a ‘boom’ like a bomb had exploded,” he said. “At first I thought it was a terrorist attack.”

He said he saw three construction workers who had been injured. One had a head injury and was passing in and out of consciousness, another one had a leg injury leg and the third was lying on the street unconscious. He started performing CPR on him.

“We were able to keep him alive to send him to the hospital,” Llera said.

Kendall Regional Medical Center received 10 injured people. Of those, two were in “extremely critical” condition and the other eight were stable with injuries such as broken bones, bruises and abrasions, said Dr. Mark McKenney, the hospital’s director of general surgery.

Of the two more serious cases, one arrived in cardiac arrest but was revived. The other had a serious brain injury, McKenney said.

The main companies behind the $14.2 million construction project have faced questions about their past work, and one was fined in 2012 when a 90-ton (80-metric ton) section of a bridge collapsed in Virginia.

Munilla Construction Management, or MCM, the Miami-based construction management firm that won the bridge contract, had a news release on its website touting the project with FIGG Bridge Engineers, a Tallahassee firm. It said initial reports that it had taken its website down were incorrect and that the site had become temporarily unavailable due to increased web traffic. “It has since been restored,” the company said in a statement.

MCM said on Twitter that it was “a family business and we are all devastated and doing everything we can to assist. We will conduct a full investigation to determine exactly what went wrong and will cooperate with investigators on scene in every way.”

FIGG said in a statement, “In our 40-year history, nothing like this has ever happened before.”

But FIGG was fined in 2012 after a 90-ton (80-metric ton) section of a bridge it was building in Virginia crashed onto railroad tracks below, causing minor injuries to several workers. The citation from the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry said FIGG did not properly inspect a girder and had not obtained written consent from its manufacturer before modifying it, according to a story in The Virginian-Pilot.

Court documents show that MCM was accused of substandard work in a lawsuit filed earlier this month. The suit said a worker at Fort Lauderdale International Airport, where the company is working on an expansion, was injured when a makeshift MCM-built bridge collapsed under his weight.

The suit accused the company of employing “incompetent, inexperienced, unskilled or careless employees” at the job site.

A review of Occupational Safety Health Administration records shows that MCM has been fined for 11 safety violations in the past five years. The fines totaling more than $50,000 arose from complaints about unsafe trenches, cement dust and other problems at its Florida work sites.

Florida International University is the second largest university in the state, with 55,000 students, most of whom live off-campus. The bridge was supposed to be a safe way to cross a busy highway.

A university student was killed in August while crossing the road that the bridge was supposed to span.

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Associated Press writers Jason Dearen in Gainesville, Kelli Kennedy in Fort Lauderdale, Curt Anderson in Miami and Tamara Lush in St. Petersburg contributed to this report.

San Francisco Embraces Amsterdam-Style Marijuana Lounges

SAN FRANCISCO — The smoke was thick and business brisk at the Barbary Coast Dispensary’s marijuana smoking lounge, a darkened room that resembles a steakhouse or upscale sports tavern with its red leather seats, deep booths with high dividers, and hardwood floors.

“There’s nothing like this in Jersey,” said grinning Atlantic City resident Rick Thompson, getting high with his cousins in San Francisco.

In fact, there’s nothing like the Barbary Coast lounge almost anywhere in the United States, a conundrum confronting many marijuana enthusiasts who find it increasingly easy to buy pot but harder to find legal places to smoke it.

Only California permits marijuana smoking at marijuana retailers with specially designed lounges. But it also allows cities to ban those kinds of shops.

Unsurprisingly, San Francisco is the trailblazer. It’s the only city in the state to fully embrace Amsterdam-like coffee shops, the iconic tourist stops in the Netherlands where people can buy and smoke marijuana in the same shop.

San Francisco’s marijuana “czar” Nicole Elliot said new permits will be issued once city health officials finalize regulations designed to protect workers from secondhand smoke and the neighborhood from unwelcomed odors. The lounges are required to install expensive heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems to prevent the distinct marijuana odor from leaking outside.

Other California cities are warming to the idea.

