Tundra Swans, Yolo Bypass, Sacramento River Delta. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

At a time when nihilistic bullies glory in doing perverse damage to the environment and to our ability to think and learn about the environment, it is important to remember that there is also a cohort, a community, of scientists and activists whose persistent, principled attention over decades has helped to preserve important remnants of our natural world.  Ted Beedy who passed away recently in Nevada City, California was one of those.

Ted was an acclaimed ornithologist.  He was part of the team whose close observation of bird life and predation at Mono Lake was the basis for stabilizing the level of the Lake against the depredations of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in the 1980’s.   He did some of the original research at the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge that identified farm water management and resulting concentration of toxic minerals as a critical factor in bird mortality and population decline.  Those practices changed, rooted in good science and careful observation.  His long-term observations and research, conducted with his wife Susan Sanders, led to the listing of the tri-colored blackbird as an endangered species in the California Central Valley.  His book Birds of the Sierra Nevada, illustrated by his friend Keith Hanson, is the standard reference for birders in that region of California.  It is a marvel of attention to detail including behaviors and sounds.

Ted was also a visionary.  He was part of the founding of Putah Creek Council, which worked to ultimately turn a dried up and degraded stream in Yolo County California into one of the country’s great restoration stories. This past winter salmon that had been naturally reared within Putah Creek returned to spawn, marking a true restoration of a once extinct salmon run.  Through his work with Putah Creek Council Ted and a handful of others saw how the Yolo Basin, a large flood-prone area west of Sacramento, could become a stop-over for migratory waterfowl, leading to the creation of the 17,000-acre Vic Fazio Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area in 1990.  He saw that disturbed managed areas could be reclaimed and transformed.

A long-time resident of the Sierra foothills, he wrote habitat conservation plans for Placer County and Nevada County that are still used to contain and manage growth and protect the wild in the Northern Sierras.  He was a conscientious steward of the Cedars, the largest remaining area of old-growth in the Northern Sierra at the top of the American River watershed.  His children and the children of his friends in the community carry on the vision, the thoughtful approach and the activism, values he expressed through his work and deeds.

The post The Passing of Ted Beedy, a Visonary Ornithologist appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bill Julian – Robin Robin Kulakow.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A few months ago, Sen. Ted Cruz announced that he had uncovered $2 billion of science grants funded by former President Joe Biden’s administration that prioritized “radical political perspectives” or “neo-Marxist theories.’’ His aides on a congressional committee assembled the list by searching the project descriptions for 699 key terms like “women,” “diversify,” “segregation” and “Hispanic culture.”

When Cruz released the database of this allegedly “woke” research earlier this month, we decided to run our own experiment. We asked one of the models powering ChatGPT, which can sift through large amounts of data, to evaluate all 3,500 grant descriptions in the database as if it were an investigative journalist looking for Marxist propaganda, “woke ideology,” or diversity, equity and inclusion. The model tried to give us descriptions of how each project might fit those themes. We were particularly interested in the grants where it came up blank. We then read through the researchers’ full summaries of those and many other grants, including each one described in this story, looking for references to some of the keywords on the list.

We found that Cruz’s dragnet had swept up numerous examples of scientific projects funded by the National Science Foundation that simply acknowledged social inequalities or were completely unrelated to the social or economic themes cited by his committee.

Among them, for example, was a $470,000 grant to study the evolution of mint plants and how they spread across continents. As best we can tell, the project ran into trouble with Republicans on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation because of two specific words used in its application to the NSF: “diversify,” referring to the biodiversity of plants, and “female,” where the application noted how the project would support a young female scientist on the research team.

Other projects our AI assistant led us to included:

• Developing a device that could treat severe bleeding. It seems to have caught the committee’s attention for using the words “victims” — as in gunshot victims — and “trauma.”
• Creating biosensors to detect infectious diseases. The grant appears to have been tagged for the repeated use of “POC,” an acronym often used for “people of color” but in this context meaning “point of care” — that is, the place where people receive medical treatment — and “barrier,” referring to a part of the biosensor itself.
• Designing eye-tracking technology for diagnosing and treating concussions. It appears to have gotten flagged for referencing “traumatic” brain injuries and the “status,” meaning the condition, of patients.

It’s “very frightening,” said Charlotte Lindqvist, a biology professor at the University at Buffalo who is conducting the research on mint plants.

Lindqvist spends hours a day grinding up plant samples and analyzing their DNA to identify genetic differences between species. Studying plant diversity, she said, could help secure more resilient food systems. “We are really trying very, very hard ... to move our world forward, understanding it better through our sort of foundational, sometimes groundbreaking research,” she said, “and then you get flagged and blacklisted because there is a word like ‘female’ in your project.”

Staff for the Republicans on the Senate committee assembled their report by examining all NSF grants awarded to projects that began between January 2021 and April 2024. Using their list of keywords, they flagged those earmarked for research that they said was “often based on neo-Marxist theories that identified merit by physical or ethnic attributes, not one’s talent, work ethic, or intellectual curiosity.”

Evaluating the merits of these awards would require a deep understanding of dozens of scientific fields, from gravitational waves to DNA methylation. But the report describes a crude approach; while staffers did attempt to account for the different ways their keywords can be used, they did not manually review all grants. The report also failed to acknowledge that the NSF has a legal mandate to make science more inclusive of women, racial minorities and disabled people.

Cruz released the full database just as the Trump administration’s NSF said it was examining research grants to make sure they complied with the president’s executive orders terminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Cruz said he requested “significant scrutiny” of the grants in his database. At the time, the NSF was using a similar list of keywords for its review.

Neither Cruz’s office nor a spokesperson for Republicans on the committee responded to requests for comment.

It’s not clear if approved projects that are still waiting for payments will get their money. A federal judge ruled last Friday that the administration can’t cancel or freeze grants for supporting diversity, equity and inclusion programs. When asked how it would respond to the judge’s preliminary injunction, an NSF spokesperson directed ProPublica to an agency webpage, which had not been updated with information about the court ruling at the time of publication.

“NSF is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders,” a spokesperson told ProPublica in response to questions about its review process.

The Senate committee’s list includes words like “diversify” and “biases,” which have technical meanings unrelated to social issues. Although the report’s authors worked to remove grants flagged for those reasons, some, like Lindqvist’s, slipped through.

