Chris Hedges's Blog, page 70

Pope Offers Christmas Message of Hope to a Suffering World

VATICAN CITY—Pope Francis offered a Christmas message of hope Wednesday against darkness that cloaks conflicts and relationships in large parts of the world from the Middle East to the Americas to Africa.

The pope told tens of thousands of tourists, pilgrims and Romans gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the annual Christmas Day message that “the light of Christ is greater” than the darkness “in human hearts” and ‘’in economic, geopolitical and ecological conflicts.”

The traditional “Urbi et Orbi’’ (“to the city and to the world’’) Christmas message has become an occasion for popes to address suffering in the world and press for solutions. Francis was flanked by Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino, president of the papal council for migrants, and Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the pope’s official almsgiver.

The pope cited the Syrian people “who still see no end to the hostilities that have rent their country over the last decade’’ as well as Israel, where Jesus “was born as the savior of mankind and where so many people — struggling but not discouraged — still await a time of peace, security and prosperity.’’

Francis also called for an easing of the crisis in Lebanon, social tensions in Iraq and “a grave humanitarian crisis’’ in Yemen.

He noted that a number of countries in the Americas “are experiencing a time of social and political upheaval,’’ citing “the beloved Venezuelan people, long tried by their political and social tensions.”

The pope also noted migrants forced by injustice “to emigrate in the hope of a secure life.’’ Instead of finding acceptance, Francis said injustice continues along their journey, where they often face abuse, enslavement and torture in “inhumane detention camps” and death during dangerous sea and desert crossings.

And once migrants arrive in “places where they might have hoped for a dignified life’’ … they “instead find themselves before walls of indifference,” he said.

The pope offered prayers of hope for the people of Africa, including those in Congo “torn by continuing conflicts’’ and the people of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Nigeria, where people have been “persecuted for their religious faith.’’

And in an extraordinary message, Francis along with two other religious leaders urged the rival leaders of South Sudan to maintain a pledge to form a coalition government early next year. A peace deal to end a 5-year civil war that killed close to 400,000 people was signed last year, but a November deadline to form a coalition government was extended to February as key aspects of the peace deal still need to be resolved.

The message, issued separately from the traditional papal Christmas address, was signed by the leader of the Anglican church, Archbishop Justin Welby, and the Rev. John Chalmers, ex-moderator of the Church of Scotland.

The religious leaders offered assurances “of our spiritual closeness as you strive for a swift implementation” of peace agreements and prayers “for a renewed commitment to the path of reconciliation and fraternity.”

The leaders also expressed a desire to visit the East African nation.

Bernie Sanders Has All the Right Enemies

For the United States, oligarchy is the elephant—and donkey—in the room. Only one candidate for president is willing to name it.

Out of nearly 25,000 words spoken during the Democratic debate last Thursday night, the word “oligarchy” was heard once. “We are living in a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy,” Bernie Sanders said, “where you have a handful of billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and politicians.”

Sanders gets so much flak from corporate media because his campaign is upsetting the dominant apple cart. He relentlessly exposes a basic contradiction: A society ruled by an oligarchy—defined as “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes”—can’t really be a democracy.

The super-wealthy individuals and huge corporations that own the biggest U.S. media outlets don’t want actual democracy. It would curb their profits and their power.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post editorialized that the agendas of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “probably would fail at the polls and, if not, would carry extreme risks if they tried to implement them.” The editorial went on to praise “the relative moderates in the race”—Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar—for “offering a more positive future.”

But “a more positive future” for whom? Those “moderates” are certainly offering a more positive future for the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who usually ranks as the richest person in the world. He wants to acquire even more extreme personal wealth beyond his current $108 billion.

The Washington Post‘s routinely negative treatment of Sanders, which became notorious during his 2016 presidential run, remains symptomatic of what afflicts mass-media coverage of his current campaign—from editorial pages and front pages to commercial TV news and “public” outlets like the “PBS NewsHour” and NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.”

The essence of a propaganda system is repetition. To be effective, it doesn’t require complete uniformity—only dominant messaging, worldviews and assumptions.

Prevailing in news media’s political content is the central, tacit assumption that oligarchy isn’t a reality in the United States. So, there’s scant interest in the fact that the richest three people in the USA “now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined.” As for the damaging impacts on democracy, they get less attention than Melania Trump’s wardrobe.

Now, as Sanders surges in Iowa and elsewhere, there’s a renewed pattern of mass-media outlets notably ignoring or denigrating his campaign’s progress. Like many other Sanders supporters, I find that disgusting yet not surprising.

In fortresses of high finance and vast opulence—with no ceiling on the often-pathological quests for ever-greater wealth—defenders of oligarchy see democratic potential as an ominous weapon in the hands of advancing hordes. Media outlets provide a wide (and shallow) moat.

For mass media owned by oligarchs and their corporate entities, affinity with the “moderate” orientations of Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar is clear. Any one of them would be welcomed by corporate elites as protection against what they see as a hazardous upsurge of progressive populism.

While Buttigieg has emerged as a sharp corporate tool for the maintenance of oligarchy, Joe Biden is an old hand at such tasks. Meanwhile, ready to preempt the politician-intermediaries for plutocracy, Michael Bloomberg is offering a blunt instrument for direct wealthy rule. Estimated to be the eighth-richest person in the United States, he was urged to run for president this year by Bezos.

During the next few months, Bloomberg will continue to use his massive class-war chest to fund an advertising onslaught of unprecedented size. In just weeks, he has spent upwards of $80 million on TV ads, dwarfing all such spending by his opponents combined. And, with little fanfare, he has already hired upwards of 200 paid staffers, who’ll be deployed in 21 states.

If Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar or Bloomberg win the Democratic presidential nomination, that would be a triumph for oligarchy in the midst of rising grassroots opposition.

Right now, two corporate Democrats are the leading contenders to maintain corrupted business-as-usual at the top of the party. As the executive director of Our Revolution, Joseph Geevarghese, aptly put it days ago, “Almost every problem facing our country—from runaway greed on Wall Street, to high prescription drug prices, to locking kids in private detention facilities, to our failure to act against the climate crisis—can be traced back to the influence of the kind of donors fueling Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden’s campaigns for president.”

While uttering standard platitudes along the lines of making the rich and corporations “pay their fair share,” you won’t hear Buttigieg or Biden use the word “oligarchy.” That’s because, to serve the oligarchy, they must pretend it doesn’t exist.

Let 2020 Be the Year of a Truly Free Press

The grisly murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi Arabian operatives inside their consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018, reportedly on direct orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was compounded Monday when the Saudi Arabian public prosecutor announced that five people had been sentenced to death for the crime. Two senior members of the Saudi government, including a close adviser to the crown prince, were released for “lack of evidence.” The case of Jamal Khashoggi highlights just how dangerous the practice of journalism can be, especially when elected leaders like President Donald Trump ignore, condone or even inflame hostility and violence against reporters.

Sherif Mansour of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) responded, saying the announcement “shows that the Saudi government under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is committed to an ongoing mockery of justice.”

