Chris Hedges's Blog, page 95

Amazon’s Labor Abuses Are More Appalling Than You Think

This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Get their investigations emailed to you directly by signing up at revealnews.org/newsletter.

When Candice Dixon showed up for her first day of work at an Amazon warehouse in Eastvale, California, she stepped into a wonder of automation, efficiency and speed. Inside the sprawling four-story building in Southern California’s Inland Empire, hundreds of squat orange robots whizzed across the floor, carrying tall yellow racks.

As a stower, her job was to stand in a spot on the floor, like hundreds of others in that million-square-foot warehouse, and fill an unending parade of merchandise racks. Another worker, known as a “water spider,” would bring her boxes upon boxes of goods – jars of protein powder, inflatable unicorn pool floats, laptops, makeup, Himalayan sea salt, vibrators and plastic toy cars. She’d grab each item out of a box, scan it, lift it onto the rack and scan its new location. She’d use a stepladder to put things on the top of the rack. For heavy items – she remembers the cases of pet food in particular – she’d have to squat down to hoist them in, then pop back up to grab the next item. As soon as she’d filled a rack, she’d press a button and one robot would zip it away while another robot would bring a new one to fill.

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The moment an Amazon customer clicked “place your order,” a robot would haul one of those racks to a picker, who would grab the right item for the order and send it on a series of long conveyors to a packer, who would stuff it in one of those familiar, smiling cardboard boxes.

The clock was always ticking on Amazon’s promised delivery time. Dixon had to scan a new item every 11 seconds to hit her quota, she said, and Amazon always knew when she didn’t.

Dixon’s scan rate – more than 300 items an hour, thousands of individual products a day – was being tracked constantly, the data flowing to managers in real time, then crunched by a proprietary software system called ADAPT. She knew, like the thousands of other workers there, that if she didn’t hit her target speed, she would be written up and, if she didn’t improve, she eventually would be fired.

Amazon’s cutting-edge technology, unrelenting surveillance and constant disciplinary write-ups pushed the Eastvale workers so hard that in the last holiday season, they hit a coveted target: They got a million packages out the door in 24 hours. Amazon handed out T-shirts celebrating their induction into the “Million Unit Club.”

But Dixon, 54, wasn’t around for that. She started the job in April 2018, and within two months, or nearly 100,000 items, the lifting had destroyed her back. An Amazon-approved doctor said she had bulging discs and diagnosed her with a back sprain, joint inflammation and chronic pain, determining that her injuries were 100% due to her job. She could no longer work at Amazon. Today, she can barely climb stairs. Walking her dog, doing the dishes, getting out of her chair – everything is painful. According to her medical records, her condition is unlikely to improve.

So this holiday shopping season, as Amazon’s ferocious speed is on full display, Dixon is at a standstill. She told Reveal in mid-October that her workers’ compensation settlement was about to run out. She was struggling to land a new job and worried she’d lose her home.

“I’m still too young to feel like I’m 90 years old,” Dixon said, sitting in the living room of her Corona, California, home, which was decorated with inspirational sayings (“You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have”). “I don’t even know how I’m going to make it in a couple of months.”

Amazon’s famous speed and technological innovation have driven the company’s massive global expansion and a valuation well over $800 billion. It’s also helped make Amazon the nation’s second-largest private employer behind Walmart and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on Earth. Now, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found that the company’s obsession with speed has turned its warehouses into injury mills.

Reveal amassed internal injury records from 23 of the company’s 110 fulfillment centers nationwide. Taken together, the rate of serious injuries for those facilities was more than double the national average for the warehousing industry: 9.6 serious injuries per 100 full-time workers in 2018, compared with an industry average that year of 4.

While a handful of centers were at or below the industry average, Reveal found that some centers, such as the Eastvale warehouse, were especially dangerous. Dixon’s was one of 422 injuries recorded there last year. Its rate of serious injuries – those requiring job restrictions or days off work – was more than four times the industry average.

“According to Amazon’s own records, the risk of work injuries at fulfillment centers is alarmingly, unacceptably high,” said David Michaels, former head of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, now a professor at George Washington University’s public health school. “Amazon needs to take a hard look at the facilities where so many workers are being hurt and either redesign the work processes, replace the top managers or both, because serious injury rates this high should not be acceptable to any employer.”

Amazon officials declined repeated interview requests. Instead, company spokesperson Ashley Robinson provided a written response to some of Reveal’s questions. Robinson said Amazon’s injury rates are high because it’s aggressive about recording worker injuries and cautious about allowing injured workers to return to work before they’re ready.

“We know that by making a conservative choice to not place an injured associate back into a job, we are elevating restricted and lost time rates as a company, but with the intent to benefit the associate,” Robinson wrote.

Many workers said that was not their experience. They spoke with outrage about having been cast aside as damaged goods or sent back to jobs that injured them further. Dixon said she had doctor’s orders not to pull or lift heavy objects and to alternate sitting and standing, but she wasn’t given a chair and heavy boxes kept coming her way.

“For Amazon,” said Dixon, “all they care about is getting the job done and getting it out fast and not realizing how it’s affecting us and our own bodies.”

The company does instruct workers on the safe way to move their bodies and handle equipment. But several former workers said they had to break the safety rules to keep up. They would jump or stretch to reach a top rack instead of using a stepladder. They would twist and bend over to grab boxes instead of taking time to squat and lift with their legs. They would hoist extra-heavy items alone to avoid wasting time getting help. They had to, they said, or they would lose their jobs. So they took the risk.

Then, if they got hurt, they would lose their jobs anyway. Even some workers who loved the pace, camaraderie and compensation at Amazon’s fulfillment centers told Reveal that they were quickly replaced as soon as their bodies broke down.

The problems Reveal uncovered go far beyond common sprains, strains and repetitive stress injuries. When a gas leak inundated the Eastvale warehouse where Dixon used to work, managers wouldn’t slow down, several workers said, even though they were dizzy and vomiting. They were told that they’d have to use personal time off if they wanted to leave.

And when disaster struck at one Indiana warehouse, Amazon’s economic might may have helped the company evade accountability. When a maintenance worker was crushed to death by a forklift there, state officials in Indiana, which then was jockeying for Amazon’s second headquarters, sided with the company over their own investigator.

“When you order something from Amazon and you’ve worked inside Amazon, you wonder, ‘Hey, is ordering my package going to be the demise of somebody?’ ” said one former safety manager, who had worked at multiple Amazon facilities.

The root of Amazon’s success appears to be at the root of its injury problem, too: the blistering pace of delivering packages to its customers.

Amazon’s busiest season, which the company calls “peak,” begins with the runup to Black Friday. Amazon said it shipped Prime members more than a billion items last holiday season. This year, Amazon has a new promise: free one-day delivery for Prime members.

It’s also crunch time for the human body. Employees face the exhaustion of mandatory 12-hour shifts, and warehouses are crammed with seasonal workers unaccustomed to the grind. The company’s 2018 logs show weekly injury counts spiked at two distinct moments when Amazon offers special deals: Cyber Monday and Prime Day.

Robinson, the Amazon spokesperson, said total injuries do go up during those peak times, but that’s only because the company brings on more workers then. Robinson said the rate of injuries historically has stayed steady, or even decreased, at peak times. Amazon declined to provide data to back up that claim.

As ever-increasing production targets flow down from corporate, regional managers lean on warehouse directors, who put pressure on the supervisors who oversee all those water spiders, stowers, pickers and packers. And the key to advancement is great production numbers.

“It incentivizes you to be a heartless son of a bitch,” said a former senior operations manager who had leadership roles at multiple facilities.

The former senior operations manager described going from the omniscient ADAPT system to an Amazon competitor, where he had to search occasionally updated Excel spreadsheets to find productivity numbers.

Marc Wulfraat, president of the supply chain and logistics consulting firm MWPVL International, described Amazon as more aggressive than any other industry player in what the company expects from workers. “And they will not waste time hanging on to people who can’t perform,” he said.

The Amazon tenure of Parker Knight, a disabled veteran who worked at the Troutdale, Oregon, warehouse this year, shows the ruthless precision of Amazon’s system. Knight had been allowed to work shorter shifts after he sustained back and ankle injuries at the warehouse, but ADAPT didn’t spare him. Knight was written up three times in May for missing his quota.

The expectations were precise. He had to pick 385 small items or 350 medium items each hour. One week, he was hitting 98.45% of his expected rate, but that wasn’t good enough. That 1.55% speed shortfall earned him his final written warning – the last one before termination.

“You are expected to meet 100% of the productivity performance expectation,” the warning reads. Days later, the company informed him he was being fired because of an earlier confrontation over workers’ compensation paperwork.

Robinson said Amazon has performance expectations “like most companies.”

“We measure actual performance against those expectations,” she said. “Associate performance is measured and evaluated over a long period of time – at least six weeks – as we know a variety of things could impact the ability to meet expectations in any given day or hour.”

The company’s aggressive production demands have overwhelmed its safety teams’ efforts to protect workers, according to five former Amazon safety managers, who oversaw safety at fulfillment centers around the country and spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.

One of them, a former senior safety manager, said it’s well known internally that the injury rates are too high, but there’s no way Amazon will slow down. “It’s not a conversation that can be had,” the former manager said. “We’re never going to fix safety at Amazon because we’re never going to fix what the real issue is.”

Amazon is fond of showing off its industry-changing innovation: The fleets of robots, it claims, not only speed up production, they also make employees’ jobs easier and safer. Instead of having to walk miles of warehouse floor every day, pickers stand in one spot as robots come to them.

But injury records and interviews with three of the former Amazon safety managers suggest the introduction of the robots led to even more injuries. Of the records Reveal obtained, most of the warehouses with the highest rates of injury deployed robots. One robotic facility in Kent, Washington – which a senior operations manager boasted was “the flagship of fulfillment,” as one of the few centers in 2016 to ship a million packages in a day – logged 292 serious injuries last year, for a rate of about 13 serious injuries per 100 workers.

After Amazon debuted the robots in Tracy, California, five years ago, the serious injury rate there nearly quadrupled, going from 2.9 per 100 workers in 2015 to 11.3 in 2018, records show.

Jonathan Meador watched the transition from his position loading boxes into big rig trailers. The robots at the Tracy warehouse were so efficient that humans could barely keep up. Suddenly, the pickers and packers were expected to move more products every minute, and more boxes shot down the conveyor belt toward Meador.

“Before robots, it was still tough, but it was manageable,” he said. Afterward, “we were in a fight that we just can’t win.”

The Oregon facility where Knight worked opened with robotics in August 2018 and had the highest serious injury rate Reveal found: nearly 26 per 100 employees, more than six times the industry average.

New warehouses sometimes are rushed to open before they’re ready, said two of the former safety managers, leading management to skimp on training and start operations without full safety teams in place.

Robinson declined to comment on the elevated injury rates at robotic warehouses. But she said Amazon doesn’t launch new buildings until they are “ready and safe for employees.”

Injury records are supposed to be one way of holding companies accountable for their safety culture. The U.S. Department of Labor under the Obama administration proposed posting them online, but under President Donald Trump, the agency has reversed course and also has fought public records requests. And Amazon has resisted making its own safety records public.

Reveal filed multiple requests to OSHA for injury records from Amazon facilities in more than a dozen states, many of which were released with critical information redacted; Reveal has filed suit to challenge those redactions.