The lack of precision in the committee’s methodology is “obviously laughable,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional governments. But she also worries about what might happen if lawmakers take a more serious approach, such as trying to ban research on racial inequality, similar to how Congress severely limited studies on gun violence.

The NSF evaluates grant proposals based on two factors. The first is intellectual merit. Every application is reviewed by a panel of experts — often other academics — who specialize in the same topic. They pore over detailed applications that include data, references and researchers’ qualifications, far more information than the brief summaries evaluated by the Senate committee.

The other factor is “broader impacts,” which could include how the research might benefit societal well-being or make science more inclusive.

Currently, federal laws require the NSF to support research at historically Black colleges and universities and other institutions that serve groups who are underrepresented in science. Congress also ordered the NSF to fund efforts “designed to increase the recruitment, retention, and advancement” of members of these groups in scientific careers.

“All of that is hard-wired into federal funding,” Scheppele said. “If anyone was ‘woke,’ it was Congress.”

Laws passed by Congress have more legal weight than executive orders, so the NSF shouldn’t prioritize Trump’s order over its mandate to support underrepresented people in science, Scheppele said. The White House, she said in an email, is “literally asking the NSF to violate the law!”

The committee report singled out some projects for simply acknowledging that people from certain demographics face unique challenges. That includes a University of Houston study of maternal mortality that examines why Black, Indigenous and other people of color in the U.S. are nearly three times as likely as white women to die during pregnancy or within the first year after childbirth. Another project, which involved using drones to deliver defibrillators to people suffering cardiac arrest, appeared to be flagged because it noted that emergency response times are slower in low-income and minority neighborhoods.

In other cases, the keywords that caught the committee’s attention may have come from outreach efforts meant to broaden the impact of the research. A $6 million nuclear astrophysics project to study the origins of the universe includes a reference to attracting a “diverse group” of students interested in the subject and a summer school program for increasing interest in nuclear-science careers, “especially among women and minorities.”

That’s in line with a 1998 law that ordered the NSF to develop “intellectual capital, both people and ideas, with particular emphasis on groups and regions that traditionally have not participated fully in science, mathematics, and engineering.”

Congress recognized “you’re going to get better science” that way, said Melissa Finucane, vice president of science and innovation at the Union of Concerned Scientists. When you get different perspectives interacting and thinking about complex problems, she said, you’ll get different and new ways of solving a problem.

The report’s “sledgehammer” methodology ignores the substantial scientific merit of these projects, many of which address “critical national needs in areas such as aerospace, agriculture, and computing infrastructure — as well as the need to broaden the talent pool,” a spokesperson for Democrats on the Senate committee said in an email. The email said that ranking Democrat Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington “understands that there is no way the United States can compete” with the rest of the world on innovation “without ensuring that NSF funding emphasizes the participation of women and minorities in STEM,” a reference to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Rice University professor Vicky Yao has seen firsthand how efforts to broaden participation can increase excitement and interest in science.

When Yao applied for a research grant in 2022, she included outreach to community college students, many of whom are from underrepresented populations and don’t have access to research opportunities.

When ProPublica informed Yao her $610,000 project was on the Senate committee’s list, she found it bizarre that such technical work on DNA methylation — a process that can affect cancer and neurological diseases — could be labeled as “woke.”

The committee’s choice of keywords is so sweeping that shutting down the research that uses those terms would end not just diversity programs but also vast fields of research on social science (“Black communities,” “racial inequality,” “LGBT”), climate change (“net zero,” “climate research,” “clean energy”) and medicine (“white women,” “victims,” “trauma”).

If any research related to women or minority populations is under fire, then “we’re talking about maybe 65% of the American population. So at that point, what’s left?” said Dominic Boyer, an anthropology professor at Rice University whose project on reducing flood risk was flagged by the committee. “Under what authority, or according to what philosophy, can a government invalidate or discredit research that’s focusing on two-thirds of the population?”

Boyer received an award of $750,000 to use nature-based solutions like rain gardens to reduce flooding in Houston, where Hurricane Harvey displaced tens of thousands of people in 2017. His team has begun collaborating closely with residents from three neighborhoods: two lower-income communities where the residents are mostly Hispanic, Black or Asian, and a middle-income neighborhood with mostly Hispanic and white residents.

He initially assumed that’s why his research was flagged. But it turned out that the triggering keywords may have come from boilerplate language that describes the specific NSF program that funded Boyer’s work: Strengthening American Infrastructure. The portions of the grant’s program description containing those keywords were written by the NSF during Trump’s first term. It used the words “socioeconomic” and “equal opportunity” to explain why infrastructure is important to society. The same description is found in more than two dozen other grants on the committee’s list.

Boyer said it speaks to a kind of “Orwellian absurdity” that “these words can only have one meaning, and it’s the meaning that they would like to politicize.”

Sharon Lerner contributed reporting and Brandon Roberts contributed data reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Agnel Philip and Lisa Song.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

The three individuals, which included his parents-in-law, were taken to Castle Peak and Yuen Long police stations for questioning "to help with the authorities' investigation," the Standard newspaper quoted sources as saying.

The move comes after police questioned several relatives of others among the group of eight wanted activists, asking similar questions, throughout July and August.

The South China Morning Post also cited a source familiar with the case as saying that officers raided the Yuen Long home of Hui's in-laws and their son on Tuesday morning. Hui's father-in-law was seen leaving Castle Peak police station following the earlier release of his wife and son that day.

No arrests were made, according to the reports.

"The three were questioned by officers from the force’s National Security Department about whether they had contacted the former legislator and offered him any help, such as financial support," the Post said.

National security police will continue to investigate the Hong Kong-based contacts of the eight wanted activists and disrupt any help or funding for them, the Post quoted its source as saying.

Police issued arrest warrants and offered bounties for exiled former pro-democracy lawmakers Nathan Law, Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, U.S.-based activist and political lobbyist Anna Kwok and legal scholar Kevin Yam, offering bounties of HK$1 million (US$127,700) for information that might lead to an arrest. 

U.K-based activists Finn Lau and Mung Siu-tat and U.S.-based businessman Elmer Yuen are also on the wanted list.

Punished for posters

As Hui's relatives were being questioned, a Hong Kong court handed down a six-month jail term to Zeng Yuxuan, a doctoral student from mainland China found in possession of posters depicting the banned "Pillar of Shame" sculpture commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

Zeng had pleaded guilty to conspiring with U.S.-based democracy activist Zhou Fengsuo to "commit acts with seditious intent" ahead of the June 4 massacre anniversary. Zhou has said he bears full responsibility for creating the banners bearing the image that were found in Zeng's possession.