The city of West Hollywood has approved plans to issue up to eight licenses; the tiny San Francisco Bay Area town of Alameda said it will allow two; and Oakland and South Lake Tahoe each have one lounge. Sacramento, Los Angeles and other cities are discussing the issue but have not authorized any lounges.

Jackie Rocco, the city of Los Angeles’ business development manager, said residents and cannabis businesses complain there is “no safe place, no legal place, to use it.”

Rocco said Los Angeles officials envision smoking lounges set up like traditional bars, but for now the idea is more concept than plan.

Meanwhile, lawmakers and officials in other states are dithering over the issue.

Massachusetts marijuana regulators considered approval of “cannabis cafes.” But the proposal came under withering criticism from Republican Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration and law enforcement officials, who claimed among other things that opening such businesses would lead to more dangerously stoned drivers.

The five-member Cannabis Control Commission ultimately yielded to pressure by agreeing to put off a decision on licensing any cafes until after the initial rollout of retail marijuana operations, expected this summer. Members of the panel, however, continue to support the idea.

“Those who wish to consume cannabis are going to do so whether social sites exist or not, and are going to make driving decisions regardless of where they consume,” said Jim Borghesani, spokesman for the Massachusetts chapter of the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project. “Social sites will simply give cannabis users the same options available to alcohol users.”

In Colorado, one of the first states to broadly legalize, lawmakers failed in a close vote to make so-called “tasting rooms” legal. However, cities may do it, and Denver has authorized lounges where consumers bring their own marijuana, issuing a single permit so far.

Nevada has put off a vote on the issue until next year, while lawmakers in Alaska and Oregon have considered and rejected legislation.

San Francisco has allowed medical marijuana patients to smoke in dispensaries for years, though there was uncertainty over whether the practice was authorized when California voters in 1996 made the state the first in the nation to legalize cannabis use with a doctor’s recommendation.

The Barbary Coast, which received its state license in January, first opened as a small medical dispensary in 2013. It expanded and opened its smoking lounge to medical users last year. On Jan. 11, the shop opened to all adults when it received its California recreational use license. The state started issuing those on Jan. 1 and continues to approve dozens of applications a month since voters broadly legalized the use and sale of marijuana.

Thompson traveled from Atlantic City to celebrate his 27th birthday with his cousins, who live in Oakland. They decided to celebrate in style, getting as high as they could in San Francisco.

The three 20-somethings bought a variety of buds and the quick-acting “wax,” a potent pot concentrate, and settled into a booth with all the accoutrement they needed. After customers purchase at least $40 worth of product, the Barbary Coast will supply bongs, joint rollers, “rigs” for wax smoking and just about any smoking tool desired.

They smoked and debated the merits of smoking buds versus wax. The verdict: There’s something innately satisfying about smoking buds, but wax gives a quicker high even if it requires a hotter flame and more elaborate setup to smoke.

Barbary is in a once-rundown neighborhood that is gentrifying. Two other dispensaries with smoke lounges are three blocks away. Three flat-screen televisions tuned to sports hang on the lounge’s brick walls. Outside the enclosed room, customers line up at the dispensary’s glass counters to buy marijuana.

General manager Jesse Henry said Barbary’s owners plan to open a bigger store and smoking lounge about a mile away, across the street from a popular concert hall, after city health officials finalize regulations for on-site consumption.

“This city is built for tourists,” Henry said. “We put a lot of work into giving them a San Francisco experience.”

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Associated Press writers Michael R. Blood in Los Angeles and Bob Salsberg in Boston contributed to this report.

Iconic Retail Chain Toys R Us Is Closing

NEW YORK—Toys R Us is headed toward shuttering its U.S. operations, jeopardizing the jobs of some 30,000 employees while spelling the end for a chain known to generations of children and parents for its sprawling stores and Geoffrey the giraffe mascot.

The closing of the company’s 740 U.S. stores over the coming months will finalize the downfall of the chain that succumbed to heavy debt and relentless trends that undercut its business, from online shopping to mobile games.

CEO David Brandon told employees Wednesday the company’s plan is to liquidate all of its U.S. stores, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The Associated Press.