Still, by law, employers must provide complete injury records to any current or former employee who requests them. Reveal reached out to Amazon warehouse workers past and present and explained how to request records for their worksite, ultimately receiving 2018 records for 23 fulfillment centers in 14 states. Two of the injury logs came from a collaboration of worker advocacy groups, including New York Communities for Change and Make the Road New York.

Reveal now is seeking to compile the remaining injury logs. (If you’ve worked for Amazon, here’s how you can get the records and share them with Reveal.)

In at least a dozen cases, Amazon either ignored these employee requests or provided only partial records, in apparent violation of federal regulations. Amazon told some workers that they were entitled only to the records for the time period they worked there; OSHA spokesperson Kimberly Darby said that’s incorrect. And when Amazon did provide records, warehouse managers used identical language to call them confidential and request they be kept secret. Yet OSHA guidance says, and Darby confirmed, that employers are not allowed to restrict workers from sharing the records. Some workers said they felt intimidated by the notice, fearing they might get sued by Amazon for sharing the records with a news organization.

Several years ago, according to three of the former safety managers, Amazon had a policy for systematically hiding injuries. A former safety specialist in a warehouse confirmed their account. He said higher-ups instructed him to come up with justifications for not recording injuries that should have been counted by law.

After OSHA cited Amazon for failing to record dozens of injuries at a New Jersey warehouse in 2015, Amazon changed the practice, and the former safety managers said the company became more diligent about counting injuries. (OSHA requires companies to record work-related injuries on official logs only when they result in days away from work, job restrictions or medical treatment beyond first aid.)

Robinson said that Amazon never had a policy for underreporting injuries but that in 2016, it implemented a policy change after recognizing the challenge of ensuring “consistency and accuracy.”

“Amazon took the decision to shift to a fully transparent reporting model as we would rather over-report and lead in this space for our associates’ safety than optimize for optics,” she said.

The former senior safety manager said some warehouse managers still found ways to avoid directing workers to the on-site health clinic – such as sending them to the break room instead – so their injuries wouldn’t get recorded. A few workers said supervisors would get upset if they reported injuries or sought medical treatment.

The logs Reveal obtained are scattered with lacerations and concussions and fractures, but most of the injuries are labeled as sprains and strains. The pain from these injuries can be debilitating. About a third of the injured workers had to take off more than a month to recover.

A handful of the injuries were far worse.

In September 2017, Amazon announced a search for a second headquarters, saying it would invest more than $5 billion and bring as many as 50,000 jobs to whichever city won the sweepstakes.

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb got the news while on a trip to Japan. He returned home on a Friday night and spent the weekend in deliberations. On Monday, he announced his state would join the bidding war. He put the Indiana Economic Development Corporation in charge of putting together a package of local and state incentives.

“We are doing what Amazon has asked us to do: coordinating efforts with all interested regions of the state to put our best bid forward,” he said in the statement.

He had tough competition. Arlington, Virginia, offered $550 million in cash and a helipad. Atlanta dreamed up an exclusive airport lounge with free parking for Amazon executives. Maryland’s Montgomery County dangled $6.5 billion in tax incentives.

The efforts of Indiana state officials to vie for Amazon’s interest were about to intersect with the life of one local Amazon employee, 59-year-old Phillip Lee Terry.

Terry had been at Amazon for about two years. He started as a picker in a Plainfield fulfillment center, then moved to the maintenance department. He had a background in an unrelated field – marketing – but quickly took on the task of handling complicated industrial equipment.

Terry made a surprisingly strong impact on his co-workers, even at a big, busy warehouse. He’d chat them up and make them laugh whenever he could, said Jennie Miller, who worked picking orders with Terry.

“There’s only kind of a few people that you ever meet in your life that have those kinds of sparkling personalities,” she said.

On Sept. 24, just a few days after he’d been eating ice cream and watching college football with his grandkids, Terry showed up for work and was sent to do maintenance on a forklift. He walked under the machine’s forks and metal platform to work on it with a wrench. Suddenly, the 1,200-pound piece of equipment dropped down and crushed him.

His body lay there nearly two hours before a co-worker noticed the pool of blood.

The next day, a safety inspector with Indiana OSHA headed to Amazon to investigate.

Safety was the family business for John Stallone. His father had worked his way up to become director of enforcement for the Alaska state branch of OSHA. Years ago, when Stallone joined the U.S. Air Force and served in Afghanistan, his father told him that wherever his career took him, to always get involved in safety work. And so he did, volunteering on safety committees in the military, then working in industrial safety in oil and gas fields. On a shelf near his front door, he keeps a collection of hard hats from his safety work around the globe.

As he surveyed the site of the accident, Stallone quickly figured out the problem: A tall pole, lying just feet away, should have been used to prop up the forklift during maintenance. In a recording he made of his inspection, Stallone asked an Amazon manager whether there was any written documentation of Terry being trained on that.

“No, sir,” the supervisor says on the recording. He told Stallone that Terry had been informally trained by a co-worker.

Stallone interviewed a co-worker of Terry’s, who put the blame on Amazon’s safety culture coming in second to production demands.

“The safety issues I’ve brought up have been dismissed and not dealt with,” the worker said in a signed statement. “I want to see the safety culture in Amazon change and ensure the maintenance workers have the appropriate amount of training. There’s no training, there’s no safety, it’s ‘Get ’er done.’ ”

Stallone repeatedly pressed Amazon to provide records showing Terry had been trained on that piece of equipment. In the end, he found that Amazon failed to provide adequate training, exposing Terry to a fatal hazard.

Indiana OSHA issued four serious safety citations, for a total fine of $28,000. Stallone sought more, but he was getting pushback. On Nov. 20, 2017, Stallone joined his boss, Indiana OSHA Director Julie Alexander, as she called Amazon officials. He secretly recorded the conversation, which is legal in the state, and shared the recording with Reveal.

During the call, Alexander told the Amazon officials what she’d need from them in order to shift the blame from the company to “employee misconduct,” according to the recording.

And she walked them through how to negotiate down the fines. “We sometimes like to consider grouping citations to lower the penalty amounts,” she said.

She suggested Amazon could partner with her agency as a “leader in safety” to kick off a program promoting best practices in the logistics industry.

After hanging up with Amazon, Alexander said: “They’re wanting to probably take this offer and go back and look and say, ‘Hey, we’re partnering with Indiana. We’re going to be the leader.’ ”

She told Stallone, “I hope you don’t take it personally if we have to manipulate your citations.”

Amazon had said it would appeal the citations and had further information that it would share in confidential settlement negotiations. Alexander wondered what it could be. Then she speculated out loud that the information might be about Terry himself, saying, “I’m guessing the guy was probably on drugs or something.”

By this point, a coroner had found nothing in his blood except nicotine and caffeine.

Stallone said he was disgusted. But the pressure to placate Amazon didn’t stop there.

Some days after the conference call with Amazon officials, Stallone said Indiana Labor Commissioner Rick Ruble pulled him into his office. The governor was there, too, standing by the commissioner’s desk, according to Stallone.

He recalled that Holcomb told him how much it would mean to Indiana if the state won the Amazon headquarters deal. Then, Stallone said, the commissioner told him to back off on the Amazon case – or resign.

Stallone said he quit soon afterward. On Dec. 6, 2017, Stallone sounded the alarm to a federal OSHA official. In an email he shared with Reveal, Stallone told the federal official that “someone higher than Director Alexander” wanted the Amazon case to go away “in the hopes it would keep Indianapolis in the running for their new HQ location.”

The governor’s office denied the meeting with Stallone and the labor commissioner took place, with press secretary Rachel Hoffmeyer writing, “The Governor never gets involved in Department of Labor cases.”

The same day Stallone sent his whistleblower email, Amazon’s corporate offices in Seattle gave a $1,000 campaign contribution to Indiana’s governor. It was years before Holcomb would next face reelection, and Amazon hasn’t donated to him before or since.

A year after Terry’s death, Indiana officials quietly signed an agreement with Amazon to delete all the safety citations and fines. The agreement said Amazon had met the requirements of an “unpreventable employee misconduct defense.” The official record now essentially blames Terry for his own death.

At that point, Indianapolis was one of 20 finalists for the Amazon headquarters deal. Three and a half weeks after the citations were deleted, Amazon held a small-business roundtable event in Indianapolis. Holcomb was there, sitting next to a company representative.

“Our tax and regulatory climates are very – not just attractive, but enticing,” he told a local TV reporter at the event. “And we want to grow together.”

Ultimately, Indiana didn’t win the big sweepstakes, as Amazon chose Arlington for its second headquarters. Federal OSHA declined to investigate Stallone’s complaint.

The governor’s office and Indiana labor officials declined interviews. The Indiana Labor Department, which oversees the state OSHA, responded to questions about Stallone’s account of the meeting and Alexander’s statements by email, writing that, “The allegations are nothing short of bizarre and fantastical – in addition to being absolutely false.”

In a later statement, the department said it couldn’t prove Amazon should have known Terry wouldn’t properly prop up the forklift. Labor Department spokesperson Stephanie McFarland said Amazon produced proof that Terry was properly trained, including a video of Terry handling the equipment the right way another time. But the agency did not provide any documentation of Amazon’s evidence or any records that would corroborate the department’s account.

Two of the former Amazon safety managers who were aware of Terry’s death at the time faulted Amazon for failing to use formally trained maintenance professionals. One of them, the former senior safety manager, said Amazon had a systemic problem, vividly recalling a report from another warehouse in which a maintenance worker also had failed to properly brace a forklift while working on it, months after Terry’s death.

“If there was any misconduct there, it’s putting a person that has little to no experience and working on this piece of equipment,” said the other former safety manager, who has worked at multiple facilities. “Whoever allowed that to happen – that’s the misconduct.”

Ashley Robinson, the Amazon spokesperson, would not comment on the circumstances surrounding Terry’s death, citing privacy concerns.

Stallone was so troubled by the incident that he attended Terry’s funeral.

“Someone died on the job because they don’t have a good safety culture,” Stallone said. “I think Amazon was given a pass, and they were able to walk away from this fatality incident with no blood on them.”

More than two years later, Terry’s son, Zach, still thinks about his dad each day.

“I have a lot of anger built up because of everything that’s happened,” he said. “He wasn’t an accident. He was the patriarch of our family.”

Candice Dixon remembers her excitement when the Amazon warehouse opened in Eastvale in March 2018. The new fulfillment center would help make Amazon the Inland Empire’s largest private employer, offering a decent wage and health benefits – with no experience necessary. That fall, Amazon executive Dave Clark chose the Eastvale warehouse to make the announcement that Amazon’s new minimum wage would be $15 per hour. The hundreds of workers crowded around him broke into cheers and applause.

But the jobs, Dixon soon found, came with a brutal work pace. She and other Eastvale workers said nothing was allowed to stand in the way of Amazon’s delivery targets.

On New Year’s Day 2019, the smell of gas wafted through the giant warehouse and workers started to fall ill.

A call came in to the local 911 dispatcher just after midnight Jan. 2, five and a half hours into the night shift.

“There’s a lot of people sick,” an Amazon worker said.

The person on the line, Christina Van Vorce, a robotics floor monitor, had been smelling gas since the start of her shift. Some workers had been moved to another part of the building, and others were sent briefly to a break room, but the warehouse had not been evacuated, according to accounts by Van Vorce and four others at work that night. After seeing pickers throwing up into trash cans, Van Vorce clocked out to dial 911. She told the dispatcher she didn’t want Amazon to know she had called.