Meanwhile, authorities in Macau have issued a one-year ban to a street performer known for performing the banned 2019 protest anthem "Glory to Hong Kong."

Busker Oliver Ma, 24, was taken away by police from the ruins of St Paul's, a popular tourist destination in the former Portuguese-run city, on Sept. 3, and held for several hours.

"I was arrested without warning and detained by the Public Security Police Force for over 13 hours before I was kicked out," Ma wrote on his Facebook page. "I felt as if I was treated like less of a tourist, let alone a human, and more like some terrorist."

"I answered each and every single one of their questions, and it was not until it reached these questions when I finally knew why they were so hostile to me: 'Have you sung #GlorytoHongKong in Hong Kong? Were you planning to sing it all the way here? What does the song mean?'" Ma wrote in an account of his ordeal on his Facebook page.

"It was not until 3:00 the next day when I was told I was banned in Macau for a year and escorted through the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge," Ma said, adding: "For all of my past experiences being arbitrarily arrested and detained for busking, this one has got to be the most dehumanizing one yet."

Ma's family were also detained for nearly two hours and forced to sign forms, while his phone was scanned by police, who refused to let him call his lawyer or give him food during an overnight stay in custody, he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Simon Lee, Ng Ting Hong and Gigi Lee for RFA Cantonese.

The three individuals, which included his parents-in-law, were taken to Castle Peak and Yuen Long police stations for questioning "to help with the authorities' investigation," the Standard newspaper quoted sources as saying.

The move comes after police questioned several relatives of others among the group of eight wanted activists, asking similar questions, throughout July and August.

The South China Morning Post also cited a source familiar with the case as saying that officers raided the Yuen Long home of Hui's in-laws and their son on Tuesday morning. Hui's father-in-law was seen leaving Castle Peak police station following the earlier release of his wife and son that day.

No arrests were made, according to the reports.

"The three were questioned by officers from the force’s National Security Department about whether they had contacted the former legislator and offered him any help, such as financial support," the Post said.

National security police will continue to investigate the Hong Kong-based contacts of the eight wanted activists and disrupt any help or funding for them, the Post quoted its source as saying.

Police issued arrest warrants and offered bounties for exiled former pro-democracy lawmakers Nathan Law, Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, U.S.-based activist and political lobbyist Anna Kwok and legal scholar Kevin Yam, offering bounties of HK$1 million (US$127,700) for information that might lead to an arrest. 

U.K-based activists Finn Lau and Mung Siu-tat and U.S.-based businessman Elmer Yuen are also on the wanted list.

Punished for posters

As Hui's relatives were being questioned, a Hong Kong court handed down a six-month jail term to Zeng Yuxuan, a doctoral student from mainland China found in possession of posters depicting the banned "Pillar of Shame" sculpture commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

Zeng had pleaded guilty to conspiring with U.S.-based democracy activist Zhou Fengsuo to "commit acts with seditious intent" ahead of the June 4 massacre anniversary. Zhou has said he bears full responsibility for creating the banners bearing the image that were found in Zeng's possession.

Meanwhile, authorities in Macau have issued a one-year ban to a street performer known for performing the banned 2019 protest anthem "Glory to Hong Kong."

Busker Oliver Ma, 24, was taken away by police from the ruins of St Paul's, a popular tourist destination in the former Portuguese-run city, on Sept. 3, and held for several hours.

"I was arrested without warning and detained by the Public Security Police Force for over 13 hours before I was kicked out," Ma wrote on his Facebook page. "I felt as if I was treated like less of a tourist, let alone a human, and more like some terrorist."

"I answered each and every single one of their questions, and it was not until it reached these questions when I finally knew why they were so hostile to me: 'Have you sung #GlorytoHongKong in Hong Kong? Were you planning to sing it all the way here? What does the song mean?'" Ma wrote in an account of his ordeal on his Facebook page.

"It was not until 3:00 the next day when I was told I was banned in Macau for a year and escorted through the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge," Ma said, adding: "For all of my past experiences being arbitrarily arrested and detained for busking, this one has got to be the most dehumanizing one yet."

Ma's family were also detained for nearly two hours and forced to sign forms, while his phone was scanned by police, who refused to let him call his lawyer or give him food during an overnight stay in custody, he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Simon Lee, Ng Ting Hong and Gigi Lee for RFA Cantonese.

Image by Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Kaczynski's analysis of how the economy works was spot on and was also given short shrift, in part because of the stupid name, "Unabomber," that he has been tagged with. The word derives from the Unabomb Task Force, the group the FBI assembled to track down Kaczynski. "Unabomb" was short for "University and Airlines Bombings," which were the first targets of Kaczynski's mail bombs. Despite tons of physical evidence, the FBI completely failed at locating Kaczynski until they asked the major media to publish his manifesto. Kaczynski's brother recognized his sibling's handwork and gave the FBI directions to the cabin in the woods.

More

The post Inside the Mind of Ted Kaczynski appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by STEVE O’KEEFE.

The post Ted Kaczynski We Hardly Knew Ye appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

The post Ted Kaczynski, Technology and Trauma appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

A central theme of the experiments was examining the effects of stress, characterised by what Murray called “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks. Ideals and beliefs were assailed; egos pulverised. For Murray, this came naturally. He had cut his teeth designing psychological screening tests for the forerunner to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. It was perfect preparation for what came to be known as Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men.

Kaczynski was the less than grateful recipient of the higher end of the experiment. “I had been talked or pressured,” he told his attorney Michael Mello in August 1998, “into participating in the Murray study against my better judgment.” It is indisputable that he, along with other subjects, had been sufficiently deceived to be victims of a breach of experimental ethics known more commonly as the Nuremberg Code.

Drafted in the aftermath of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial of German concentration camp doctors, the code stressed the importance of informed consent. “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential,” declared the judges responsible for formulating the code. The subject should also be “so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress…”

Kaczynski can hardly be said to go on to better things, but they were certainly bigger. In terms of notoriety, his position in the technology obsessed undergrowth of the United States was assured by his murderous and maiming efforts. His favourite method: the package bomb, 16 of which were mailed to his intended victims. Three people died; 23 were injured.

A central tenet of Kaczynski’s thought was levelled at those complicit representatives of what he called the Industrial Society and its state manifestation. Far from being critical of power, its methods, and its wielding by bureaucrats and planners, its members were adjutants and prosecutors of a sinister agenda of behavioural control.