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CPJ defends the right of journalists to report the news safely, without fear of reprisal. Their recent report on journalists killed in 2019 named 25 journalists, the lowest number since 2002. Of those, 10 were murdered directly because of their work as journalists, which is the lowest number since CPJ started keeping records in 1992. Five of the 10 murdered were in Mexico, which is on par with Syria as the most dangerous place to work as a journalist. CPJ still has an additional 25 deaths of journalists under investigation, so the total will likely change.

CPJ also tracks reporters imprisoned around the world, and counts at least 250 currently behind bars. The greatest jailers of journalists in 2019 are China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Beneath that grim statistic that 10 reporters were murdered in 2019 lies an important shift toward a public rejection of impunity for violence against journalists. CPJ’s Elana Beiser noted in their report three recent cases that define the trend: the October 2017 murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, in Malta; the 2018 killing of Jan Kuciak and his fiancee in their home in Slovakia; and the Khashoggi case. Both Galizia and Kuciak were reporting on corruption at the highest levels of government in their respective countries when they were murdered.

Recently, as thousands marched in the streets of Malta demanding accountability for the assassination of Galizia, the Mediterranean island nation’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat announced that he will be resigning in mid-January. Public pressure on Muscat increased in part due to a consortium of journalists who continued Galizia’s work. The group calls itself “Forbidden Voices.” They coordinated the Daphne Project, with 45 journalists pursuing Galizia’s unfinished stories and investigating her assassination. Malta’s richest man, gambling tycoon Yorgen Fenech, has been charged with complicity in the journalist’s murder, and has been arrested in a separate money laundering case. Fenech is also linked to Muscat’s former chief of staff.

Similarly, in the wake of the murder of Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico resigned, and the Slovak businessman who is accused of ordering the murder, Marian Kocner, is finally set to stand trial almost two years later.

Justice for Jamal Khashoggi remains elusive. Agnes Callamard, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, tweeted after the announcement of the Saudi convictions: “Bottom line: the hit-men are guilty, sentenced to death. The masterminds not only walk free, they have barely been touched by the investigation and the trial. That is the antithesis of Justice. It is a mockery.”

The Washington Post reported over a year ago that the CIA had concluded, on evidence that included intercepted phone calls, that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman ordered the killing. His close friendship with Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner has certainly contributed to the impunity he has so far enjoyed. One way to punish Saudi Arabia is through sanctions and denial of military aid — options that were open until just last week, when Congress passed, and sent to the White House for Trump’s signature, the $738 billion 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna issued a joint statement calling the NDAA “a bill of astonishing moral cowardice,” in part for failing to deny aid to Saudi Arabia.

The role of a free press is to inform the public and to hold those in power accountable. We all have a responsibility to ensure that journalists are free to do their work, without threats of injury, imprisonment or death.

* * *

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,400 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan and David Goodman, of the New York Times best-seller “Democracy Now!: 20 Years Covering the Movements Changing America.”

Time For a New Christmas Truce

This piece originally appeared on Antiwar.com.

They lived in similar squalor, shared the same God, and celebrated the same holidays. It was December 24, 1914, Christmas Eve, and – though they spoke different languages and had ruthlessly killed one another for over four months – the British and German soldiers in the opposing trench lines had much in common.

The ruling families, the leaders of the prominent monarchies of Germany, Russia, and England were literally blood relatives. Indeed, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was Queen Victoria’s grandson and regularly visited the British Isles throughout his youth. Given the commonalities of the mostly working-class soldiers in the opposing trenches, perhaps, then, it should come as little surprise that some British an German enlisted men spontaneously, and unofficially, called a truce that Christmas, and, in their own way, celebrated the birth of Christ – their shared savior – together, if only for a moment. How beautiful it was…

These days, the war described is known as World War I, but, since the boys on the frontline couldn’t then imagine another maelstrom so terrible would follow, it was known, at the time, simply as the Great War. Warfare of such dimensions had never unfolded before. The scale of the bloodshed had been unthinkable even a Christmas before – about a million men had been killed since August – yet by then stalemate reigned as both sides settled into trench lines that stretched from Belgium to Switzerland. A peculiar, ultimately absurd, form of hyper-nationalism had recently infected Europe, and, when combined with a worldwide competition for colonies, caused this arguably existential war. So prevalent, in fact, was the jingoistic patriotism of the era that even the socialists of each nation initially, and widely, supported the march to war.

Those were dark times. To simplify the military analyses of the war, the tactics (mass formation infantry attacks) had yet to catch up with the more lethal technology (machine guns, poison gas, and airplanes) of the day. The senseless delusion of nationalism ought to have died a bloody death – metaphorically riddled with bullets whilst stuck in endless strands of barbed wire – commensurate with the murder of so many millions of naive troopers. It didn’t, unfortunately, and across the globe today – even in normally circumspect Western Europe – insular nationalism is again on the rise. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Bolsinaro, Modi, Orban…they’re all symptoms of the resurgence of this worldwide disease. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well last time around.

Still, I digress – back to the Christmas truce. Though some have described the widespread phenomenon as somewhat apocryphal, some version of the following certainly did occur. Up and down the lines that first Christmas Eve of the Great War, German soldiers sang well-known holiday songs, such as “Silent Night.” Though the language of the verses differed on either side of the trenches, the melodies and content were widely known. British troops joined in the rather solemn caroling, as did some brass bands, along both sides of the lines.

At dawn on Christmas Day, Germans and Britons – up and down the firing line – emerged from their trenches and ventured into the deadly “No Man’s Land” between the armies. Some brought Christmas trees along; others exchanged cigarettes and snacks with their normative enemies. None brought weapons. During the brief, beautiful, gesture of peace, many soldiers also took the opportunity to identify, retrieve, and bury the bodies of comrades stranded between the trench lines. In one sector, at least, the opposing troops played an ad hoc game of soccer – another shared cultural pastime. As one participant, German Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch, remembered: “How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.”

The undeniable beauty, the event’s last gasp of wartime chivalry, aside, it was never to be repeated – not on the four following Christmases of that war, nor in the interminable global warfare that has since followed. Senior officers on both sides, rightfully, had been terrified by the 1914 display of class and species solidarity, and brutally quashed such cross-trench harmony in years to come, with threats of disciplinary action. So it goes…

Nonetheless, as today’s forever wars rage – decades longer than the first Great War of old – the time for spontaneous truce between the grassroots ranks of all sides couldn’t be more essential. I know, I know, contemporary wars are geographically diffuse, rage far from the European continent, and are waged between belligerents that practice different religions. On the surface, at least, these caveats seem sensible. But are they? What if Americans and Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Somalians, et. al., have more in common – even now – than most assume?

Bear with me now: it ain’t as much of a stretch as it may seem. First off, contrary to popular belief, Christians and Muslims worship the same god, if with a different flavor of tradition. Figures such as Abraham, King David, Jesus, and, especially Mary, figure prominently in the Koran. Islam, as such, though often distorted – as it was (and is) in certain bellicose strands of Christianity – is best seen as an extension, or addition, to the Judeo-Christian tradition, rather than a unique religion. Furthermore, the grunts on either side of America’s “terror wars” still share extraordinary commonalities.