“Where I was at on my floor, pretty much everyone on that side felt sick,” she can be heard saying in the recording. “Two associates that I know for sure that were vomiting. One girl almost completely passed out. She had to be taken by a wheelchair. And then everyone else has got, like, headaches and the burning in the chest and the nose.”

The dispatcher said everyone should evacuate the building. Robinson told Reveal that Amazon shut down the site for about an hour and a half while a maintenance team repaired the leak. But Van Vorce tells the dispatcher that management wouldn’t stop operations.

“They’re trying to tell us we have to use our personal time if we want to leave,” she says in the 911 recording.

Another worker called 911 with a similar report, saying she and her co-workers smelled gas and she had clocked out with a headache, but management wouldn’t evacuate. The fire department arrived and found that wind had damaged a gas line, funneling gas into the building.

One current Eastvale worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation, said a friend drove her to a hospital in Upland, where she spent several hours on oxygen, an account the friend confirmed. The friend said she herself ended up out of work for weeks with dizziness and headaches. Amazon’s injury logs did record one worker’s “respiratory irritation” that day.

Robinson said that before firefighters arrived, gas was shut off to the building and its safety team “assessed we had fresh air entering the building and there was no risk” to workers. She insisted that no one was hospitalized.

Van Vorce and other workers said Amazon docked their personal time off for leaving work during the leak, though Robinson told Reveal that was against company policy. She confirmed that anyone docked time off got it reversed if they complained.

“It was all about numbers,” Van Vorce said in an interview. “They didn’t want to stop production.”

If Amazon’s Eastvale leadership wouldn’t pause production for a gas leak, they certainly didn’t pause for something as mundane as a trip to the bathroom.

Bathroom visits are tracked carefully at Amazon fulfillment centers, according to multiple current and former workers and managers, with each gap in scanning labeled as “time off task.” Too much time off task can trigger a write-up, and workers describe being caught between wanting to stay hydrated and trying to avoid long treks across a giant warehouse to the bathroom.

Robinson said Amazon ensures every worker has access to a restroom a “short walk” away “whenever needed.” But she did not address whether workers are docked for such trips as time off task. It was that threat that sparked some workers to devise workarounds.

Adam Kester, who worked as a picker at a fulfillment center in Phoenix until last year, said he and other workers would bring customers’ orders into the bathroom with them to scan midway through. “It sounds disgusting,” he acknowledged.

Kristi Shrum, who worked as a stower until 2018 at another Amazon warehouse in Southern California, said she sometimes would have friends scan items for her while she went to the bathroom to make it look as though she was working. Still, she said she got multiple urinary tract infections.

“You have to hold your pee or not make your rate. Which one you want to do?” Shrum said. “I had to make my rate.”

Faith Gerdon of Anaheim said she developed urinary tract infections while working as a stower at the Eastvale warehouse last year. At one point, she got so upset that she told her supervisor, “I’m happy to bring puppy pads and pee here on the floor.”

As Eastvale – a member of last year’s Million Unit Club – again gears up for the frantic holiday season, Gerdon won’t have a chance to earn all that overtime.

Last December, injuries to both of her thumbs and wrists put her off work, according to Amazon’s logs. She hasn’t worked since.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, is focused relentlessly on his customers.

“We are ramping up to make our 25th holiday season the best ever for Prime customers – with millions of products available for free one-day delivery,” he said in an Oct. 24 press release about Amazon’s most recent earnings report. “Customers love the transition of Prime from two days to one day – they’ve already ordered billions of items with free one-day delivery this year.”

Illustrations by Jason Raish for Reveal.

Producer Rachel de Leon, engagement reporter Byard Duncan, data reporter Melissa Lewis, senior reporter Katharine Mieszkowski and director of audience Hannah Young contributed to this story. It was edited by Andrew Donohue and Esther Kaplan, copy edited by Nikki Frick, and designed by Sarah Mirk.

Will Evans can be reached at wevans@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @willCIR.

Who Is Overseeing $1 Billion in U.S. Aid to Iraq?

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Iraq is one of the top recipients of American assistance, and the U.S. foreign aid agency manages more than $1 billion in projects there, including funding for Iraqi religious minorities pushed by Vice President Mike Pence. But increasingly, the agency doesn’t have people on the ground to make sure the money is being well-spent.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has been forced to cut nearly 80% of its non-Iraqi staff in Iraq in the last year, even as the agency funds large, ambitious and complex aid projects there. A critical government watchdog report released this week said USAID officials reported the cuts “have had significant adverse effects” on the oversight and management of grants.

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As ProPublica detailed this month, Pence’s office has pressured USAID to support local groups representing Iraqi minorities, particularly Christians. The watchdog report released this week said, in the context of the staff reductions and uncertainty, overseeing local groups “is particularly challenging given that awards to local organizations require increased involvement.”

One small charity that recently received a USAID grant and primarily serves Christian Iraqis has no full-time paid staff and no experience with government grants.

Overall, the report notes that USAID now has no staff based permanently in Iraq to oversee $430 million in basic humanitarian aid, such as food, safe drinking water and medical services. USAID officials manage the funding remotely via phone calls, reports from implementers and temporary visits, the report said.

As a result, “staff are only able to engage in the bare minimum coordination” with the rest of the U.S. government, the Iraqi government and the international community, USAID staff told the inspector general.

In May, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ordered a partial evacuation of U.S. personnel in Iraq in response to concerns over threats from Iran. The ordered departure has been controversial, and diplomats have criticized what they view as a gutting of core diplomatic functions in Iraq.

That decision, combined with an earlier State Department move to shrink the USAID mission, reduced the agency’s non-Iraqi staff from 26 at the start of the 2019 fiscal year to six by this fall, the report said. Some of those officials relocated to Washington, while others transferred to Germany.

USAID, the State Department and Pence’s office did not respond to questions. In response to the prior ProPublica story, a USAID spokeswoman said local grants in Iraq follow all federal regulations and have empowered those groups to respond to “grassroots needs.”

The report, which covers the period between July 1 and Oct. 25, was jointly prepared by the inspectors general of USAID, the State Department and the Pentagon.

The watchdog report said the Pompeo-ordered departure had been extended through Nov. 9, citing reports of violence and threats to diplomatic personnel. In July, Foreign Policy reported that the lower staffing levels are being treated as permanent.

USAID manages $1.16 billion in assistance in Iraq, spanning development, humanitarian aid and stabilization efforts, according to the report.

That “large portfolio,” coupled with the staff reductions, “create uncertainty as to how programs will be overseen remotely,” the report said. “Uncertainty around staffing levels also raises questions about USAID’s continuing ability to effectively oversee its high-priority, high-risk portfolio.”

U.S. assistance in Iraq includes over $400 million for religious and ethnic minorities targeted by the militant group Islamic State. That has been a major priority for Pence, as well as for conservative Christian groups and vocal communities of Iraqi Christians.

A new component of that effort was announced by USAID last month: $4.1 million to six local Iraqi organizations. ProPublica previously found that political appointees played a significant role in the latest awards.

The awardees included two groups that had been rejected by career officials for separate grants in Iraq in 2018. One of the groups, the Shlama Foundation, is a small charity that primarily serves Christian Iraqis; it will receive $1 million over two years. It has no full-time paid staff and no experience with government grants, a Shlama board member, Ranna Abro, previously told ProPublica.

Shlama did not respond to a request for comment this week, but Abro said previously that it is capable of handling the work, and that USAID had “fully and completely reviewed our capacity and is releasing the funds in small, manageable amounts based on deliverable outcomes.”

USAID has exacting requirements for its funding, requiring groups to provide extensive background and financial information. Small organizations often are less equipped to fulfill those requirements and need particularly close oversight from agency officials, experts on foreign aid said.

The watchdog report addressed the latest awards to local Iraqi groups, and it said their structure “relies on in-country expertise from USAID personnel to train local organizations on the requirements of receiving U.S. funding.” It added: “According to USAID, this is particularly challenging given that awards to local organizations require increased involvement.”

The report also raised questions about the effectiveness of some of USAID’s efforts toward Christians and other minority groups in Iraq.

For instance, one major USAID goal in Iraq has been to encourage the return of Christians, Yazidis and other groups to their homes in northern Iraq, which they fled after Islamic State took over swaths of the country. Last year, USAID administrator Mark Green said the agency was “committed to creating the conditions so that these communities can return safely to their ancestral lands.”

But officials have acknowledged relatively modest returns on the effort thus far. In September, senior USAID official Hallam Ferguson said the returns of persecuted religious minority groups to their homes still “lag far behind” other displaced groups in Iraq.

“We are struggling against tectonic forces in Iraq,” including decades of government neglect and discriminatory policy, more than 15 years of sectarian strife and unchecked local armed groups, Ferguson said in testimony to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

According to the watchdog report, USAID officials have said that obstacles in Iraq cannot be resolved without more diplomatic engagement, made far more difficult by Pompeo’s drawdown. The report cited disputes between local Iraqi political leaders that had allowed a “vacuum of governance” to develop in Sinjar, an area of Iraq that includes many religious minorities.

“The longer these barriers remain in place, the more significant the questions grow about the potential effectiveness of these assistance efforts,” the report said.

The End of the Rule of Law

Bruce Fein, a former senior official in the Department of Justice and a constitutional scholar, has identified 12 impeachable offenses committed by Donald Trump. But, as he notes, many of these constitutional violations are not unique to the Trump administration. They have been normalized by Democratic and Republican administrations. These long-standing violations are, for this reason, ignored by Democratic Party leaders seeking to impeach the president. They have chosen to focus exclusively on Trump’s attempt to get the Ukrainian president to open an investigation of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in exchange for $400 million in U.S. military aid and a visit by the Ukrainian leader to the White House. Ignoring these institutionalized violations during the impeachment inquiry, Fein fears, would legitimate them and lead to the death of democracy.

In a letter on Friday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, also signed by Ralph Nader and Louis Fisher, Fein warns that Trump is “shattering our entire constitutional order.” He lists as the president’s most serious constitutional violations the “defiance of congressional subpoenas and oversight; spending billions of dollars on a southern border wall not appropriated for that purpose; continuing or expanding presidential wars not declared by Congress; exercising line-item veto power; flouting the Emoluments Clause; and, playing prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to kill any person on the planet based on secret, unsubstantiated information.” But he also notes that many of these violations are not unique to Trump and were also carried out by Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

“Many of the Democrats in the past have been complicit in these violations,” Fein said when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “They have unclean hands. They have acquiesced in illegal surveillance, as revealed by Edward Snowden. The most serious constitutional violations are the ones that are institutional usurpations. These usurpations [by both parties] have permanently weakened, if not eviscerated, the power of the legislature versus the executive.”

“We have a Congress whose members, by and large, do not want the responsibilities the Constitution entrusts them with,” Fein continued. “They like to give away everything to the president and then clamor if something goes bad. The most worrisome constitutional violations are, unfortunately, ones many members of Congress rejoice in. It enables them to escape making hard choices that might compromise their ability to win reelection. But you can’t rely on a past dereliction to justify its perpetuation indefinitely.”

“If we take a narrow approach to impeachment, that will mean that all the more egregious violations will be viewed as having been endorsed and not rebuked and successive presidents will feel they have a green light to emulate Trump on everything except a Ukrainian shakedown,” Fein said. “This is dangerous for the country. This could boomerang, even if we get rid of Trump, by endorsing these usurpations forever. This would be a return to a one-branch government like the monarchy we overthrew in 1776. The unwitting result is to further the [power of the] executive rather than diminish it, which is what should be happening.”