Brandon said Toys R Us will try to bundle its Canadian business, with about 200 stores, and find a buyer. The company’s U.S. online store would still be running for the next couple of weeks in case there’s a buyer for it.

It’s likely to also liquidate its businesses in Australia, France, Poland, Portugal and Spain, according to the recording. It’s already shuttering its business in the United Kingdom. That would leave it with stores in Canada, central Europe and Japan, where it could find buyers for those assets.

Toys R Us had about 60,000 full-time and part-time employees worldwide last year.

Brandon said on the recording that the company would be filing liquidation papers and there would be a bankruptcy court hearing Thursday.

“We worked as hard and as long as we could to turn over every rock,” Brandon told employees. He put much of the blame on its woes on the media, saying negative stories about the company’s prospects scared customers and vendors.

The Wayne, New Jersey-based company declined to comment.

The chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last fall, saddled with $5 billion in debt that hurt its attempts to compete as shoppers moved to Amazon and huge chains like Walmart.

It pledged then to stay open, but Brandon told employees that it had a “devastating” sales performance during the critical holiday season as nervous customers and vendors shied away. That made its lenders more skittish about investing in the company. In January, it announced plans to close about 180 stores over the next couple of months, leaving it with a little more than 700 stores.

The company’s troubles have affected toy makers Mattel and Hasbro, which are big suppliers to the chain. But the likely liquidation will have a bigger impact on smaller toy makers, who rely more on the chain for sales. However, many have been trying to diversify in recent months as they worried about the chain’s survival.

Toys R Us was also hurt by the shift to mobile devices taking up more play time. But steep sales declines over the holidays and thereafter were the deciding factor, said Jim Silver, who is editor-in-chief of toy review site TTPM.com.

The company didn’t do enough to emphasize that it was reorganizing but not going out of business, Silver said. That misperception led customers to its stores because they didn’t think they would be able to return gifts.

Now, the $11 billion in sales still happening at Toys R Us each year will disperse to other retailers like Amazon and discounters, analysts say. Other chains, seeing that Toys R Us was vulnerable, got more aggressive. J.C. Penney opened toy sections last fall in all 875 stores. Target and Walmart have been expanding their toy selections. Even Party City is building up its toy offerings.

“Amazon may pick up the dollars, but won’t deliver the experience needed for a toy retailer to survive and thrive in today’s market,” said Marc Rosenberg, a toy marketing executive.

Toys R Us had dominated the toy store business in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it was one of the first of the “category killers”— a store totally devoted to one thing. Its scale gave it leverage with toy sellers and it disrupted general merchandise stores and mom-and-pop shops. Children sang along with commercials about “the biggest toy store there is.”

But the company lost ground to discounters like Target and Walmart, and then to Amazon, as even nostalgic parents sought deals elsewhere. GlobalData Retail estimates that nearly 14 percent of toy sales were made online in 2016, more than double the level five years ago. Toys R Us still has hundreds of stores, and analysts estimate it still sells about 20 percent of the toys bought in the United States.

It wasn’t able to compete with a growing Amazon: The toy seller said in bankruptcy filings that Amazon’s low prices were hard to match. And it said its Babies R Us chain lost customers to the online retailer’s convenient subscription service, which let parents receive diapers and baby formula at their doorstep automatically. Toys R Us blamed its “old technology” for not offering its own subscriptions.

But Toys R U’s biggest albatross was its massive debt load since private-equity firms Bain Capital, KKR & Co. and Vornado Realty Trust took it private in a $6.6 billion leveraged buyout in 2005. The plan had been to take the company public again, but weak sales have prevented that from happening. With such debt levels, Toys R Us did not have the financial flexibility to invest in its business. The company closed its flagship store in Manhattan’s Times Square, a huge tourist destination that featured its own Ferris wheel, about two years ago.

In filing for bankruptcy protection last fall, Toys R Us pledged to make its stores more interactive. It added demonstrators for the holiday season to show people how toys work, and began opening Play Labs at 42 stores, areas where children can play with different items.

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Follow Anne D’Innocenzio: http://twitter.com/ADInnocenzio

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AP Retail Writer Joseph Pisani contributed to this report in New York.