Both are often drawn to military service by the limited economic opportunities in their respective societies. The soldiers who served under me typically joined as a means to a fiscal end – paying off college debt, learning a trade, or seeking healthcare and housing security. The foot soldiers in the Taliban buried IEDs and laid in wait to ambush my troops, as often as not, for a steady paycheck, a sense of dignity and purpose in a circumscribed Third World job market. American and Taliban grunts, for example, share more than they diverge. Both wage wars not of their own making; neither possess a clear path to victory; neither count many prospects in civilian life. Both believe the purported birth of Jesus to be a profound matter. The same can be said of the antagonists across America’s wars today. Let them all lay down their arms, for a moment, and celebrate in solidarity this Christmas. If only…

Alas, nationalism, particularly in its more pugnacious form, is again on the rise – from Brazil to Bengal. Yet, logically, it should be extinct. That it isn’t, and shows no signs of dissipation, might just presage the extinction of us, the human race! Truly existential threats pervade this world – climate change and potential nuclear warfare for starters – and even cursory historical analysis demonstrates that democracies, or republics, cannot weather indefinite warfare. America’s Army Chief of Staff during World War II, George Marshall, began his career as a young lieutenant engaged in an indecisive, endless war in the Philippines. The experience stuck. Decades later, Marshall, one of this nation’s most effective and humble military leaders, opined that “a democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War.” What, one wonders, would the former general, secretary of defense, and secretary of state, think of an American war that’s well into it’s 19th year?

As the should-be-bombshell Afghanistan Papers – long since buried by the impeachment charade dominating Capitol Hill and the media – definitively demonstrated, today’s generals and admirals can’t be counted on, neither for competence nor character. No, the movement for peace must come from the grassroots, from the under-privileged and under-served combatants on both sides of the contemporary fighting lines.

Truth is, as a troop commander in Kandahar in 2011-12, I had (crazy as it may sound) more in common with my counterpart in the local Taliban than with my star-fixated colonels and generals in the U.S. Army. At least my Taliban mirror also faced the daily prospect of death and undoubtedly knew the pain of burying young men under his command. I only wish that one of us, both of us, had had the courage to lay down our guns, take that exceedingly alluring risk, and met halfway between my outpost and his village, defied our respective commanders, and shared a Christmas moment.

Maybe it is fantasy; as is my hope that other belligerents will attempt this remarkable 1914-inspired protest tonight and tomorrow. Still, dreams, as they say, are what makes life tolerable…

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.comHis work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Another Christmas on Death Row

Editor’s note: This story originally ran on Dec. 21, 2018. We are reposting it as a Christmas 2019 feature. The original text begins below:

On Dec. 17, 2018, after this interview was recorded, outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown ordered new DNA testing on four key pieces of evidence in the murder conviction of Kevin Cooper. Brown issued the order after intense efforts by his legal team and journalists helped bring attention and urgency to Cooper’s story. Cooper himself is a Truthdig contributor who has recently written several pieces for the site.

This is Part 2 of a two-part interview by Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer. To listen to Part 1, click here. To read key documents in this case, click here. 

In Part 2 of this two-part interview, death row inmate Kevin Cooper, who once came within four hours of execution, details how he copes with the daily torment of impending death as his legal team fights to prove his innocence with new exonerating evidence Gov. Jerry Brown has finally allowed to be examined.

For the past 33 Christmas holidays, Cooper has inhabited an 11-by-4½-foot cell in California’s San Quentin State Prison, the last eight waiting for Brown to do what he did on Christmas eve: grant him a new hearing and advanced DNA testing. This action could prove what federal Appellate Judge William Fletcher has said: “Kevin Cooper is on death row because the San Bernardino sheriff’s department framed him.”

Cooper, at the top of the list to be killed when the state resumes executions, talks to Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence” about the unfairness of the justice system and the difficulty of proving one’s innocence once convicted: “”Whenever you have a judge that comes forward and stands up and says no, this person innocent … this person was framed, we need to take that serious as a society.”

He discusses his ongoing struggle to preserve his basic humanity: “I’ve been blessed, in a sick sense of the word. I’ve been cursed by putting me here, but while I’m in here, I’ve been blessed, because there are a lot of death row inmates who commit suicide every time you turn around. They took a guy past this cage last night on a gurney, ’cause he was ‘man down.’ … Don’t know if he lived or died. But they’ve been committing suicide up here, they’ve been killing each other up here. All types of craziness has been going on up in here.”

Cooper explains how he has kept hope alive when he could so easily succumb to desperation and despair. He paints, writes and reads voraciously, but he is most passionate when speaking out against the death penalty: “When you find yourself in a fight that is bigger than you—[capital punishment] affects the lives of many people—and you can do something to help in that fight, you can’t give up. … You can’t stop, you can’t quit. You just can’t do it. … I did not choose this, to speak out against the death penalty; I didn’t. This [struggle] chose me.”

Listen to Part 2 of Cooper’s interview with Scheer, or read a transcript of their conversation below.

Kevin Cooper: All right.

Robert Scheer: You’re back.

KC: I’m here.

RS: Well you know, I mean, just to recap for people, I mean, we’re talking about a measure of justice in a case where the evidence has been–this is now the words of appellate court Judge William C. Fletcher, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And he was speaking for almost half of the appellate court that was saying you should have these kind of hearings and so forth. He said the murders were horrible, we understand that, and Kevin Cooper is on Death Row because the San Bernardino sheriff’s department framed him. This is not some wild claim of a supporter of yours; this is a guy who looked through all the evidence, sifted through it, trained judge.

[Recorded voice on telephone] This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.

RS: I just want to be clear here so people understand, this is a matter of evidence, the distortion of evidence, and the fact that we have scientific competence in reinvestigating these things. Because for instance, the sweat under someone’s arm, whether that shirt belonged to Kevin Cooper or belonged to someone else, now can be determined with incredible precision that was not available before. And I should emphasize what these Brady violations are. And they’ve been well documented.

KC: If I may add, just–every time I turn around, we are discovering new evidence that not only proves my innocence, but proves that I was truly framed by the San Bernardino County sheriff’s department. And this new evidence is not only compelling, all a person has to do is have common sense and they can find out and read this stuff, that we are telling the truth. Now, in the history of the death penalty in America, we have often had people, including judges, turn a blind eye to truth in order to have the person that they want murdered, actually murdered. But whenever you have a judge that comes forward and stands up and says, no, this person is innocent and this person was framed, we need to take that serious as a society. Because judges don’t often do that. That is an exception, that is not the rule. The rule is, most judges turn a blind eye to truth on innocence, because they are more concerned about procedure. In America, there is no such thing in the Constitution about not executing an innocent person. If a person is innocent, but they had a, quote unquote, “fair trial,” which seems like an oxymoron to me, then it’s all right to execute them. Because the procedure was followed. It’s about constitutional violations and all that when you get to federal court. This system is rigged! It’s rigged against people like me. So if people out there don’t give a damn, then this thing will never come to an end, and I may very well end up being tortured and murdered physically by these people in here. But if society gives a damn, then they can shut these killing machines down all across this country. It’s time to bring this madness to an end! Everybody knows that this thing is not fair; it can’t be fair when the only people that get executed are poor people. It can’t be fair when a person is more likely to get the death penalty if they are convicted, rightly or wrongly, of murdering white people than murdering any other skin color of a person. It’s not fair. I mean, none of this is fair. It’s not fair when the states can spend billions and millions and millions of dollars to get someone executed, but the defense is not given that much money to try to save a person’s life, to prove them innocent. Public defenders don’t get as much money to defend their clients as district attorneys get to prosecute those people. This is not fair. This cannot be fair, that the only people who can sit on juries are people who are willing to impose the death penalty. Those are the only people who can sit on a jury. It’s not fair when a black man is the only black person in the courtroom when you got a white judge, a white district attorney, a white public defender and an all-white jury, and they’re going to tell me that’s justice? Or that man gets justice? That’s not fair. But that’s America. I would like to see a white person sit in front of a black judge, with a black prosecutor, and an all-black jury and a black public defender, and I would wonder how they’d feel, if they was going to get real justice. Or a Native American judge, or a Native American prosecutor, public defender, and a Native American jury, and ask themselves, how do they feel? Do they feel like they’re going to get real justice?