Bush and Obama bequeathed to us nine illegal wars, if we include Yemen. None were declared by Congress, as is demanded by the Constitution. Bush placed the entire U.S. public under government surveillance in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which makes it a crime for the government to surveil any American citizen without authorization by statute. Under the Executive Order 10333 the president spies on Americans as if they were foreigners, although this surveillance has not been authorized by statute. Bush embarked on a global program of kidnapping and torture, including of foreign nationals, which Obama continued. Bush and Obama carried out targeted assassinations, usually by militarized drones, across the globe. And Obama, reinterpreting the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Act, gave the executive branch the authority to assassinate U.S. citizens. The killings began with drone strikes on the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son. Such a violation denies U.S. citizens due process. By signing into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, Obama—whose record on civil liberties is even more appalling than Bush’s gutted the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force.

These two presidents, like Trump, violated treaty clauses that required Senate ratification. Obama did this when he signed the Iran nuclear deal and Trump did this when he walked away from the deal. Bush and Obama, like Trump, violated the appointments clause of the Constitution by appointing people who were never confirmed by the Senate as required. The three presidents, to override Congress, all routinely abused their right to use executive orders.

At the same time the courts, a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate power, have transformed the electoral system into legalized bribery through the Citizens United ruling, handed down by the Supreme Court in 2010. Corporations pouring unlimited money into elections was interpreted by the court as the right to petition the government and a form of free speech, essentially overturning the people’s rights by judicial fiat. Also, the courts have steadfastly refused to restore basic constitutional rights including our right to privacy and due process. “The constitutional rot is in all three branches,” Fein said.

The 12 impeachable offenses committed by Trump and singled out by Fein are:

1. C ontempt of Congress

Trump made clear his contempt of Congress when he boasted, “… I have Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

“President Trump has repeatedly and unconstitutionally systematically undermined the congressional oversight power, including the ongoing congressional impeachment inquiry of the President himself, by instructing numerous current and former White House staff and members of the executive branch to defy congressional subpoenas on an unprecedented scale far beyond any previous President,” Fein wrote to Pelosi. “Without congressional authority, he has secretly deployed special forces abroad and employed secret guidelines for targeted killings, including American citizens, based on secret unsubstantiated information. He has unconstitutionally endeavored to block private persons or entities from responding to congressional requests or subpoenas for information, e.g., Deutsche Bank. He has refused to provide Congress information about nepotistic or other security clearances he granted in opposition to his own FBI security experts. He has refused to disclose his tax returns to the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee contrary to a 1924 law, 26 U.S.C. 6103 (f).”

2. A buse of the Powers of the President and Abuse of Public Trust

“Unlike prior presidents, he has made presidential lies as routine as the rising and setting of the sun, confounding civil discourse, truth and public trust,” the memo to Pelosi reads. “He has disrespected, belittled, and serially preyed upon women, mocked the disabled, incited violence against the mainstream media and critics, and encouraged and displayed bigotry towards minorities and minority Members of Congress, including intercession with Israel in serious violation of the Speech or Debate Clause, Article I, section 6, clause 1, to deny two Members visitor visas.”

3. A ppropriations Clause, Revenue Clause

“Congress has consistently voted much less money than President Trump requested to build an extensive, multi-billion-dollar wall with Mexico,” the memo reads. “In violation of the Clause and the criminal prohibition of the Anti-Deficiency Act, President Trump has committed to spending billions of dollars far in excess of what Congress has appropriated for the wall. The congressional power of the purse is a cornerstone of the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

Article I, Section 7, Clause 1 of the Constitution requires all revenue measures to originate in the House of Representatives.

“In violation of the Clause, President Trump has raised tens of billions of dollars by unilaterally imposing tariffs with limitless discretion under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962,” the memo reads. “He has become a Foreign Trade Czar in imposing tariffs or quotas or granting exemptions from his trade restrictions in his unbridled discretion to assist political friends and punish political enemies. Literally trillions of dollars in international trade have been affected. Riches are made, and livelihoods destroyed overnight with the capricious stroke of President Trump’s pen.”

4. E moluments Clause

“Article I, section 9, clause 8 prohibits the President (and other federal officers), without the consent of Congress, from accepting any ‘present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatsoever, from any King, Prince, or foreign state.’

“President Trump has notoriously refused to place his assets in a blind trust,” the memo reads. “Instead, he continues to profit from opulent hotels heavily patronized by foreign governments. He has permitted his family to commercialize the White House. He has compromised the national interest to enrich family wealth on a scale unprecedented in the history of the presidency.”

5. Treaty Clause

Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 requires Senate ratification of treaties by two-thirds majorities. The text is silent as to whether treaty termination requires Senate ratification, and the Supreme Court held the issue was a non-justiciable political question in Goldwater v. Carter, 444 U.S. 996 (1979).

“President Trump flouted the Treaty Clause in terminating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Russia unilaterally,” the memo reads. “The treaty assigned the termination decision to the ‘United States.’ The President alone is not the United States under the Treaty Clause.”

6. Declare War Clause

Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 empowers Congress alone to take the nation from a state of peace to a state of war. That power cannot be delegated.

“In violation of the Declare War Clause, President Trump has continued to wage or has initiated presidential wars in Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and has used special forces offensively in several African nations,” the memo reads. “President Trump has claimed authority to initiate war against any nation or non-state actor in the world—not in self-defense—on his say-so alone, including war against North Korea, Iran, or Venezuela.”

7. T ake Care Clause; Presentment Clause

Article II, Section 3 obligates the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

“In violation of that trust, President Donald J. Trump deliberately attempted to frustrate special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of collaboration between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia to influence the presidential election,” Fein points out. “Among other things, the President refused to answer specific questions relating to his presidential conduct; endeavored to fire the special counsel; dangled pardons for non-cooperating witnesses; and, urged Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his recusal decision to better protect his presidency. In all these respects, the President was attempting to obstruct justice.”

“President Trump has also systematically declined to enforce statutory mandates of Congress by arbitrarily and capriciously revoking scores of agency rules ranging from immigration to the Consumer Financial Protection Board to the Environmental Protection Agency in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act or otherwise,” the memo reads. “He has routinely legislated by executive order in lieu of following constitutionally prescribed processes for legislation.”

“In violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, Mr. Trump has dismantled and disabled scores of preventive measures to save lives, avoid injuries or disease, help families, consumers, and workers, and detect, deter, and punish tens of billions of dollars of corporate fraud,” the memo continues. “He has disputed climate disruption as a ‘Chinese hoax,’ compounded the climate crisis by overt actions that expand greenhouse gas emissions and pollution, and excluded or marginalized the influence of civil service scientists.”

8. Due Process Clause

The Fifth Amendment provides that no person shall “be deprived of life … without due process of law.”

“In violation of due process, President Trump claims power, like his immediate two predecessors, to act as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to kill American citizens or non-citizens alike, on or off a battlefield, whether or not engaged in hostilities, whether or not accused of crime, and whether or not posing an imminent threat of harm that would trigger a right of preemptive self-defense,” the memo reads.

9. A ppointments Clause

“President Trump has repeatedly appointed principal officers of the United States, including the National Security Advisor and Cabinet officials, who have not been confirmed by the Senate in violation of the Appointments Clause, Article II, section 2, clause 2,” the memo reads. “On a scale never practiced by prior presidents, Mr. Trump has filled as many as half of Cabinet posts with ‘Acting Secretaries’ who have never been confirmed by the Senate.”

10. S oliciting a F oreign Contribution for the 2020 Presidential Campaign and Bribery

“President Trump has endeavored to corrupt the 2020 presidential campaign by soliciting the President of Ukraine to contribute something of value to diminish the popularity of potential rival Joe Biden, i.e., a Ukrainian investigation of Mr. Biden and his son Hunter relating to potential corrupt practices of Burisma, which compensated Hunter handsomely ($50,000 per month). In so doing, Mr. Trump violated the criminal campaign finance prohibition set forth in 52 U.S.C. 30121,” Fein’s memo reads.

“President Trump solicited a bribe for himself in violation of 18 U.S.C. 201 in seeking something of personal value, i.e., discrediting Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign with the help of the President of Ukraine to influence Mr. Trump’s official decision to release approximately $400 million in military and related assistance,” it adds.

11. V iolating Citizen Privacy

“Government spying on Americans ordinarily requires a warrant issued by a neutral magistrate based on probable cause to believe crime is afoot,” the memo reads. “President Trump, however, routinely violates the Fourth Amendment with suspicionless surveillance of Americans for non-criminal, foreign intelligence purposes under Executive Order 12333 and aggressive interpretations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”

12. S uppression of Free Speech

“President Trump is violating the First Amendment in stretching the Espionage Act to prosecute publication of leaked classified information that are instrumental to exposing government lies and deterring government wrongdoing or misadventures, including the outstanding indictment against Julian Assange for publishing information which was republished by the New York Times and The Washington Post with impunity,” the memo reads.

“The Republic is at an inflection point,” the letter to Speaker Pelosi reads. “Either the Constitution is saved by impeaching and removing its arsonist in the White House, or it is reduced to ashes by continued congressional endorsement, whether by omission or commission, of limitless executive power and the undoing of checks and balances.”

The Driving Factor Behind Trump’s Policies

“Is Trump a racist?” I have two answers to that question.

First, most white Americans misunderstand racism solely as intentional beliefs held by individual racists who hate people on the basis of race. For example, at times the media has focused on whether or not they could prove Trump had ever used the N-word, as if that alone would be the measure of whether or not he is a racist.

Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva says that this “misses the fact” that racism is “a part of the social structure of society. Hence, we all participate in it — and we participate in it whether we like it or not, in conscious and unconscious ways, and in passive as well as active ways.”

This latter definition, the one accepted by sociologists and race scholars, takes a bit of getting used to, particularly if you are a white person who abhors racism.

I try to frame it for my students as follows: This nation was founded by people of European descent who stole land from — and committed a genocidal campaign against — the indigenous people on this continent. Then they enslaved Africans and their descendants for more than 200 years.

Segregation only became fully illegal in 1968. Anyone over the age of 51 was alive while segregation was still legal. We as a nation are still grappling with the legacy of our past, working toward justice for all — and we aren’t there yet.

None of us alive today asked to be born into a racist society — and yet, here we all are. It’s impossible to grow up in that society without participating in the status quo and absorbing at least some prejudices, even if they are only subconscious ones.

In short, learning about race means getting comfortable with the idea that our society itself is effectively racist, even for white folks who don’t actively feel that hatred themselves.

My second answer about whether or not Trump is a racist is: yes. And not just in the “everyone’s a racist” sense of the word.

For example, during the run up to the 2016 election, white nationalists supported Donald Trump because they felt like he would represent their interests and values best. Former Klan leader David Duke openly supported Trump, and still does.

Now, a trove of leaked emails show that Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller is “clearly immersed in white nationalist ideology.”

If Trump appeals to white nationalists and appoints white nationalists to senior positions in his administration, does that mean he holds racist views himself? Probably — but does it even matter? Whatever he privately believes, he’s allowed white nationalists to infiltrate senior levels of government, and they are influencing national policy.

In a more recent talk at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bonilla-Silva analyzed Trump’s use of language to show how he speaks in terms of “us” and “them,” in which “us” refers to white Americans and “them” refers to people of color.  And he routinely refers to immigrant “infestations,” using language most people reserve for insects and rodents they intend to exterminate. (Yet he’s not against all immigrants: he likes to marry the white ones.)