The profiles of the victims, actual and intended, constituted a true fruit salad, at times erratic and scattered: academics in engineering, psychology, genetics and computer science; the president of the California Forestry Association; a computer store owner; an advertising executive; American Airlines Flight 444 and the United Airlines President.

In its unifying theme, the manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, opens its barrels on the role of technology. “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences,” goes the grave opening, “have been a disaster for the human race.” While it had “greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries”, society had been destabilised, life made “unfulfilling”. Humans had been subjected to “indignities” and “widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well)”. The “natural world” had also suffered.

James Ley, reflecting on Kaczynski’s writing, finds his understanding of technology to be “the ultimate constraint on freedom, beyond any specific laws or political arrangements that might obtain.” The conservatives are deluded for conniving in the destruction of their own ideals in embracing technology; leftists merely pursue goals of improvement without dealing with the elephant in the room: the properties of technological enslavement.

In an area of surveillance capitalism, inexorable data mining, and Mark Zuckerberg, there is something haunting about this. The manifesto may not be the sprightliest work of originality, but the vision is contemporary and relevant. The technological society systematically oppresses; it cannot be regulated. With that monstrous genie out of the bottle, it can only be, according to Kaczynski, destroyed.

Kaczynski defied the authorities and the technological state he so despised, eluding capture for almost two decades. Being incapable of summoning the forces to destroy technology, he eschewed it, becoming a rustic version of the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the man who “ate civilization”, and in so doing ate his own wickedness.

He lived in a cabin near Lincoln, Montana, a place in every sense off the grid: no electricity, no television, no telephone. He moved about with a bicycle. He took an interest in regeneration in nature. He even foraged. This was his way of romancing the notion of the “pre-industrial city”, as he termed it, where the “19th century frontiersman” could create “change himself, by his own choice.” Change for the “modern man”, in contrast, was “imposed”.

Despite isolation, his pride proved too powerful, the need for recognition, consuming. His efforts to get the New York Times and Washington Post to publish his 35,000-word manifesto undid him. His brother David, and sister-in-law, on realising he was the author, identified him. The FBI, furnished by letters and documents provided by David, joined the dots, arresting Kaczynski on April 3, 1996.

The stage was set for the Unabomber to become a figure of medical interest. At trial, fearing that his brother would receive the death sentence, David, and the defence, opted for psychopathological grounds. Did the Murray experiments tip him over? The lawyers ran with the argument that the Harvard experience had provided the bricks and mortar of paranoid schizophrenia. Their client begged, with tenacious fury, to differ. His terrorism had been principled, rational, his Weltanschauung outlined in his manifesto. To suggest medical illness and disturbance was to give into the pathologizing agenda, something that would render him mad and therefore illegitimate as a thinker.

Far from being mad, the dystopia of Kaczynski’s industrial society has found solid roots. And the forces behind it, be they the myriad of social networks, data hungry platforms and the increasingly agitated discussion about Artificial Intelligence and its generative properties, implicates us all.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

A central theme of the experiments was examining the effects of stress, characterised by what Murray called “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks. Ideals and beliefs were assailed; egos pulverised. For Murray, this came naturally. He had cut his teeth designing psychological screening tests for the forerunner to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. It was perfect preparation for what came to be known as Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men.

Kaczynski was the less than grateful recipient of the higher end of the experiment. “I had been talked or pressured,” he told his attorney Michael Mello in August 1998, “into participating in the Murray study against my better judgment.” It is indisputable that he, along with other subjects, had been sufficiently deceived to be victims of a breach of experimental ethics known more commonly as the Nuremberg Code.

Drafted in the aftermath of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial of German concentration camp doctors, the code stressed the importance of informed consent. “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential,” declared the judges responsible for formulating the code. The subject should also be “so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress…”

Kaczynski can hardly be said to go on to better things, but they were certainly bigger. In terms of notoriety, his position in the technology obsessed undergrowth of the United States was assured by his murderous and maiming efforts. His favourite method: the package bomb, 16 of which were mailed to his intended victims. Three people died; 23 were injured.

A central tenet of Kaczynski’s thought was levelled at those complicit representatives of what he called the Industrial Society and its state manifestation. Far from being critical of power, its methods, and its wielding by bureaucrats and planners, its members were adjutants and prosecutors of a sinister agenda of behavioural control.

The profiles of the victims, actual and intended, constituted a true fruit salad, at times erratic and scattered: academics in engineering, psychology, genetics and computer science; the president of the California Forestry Association; a computer store owner; an advertising executive; American Airlines Flight 444 and the United Airlines President.

In its unifying theme, the manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, opens its barrels on the role of technology. “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences,” goes the grave opening, “have been a disaster for the human race.” While it had “greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries”, society had been destabilised, life made “unfulfilling”. Humans had been subjected to “indignities” and “widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well)”. The “natural world” had also suffered.

James Ley, reflecting on Kaczynski’s writing, finds his understanding of technology to be “the ultimate constraint on freedom, beyond any specific laws or political arrangements that might obtain.” The conservatives are deluded for conniving in the destruction of their own ideals in embracing technology; leftists merely pursue goals of improvement without dealing with the elephant in the room: the properties of technological enslavement.

In an area of surveillance capitalism, inexorable data mining, and Mark Zuckerberg, there is something haunting about this. The manifesto may not be the sprightliest work of originality, but the vision is contemporary and relevant. The technological society systematically oppresses; it cannot be regulated. With that monstrous genie out of the bottle, it can only be, according to Kaczynski, destroyed.

Kaczynski defied the authorities and the technological state he so despised, eluding capture for almost two decades. Being incapable of summoning the forces to destroy technology, he eschewed it, becoming a rustic version of the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the man who “ate civilization”, and in so doing ate his own wickedness.

He lived in a cabin near Lincoln, Montana, a place in every sense off the grid: no electricity, no television, no telephone. He moved about with a bicycle. He took an interest in regeneration in nature. He even foraged. This was his way of romancing the notion of the “pre-industrial city”, as he termed it, where the “19th century frontiersman” could create “change himself, by his own choice.” Change for the “modern man”, in contrast, was “imposed”.