RS: So let me just interrupt for a second, because people listening to this might say, OK, yeah, race is a factor; race is out there. But–but, is that a cop-out here, is it a coverup? And I have to point out, this is not something Kevin Cooper is inventing for this case. Race has been built into it from day one. A terrible murder happened in San Bernardino County. A family got slaughtered, OK? And the survivor, the young son of this family, and he told the police that three white guys did it. That’s a quote. He didn’t say a black guy with dreadlocks, or somethin’. Now, there are suspects in this case. All that stuff about the bloody overalls, and the bar, and everything. There were three white guys in a bar with blood on them. That’s part of the evidence that was withheld from the defense. So I don’t want people to squiggle off the hook here and say, yeah, yeah, black guy bringing up the white, you know, race issue. The fact is, anyone who looks at this case will see that it was informed by a racism from the first hour. The police, the sheriffs had a horrendous murder on their hands in a rural, primarily white county of California, San Bernardino. And the first report from the surviving witness was, go find three white guys who did it. And instead, they find a black guy who’d walked off a prison farm, and he’s going to be the guy, they’re going to nail him. And they’re going to quiet the crowd, they’re going to save their political future, they’re going to calm people–we got the killer. The DA of San Bernardino County, for the longest time, opposed any kind of testing of the DNA, any kind of look at the evidence. He was defeated by voters down there in part, in part because a very good law school professor wrote an article about his prejudice in this case. But the fact of the matter is, they had an institutional connection now with protecting their department. And it should be pointed out that that sheriff’s department had a lot of corruption in it. People who stole guns from the department thing and sold them out there; people who destroyed evidence. We should talk about that–we’re not talking about a bunch of saints in law enforcement.

[Recorded voice on telephone] This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.

KC: And the head criminalist of this case, he was fired after my conviction for stealing around five pounds of heroin from the evidence room for his own personal use and to sell to drug dealers. So while he was working on my case, he was a heroin addict. This is the same man who claimed to have found a bloody tennis shoe imprint on a bedsheet of the victims, not at the crime scene, but at the crime lab by folding two pieces of sheet together. And, he had an exact pair of shoes, tennis shoes in his office that matched the print of blood on that sheet. I am not making this stuff up!

RS: No, this is some of the stuff that Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, has led him to feel that there’s been a miscarriage of justice here. And when you look at the people who, here’s the judge, a very important federal judge, said you were framed–now, you’re right, he wouldn’t use that word without a great deal of consideration; that’s a very serious charge for him to make. And the system will rally around not making it, not exposing it–because then, hey, what are we saying? We’re saying that, what, the police can be corrupt? You got a case there in San Bernardino County, right, where the guy in the evidence room, he had guns that he sold. Wasn’t just the drugs. Right?

KC: No, that was the sheriff himself. That was the sheriff who stole all those guns, over 500 guns. The sheriff, the then-sheriff Floyd Tidwell, stole, and gave away to other deputy sheriffs as gifts, those guns that he stole.

RS: And he got–he got a slap on the wrist, right? He got–

KC: A slap on the wrist, exactly.

RS: –what, a misdemeanor, but then they waived it. I mean, he didn’t even do time.

KC: He didn’t go to jail, that’s for sure. This good old boys club down there in San Bernardino County. And again, I say this to your listeners: we, you and I, are not making any of this up. This is the truth about my case.

RS: Kevin, I’m only here because I spent the last two years, while my wife was writing what I assume will be a book about all this, I was looking at all this evidence. At first I thought, what is this all about, and why are you spending all this time? And then I kept thinking, you know, wait a minute–this is so blatant, so obvious. Why hasn’t anybody put a stop to it? That’s the part I don’t get, because we’re not talking about Louisiana in the bad old days. We’re talking about California, the deep blue state, you know? A center of progress and everything…

[Recorded voice on telephone] This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.

KC: If I may, I’d like to give out my website addresses, so that people who really want to know more about this case can go and they can read Judge Fletcher’s powerful and unprecedented, 100-page dissent on my case, in which those other ten justices dissented with him, and many other powerful things that prove everything that you just said during this interview. And that website is–

[Recorded voice on telephone] You have 60 seconds remaining.

KC: www.freekevincooper.org. And the media website, where you can go find out–

KC: –who is all supporting me, is www.kevincooper.org. And we’ll talk more about that when I call back.

RS: OK. Well, finish giving me those places. Can they get the Nick Kristof there too, on your site?

KC: Yes, you can get everything on my website. The Nick Kristof piece about my case, even the link to my podcast that I did with Mr. Kristof and the New York Times, you can find that on my website at freekevincooper.org.

RS: OK. Because I think people, if they just listen to some of that, they’re going to be pretty unhappy with their own apathy. And let me just add, by the way, that we’ve been publishing Kevin Cooper on Truthdig.com, and we have a pretty good site there with a lot of material on this case. So go to Truthdig.com, look up Kevin Cooper. And I want to ask you, I mean, we’re–I’ve always wondered about how people keep sane under these situations. I remember when Nelson Mandela got out in South Africa, I wondered, how did this guy survive being so clear and logical? And you know, I met you for five hours in San Quentin, and just today I was with the young lady Daniela, who’s a part of our leadership, communications leadership program here at the Annenberg School at USC.

KC: [Inaudible] …write to me, I got a letter from her yesterday.

RS: I’m sure she’ll write something about it. But we both talked today, and we talked about how–I don’t know what the right word is, but there’s a humanity that you’ve preserved; there’s a humor, amazingly; a perspective; I’m sure there’s plenty of times you want to bang your head against the wall. We should talk a little bit about that. I mean, we didn’t get to talk–you mentioned the books, for instance, that you’ve read.

KC: Right.

RS: What’s with these books? You wrote a whole piece for Truthdig, but–let’s, which books have really influenced you, and how has that helped you there in that cage?

KC: Let me say this real quick, because I’m running out of time. [inaudible] Something happened, not just to Nelson Mandela, and not just to Malcolm X, and not just to me, and not just to a lot of other people who are in prison. They found out that they’re fighting for something that is bigger than them. And when you find out, through reading books, all different types of books–

[Recorded voice on telephone] This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.