Although Trump often defends his immigration policies in terms of national security or economic concerns, the facts show that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native born citizens and, as one study put it, “immigration has an overall positive impact on the long-run economic growth in the U.S.”

In short, Trump’s language, his choice of senior officials in his administration, and his popularity among white nationalists show that he holds racist views. It’s those views — and not national security or economic factors — that are behind his policies.

The Surprising Parallels Between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

Israel’s attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit on advice from the police, indicted caretaker Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu on fraud and bribery charges Thursday. On Friday, he refused to step down.

Netanyahu is charged in three cases. In Case 4000, Netanyahu is accused of giving the owner of the Walla! News website $280 million worth of regulatory benefits, in return for which Netanyahu received positive media coverage.

In Case 1000, Netanyahu allegedly accepted a couple hundred thousand dollars in bribes from an Australian businessman in return for favorable treatment of his business and attempting to get him a US visa.

In Case 2000, Netanyahu is alleged to have offered a deal to Arnon Mozes, the publisher of Israel’s biggest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. Netanyahu supporter and shady casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson had begun a free pro-Netanyahu newspaper, Yisrael Ha-Yom, and it obviously was eating into the profits of the other newspapers in the country. (How this is not illegal as “dumping” baffles me.) Netanyahu allegedly told Mozes that he could persuade Adelson to reduce the publication run of Yisrael Ha-Yom, which would help his bottom line. In return, Mozes should report more favorably on Netanyahu.

Case 2000 shows how far right wing nationalist politics is intertwined with shady businesses like casino-owning and their ability, having bilked millions of poor and working people out of their money, to turn around and buy influential press organs to convince the latter to vote for the people who screwed them over. (Although Netanyahu is notorious in the West for having reneged on the Oslo Accords and having denied Palestinians their rights, within Israel he has also led an assault on the old socialist welfare state, throwing workers under the bus and diverting money to the billionaire class.) It is a perfect vicious circle.

Sheldon Adelson, who allegedly recouped his fortune at one point by bribing members of the Chinese Communist Party to let him operate in Macao, has the dubious distinction of having ruined both the United States and Israel by pushing, respectively, Netanyahu and Trump. Adelson sidelined New Jersey governor Chris Christie in the 2016 Republican primary for having referred to Gaza and the West Bank as “Occupied Territories,” which they self-evidently are. In Adelson’s warped world, there are and never have been any Palestinians and random Arabs have no business in his Israel.

Are there parallels between Netanyahu’s situation and Trump’s?

Both came to power in part through the backing of billionaires and their fake news organs such as Fox Cable News for Trump and Yisrael Ha-Yom for Netanyahu.

Both men are being investigated for corruption.

Both have responded by denigrating law enforcement. Netanyahu attacked the police, Trump the FBI and whistleblowers.

Both have denounced the evidence against them as “corrupt” and “tainted.”

Both have decried the investigations into their criminal activities as “a coup.”

Both have tried to normalize corruption. Netanyahu dismissed the hundreds of thousands of dollars he received as a few gifts among friends. Trump asks his audience if they don’t want him to make money for his businesses.

And in the case of both men, if they are removed from office for corruption, they will be succeeded by political figures even farther to their right and more dangerous to the world.

 

Media Refuse to Ask Where the ‘War on Terror’ Is Going

The death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in October, during a raid by US special forces in Syria’s Idlib province, would have been an opportune time for US media to reflect on the 18-year-long “War on Terror,” and US policy more broadly in the Middle East. But the circumscribed coverage of al-Baghdadi’s death represented yet another artful evasion of any critical discussion of imperial foreign policy.

“The night unfolded with methodical precision and unexpected turns,” AP (10/28/19) breathlessly reported.

Time (10/27/19) declared that “al-Baghdadi’s death is a crucial symbolic victory in the battle against the embattled terrorist group” and “a victory for the Trump administration.” The Associated Press’ report, “The Tip, the Raid, the Reveal: The Takedown of al-Baghdadi” (10/28/19), read like a Hollywood action movie treatment of the assassination raid, excitedly describing how “the night unfolded with methodical precision and unexpected turns,” presenting the “daring raid” as the “culmination of years of steady intelligence-gathering work.”

The New York Times (10/27/19) reveled alongside Trump in the “daring American commando raid” that claimed “a significant victory” in the “War on Terror,” and wrote how al-Baghdadi’s death could be “a signal moment in the generation-long war against terrorists as well as in Mr. Trump’s presidency,” because it “culminated” in the elimination of a “ruthless enemy.” To the extent the Times was critical of the operation, it echoed Democratic criticisms that Trump didn’t keep congressional leadership informed, questioned the veracity of Trump’s account of the raid before his death, or scolded him for not maintaining proper presidential etiquette by using “boastful and provocative language unlike the more solemn tone typically adopted by presidents in such moments.”

On the same day, the Times’s 3,000-word obituary (10/27/19) of al-Baghdadi described details of his life—including his brutal crimes, the significance of his claim to be restoring a theocratic “caliphate” through ISIS, and how his movement differed from Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda—all without explaining the US’s role in creating ISIS, or mentioning US assistance to its Al Qaeda rivals (FAIR.org, 3/21/16, 1/4/17). Nor did the obituary explore why people in the Middle East, like the “tens of thousands of followers” ISIS “electrified,” would seek to “take up arms” against US presence in the Middle East, which would mean examining US Mideast policy and the US’s own war crimes (FAIR.org, 9/11/19).

This Washington Post story (10/27/19) originally had the headline, “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Austere Religious Scholar at Helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.”

The Washington Post’s original headline for its obituary, “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Austere Religious Scholar at Helm of Islamic State, dies at 48” (10/27/19), was widely derided because it could have been used to describe an academic who died in his sleep, as opposed to a violent guerrilla leader killing himself and his three children while being pursued by US commandos.

Like the Times, the Post downplayed the role US Mideast policy plays in inspiring animosity against the US; it said the US invasion of Iraq offered the things ISIS “needed most: a new cause and a fresh and nearly boundless source of recruits and arms,” but did not explain why US intervention—generally portrayed in the Post as benevolent and altruistic—would prompt such a response. It attributed ISIS’s success in seizing and holding “territory that would form the basis of a declared Islamic caliphate” to al-Baghdadi’s “canny pragmatism as a leader,” allowing him to “meld…a fractious mix of radical Islamist militants and former Iraqi Baathists.”

Why do radical Islamist militants want to attack the US, instead of countries like Costa Rica and Switzerland? Why would former Baathists, who weren’t sympathetic to any form of Islamism—despite popular narratives seeking to exonerate the US’s role in the rise of ISIS, based on Saddam Hussein’s 1993 Faith Campaign—want to join fanatics like ISIS? Could the Bush administration’s decision to disband the Iraqi army and render more than 500,000 well-armed and well-trained troops unemployed overnight be a reason why many former Baathist military leaders have leading roles in ISIS (Time, 5/29/15; Intercept, 1/29/18)? The Post gave no answers to these kinds of critical questions.

The Wall Street Journal’s report on the raid (10/27/19) also triumphantly described al-Baghdadi’s death, describing it as “fulfilling a long-held US goal and marking the most significant setback for the militant group since losing the last of its territorial caliphate earlier this year.” The Journal’s accompanying obituary (10/27/19) also downplayed the US role in creating ISIS—omitting, for example, the US decision to dissolve the Iraqi military. It also obfuscated US support for Al Qaeda fighters opposed to the Syrian government (misleadingly referred to as “moderates” or “rebels” throughout corporate media), when it discussed how al-Baghdadi helped “establish an Al Qaeda affiliate called Nusra Front in 2012,” and later managed to lure “most of Nusra’s foreign fighters to Islamic State,” without mentioning this important fact.

Watching Fox News‘ coverage (10/27/19), you might think the Al-Baghdadi raid was aimed as much at the Democrats as at ISIS.

Fox News (10/27/19) exemplified the vapidity of hyperpartisan journalism by immediately emphasizing the political benefits the death of al-Baghdadi would offer the Trump administration as the impeachment process began. Instead of giving facts about the mission, or raising questions about the continued War on Terror and how the US contributed to al-Baghdadi and ISIS’s rise, Fox tried to play “Gotcha!” by contrasting Washington Post coverage of Osama bin Laden and al-Baghdadi’s deaths, as well as citing how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats lavished praise on Barack Obama after his assassination of bin Laden, “while pointedly avoiding complimenting the president in any way.” Is the degree of adulation accorded presidents for killing foreign leaders really the most important issue to be addressed?

Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone, 10/28/19) articulated the problem with our broken media’s tunnel-vision emphasis on the political benefits for the two major parties, at the expense of all other considerations:

This ought to have been a moment to reflect on what’s happened in the last 20 years, and if our policies across multiple administrations have been the right ones. Would we even be launching operations against such a person if we hadn’t invaded Iraq all those years ago? What’s the endgame? What do the people of the region think?

It’s telling that one of the few questions corporate media raised about the raid was to criticize the Trump administration’s subsequent, largely imaginary “pullout” from Syria, further reinforcing the notion that the US has the right—and even obligation—to illegally invade and occupy Middle Eastern nations (FAIR.org, 10/18/19). Despite reporting on al-Baghdadi’s time in US captivity in Camp Bucca, corporate media obituaries omit that eight out of the ten months al-Baghdadi spent in US captivity were at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison (Intercept, 8/25/16). Both US prisons were notorious for being sites of brutal torture, as well as for being “jihadi universities” that ISIS members actively infiltrated to recruit and train new members; al-Baghdadi connected there with the jihadists and former Iraqi military officials who would later make up ISIS’s leadership. Yet these pertinent details of al-Baghdadi’s biography weren’t used to question the US’s continued presence in the Middle East.

Despite lies from US Iraq War architects claiming to be “surprised” by the lengthy violent insurgency erupting from Iraq after the illegal invasion, prewar assessments by the CIA and the National Intelligence Committee warned the Bush administration that the invasion would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent conflict, with increased sympathy for terrorist objectives (New York Times, 9/28/04, 10/13/05). The destabilization and power vacuum following the invasion is what allowed ISIS to rise, making ISIS an indirect US creation, and a fulfillment of Osama bin Laden’s objectives behind the 9/11 attacks (Extra!, 7/11; CounterPunch, 9/19/14; Guardian, 7/6/16).

A 2004 Defense Science Board Task Force report concluded that “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies.” Indeed, US officials have known for more than half a century that US Mideast policies engender hatred against the US, and consciously pursued them anyway. In 1958, Dwight Eisenhower noted to his staff that there “is a campaign of hatred against us, not by the governments, but by the people,” with his National Security Council later noting that “the majority of Arabs” (labeled “Arab nationalists”) believe that the US is “seeking to protect its interest in Near East oil by supporting the status quo and opposing political or economic progress.” The NSC paper explicitly noted that the US can’t afford to “accommodate” the demands of “Arab nationalists,” because of the “disparities between our interests.” The paper foresaw the “probable necessity of continued deployment of troops in the Near East, with the likelihood of increasingly serious incidents and the resultant risks of war.”

Just as the US cultivated Osama bin Laden and the mujahideen fighters in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a 2012 Pentagon report predicted and even welcomed the possibility of a “Salafist principality” (Salafism being ISIS’s official ideology), because it hoped an organization like ISIS would lead a violent insurgency to weaken the Syrian government (Salon, 11/18/15; Guardian, 6/3/15).