Despite isolation, his pride proved too powerful, the need for recognition, consuming. His efforts to get the New York Times and Washington Post to publish his 35,000-word manifesto undid him. His brother David, and sister-in-law, on realising he was the author, identified him. The FBI, furnished by letters and documents provided by David, joined the dots, arresting Kaczynski on April 3, 1996.

The stage was set for the Unabomber to become a figure of medical interest. At trial, fearing that his brother would receive the death sentence, David, and the defence, opted for psychopathological grounds. Did the Murray experiments tip him over? The lawyers ran with the argument that the Harvard experience had provided the bricks and mortar of paranoid schizophrenia. Their client begged, with tenacious fury, to differ. His terrorism had been principled, rational, his Weltanschauung outlined in his manifesto. To suggest medical illness and disturbance was to give into the pathologizing agenda, something that would render him mad and therefore illegitimate as a thinker.

Far from being mad, the dystopia of Kaczynski’s industrial society has found solid roots. And the forces behind it, be they the myriad of social networks, data hungry platforms and the increasingly agitated discussion about Artificial Intelligence and its generative properties, implicates us all.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Kaczynski’s cabin, photographed in 1996. Federal Bureau of Investigation – Public Domain

Of all the public figures I profile in this book, Ted Kaczynski’s story is, for me, the most tragic—tragic, of course, for his murder victims; tragically traumatizing for his injury victims and near-miss victims; tragic for the position that he put his family members in; tragic for enabling authoritarians to marginalize causes that many nonviolent anti-authoritarians care about; and tragic for him.

Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski’s bombs killed three people and injured 23 others. While some of his victims had positions of power in his hated “industrial society,” others did not (for example, a murdered computer store owner and an injured secretary and graduate student). And in an early failed attempt to blow up an airplane by placing a bomb in its cargo hold, anti-authoritarians who held his same views could well have been killed if the bomb had worked.

Ted Kaczynski placed his own family, especially his brother David, in a nightmarishly tragic position. Once David read what came to be called the “Unabomber Manifesto” (Industrial Society and Its Future), David realized that it was Ted’s work, and David had to decide between informing on his brother or complicity in further deaths. So David reported his brother to authorities. Once Ted Kaczynski was brought to trial, in order to save him from the death penalty, David and their mother Wanda helped portray Ted as being seriously mentally ill, which enraged Ted against them; as he knew that his political reasons for the bombings would now not be taken seriously.

Ted Kaczynski’s biographer Alston Chase reported that much of what the world heard about Kaczynski’s mental status was not true. Chase documents how Kaczynski was psychopathologized for two reasons: the concerns of his family, who wanted to spare him the death penalty; and to meet the needs of societal authorities who wanted to dismiss his societal critiques. Chase came to discover that “Kaczynski is neither the extreme loner he has been made out to be nor in any clinical sense mentally ill.”

Intelligence testing conducted on Ted in the fifth grade determined that he had a “genius” 167 IQ. As a result, he skipped the sixth grade, which made it difficult for him to socialize. Chase reported, “He would never be accepted by his new classmates, who were at least a year older. The bigger boys bullied and teased him.” But it is a myth that he was a complete social outcast. Robert McFadden reported in 1996 in the New York Times that in high school, Ted’s fellow math club member and his closest friend, Russell Mosny, played chess with him, and they talked about equations and physics in Ted’s attic bedroom. Mosny recalled, “He was just quiet and shy until you got to know him. Once he knew you, he could talk and talk.” Ted was accepted at Harvard, and at age 16 he began his freshman year.

Early on at Harvard, Kaczynski joined the Harvard band, played pickup basketball, and made a few friends. His housemate Gerald Burns recalled hanging out with Kaczynski at an all-night cafeteria and arguing about the philosophy of Kant. The Harvard health-services doctor who interviewed Kaczynski, as required for all freshmen, observed: “Good impression created. Attractive, mature for age, relaxed. . . . Talks easily, fluently and pleasantly . . . likes people and gets on well with them. . . . Exceedingly stable, well integrated and feels secure within himself.”

However, in Kaczynski’s sophomore year at Harvard, he fell victim to a disturbingly abusive experiment by one of the most renowned figures in the history of U.S. psychology, Henry Murray. Experimental subjects were told they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student; but instead, they were subjected to abusive personal attacks that were purposely brutalizing. Kaczynski and other subjects were instructed to write an essay detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations, and the essay was given to an attorney who would belittle them based on the disclosures they had made. This humiliation was filmed, and played back to the subjects. Thus, Kaczynski had personal reasons for rage and for distrust of the elites who managed society.

Kaczynski began his 1995 manifesto this way: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” He then discussed how the increasing growth and worship of technological and industrial systems have subverted individual freedom and destroyed our natural environment. The manifesto is approximately 35,000 words and covers many extraneous areas, and with respect to the tyranny of giant industrial-technological systems, for readers familiar with public intellectuals Kirkpatrick Sale and John Zerzan, Kaczynski’s work may be simplistic, unoriginal, and unenjoyable to read but not insane.

However, politics—not science—dictated that Ted Kaczynski be labeled insane. Against Kaczynski’s wishes, his defense attorneys launched a “mental illness” defense for him. Defense expert psychologist Karen Bronk Froming concluded that Kaczynski exhibited a “predisposition to schizophrenia,” citing his anti-technology views as having cemented her conclusion. Sally Johnson, a forensic psychiatrist with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, provisionally diagnosed Kaczynski with “Paranoid Type” schizophrenia, largely based on her view that he harbored “delusional beliefs” about the threats posed by technology.

In addition to Kaczynski’s views on technology, other so-called “evidence” for his mental illness included his personal habits and unkempt appearance living alone in a cabin in Montana. But as Chase—a former Harvard student, former professor, and Montana resident—points out, “His cabin was no messier than the offices of many college professors. The Montana wilds are filled with escapists like Kaczynski (and me). Celibacy and misanthropy are not diseases. Nor was Kaczynski really so much of a recluse.”

In the end, Kaczynski’s violent behaviors gave authoritarians ammunition to not only marginalize him as mentally ill, but to discredit as “Kaczynski-like” other critics of the authoritarian use of technology.

This  profile of Ted Kaczynski is excerpted from Resisting Illegitimate Authority (AK Press, 2018) from the chapter “Violent Anti-Authoritarians.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bruce E. Levine.

Most of the cuts will slash the domestic programs that protect the health, safety and economic well-being of the American people. Cuts will also be made to the starved I.R.S. budget, further weakening its capacity to pursue super-rich tax cheats and giant corporate tax escapees. The GOP insisted on continuing its aiding and abetting of grand-scale tax evasion that fuels bigger deficits.