KC: –all different types of books about the history of this country, and the different struggles that have happened to different people, all poor, in this country. Even poor white people have been struggling in this country, and they still are struggling in this country. But when you find yourself in a fight that is bigger than you, for yet it affects the lives of many people, and you can do something to help in that fight, you can’t give up. You can’t stop, you can’t quit. You just can’t do it. As I was saying to you earlier, I did not choose this, to speak out against the death penalty; I didn’t. This stuff chose me. I did not choose it. I was up here when I was in my early twenties, and the last thing I was, ever thought about doing was this type of stuff. I was practicing escapism back then, I was going outside every day, playing basketball, working out, lifting weights, doing whatever I could not to pay attention to this stuff. Because this is a depressing joint that I’m in. And it’s a lot of negativity, a lot of hatred, a lot of gangs, a lot of misery that you wouldn’t believe that runs amok up in this joint. So I was practicing escapism, but one day, some older brother–his name was brother Marshall–he gave me a book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Read this, man–that’s what he told me. And I read it. And then after I read that, I wanted to read more. I didn’t even know I could read; I was told when I was growing up that I wasn’t going to be nothin’, and I couldn’t read, because I never tried to read. But little by little, this movement, it got ingrained in me. I didn’t get ingrained in it, because I didn’t even know it existed before I came here. And this is how, when you find yourself down and out like this, you find the strength, from your ancestors, from your spirituality, from your whatever it is you find stuff from to keep going. And in the process of keep going, you find more like-minded people, whether on the outside where you are, or on the inside of here, will help you to continue on. I mean, if I hadn’t been in this movement, Mr. Robert Scheer, I would not have met you. If I had not been in this movement, I would have not met your wife. If I had not been in this movement, I would have never met the people from the grassroots movement called the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, who helped get the Northern California Innocence Project involved in my case, who in turn got the law firm of Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe involved in this case–which got me that stay of execution in 2004. But I’m alive today because of this movement. This movement for our human rights, this movement for our humanity, this movement against the death penalty. So I can’t give up. I know no way but forward. And I will continue to go forward. Just as Nelson Mandela did. Because Madiba, I admire that man. He is truly the inspiration, for all people, but especially [oppressed] people. I’ve been blessed, in a sick sense of the word; I’ve been cursed by putting me here, but while I’m in here, I’ve been blessed. Because there are a lot of Death Row inmates who commit suicide every time you turn around. They took a guy past this cage last night on a gurney, ‘cause he was man down. Don’t know why, but he had an oxygen mask on when they carried him by. Don’t know if he lived or died. But they’ve been committing suicide up here, they’ve been killing each other up here. All types of craziness has been going on up in here.

RS: Let me ask you a question, though. Let’s say when the–because you’re talking to me from your cage now, right?

KC: Right.

RS: What is it? You know, it’s almost no room to walk, and you got that upside-down paint can to sit on, and you got the–the TV you’ve talked about is on some wire going–

[Recorded voice on telephone] This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.

KC: Abnormal living. I don’t know what’s normal no more.

RS: OK. But I mean, you’re in this cage, and you get off the phone, and you get depressed, let’s say. What could you do in terms of a book or something, or painting, or–how do you get through the next hour, the hour after that? What do you do?

KC: So, books or reading material is always at my disposal. And I’ve been lucky to do that. I listen to the radio; I listen to talk radio, I listen to KPFK Pacifica radio. I always–like what I stated in my column, that “reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body” is something that I believe in. I must exercise my mind by reading different types of things. I don’t always want to read the same thing, I want to read different things, but it’s all about–

[Recorded voice on telephone] You have 60 seconds remaining.

KC: –everything I read is about this fight that we’re in. That I’m in, that poor people are in. That gays, lesbians, transgender people are in, bisexual people. I mean, we’re all in the same fight, no matter what our sexual orientation or our religion or whatever. If we’re poor, or we’re considered different, or being different by the powers that be, we’re all in this struggle. ‘Cause they’re trying to kill us, one way or the other.

RS: I heard a voice saying we only had six–

[Recorded voice on telephone] You have 30 seconds remaining.

RS: We now have 30 seconds. Is that the final cut here, or are we gonna–

KC: I got to call back one more time.

RS: You back on, Kevin?

KC: Yes, I’m back on. It’s the last call.

RS: You know, it’s interesting. People should know, I was in San Quentin with you for five hours in a cage where they had people interview you and so forth. And there’s a certain banality of evil. I mean, a guard will take our picture, or we can buy something from the canteen, or something. You know, and you’re handcuffed when you come in, and you have to stick your hands back out. And you say with the phone–what is it, that you push the buttons? Or where is the phone, do you actually get to hold it, or–?

KC: The phone itself is outside this cage on a cart. The body of the phone, where the receiver goes, the dial tone and the buttons and all that stuff is outside this cage on the cart. Now, I have the receiver inside this cage, because it has a cord that may be about four, four feet long.

RS: I see. So, you can’t actually make the call–yeah.

KC: Yeah, every time I hang up, I got to put my hand outside through the tray slot, hang up, and then redial the buttons, and then back in here.

RS: I got involved in your case really emotionally when I went to an exhibit at Columbia University with art from people in prison. And you had one piece that I thought was really powerful, right at the front of this exhibit. And Narda said, well, that’s the guy that I’m interested in his case, and so forth. And now I got a painting you did of John Coltrane, which I think is very powerful. And I know your art is important to you, and I know, I’ve been talking about maybe having an exhibit of your art here at USC, where we’re doing this recording, and elsewhere. Tell me about the art, and what it means, and how you do it.

KC: My art is therapy. You know, it helps me not just escape from this cage that I’m locked in by going inside the paintings that I’m working on at that time; but it allows me to show my appreciation to the people who I do portraits of, or the scenes that I paint. Because I really, I’m being deprived of so much, that I find myself doing nature scenes just because nature is beautiful, and everything in here seems to be ugly. So I use bright colors, and different things. I knew how to draw when I first came here, and paint a little bit, but mostly I learned from PBS stations that had art shows on there, like Bob Ross and different other artists who, throughout the years, have been shown on PBS, their painting shows. And I would pick up something here, something there, until I found my own style. Because I didn’t want to copy anybody; I wanted to be me. So it was just how I learned to express myself in a situation where expressing yourself was not real good. It helps me scream without making a noise. You know? It helps me say something without opening my mouth. So my artwork is the way I communicate with the outside world, I guess. And I like it like that. I like to produce. I guess I’m not just a consumer, I’m also a producer. So that makes me feel good, too.

RS: And it’s a way you can earn money, so you pay for your own meals.

KC: …My art supplies and all that stuff, yeah.

RS: But let me ask you, because that “scream without making a noise”–that’s the picture that led the Columbia exhibit.

KC: It’s called “Free Me.” I was doing that to my attorney, Norman. That was his painting I did for him, because I’m screaming to him to free me, to get me out of here, I should never have been in here; I’m screaming from the top of my lungs, free me, man. But that’s the only way I could do it where he could hear me, but not hear me. If he held it on a wall, what it said–because it’s called “Free Me”–every time he looks at it, he hears me without hearing me.