Corporate media can’t bring themselves to mention this information in their coverage of al-Baghdadi’s death, or of the endless wars in the Middle East. Informing their audiences of the possibility that US officials are consciously endangering Americans by cultivating and sponsoring terrorist groups, or that aspects of US foreign policy can qualify as terrorism, would endanger US imperialism, the military/industrial/media complex and the entire basis for this so-called “War on Terror” (Extra!, 8/05; FAIR.org, 3/13/19).

The Many Ways Americans Are Paying for Forever War

There is some incongruity between my role as an editor of a book about the costs of America’s wars and my identity as a military spouse. I’m deeply disturbed at the scale of human suffering caused by those conflicts and yet I’ve unintentionally contributed to the war effort through the life I’ve chosen.

I am the co-editor with Catherine Lutz of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new volume of social science research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. At the same time, I am a practicing therapist-in-training and I specialize in working with veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Through the scholarly research I review and the veteran clients I have seen, I am committed professionally to bearing witness to the human costs of America’s forever wars, and to alleviating suffering where I can.

I am also married to a submarine officer in the Navy. We are so fortunate in so many ways. We have two beautiful children, pets, loving friends, and extended family. We both have graduate degrees. While our finances take hits from relocations without adequate job and childcare support, we don’t face the continuous fears that many military families experience when a loved one is sent into a war zone. In many respects, my family’s life does not look like that of most American military families profiled in my book.

And yet I have misgivings.

During one of my husband’s deployments, I was relieved to hear our 2-year-old son talk about war in a way that, despite his innocence, was more nuanced than the usual tales of “sacrifice,” “honor,” and “fighting terror” that one hears routinely in the mainstream media and in local command newsletters.

It was spring 2017 and we had just seen Kim Jong-un displaying one of North Korea’s new missiles on the TV news. Our son asked me what a war is. I gave my best explanation and his reply, undoubtedly garnered from preschool discussions about conflict resolution, was: “They don’t use words? They hit?”

Sort of, I told him. I did my best to explain what a weapon was, a description I suspect that many of my liberal mom friends would balk at. In our military community, however, such imagery is all around us. Real missiles and replicas are, for instance, often used as decorations lining the streets of naval bases or as lampposts or even wall hangings in military family households.

My son did his best to take it in. Later, at the waterfront near our home, he tossed a piece of his donut into the ocean and told me it was for his father who, he insisted, was under the water “playing hide-and-seek.” Of course, he doesn’t connect the relentless training and deployments characteristic of our military life with the fighting of war itself, though our family feels the strain and implicit sense of danger in our daily lives.

In writing my recent book on the costs of this country’s post-9/11 wars, I learned about Afghan war widows who use heroin to make it morally possible to live amid grief and poverty after seeing their spouses and children killed; about NGO workers who leave their own families, facing threats of kidnapping and death, to aid refugees in the Pakistani-Afghan borderlands. And I read about the experiences of the million war-wounded, ill, or traumatized American combat veterans, the sorts of patients my therapy will someday (I hope) help, who have sought health care and social support and so often come up desperately short.

As I do this, there’s always a low buzz of guilt somewhere in my gut, even about my own voluntary, unpaid work in support of other military spouses, even after I’ve relinquished travel assignments in my work as an activist that would have compromised my husband’s security clearance, even as I abide by harsh security restrictions in my personal life. I worry, in other words, about aiding the very military that, 18 years after the 9/11 attacks, still continues to rack up war’s costs without an end in sight.

The Costs of War at Home

I see firsthand trends affecting all military communities in the United States. Deployments during these wars have come more frequently and often last longer than in past American wars. The specter of death by suicide hangs over all our lives, because everyone in such communities knows someone who has died that way or has threatened to do so.

In 2012, for the first time in our history, American service members began to die by suicide at higher rates than civilians. Today, they are more likely to take their own lives than to perish in combat. As anthropologist Kenneth MacLeish points out, military suicides are most prevalent among those who have deployed to our war zones just once or not at all, or who left the military involuntarily with a “bad paper discharge” or other than honorable discharges of some kind. Moreover, mental illness is rampant among active-duty military service members. According to the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness, in 2014 roughly one in four active-duty service members showed signs of mental illness, including mood and trauma disorders such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety (though this figure is conservative, given that the study did not include the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries among combat vets. Many soldiers seek relief from the stresses of training and combat through alcohol and other drugs and, in our military community, it’s common knowledge that seeking professional support for such problems can place you at risk of social stigma.

And don’t forget military families either. Training and fighting both take a toll on us, too. What modest figures we have on the subject make the point. For example, as anthropologists Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger point out in our book, among servicemembers who entered the military between 1999 and 2008, the more months spent deployed, the more likely they are to divorce, with the vast majority of such divorces occurring soon after returning from deployments.

Local reports of domestic violence in military communities suggest that the problems leading to such divorces are only growing, though documentation on the subject is unreliable. It wasn’t until 2018 that, under pressure from Congress, the military made domestic violence a crime under its own legal code. Deployments of nine months or longer or frequent redeployments leave spouses at greater risk of depression, anxiety, and sleep problems, which, in turn, often affect the mental and physical health of their children as well.

Young children with deployed parents visit the doctor more frequently for behavioral health issues than those whose parents have not been deployed. Yet, as many spouses like me have discovered, community-based physicians are often unprepared to help in such situations, tending instead to blame the behavioral and mental-health issues of children on their parents or even on the children themselves, while not making referrals to services that could help (often, sadly, because there are none in the community).

“They Were as Hard Off as Me and I Was Killing Them”

Such collective problems are, of course, experienced individually and I’ve felt many of them in my own life. My spouse, for instance, departed for sea tours at moments when most of our family’s ducks were anything but in a row, whether it was a matter of childcare, work schedules, my health needs, or our other family obligations. Our son, for instance, has trouble sleeping because he was sad and scared for his dad, given what he hears in passing about Syria, North Korea, and — from other well-meaning military spouses and our own extended family — his own father’s attempts to “keep us safe” from unnamed others who might want to harm us.

I’m edgy and uneasy, knowing that my husband’s commander, a combat vet, has been angry at our family because I refused at one point to volunteer to work with a spouses group. When our house gets broken into, mid-deployment, and I’m alone with our toddler and pregnant, I wonder briefly if payback could have been involved before I dismiss the thought.

After I have our second child, a woman from the base with no mental-health or social-work training calls me weekly to ask about my baby’s health and safety. When I request that she stop, she refuses, telling me the same commander has ordered her to check in on each new mother in his command during deployment. I receive capitalized, hysterically punctuated emails from this woman warning all spouses not to jeopardize national security by talking to anyone about the submarine’s movements or, for that matter, emailing anything to our partners that they might find “distressing,” even details about a family member’s illness. Repeatedly, I am reminded that the U.S. is fighting a war on terror and our individual problems should never get in the way of that.

Things aren’t exactly a cakewalk between deployments either. It seems that, wherever I go, I find stigma, not support. For example, shortly after giving birth, I consulted a psychiatrist for help with post-partum depression. He was the only psychiatrist within 30 miles of our town who accepted military health insurance. Upon meeting me for the first time, he asked me to sign paperwork allowing him discretion to commit me to a psychiatric hospital “because military spouses often get psychotic during deployments.” I decided to tough it out rather than see him again.

And I try to keep in mind that my problems don’t add up to much, given the true costs of war out there. As a start, it’s a stretch to draw comparisons of any sort between an educated, white millennial family here and those who directly pay war’s costs like combat vets or, above all, civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other American war zones. As my co-editor Catherine Lutz and others have shown, though, combat and the home front are connected in unexpected ways.

If you spend 18 years fighting wars you grossly underestimated how to pay for, if you embark upon those wars without first considering alternatives like diplomacy, if you assume that social support for this country’s wars and those fighting them will come from military families that are patriarchal ideals from the white 1950s, and if you imagine an enemy — terrorism — that could be anywhere at all any time at all, then you’re already in a battle that’s going to prove unwinnable and morally unnerving for everyone involved.

I obviously can’t speak for how people from groups in this country more vulnerable than mine think about our never-ending wars and their costs, but my guess is that at least some of them feel connections to those in the war zones far more intimately than I do, no matter how hard I try. I will never forget a neighbor of ours, a Mexican-American Vietnam vet whom I would find smoking on our street when I completed my daily runs. One evening, when we were chatting, he told me that what haunted him most was how many of the rural, poor Vietnamese he’d shot at looked more like him than most of the American officers in his unit. “They were as hard off as me and I was killing them,” he suddenly said, tears in his eyes. Among veterans, he’s not alone in feeling an affinity for those on the other side.

On Bearing Witness

When Catherine Lutz, Neta Crawford, and I first founded the Costs of War Project at Brown University in 2011, we took a close look at the kinds of public assumptions we wanted to upend. As a start, we wanted to show that, contrary to the Bush administration’s stated rationales for invading Afghanistan and then Iraq, Washington had not effectively protected human rights — not to safety, liberty, or for that matter freedom of speech — nor brought “democracy” with us into those distant lands. Instead, by then, those countries had already seen spikes in gender-based violence and the deterioration of the most basic protections that led to everything from the collapse of prenatal care to the killing of civilians to the kidnapping of journalists, aid workers, and academics.

We wanted to go beyond the Pentagon’s focus on the deaths of American soldiers and focus instead on the tens of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi military deaths that had taken place and especially the soaring death rates of civilians in those lands. And, of course, we wanted to show that our grim wars should not be described in sterile terms via the usual imagery of families embracing upon a smiling service-member’s return or the by-then-familiar photographs of neat coffins draped with flags being carried out of planes by uniformed service members as spouses (usually white, female, and non-disabled) looked on sadly.

That, we knew, was not the essence of America’s already ongoing war on terror. My colleagues and I wanted people in this country to refocus on the staggering death and injury rates that only grew as the years passed, the ever-more-crippling ways in which all sides learned to kill and injure, and the long-term mental-health effects of arduous family separations.

A therapist mentor once taught me that, when working with veterans who have PTSD, I should, as he put it, “Ask them to start their story a little before they think it began and have them keep going even after they think it’s over.” My colleagues and I wanted to do that when it came to our wars, focusing not just on the obvious newsworthy photographs that tended to appeal to the American psyche, but on the missing context in which those photographs were taken. That’s the best way I can think of to describe the purpose of our new book (and our future work). None of us should stop trying to refocus in that way, not until America’s war story is declared over — and not even then, given how long the costs of war are likely to take to play out.

One sunny afternoon in May 2011, as Catherine Lutz and I sat in her office in Brown’s Anthropology Department sifting through media images for the initial launch of the Costs of War website, we happened upon a video of a screaming young Iraqi child with open burn wounds covering his face and body, a relative clutching him in her arms as they hustled through a crowd. Gunshots and explosions were audible in the background. The before, the after, the neighborhood where the violence was taking place, the weapons used, who was even fighting whom — none of that was evident from the clip.

For years, that image and the sound of that child has haunted me. Who was he? Did he get to the hospital? Was there even a hospital for him to get to? Would he ever go to school or play again? Who was the woman and what had her life been like before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003? What was it like now? What services could she access? Was she safe?

I think of this image when I wake up at night, when I hear patients describe the screams of children in war zones, when I hear my own children scream during tantrums. It’s like a nightmarish echo that spurs me to keep working because all of us, regardless of where we are, should be bearing witness to the costs of war until somebody in power decides to end the suffering.

What Trump Stands to Gain From His New Policy on Israeli Settlements

This piece originally appeared on Truthout. 