Biden also agreed not to restore any of Trump’s tax cuts on these same plutocrats and corporatists who refuse to pay for the undeclared wars of Empire from which they massively profit.

Welcome to America – Land of the Free, Home of the Brave sleepwalking its way through Sucker Land. It gets worse, People. Not only did the Pentagon, and indirectly the giant munitions corporations like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and General Dynamics get exempted, they were told by both the GOP and the Democrats to get ready, in the coming years, to receive additional tens of billions of dollars that the Generals and Biden didn’t even ask for. Biden wants to increase last year’s Pentagon budget by $48 billion, and the blank-check solons on Capitol Hill are inclined to match him. Except for a few dozen progressives, the support for this Niagara of dollars is bipartisan even though the Pentagon budget is and has been unauditable.

Yet, since 1992, the Department of “Offense” has been violating the federal law that requires DOD to submit an auditable budget to Congress every year. Every Secretary of Defense has admitted this noncompliance and promised to correct it. Yet year after year the violation of law continues. No one can fathom the waste, redundance and gigantic cost overruns by the coddled big business military contractors with their government-guaranteed arrangements. Without Congressional investigatory hearings, without instructing the Congressional watchdog GAO (Government Accountability Office) to do its neglected, underfunded specialized auditing, and without giving voice to budget experts like William Hartung or knowledgeable military professionals like retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, the Pentagon has gone unchecked. The two-Party duopoly has turned Congress into a giant shovel of unaudited money for the military to secure misguided bragging rights for your Representatives and Senators back home about being “strong on defense” rather than watchdogs over your tax dollars.

Meanwhile, back home, schools crumble, existing public transit is dangerously antiquated and in need of repair, as are bridges, roads, clinics, ports, airports, public drinking water systems and waste management facilities. Care for the public lands and national parks suffers massively due to deferred maintenance. Funding to deal with land erosion, toxic water and air pollution is in short supply.

The failure of Congress to provide support for desperately needed programs such as Head Start and other programs to reduce child hunger, homelessness and poverty involving 80 million people, either without health insurance or under-insured, is beyond shameful. Why is the United States, the richest nation on the planet, providing less to its citizens than Western European countries and Canada? Answer: The runaway power of Big Business over public budgets!

Moreover, we are woefully unprepared for the coming pandemics, as we were for COVID-19, and for worsening natural disasters of climate violence perpetuated by the giant fossil fuel companies (e.g. Chevron and Exxon Mobile) that control Congress.

But hey, our war machine can remotely vaporize a cluster of young men idly standing on a dusty road in Yemen with a drone operator pushing buttons in Virginia and Nevada. Over a trillion and a half dollars will be spent on upgrading our nuclear bombs with the same amount being wasted on strategically useless F-35 fighter planes.

And remember citizens, when the government talks war, organizes for war, has military bases in a hundred countries and provokes belligerence, wars are likely to happen.

Not even the money spent on one F-35 is being devoted to waging peace, initiating ceasefire negotiations and launching efforts for international arms control treaties as occurred under former presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

There is no Department of Peace, and the State Department is more bellicose than the Pentagon in its war of words. We’ve been waiting for Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) who has yet to put a bill in the hopper to create such a department – a purported priority of his since long before his election to Congress.

One can hope that the Pentagon Brass – the generals and admirals, some of whom anticipate retiring to become consultants to, or executives of, the corporate weapons industry, would teach the rampaging Congressional Yahoos a lesson in patriotic restraint. Congress must learn to say “no thanks” to more money than requested and use those funds to help save hundreds of thousands of lives in America lost every year to toxic pollution, preventable negligence in hospitals, the opioid epidemic, tobacco, alcohol, occupational hazards and more.

Absent that prospect, the dozens of small citizen peace advocacy groups and organizations such as Veterans for Peace should establish a national “Rein in and Audit the Military Budget and Save American Lives Day” to spark a nationwide grassroots mobilization focused on Congressional offices on Capitol Hill and in the states. There is no time to waste!

Fill the reception rooms of Members of Congress with citizens for peace and justice for a change. Let our elected officials start hearing the rumble from an aroused people conveying irresistible arguments backed by irrefutable evidence. Tell them to stop the arms race and pursue arms control treaties before autonomous weapons of mass destruction and miscalculations lead to World War III – the final world war.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

Americans for Tax Fairness on Monday released the group's latest report on "the threat posed to American democracy by billionaire political spenders," revealing that last year their collective congressional campaign contributions topped $1 billion for the first time.

"That 'Billionaires' Billion' was almost three-quarters more than the tycoons' total spending on the last midterms, in 2018, and 300 times more than what billionaires spent on congressional races as recently as a dozen years ago," states the ATF report.

"The Billionaires' Billion—contributed by fewer than 500 individuals—represented about one of every nine dollars raised from all sources in the 2022 elections," the analysis continues, noting that 15 of the nation's richest households were responsible for $658 million, or nearly two-thirds, of the contributions.

"Nearly 80% of billionaire cash—$782 million—went to outside campaign groups," the document adds, and in eight key races that decided which party controlled the Senate, "billionaire donations supported Republican candidates over Democratic ones by almost a 5-1 margin."

Democrats initially secured a slim majority in the Senate—including the two Independents who caucus with the party—after Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) won a runoff against GOP challenger Herschel Walker in December, but that victory was quickly tempered when Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona became an Independent just days later.

Although Republicans lost five of the eight key Senate races, the ATF report explains, billionaire spending not only encouraged candidates to focus on positions favored by their wealthy benefactors, but also, in North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin—won by GOP Sens. Ted Budd, J.D. Vance, and Ron Johnson, respectively—the superrich overwhelmingly backed the party and "Republican billionaires outspent the much smaller pool of Democratic billionaires by at least 9-to-1 in each race."

The GOP did seize control of the House of Representatives in last year's midterms—enabling their efforts to quash recent legislative victories and priorities of congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden, including the ongoing battle over whether to raise the debt ceiling to avert the first-ever U.S. default, which economists warn would be catastrophic for the global economy.

The current makeup of Congress makes it exceptionally difficult to pass any legislation—including campaign finance reforms that critics of billionaires' influence on the U.S. political system have increasingly demanded since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which loosened restrictions on political spending.