RS: Tell me about your attorney. Because he would have been retired by now; he’s put in a lot of time on this case, and he’s the go-to guy in your defense–Norm Hile, right?

KC: Yeah, and I’ve been very blessed to have Norman as my attorney at Orrick. In 2004 it was David Alexander who was the attorney for Orrick, helped get me the stay of execution. When David left Orrick, Norman stepped in and took his place.

RS: That’s a kind of respectable law firm, right, in San Francisco and in–

KC: Right. Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe. They’re not a criminal law firm. And that actually is something else about this criminal justice system. This white-collar law firm comes and takes my case away from an attorney, a criminal defense attorney, appeals attorney, who damn near got me executed. And they use the same information that he had, and they get me a stay of execution. So that says something about this rotten-ass system, where they appoint attorneys to you who will get you murdered, because they don’t care. And you get a, and I lucked up and got this law firm who did care, and they ended up getting me the stay. And Norman is part of that law firm, and he has been–he could have been retired, like, ten years ago. But he said he was not retiring until he either got me out, or I got executed. And he believes he’s going to get me out. So we just have to keep fighting. And I’m truly blessed to have a man like that who cares enough to not abandon me, the way I’ve been abandoned in this place by so many other people. I thank God for Norman. And I don’t thank God for many people.

RS: Well, you know, I’m very impressed with Norm Hile. So is my wife, Narda. And he’s not one of these lawyers that you hear a lot about in terms of, you know, like the old William Kunstler, people like that–

[Recorded voice on telephone] This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.

RS: –but you know, in a very effective, quiet way, he has really opened up this case. And also, you got an ex-FBI agent helping you on this case, a guy who was second in command in the L.A. FBI office.

KC: Yeah, Mr. Tom Parker, he’s a former special FBI agent. And he came, he saw my case, he read it; he said, man, this guy is innocent, and I’m going to get involved and try to help get him out. And that’s what he’s been doing for the last eight or nine years. And he’s come up, a lot of this new evidence that we come up with, he found it. A lot of new witnesses that we come up with, he’s located them. I, again, have been blessed by people who are from the outside of this California criminal justice system, have come in to this criminal justice system, and they’re helping to expose the wrongs in my case. That without them would not have been exposed, and I’d have been dead a long time ago.

RS: That’s what–I just don’t get it. I just don’t get it.

[Recorded voice on telephone] This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.

RS: I mean, how can you read that clemency petition, how can you look at what Norm Hile compiled and what Tom Parker came up with, Nick Kristof in the New York Times wrote about? You look at all this stuff, and what you’re only asking–I keep repeating this, but it should not be lost here–is more precise DNA testing using modern means, a reexamination of the prospect of innocence, and innocence hearing. And that’s what they’re resisting. I think that your case is a case study in the cynicism of this whole thing. You know, because what is the cost? Your defense is willing to pay for the testing. What is the cost? You know, why the rush to judgment, why the rush to judgment in the face of new evidence, new evidence?

KC: There is a cost to be paid when we prove my innocence, even more so than we already have. Because this criminal justice system will suffer for it.

RS: Not if we’re an enlightened society–it’ll benefit, you know?

KC: What’s that mean?

RS: Well, I’m just saying, who with a straight face would want to say, let’s rush to judgment and kill someone for whom there is evidence showing innocence? That’s what the Brady–people, look up, listening to his, look up what a Brady violation is. That’s what they’re saying, they’re saying six different times, the authorities in this case down in San Bernardino County suppressed evidence, distorted evidence that would show a man who’s on Death Row to be innocent. And then the other people, like in the governor’s office, can ignore that? Walk away from it? That’s not right.

KC: …Because they don’t care. They don’t care, man.

RS: Well, the whole purpose of doing journalism is to get them to care, you know, is to make them care. That’s why we’re doing this interview, and I’m going to do my best to have them listen to it, others listen to it.

KC: And I thank you very much. And in the little bit of time I got left, I would like to say this. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak, and I thank you for exposing the truth about my case. But this case is no different than a whole lot of other cases that people have learned about throughout the history of this death penalty. I mean, look what happened to Troy Davis in Georgia not too long ago. You know? I mean, there’s cases like this all the time that come up. But this system is so hell-bent on killing us, that they don’t give a damn about innocence. It’s about the system, it’s about the process, it’s about their justice.

[Recorded voice on telephone] Thirty seconds remaining.

KC: Thank you very much. [Inaudible]

 

Thousands Mark Christmas in West Bank Town of Bethlehem

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — Thousands of Christian pilgrims on Tuesday flocked to the West Bank town of Bethlehem, celebrating Christmas Eve in the traditional birthplace of Jesus.

Visitors converged on the town’s large Christmas tree in Manger Square, near the spot believed to mark Jesus’ birthplace. Uniformed Palestinian scouts wearing yellow and gold capes paraded past assembled visitors, the sound of drums and bagpipes filling the cool, clear air. Vendors hawked snacks and holiday gifts, adding to the festive atmosphere.

Roger Hoagland, a Christian educator and missionary from Louisville, Kentucky, said he had come to lead a Baptist choir for a fourth time and described his visit as the experience of a lifetime.

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“We love this opportunity,” he said. “We have 40 people and many of them are from the U.S. and other countries. They come to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.”

While Bethlehem is in the Palestinian-administered area of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Israel’s imposing separation barrier encloses parts of the city and is a constant reminder of the complex political reality. Most of the Christmas Eve visitors appeared to be local residents, with foreign pilgrims seeming to make up a modest portion of the crowd.

Still, the celebrations capped the most successful year in history for Palestinian tourism, according to Tourism Minister Rula Maayah.

Bethlehem — located just outside of Jerusalem — has invested heavily in tourism. It’s built new hotels and tried to diversify itself by offering culinary and cultural destinations in addition to its traditional holy sites.

Maayah estimated that some 15,000 pilgrims were staying overnight in Bethlehem’s fully booked hotels this Christmas. Tourists were also staying in other West Bank towns, such as Ramallah and Jericho, in addition to Jerusalem.

In all, she said the number of foreign tourists visiting the West Bank this year is estimated to reach 3.5 million people, up from 3 million last year.

Christmas festivities are typically a boost for Bethlehem’s flagging economy and for the Holy Land’s dwindling Christian population, which has shrunk over the decades as people fled conflict and searched for better opportunities abroad.

“Our message this year is that Christmas is a message of joy,” Maayah said. “But of course we are celebrating Christmas while we are still under occupation. We hope that we will celebrate Christmas joyfully next year with the end of occupation so that we could celebrate like all other nations in our independent country without occupation.”

The Church of the Nativity, where Christians believe Jesus was born, hosted Palestinian dignitaries and pilgrims from around the world for a midnight Mass. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, was among those in attendance.

At midday Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the head Catholic cleric in the Holy Land, crossed an Israeli army checkpoint from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, where he was greeted by prominent members of Bethlehem’s Christian community. He later celebrated Midnight Mass at the Church of Saint Catherine, part of the Church of the Nativity compound, which houses the grotto revered as Jesus’ birthplace.