Thumbing his nose at the Geneva Convention, the Rome Statute, the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly and the International Court of Justice, Donald Trump decided that Israel’s unlawful construction of Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory is lawful. This policy change is part of Trump’s pattern of seeking to legalize illegal Israeli practices. It panders to Israel at the expense of the Palestinians while aiming to burnish Trump’s bona fides with his Christian Zionist base. Christian Broadcasting Network quoted Jack Graham, pastor of the megachurch Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, as saying that the Trump administration “once again has demonstrated why evangelical Christians have been unwavering in their support.”

“The timing of this was not tied to anything that had to do with domestic politics anywhere in Israel or otherwise,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed, denying that the change in policy was designed to benefit Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s locked in a tight battle for political survival.

Rabbi Alissa Wise, acting co-executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace,said, “It’s hardly a surprise that on the eve of Netanyahu’s indictment and Trump’s impeachment proceedings we suddenly have the Trump administration throwing the Geneva Convention and international consensus out the window and shamelessly pandering to the right-wing and evangelical base.”

Walking in lockstep with Netanyahu, Trump also illegally declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel. And three months after he illegally recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, Netanyahu named a new — and illegal — settlement under construction, “Trump Heights.”

On November 18, Pompeo announced the end of the United States’s 41-year policy of considering Israeli settlements to be unlawful. “The establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law,” Pompeo declared.

In 1978, the Carter administration adopted the position detailed in a letter written by State Department Legal Advisor Herbert Hansell. It concluded that “the establishment of the civilian settlements in [the occupied Palestinian] territories is inconsistent with international law.” Hansell’s letter cited Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring “parts of its own civilian population into the territories it occupies.” The letter stated that just because territory comes “under the control of a belligerent occupant,” it “does not thereby become its sovereign territory.”

After the 1967 war, Israeli military forces occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. The narrative that Israel acted in self-defense when it attacked Egypt, Jordan and Syria and seized those Palestinian territories is a false one.

Security Council Resolution 242, passed in 1967, specifies “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” In 2016, the Council reiterated that language in Resolution 2334, which condemned Israel for the establishment of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem. The Resolution says that the building of settlements “has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.”

The United States abstained from Resolution 2334. Barack Obama allowed it to pass by not vetoing it. Just before Trump took office, he tried unsuccessfully to keep the resolution from reaching the Council floor. In addition to pandering to his evangelical base, Trump is reversing still another Obama achievement. Pompeo admitted that the new policy is a rejection of Obama’s failure to veto Resolution 2334.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that the “settlements have been established in breach of international law.” The Court cited the Security Council’s characterization of Israel’s policy of establishment of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory as a “flagrant violation” of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court considers an occupying power’s direct or indirect transfer “of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” to be a war crime.

Over 600,000 Israelis live in settlements in the occupied West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem. About 3 million Palestinians live there.

Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator and secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, condemned the Trump administration’s “unceasing attempts to replace international law with the ‘law of the jungle.’” He called on the global community to resist the new U.S. policy. “Israel’s colonial-settlement enterprise perpetuates the negation of the Palestinian right to self-determination,” Erekat said.

“Israeli settlements in occupied territory are illegal,” Bernie Sanders tweeted. “This is clear from international law and multiple United Nations resolutions. Once again, Mr. Trump is isolating the United States and undermining diplomacy by pandering to his extremist base.”

Trump has made explicit what has long been implicit: The United States directly enables Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and oppression of the Palestinians. As journalist Ali Abunimah tweeted, the U.S. proclamation that Israeli settlements do not violate international law “is merely a shedding of the fiction that the U.S. has ever opposed Israel’s land-theft colonies. It changes nothing but makes clear to all that the U.S. and Israel are partners in crime.”

Secret Documents Reveal How China Mass Detention Camps Work

The watch towers, double-locked doors and video surveillance in the Chinese camps are there “to prevent escapes.” Uighurs and other minorities held inside are scored on how well they speak the dominant Mandarin language and follow strict rules on everything down to bathing and using the toilet, scores that determine if they can leave.

“Manner education” is mandatory, but “vocational skills improvement” is offered only after a year in the camps.

Voluntary job training is the reason the Chinese government has given for detaining more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslims. But a classified blueprint leaked to a consortium of news organizations shows the camps are instead precisely what former detainees have described: Forced ideological and behavioral re-education centers run in secret.

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The Stain on America’s Soul That Will Not Wash Away



by Robert Scheer

The classified documents lay out the Chinese government’s deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities even before they commit a crime, to rewire their thoughts and the language they speak.

The papers also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence. Drawing on data collected by mass surveillance technology, computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week.

Taken as a whole, the documents give the most significant description yet of high-tech mass detention in the 21st century in the words of the Chinese government itself. Experts say they spell out a vast system that targets, surveils and grades entire ethnicities to forcibly assimilate and subdue them — especially Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic minority of more than 10 million people with their own language and culture.

“They confirm that this is a form of cultural genocide,” said Adrian Zenz, a leading security expert on the far western region of Xinjiang, the Uighur homeland. “It really shows that from the onset, the Chinese government had a plan.”

Zenz said the documents echo the aim of the camps as outlined in a 2017 report from a local branch of the Xinjiang Ministry of Justice: To “wash brains, cleanse hearts, support the right, remove the wrong.”

China has struggled for decades to control Xinjiang, where the Uighurs have long resented Beijing’s heavy-handed rule. After the 9/11 attacks in the United States, Chinese officials began justifying harsh security measures and religious restrictions as necessary to fend off terrorism, arguing that young Uighurs were susceptible to the influence of Islamic extremism. Hundreds have died since in terror attacks, reprisals and race riots, both Uighurs and Han Chinese.

In 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched what he called a “People’s War on Terror” when bombs set off by Uighur militants tore through a train station in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, just hours after he concluded his first state visit there.

“Build steel walls and iron fortresses. Set up nets above and snares below,” state media cited Xi as saying. “Cracking down severely on violent terrorist activities must be the focus of our current struggle.”

In 2016, the crackdown intensified dramatically after Xi named Chen Quanguo, a hardline official transferred from Tibet, as Xinjiang’s new head. Most of the documents were issued in 2017, as Xinjiang’s “War on Terror” morphed into an extraordinary mass detention campaign using military-style technology.

The practices largely continue today. The Chinese government says they work.

“Since the measures have been taken, there’s no single terrorist incident in the past three years,” said a written response from the Chinese Embassy in the United Kingdom. “Xinjiang is much safer….The so-called leaked documents are fabrication and fake news.”

The statement said that religious freedom and the personal freedom of detainees was “fully respected” in Xinjiang.

The documents were given to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists by an anonymous source. The ICIJ verified them by examining state media reports and public notices from the time, consulting experts, cross-checking signatures and confirming the contents with former camp employees and detainees.

They consist of a notice with guidelines for the camps, four bulletins on how to use technology to target people, and a court case sentencing a Uighur Communist Party member to 10 years in prison for telling colleagues not to say dirty words, watch porn or eat without praying.

The documents were issued to rank-and-file officials by the powerful Xinjiang Communist Party Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the region’s top authority overseeing police, courts and state security. They were put out under the head official at the time, Zhu Hailun, who annotated and signed some personally.

The documents confirm from the government itself what is known about the camps from the testimony of dozens of Uighurs and Kazakhs, satellite imagery and tightly monitored visits by journalists to the region.

Erzhan Qurban, an ethnic Kazakh who moved back to Kazakhstan, was grabbed by police on a trip back to China to see his mother and accused of committing crimes abroad. He protested that he was a simple herder who had done nothing wrong. But for the authorities, his time in Kazakhstan was reason enough for detention.

Qurban told the AP he was locked in a cell with 10 others last year and told not to engage in “religious activities” like praying. They were forced to sit on plastic stools in rigid postures for hours at a time. Talk was forbidden, and two guards kept watch 24 hours a day. Inspectors checked that nails were short and faces trimmed of mustaches and beards, traditionally worn by pious Muslims.

Those who disobeyed were forced to squat or spend 24 hours in solitary confinement in a frigid room.

“It wasn’t education, it was just punishment,” said Qurban, who was held for nine months. “I was treated like an animal.”

___

WHO GETS ROUNDED UP AND HOW

On February 18, 2017, Zhu, the Han Chinese official who signed the documents, stood in chilly winter weather atop the front steps of the capital’s city hall, overlooking thousands of police in black brandishing rifles.

“With the powerful fist of the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, all separatist activities and all terrorists shall be smashed to pieces,” Zhu announced into a microphone.

With that began a new chapter in the state’s crackdown. Police called Uighurs and knocked on their doors at night to take them in for questioning. Others were stopped at borders or arrested at airports.

In the years since, as Uighurs and Kazakhs were sent to the camps in droves, the government built hundreds of schools and orphanages to house and re-educate their children. Many of those who fled into exile don’t even know where their children or loved ones are.

The documents make clear that many of those detained have not actually done anything. One document explicitly states that the purpose of the pervasive digital surveillance is “to prevent problems before they happen” — in other words, to calculate who might rebel and detain them before they have a chance.

This is done through a system called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform or IJOP, designed to screen entire populations. Built by a state-owned military contractor, the IJOP began as an intelligence-sharing tool developed after Chinese military theorists studied the U.S. army’s use of information technology in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“There’s no other place in the world where a computer can send you to an internment camp,” said Rian Thum, a Xinjiang expert at the University of Nottingham. “This is absolutely unprecedented.”

The IJOP spat out the names of people considered suspicious, such as thousands of “unauthorized” imams not registered with the Chinese government, along with their associates. Suspicious or extremist behavior was so broadly defined that it included going abroad, asking others to pray or using cell phone apps that cannot be monitored by the government.

The IJOP zoomed in on users of “Kuai Ya,” a mobile application similar to the iPhone’s Airdrop, which had become popular in Xinjiang because it allows people to exchange videos and messages privately. One bulletin showed that officials identified more than 40,000 “Kuai Ya” users for investigation and potential detention; of those, 32 were listed as belonging to “terrorist organizations.”

“They’re scared people will spread religion through ‘Kuai Ya,’” said a man detained after police accused him of using the app. He spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to protect himself and his family. “They can’t regulate it….So they want to arrest everyone who’s used ‘Kuai Ya’ before.”

The system also targeted people who obtained foreign passports or visas, reflecting the government’s fear of Islamic extremist influences from abroad and deep discomfort with any connection between the Uighurs and the outside world. Officials were asked to verify the identities even of people outside the country, showing how China is casting its dragnet for Uighurs far beyond Xinjiang.

In recent years, Beijing has put pressure on countries to which Uighurs have fled, such as Thailand and Afghanistan, to send them back to China. In other countries, state security has also contacted Uighurs and pushed them to spy on each other. For example, a restaurateur now in Turkey, Qurbanjan Nurmemet, said police contacted him with videos of his son strapped to a chair and asked him for information on other Uighurs in Turkey.

Despite the Chinese government’s insistence that the camps are vocational training centers for the poor and uneducated, the documents show that those rounded up included party officials and university students.

After the names were collected, lists of targeted people were passed to prefecture governments, who forwarded them to district heads, then local police stations, neighbor watchmen, and Communist Party cadres living with Uighur families.

Some former detainees recalled being summoned by officers and told their names were listed for detention. From there, people were funneled into different parts of the system, from house arrest to detention centers with three levels of monitoring to, at its most extreme, prison.

Experts say the detentions are a clear violation of China’s own laws and constitution. Maggie Lewis, a professor of Chinese law at Seton Hall University, said the Communist Party is circumventing the Chinese legal system in Xinjiang.