"Billionaires spending a billion dollars on a shopping spree for democracy should wake us all up to the threat posed by nearly unlimited wealth applied without limits to our elections," ATF executive director David Kass declared Monday. "There are well-known solutions to the problem, including overturning Citizens United and effectively taxing the biggest sources of billionaire wealth, which now often go lightly taxed if at all."

"Those tax reforms include taxing wealth like work by equalizing the top tax rate on investment and wage income, and closing the stepped-up basis loophole that allows investment gains to go untaxed forever," Kass added. "All that's needed is for Congress to heed the call of the American people to unrig a corrupt system."

In March, Biden unveiled a budget blueprint—which included various tax reforms—that then-ATF executive director Frank Clemente said "plainly shows whose side he's on: working families struggling with the high cost of healthcare, childcare, housing and more—not the wealthy elite and their big corporations rolling in dough and dodging their fair share of taxes."

However, the GOP continues to make clear that the party only plans to serve the rich with tax breaks, not force them to pay more. Citing three unnamed sources, The Washington Postreported Monday that "the White House recently gave Republican congressional leadership a list of proposals to reduce the deficit by closing tax loopholes during the ongoing negotiations over the federal budget and the debt ceiling. But Republican negotiators rejected every item."

"On a phone call last week, senior White House officials floated about a dozen tax plans to reduce the deficit as part of a broader budget agreement with House Republicans, including a measure aimed at cryptocurrency transactions and another for large real estate investors," according to the Post. "They were all swiftly rejected by the GOP aides on the call."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

The U.S. Senate is set to vote Tuesday afternoon on a Republican amendment that would explicitly authorize the president to take military action against Iranian forces.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the amendment's author, is looking to attach the measure to a resolution that—if passed—would repeal the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force in Iraq.

The amendment's text contends that Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution "empowers the president to use force against forces of Iran, a state responsible for conducting and directing attacks against United States forces in the Middle East and to take actions for the purpose of ending Iran's escalation of attacks on, and threats to, United States interests."

Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the Crisis Group's U.S. program, called the Cruz amendment "pernicious" and warned that it would "have Congress endorse broad Article II authority for POTUS to use force against Iran, [without] even a caveat about actions amounting to 'war' in the constitutional sense."

The amendment's prospects for passage are unclear, but the Senate is chock-full of Iran hawks—including some on the Democratic side. The amendment needs 60 votes to pass.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) issued a statement on Tuesday voicing opposition to "sunsetting any military force authorizations in the Middle East."

"Our terrorist enemies aren't sunsetting their war against us," McConnell said. "Tehran wants to push us out of Iraq and Syria. Why should Congress make that easier?"

Cruz has introduced virtually identical amendments in the recent past. In 2021, the Texas Republican unsuccessfully pushed an amendment that would have empowered the president to "use force against forces of Iran."

Ryan Costello, policy director of the National Iranian American Council, warned at the time that the Cruz amendment would "pre-authorize war with Iran."

The vote on Cruz's new amendment will come just days after President Joe Biden authorized—without congressional approval—airstrikes targeting groups in Syria that the Pentagon said were "affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps," heightening concerns over what's become a dangerous proxy war.

Following the airstrikes, which were launched in response to an attack in northeast Syria that killed an American contractor, Biden said that "the United States does not, does not, I emphasize, seek conflict with Iran."

"But be prepared for us to act forcefully to protect our people," the president added.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

The sooner the war in Ukraine is over, the sooner the U.S. and Russia can get down to the business of preserving arms control as a viable part of the relationship between the two nations.

By seeking to extend the Ukraine conflict, however, the U.S. is in effect engaging in an act of self-immolation that threatens to engulf the world in a nuclear holocaust.

— former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter

It is an imperative, and it must be a universal principle of all morally conscious people that war is anathema and militaries should be abolished everywhere, at least on the national level. (I leave open space for the establishment and maintenance of a genuinely international military force under a nonaligned international command to uphold the disarmament and abolishment of national and extranational militaries.)

In the article, “On the Left and Violence in Syria: The imperialist Violence in Syria, Part 7,” B.J. Sabri and I discussed violence in the context of mortal struggle between or inside nation states and the need to consider the factors that generated it. It is a given that every decent person in the world should decry the killing of kids, women, elderly, and civilians of all ages anywhere, and this includes men; there is no debate on this point. However, our rage, analysis, and criticism should be directed primarily and even exclusively on all those governments whose involvement in imperialism, warring, and killing that create death, destruction, and tragedies.

However, the root causes of warring must be addressed, and not all warring must be considered as equivalent. Morality and principles must guide us in how we address warring.

Earlier, I argued: “As a principle, resistance to oppression must be an inalienable right no matter what the type of resistance it may be. Blame for any violent resistance must never be laid on the oppressed but rather on the oppressor because oppression in itself is violent and when one suffers violence then violent resistance becomes justified as self-defense.”

Numerous anti-imperialist writers from around the world are antiwar. Yet, not all clearly distinguish between the initiator of the violence, resistance to the initial violence, and machinations that corner a rival country which then fights it way out from the corner.

Ted Glick, antiwar activist and author of Burglar for Peace, wrote on 24 February,

The Ukraine/Russia war continues to be, at root, a battle for national self-determination by Ukraine against an imperialist power, Russia. Disturbingly, there continue to be leftist groups and individuals in the US who deny this fact.

I demurred with his contention that it was “a battle for national self-determination by Ukraine against an imperialist power, Russia,” so I asked Ted Glick,

How do you define NATO’s massive eastward encroachment to Russia’s border? Yet, you define Russia as an imperialist for defending its security after its proposal of a mutual security agreement was rejected by US-NATO-Ukraine. It sure seems to me that Russia asked for a win-win from all parties, and that the blame lies on those who rejected security for all.

Glick replied,

An invasion by 125,000 troops into a neighboring country isn’t ‘defending its security,’ it is imperialist aggression.

Peace advocate Jan Oberg, co-founder of the The Transnational Foundation (a think tank dedicated to bringing about “peace by peaceful means”), wrote in an email missive on 8 April 2022:

It’s time to say it clear and loud: Russia is responsible for its illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine. The West is responsible for its military, economic and political reaction to it and for NATO’s expansion before it. And Ukraine’s leaders are responsible for how they operated 2014-2022.

And it is every social science intellectual’s duty to do comparative studies – to compare also this war with other wars over the last 30 years, the far majority of which conducted illegally and immorally by the US and NATO allies – and with many times worse consequences than the war on Ukraine has so far had.