In his homily, Pizzaballa lamented the violence and deep divisions that characterize the modern Holy Land. But he also praised those who pursue what he called the “style of Bethlehem,” or example of Jesus.

“Celebrating Christmas also means celebrating those who still have a desire to love mankind and put themselves on the line for it,” he said. “Here in the Holy Land, and not only today but every day of the year, there are still many people who celebrate the Christmas of Jesus in this way.”

‘1917’ Is a Cinematic Trip Through Hell

In the spring of 1917, in the days following Operation Alberich, a strategic withdrawal by the German army to the heavily fortified Hindenburg Line dividing the French countryside, two soldiers are dispatched with a warning. They have only 24 hours to deliver orders to the Second Battalion, 1,600 strong, to cancel attack plans that unwittingly play into a German plot. This tale, reportedly told to filmmaker Sam Mendes by his paternal grandfather who fought in World War I, is the basis for his captivating cinematic reimagining, “1917.”

A bucolic field is bordered by forest, copses and meadows in between as the camera pulls back to reveal a soldier sitting foreground, Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay). As the camera pulls further back, we find Schofield is with his comrade, Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman). When they are summoned by their superiors, the camera recedes even further to reveal that they are not alone. Instead, they are sitting on the perimeter of a sprawling British army unit dug into the landscape in a maze of battle-worn trenches.

With the camera leading and trailing and looping around them, Mendes and his army of artists and actors populate the trenches with soldiers doing everything from sleeping to sharing a cigarette, singing, cooking, fighting, yelling and eating. The two lads enter a bunker and are given orders by General Erinmore (Colin Firth), who adds that Blake’s brother is among the soldiers at risk of falling into the German trap.

Periodically pursued through the decades, the one-take movie is a filmmaker’s coveted conundrum. Its first notable appearance is the 1948 Hitchcock classic, “Rope,” in which James Stewart solves a murder based on the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s. The effect of a single take employs edits hidden in moments where the screen is blackened or otherwise obscured. When digital photography entered the lexicon, it accommodated longer takes than the 11-minute running time of a 1,000 foot film load. The first feature-length film done in a single take without hidden edits is 2002’s “Russian Ark,” shot on location in the Hermitage Museum, the former Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Editing is the filmmaker’s principal tool to govern pacing. In “1917,” to compensate for its lack, Mendes cleverly directs his actors to increase the speed of their gait, which translates into greater urgency, augmented by the two figures’ frequent change of position in relation to the camera. Dialog comes faster, off-camera space is employed to suggest mortal danger, and yes, despite the fact that we are over 10 minutes into the movie without a single edit, the intensity escalates.

Mendes made his name as a stage director, winning back-to-back Olivier Awards in 1995-56 for his West End revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” and “Company.” A Tony nomination for “Cabaret” came the following year, leading to his film debut, “American Beauty,” which won him an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award. In it, he demonstrated a dramaturg’s ease with his outstanding cast, including Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey, who won an Oscar for his work.

While there was little doubt he could work with actors, it wasn’t until he directed the James Bond classic “Skyfall” in 2012 that Mendes proved beyond doubt he had mastered the visual component of filmmaking. Here, he reteams with that film’s creatives, Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins and production designer Dennis Gassner, whose muddy craters with soldiers’ remains worn into the walls are as eerie as his graveyard of cannons self-sabotaged by Germans in their retreat. A denuded cherry orchard in blossom and the ghostly ruins of a bombarded village are just some of the breathtaking warscapes traversed by Blake and Schofield on their way to deliver their message.

In what is essentially a two-hander, Chapman and MacKay acquit themselves well with a screenplay that hamstrings their performances and likewise the entire, glorious endeavor. Written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, best known for T.V.’s “Penny Dreadful,” “1917” doesn’t go anywhere. Naturalistic dialogue is mostly about nothing extraordinary—an argument over whether they should rest or continue, or reminiscences of home. Both actors are given ample opportunity to display their craft during one particular mortal moment which, with a lesser cast and director, might have been rendered hopelessly maudlin.

In the end, having fulfilled his mission, Schofield sits by a tree, as he did at the film’s beginning, and gazes out on the countryside. Yes, he has grown through the process, but if there is a point to “1917,” it’s difficult to discern, which doesn’t make it a bad or unenjoyable movie. It is an unusual epic told in a unique way that manages to engage even as it struggles to become more than just a cinematic exercise.

‘1917’: A Cinematic Trip Through Hell

In the spring of 1917, in the days following Operation Alberich, a strategic withdrawal by the German army to the heavily fortified Hindenburg Line dividing the French countryside, two soldiers are dispatched with a warning. They have only 24 hours to deliver orders to the Second Battalion, 1,600 strong, to cancel attack plans that unwittingly play into a German plot. This tale, reportedly told to filmmaker Sam Mendes by his paternal grandfather who fought in World War I, is the basis for his captivating cinematic reimagining, “1917.”

A bucolic field is bordered by forest, copses and meadows in between as the camera pulls back to reveal a soldier sitting foreground, Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay). As the camera pulls further back, we find Schofield is with his comrade, Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman). When they are summoned by their superiors, the camera recedes even further to reveal that they are not alone. Instead, they are sitting on the perimeter of a sprawling British army unit dug into the landscape in a maze of battle-worn trenches.

With the camera leading and trailing and looping around them, Mendes and his army of artists and actors populate the trenches with soldiers doing everything from sleeping to sharing a cigarette, singing, cooking, fighting, yelling and eating. The two lads enter a bunker and are given orders by General Erinmore (Colin Firth), who adds that Blake’s brother is among the soldiers at risk of falling into the German trap.

Periodically pursued through the decades, the one-take movie is a filmmaker’s coveted conundrum. Its first notable appearance is the 1948 Hitchcock classic, “Rope,” in which James Stewart solves a murder based on the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s. The effect of a single take employs edits hidden in moments where the screen is blackened or otherwise obscured. When digital photography entered the lexicon, it accommodated longer takes than the 11-minute running time of a 1,000 foot film load. The first feature-length film done in a single take without hidden edits is 2002’s “Russian Ark,” shot on location in the Hermitage Museum, the former Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Editing is the filmmaker’s principal tool to govern pacing. In “1917,” to compensate for its lack, Mendes cleverly directs his actors to increase the speed of their gait, which translates into greater urgency, augmented by the two figures’ frequent change of position in relation to the camera. Dialog comes faster, off-camera space is employed to suggest mortal danger, and yes, despite the fact that we are over 10 minutes into the movie without a single edit, the intensity escalates.

Mendes made his name as a stage director, winning back-to-back Olivier Awards in 1995-56 for his West End revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” and “Company.” A Tony nomination for “Cabaret” came the following year, leading to his film debut, “American Beauty,” which won him an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award. In it, he demonstrated a dramaturg’s ease with his outstanding cast, including Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey, who won an Oscar for his work.

While there was little doubt he could work with actors, it wasn’t until he directed the James Bond classic “Skyfall” in 2012 that Mendes proved beyond doubt he had mastered the visual component of filmmaking. Here, he reteams with that film’s creatives, Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins and production designer Dennis Gassner, whose muddy craters with soldiers’ remains worn into the walls are as eerie as his graveyard of cannons self-sabotaged by Germans in their retreat. A denuded cherry orchard in blossom and the ghostly ruins of a bombarded village are just some of the breathtaking warscapes traversed by Blake and Schofield on their way to deliver their message.