“Once you’re stamped as an enemy, the gloves go off,” she said. “They’re not even trying to justify this legally….This is arbitrary.”

The detention campaign is sweeping. A bulletin notes that in a single week in June 2017, the IJOP identified 24,612 “suspicious persons” in southern Xinjiang, with 15,683 sent to “education and training,” 706 to prison and 2,096 to house arrest. It is unknown how typical this week might be. Local officials claim far less than a million are in “training,” but researchers estimate up to 1.8 million have been detained at one point or another.

The bulletins stress that relationships must be scrutinized closely, with those interrogated pushed to report the names of friends and relatives. Mamattursun Omar, a Uighur chef arrested after working in Egypt, was interrogated in four detention facilities over nine months in 2017. Omar told the AP that police asked him to verify the identities of other Uighurs in Egypt.

Eventually, Omar says, they began torturing him to make him confess that Uighur students had gone to Egypt to take part in jihad. They strapped him to a contraption called a “tiger chair,” shocked him with electric batons, beat him with pipes and whipped him with computer cords.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” Omar said. “I just told them what they wanted me to say.”

Omar gave the names of six others who worked at a restaurant with him in Egypt. All were sent to prison.

___

WHAT HAPPENS INSIDE THE CAMPS

The documents also detail what happens after someone is sent to an “education and training center.”

Publicly, in a recent white paper, China’s State Council said “the personal freedom of trainees at the education and training centers is protected in accordance with the law.” But internally, the documents describe facilities with police stations at the front gates, high guard towers, one-button alarms and video surveillance with no blind spots.

Detainees are only allowed to leave if absolutely necessary, for example because of illness, and even so must have somebody “specially accompany, monitor and control” them. Bath time and toilet breaks are strictly managed and controlled “to prevent escapes.” And cell phones are strictly forbidden to stop “collusion between inside and outside.”

“Escape was impossible,” said Kazakh kingergarten administrator Sayragul Sauytbay, a Communist Party member who was abducted by police in October 2017 and forced to become a Mandarin camp instructor. “In every corner in every place there were armed police.”

Sauytbay called the detention center a “concentration camp…much more horrifying than prison,” with rape, brainwashing and torture in a “black room” were people screamed. She and another former prisoner, Zaomure Duwati, also told the ICIJ detainees were given medication that made them listless and obedient, and every move was surveilled.

AP journalists who visited Xinjiang in December 2018 saw patrol towers and high walls lined with green barbed wire fencing around camps. One camp in Artux, just north of Kashgar, sat in the middle of a vast, empty, rocky field, and appeared to include a police station at the entrance, workshops, a hospital and dormitories, one with a sign reading “House of Workers” in Chinese.

Recent satellite imagery shows that guard towers and fencing have been removed from some facilities, suggesting the region may have been softening restrictions in response to global criticism. Shohrat Zakir, the governor of Xinjiang, said in March that those detained can now request time and go home on weekends, a claim the AP could not independently verify.

The first item listed as part of the curriculum is ideological education, a bold attempt to change how detainees think and act. It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in transformation through education — taken before to terrifying extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong.

“It’s the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, except now it’s powered by high-tech,” said Zenz, the researcher.

By showing students the error of their former ways, the centers are supposed to promote “repentance and confession,” the directive said. For example, Qurban, the Kazakh herder, was handcuffed, brought to an interview with a Han Chinese leader and forced to acknowledge that he regretted visiting abroad.

The indoctrination goes along with what is called “manner education,” where behavior is dictated down to ensuring “timely haircuts and shaves,” “regular change of clothes” and “bathing once or twice a week.” The tone, experts say, echoes a general perception by the Han Chinese government that Uighurs are prone to violence and need to be civilized — in much the same way white colonialists treated indigenous people in the U.S., Canada and Australia.

“It’s a similar kind of savior mentality — that these poor Uighurs didn’t understand that they were being led astray by extremists,” said Darren Byler, a scholar of Uighur culture at the University of Washington. “The way they think about Uighurs in general is that they are backward, that they’re not educated….these people are unhygienic and need to be taught how to clean themselves.”

Students are to be allowed a phone conversation with relatives at least once a week, and can meet them via video at least once a month, the documents say. Trainers are told to pay attention to “the ideological problems and emotional changes that arise after family communications.”

Mandarin is mandated. Beijing has said “the customs of all ethnic groups and the right to use their spoken and written languages are fully protected at the centers.” But the documents show that in practice, lessons are taught in Mandarin, and it is the language to be used in daily communication.

A former staffer at Xinjiang TV now in Europe was also selected to become a Mandarin teacher during his month-long detention in 2017. Twice a day, detainees were lined up and inspected by police, and a few were questioned in Mandarin at random, he told the AP. Those who couldn’t respond in Mandarin were beaten or deprived of food for days. Otherwise, speaking was forbidden.

One day, the former teacher recalled, an officer asked an old farmer in Mandarin whether he liked the detention center. The man apologized in broken Mandarin and Uighur, saying it was hard for him to understand because of his age. The officer strode over and struck the old man’s head with a baton. He crumpled to the ground, bleeding.

“They didn’t see us as humans,” said the former teacher, who declined to provide his name out of fear of retribution against his family. “They treated us like animals — like pigs, cows, sheep.”

Detainees are tested on Mandarin, ideology and discipline, with “one small test per week, one medium test per month, and one big test per season,” the documents state. These test scores feed into an elaborate point system.

Detainees who do well are to be rewarded with perks like family visits, and may be allowed to “graduate” and leave. Detainees who do poorly are to be sent to a stricter “management area” with longer detention times. Former detainees told the AP that punishments included food deprivation, handcuffing, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.

Detainees’ scores are entered in the IJOP. Students are sent to separate facilities for “intensive skills training” only after at least one year of learning ideology, law and Mandarin.

After they leave, the documents stipulate, every effort should be made to get them jobs. Some detainees describe being forced to sign job contracts, working long hours for low pay and barred from leaving factory grounds during weekdays.

Qurban, the Kazakh herder, said after nine months in the camp, a supervisor came to tell him he was “forgiven” but must never tell what he had seen. After he returned to his village, officials told him he had to work in a factory.

“If you don’t go, we’ll send you back to the center,” an official said.

Qurban went to a garment factory, which he wasn’t allowed to leave. After 53 days stitching clothes, he was released. After another month under house arrest, he finally was allowed to return to Kazakhstan and see his children. He received his salary in cash: 300 Chinese yuan, or just under $42.

Long an ordinary herder who thought little of politics, Qurban used to count many Han Chinese among his friends. Now, he said, he’s begun to hate them.

“I’ve never committed a crime, I’ve never done anything wrong,” he said. “It was beyond comprehension why they put me there.”

As Internet Restored, Online Iran Protest Videos Show Chaos

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Machine gun fire answers rock-throwing protesters. Motorcycle-riding Revolutionary Guard volunteers chase after demonstrators. Plainclothes security forces grab, beat and drag a man off the street to an uncertain fate.

As Iran restores the internet after a weeklong government-imposed shutdown, new videos purport to show the demonstrations over gasoline prices rising and the security-force crackdown that followed.

The videos offer only fragments of encounters, but to some extent they fill in the larger void left by Iran’s state-controlled television and radio channels. On their airwaves, hard-line officials allege that foreign conspiracies and exile groups instigated the unrest. In print, newspapers offered only PR for the government or had merely stenographic reporting at best, the moderate daily Hamshahri said in an analysis Sunday.

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They don’t acknowledge that the gasoline price hike Nov. 15, supported by its civilian government, came as Iran’s 80 million people already have seen their savings dwindle and jobs scarce under crushing U.S. sanctions. President Donald Trump imposed them in the aftermath of unilaterally withdrawing America from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.

Authorities also have yet to give any overall figures for how many people were injured, arrested or killed during the several days of protests that swept across some 100 cities and towns.

Amnesty International said it believes the unrest and the crackdown killed at least 106 people. Iran disputes that figure without offering its own. A U.N. office earlier said it feared the unrest may have killed “a significant number of people.”

Starting Nov. 16, Iran shut down the internet across the country, limiting communications with the outside world. That made determining the scale and longevity of the protests incredibly difficult. Some recycled days-old videos and photographs as new, making it even more difficult.

Since Saturday, internet connectivity spiked in the country, allowing people to access foreign websites for the first time. On Sunday, connectivity stood nearly at 100% for landline services, while mobile phone internet service remained scarce, the advocacy group NetBlocks said.

The restoration brought messaging apps back to life for Iranians cut off from loved ones abroad. It also meant that videos again began being shared widely.

Recently released videos span the country. One video from Shiraz, some 680 kilometers (420 miles) south of Tehran, purports to show a crowd of over 100 people scatter as gunfire erupts from a police station in the city. One man bends down to pick up debris as a person off-camera describes demonstrators throwing stones. Another gunshot rings out, followed by a burst of machine gun fire.

In Kerman, some 800 kilometers (500 miles) southeast of Tehran, the sound of breaking glass echoes over a street where debris burns in the center of a street. Motorcycle-riding members of the Basij, the all-volunteer force of Iran’s paramilitary Guard, then chase the protesters away.

Another video in Kermanshah, some 420 kilometers (260 miles) southwest of Tehran, purports shows the dangers that lurked on the streets of Iran in recent days. Plainclothes security forces, some wielding nightsticks, drag one man off by the hair of his head. The detained man falls at one point.

“Look, (the agents) wear styles like the youth,” one man off-camera says, swearing at them.

On Sunday, it remained unclear if and how widespread any remaining demonstrations were. The acting commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Ali Fadavi, repeated the allegation that America was behind the protests, without offering any evidence to support his claim.

“Why did (the Americans) get angry after we cut off the internet? Because the internet is the channel through which Americans wanted to perform their evil and vicious acts,” Fadavi said. “We will deal with this, Islamic Republic supporters, and our proud men and women will sign up to make a domestic system similar to the internet with operating systems that (the Americans) can’t (control) even if they want.”

That likely refers to what has been known as the “halal net,” Iran’s own locally controlled version of the internet aimed at restricting what the public can see. The system known as the National Information Network has some 500 government-approved national websites that stream content far faster than those based abroad, which are intentionally slowed, activists say. Iranian officials say it allows the Islamic Republic to be independent if the world cuts it off instead.

But while Fadavi earlier said the protests were put down in 48 hours, he also acknowledged the scope of the unrest by comparing it to Operation Karbala-4, one of the worst military disasters suffered by Iran during its bloody 1980s war with Iraq.

That scope could be seen in one video. In the capital, Tehran, footage earlier aired by the BBC’s Persian service shot from a car purports to show a tableau of violence on Sattarkhan Street, as anti-riot police officers clashed with protesters.

In the video, a woman’s scream rises over the shouts of the crowd as plainclothes security forces wearing white surgical masks accost one man, who puts his hands up to his face and hunches over to shield his body. Men walk backward to watch the chaos amid police with batons and riot shields, then run.

A woman in a green headscarf argues with one anti-riot police officer in front of a car.

“What do you say?” the police officer asks.

“He kicked my car,” she responds.

“Move,” the police officer orders. “Whom do you want to blame in this situation?”

Someone chases a man in front of a bank as people curse. The car makes a right-hand turn onto another street. A police officer off-camera shouts: “Come here!”

“Go, go, go!” a woman in the car cries out.

The car speeds away, passing burning debris. The clip ends. It lasts only 35 seconds.