In what is essentially a two-hander, Chapman and MacKay acquit themselves well with a screenplay that hamstrings their performances and likewise the entire, glorious endeavor. Written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, best known for T.V.’s “Penny Dreadful,” “1917” doesn’t go anywhere. Naturalistic dialogue is mostly about nothing extraordinary—an argument over whether they should rest or continue, or reminiscences of home. Both actors are given ample opportunity to display their craft during one particular mortal moment which, with a lesser cast and director, might have been rendered hopelessly maudlin.

In the end, having fulfilled his mission, Schofield sits by a tree, as he did at the film’s beginning, and gazes out on the countryside. Yes, he has grown through the process, but if there is a point to “1917,” it’s difficult to discern, which doesn’t make it a bad or unenjoyable movie. It is an unusual epic told in a unique way that manages to engage even as it struggles to become more than just a cinematic exercise.

Bloomberg Campaign Exposed for Exploiting Prison Labor

Fundraising phone calls are the bane of many campaigns’ (and voters’) existence. When it comes to wooing the wealthiest donors, elected officials typically complain about the amount of time spent soliciting funds. “There have been decades and decades of members of Congress losing their lives to ‘dialing for dollars,’ ” Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University who studies political fundraising, told Marketplace in March.

At lower donation levels it’s an equally thankless (but less lucrative) job, full of hang-ups and angry voters wondering how a campaign got their number and why they’re being bothered in the middle of dinner.

Unfortunately, the prisoners contracted to work on Bloomberg’s presidential campaign had no choice, as The Intercept reported Tuesday. Michael Bloomberg 2020 hired ProCom, a New Jersey-based call center company that owns centers in New Jersey and Oklahoma; two of the Oklahoma call centers operate out of state prisons. “In at least one of the two prisons,” The Intercept’s John Washington reports, “incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign.”

Washington continues:

According to a source, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, people incarcerated at the Dr. Eddie Warrior Correctional Center, a minimum-security women’s prison with a capacity of more than 900, were making calls to California on behalf of Bloomberg. The people were required to end their calls by disclosing that the calls were paid for by the Bloomberg campaign. They did not disclose, however, that they were calling from behind bars.

Michael Bloomberg is worth $55.9 billion, according to the Forbes real-time wealth tracker. John Scallan, a founder of ProCom, told The Intercept that his company pays $7.25 per hour, Oklahoma’s minimum wage, to the state’s Department of Corrections, which then pays the prisoners. The Intercept found conflicting information on exactly how much of that money gets to prisoners. The Department of Corrections website says the maximum monthly salary prisoners can receive is $20. Scallan claims ProCom workers earn more.

According to a 2017 study from the Prison Policy Institute, Oklahoma prisons working in nonstate-owned industries typically make 54 cents an hour, at most.

The news comes just as Bloomberg attempts to reckon with his criminal justice policies as mayor of New York City. During his tenure as mayor, from 2002 to 2013, and for years afterward, he was a vocal supporter of stop-and-frisk, a policing strategy that gives wide latitude for officers to stop anyone they deem suspicious—and one that disproportionately targeted black and Latino people. This November Bloomberg reversed his position, telling the crowd at a predominantly black church, “I was wrong. And I’m sorry.” The New York Times called the apology “almost unheard-of,” and “a remarkable concession by a 77-year-old billionaire not known for self-doubt.”

The campaign said it has ended the relationship with ProCom. “We didn’t know about this and we never would have allowed it if we had,” Bloomberg spokesperson Julie Wood told The Intercept, which also reported that “[the campaign] said it has asked vendors to do a better job of vetting subcontractors in the future.”

Later that day, Bloomberg posted a longer apology to his Twitter account:

Earlier today, a news outlet accurately reported that a subcontractor for one of our vendors was using prison workers to make phone calls on behalf of my campaign. After learning this, we immediately ended our relationship with that company.

Full statement below: pic.twitter.com/0KJ8y8Iqxj

— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) December 24, 2019

Bloomberg Campaign Calls Made by Those Behind Bars

Fundraising phone calls are the bane of many campaigns’ (and voters’) existence. When it comes to wooing the wealthiest donors, elected officials typically complain about the amount of time spent soliciting funds. “There have been decades and decades of members of Congress losing their lives to ‘dialing for dollars,’ ” Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University who studies political fundraising, told Marketplace in March.

At lower donation levels it’s an equally thankless (but less lucrative) job, full of hang-ups and angry voters wondering how a campaign got their number and why they’re being bothered in the middle of dinner.

Unfortunately, the prisoners contracted to work on Bloomberg’s presidential campaign had no choice, as The Intercept reported Tuesday. Michael Bloomberg 2020 hired ProCom, a New Jersey-based call center company that owns centers in New Jersey and Oklahoma; two of the Oklahoma call centers operate out of state prisons. “In at least one of the two prisons,” The Intercept’s John Washington reports, “incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign.”

Washington continues:

According to a source, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, people incarcerated at the Dr. Eddie Warrior Correctional Center, a minimum-security women’s prison with a capacity of more than 900, were making calls to California on behalf of Bloomberg. The people were required to end their calls by disclosing that the calls were paid for by the Bloomberg campaign. They did not disclose, however, that they were calling from behind bars.

Michael Bloomberg is worth $55.9 billion, according to the Forbes real-time wealth tracker. John Scallan, a founder of ProCom, told The Intercept that his company pays $7.25 per hour, Oklahoma’s minimum wage, to the state’s Department of Corrections, which then pays the prisoners. The Intercept found conflicting information on exactly how much of that money gets to prisoners. The Department of Corrections website says the maximum monthly salary prisoners can receive is $20. Scallan claims ProCom workers earn more.

According to a 2017 study from the Prison Policy Institute, Oklahoma prisons working in nonstate-owned industries typically make 54 cents an hour, at most.

The news comes just as Bloomberg attempts to reckon with his criminal justice policies as mayor of New York City. During his tenure as mayor, from 2002 to 2013, and for years afterward, he was a vocal supporter of stop-and-frisk, a policing strategy that gives wide latitude for officers to stop anyone they deem suspicious—and one that disproportionately targeted black and Latino people. This November Bloomberg reversed his position, telling the crowd at a predominantly black church, “I was wrong. And I’m sorry.” The New York Times called the apology “almost unheard-of,” and “a remarkable concession by a 77-year-old billionaire not known for self-doubt.”

The campaign said it has ended the relationship with ProCom. “We didn’t know about this and we never would have allowed it if we had,” Bloomberg spokesperson Julie Wood told The Intercept, which also reported that “[the campaign] said it has asked vendors to do a better job of vetting subcontractors in the future.”

Later that day, Bloomberg posted a longer apology to his Twitter account:

Earlier today, a news outlet accurately reported that a subcontractor for one of our vendors was using prison workers to make phone calls on behalf of my campaign. After learning this, we immediately ended our relationship with that company.

Full statement below: pic.twitter.com/0KJ8y8Iqxj

— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) December 24, 2019