I asked Jan Oberg,

My reading from the above is that Russia acted without provocation. So provocation (unless you reject that) based on a rejection of mutual security and knowing full well what US imperialism has wreaked over the years up to today only makes the West responsible for their reaction to Russia’s invasion? This strikes me as the onus being placed on Russia. Others argue that the SMO was legal (e.g., Scott Ritter). Immoral. Yes, killing in isolation is immoral, but killing in self-defense is not immoral. Allowing a serious threat to the lives and livelihoods of the Russian people to continue to encroach closer with an agenda to carve up Russia and siphon off its resources would be a dereliction of a government’s duty, no?

Oberg replied,

No, the invasion was by no means unprovoked – I would never use that stupid NATO phrase/lie.

In terms of a bit of philosophy, each of us are responsible for how we choose to react to a provocation – and other acts.  There is no automaticity that legitimates violent actions – I am too much of a Gandhian to believe in that. And that what I said here, today a year ago:

https://transnational.live/2022/02/25/there-were-alternatives-why-russia-should-not-have-bombed-ukraine/

Secondly, all my arguments are written up here – but I admit it is a long one:

https://transnational.live/2022/08/18/the-tff-abolish-nato-catalogue/

It’s one long argument that NATO has made the mother of all blunders – in trying to getting Ukraine into NATO and NATO into Ukraine. A series of scholars – including I myself – warned that war would be the outcome. Nobody listened to us – not even to (now CIA’s) William Burns (see my latest article) and also not to any Russian leader for 30 years.

Even so, I would argue, the invasion was not acceptable – although understandable/explainable.

David Swanson of War Is A Crime.org, has been an unrelenting opponent of war — a principled sentiment. What sane and morally guided person doesn’t share this sentiment? Although opposition to warmaking is a unifying factor of antiwar types, there is room for dissent as to what constitutes warmaking and the legitimacy of different forms of warring. For instance, Swanson lumps together warmaking and the warring of a resistance, such that he criticizes all violence, even that in self-defense, as reprehensible. Not only is such lumping flawed but it is arguably a barrier to attaining a world in which there is no more war. If one fails to unequivocally differentiate between offensive violence (what I would define as “warmaking,” although an equally apt term may be “aggression.”) and the violence of self-defense or joint defense of an ally under attack (which is not “warmaking” – except in an Orwellian sense – but is more aptly defined as “resistance.”) George Orwell was scathing in his rejection of pacifism: “Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other.”¹

In response to a 3 September 2019 article, “Nonviolence Denial Is As Dangerous As Climate Denial” by Swanson, I interviewed him to discern how he could seemingly equate all actors in a war notwithstanding why the warring started and why the warring actors where engaged. I find some of his statements factually inaccurate, logically and ethically flawed, and evasive.

For example, Swanson cited, by way of Stephen Zunes, “Mariupol became the largest city to be liberated from control by Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine…” This is propaganda for NATO. Another writer would have noted that the US engineered a coup in Ukraine to overthrow the elected government using neo-Nazis, to which a resistance arose in the east of Ukraine.

In a similar vein to Oberg, Swanson presents as a successful passive resistance the Gandhian example in India. Of this, George Orwell wrote, “As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government.”¹ Those people who were subservient to British empire in the Indian subcontinent could be considered accomplices in a genocide that has been calculated to number 100 million.

As for the problem with pacifism, to get at the core of the matter, I present a scenario from which readers can draw their own conclusions.

Imagine that a person unfamiliar to you suddenly punches you in the face. You recoil from the blow and massage your sore jaw. Somehow you stifle any physical retaliation. Instead you try to understand why this stranger would assault you. He replies, “Just because I don’t like your face.”

He comes at you again with his fist, and it lands in your solar plexus. You are bent over and winded by the blow. Then he kicks you in the side. At this point you fully understand that the attacker is going to continue to inflict physical violence against you.

Two questions for readers to ponder:

1) Seeing no other options, if you defend yourself physically, are you blameworthy for any part of the violence?

2) Are you then a “violence-maker” along with the attacker who threw the first punches without any legitimate justification?

While non-violent resistance sounds righteous. I submit that a violent attacker prefers nothing better than to target a passive “resistor”? What good is being self-righteous when you are hospitalized or dead, leaving behind your family and friends to fend for themselves and their potentially becoming the next targets for violence? I side with the logic proffered by the anti-racist revolutionary Malcolm X:

I myself would go for nonviolence if it was consistent, if everybody was going to be nonviolent all the time. I’d say, okay, let’s get with it, we’ll all be nonviolent. But I don’t go along with any kind of nonviolence unless everybody’s going to be nonviolent…. But as long as you’ve got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don’t want anybody coming to me talking any nonviolent talk.²

Readers ought to reach their own conclusions and consider the above scenario while reading the following interview with Swanson.

*****

Kim Petersen: I am thoroughly antiwar, and I’d like to see every nation disarm. However, I grant the victims of attack the right to defend against and resist attacks. This does not come through to me in your latest piece. So I pose the following questions.

David Swanson: Because I disagree with it.

KP: You wrote: “I severely criticized my fellow peace activists when some of them cheered for Russian bombings in Syria. I even went after Russia for its warmaking in Syria repeatedly on Russian television.”

I agree that warmaking is a heinous crime. And as I understand it, you condemn all warring. Nonetheless, for warring to occur there has to be a starting point and, I submit that a war does not usually start simultaneously between/among combatants. Therefore, I ask if a party makes war against your country, how should you respond? Would you not defend your country?

DS: Usually this is asked as “Do the Iraqis get to fight back?” since it’s the U.S. doing most of the aggression. The short answer to that question is that if the aggressor would have refrained, no defense would have been needed. Turning resistance to U.S. wars around into justification for further U.S. military spending is common on this topic, yet too twisted even for a K Street lobbyist.

The slightly longer answer is that it’s generally not the proper role for someone born and living in the United States to advise people living under U.S. bombs that they should experiment with nonviolent resistance.

But the right answer is a bit more difficult than either of those. It’s an answer that becomes clearer if we look at both foreign invasions and revolutions/civil wars. There are more of the latter to look at, and there are more strong examples to point to. But the purpose of theory, including Anti-Just-War theory, should be to help generate more real-world examples of superior outcomes, such as in the use of nonviolence against foreign invasions.

Studies like Erica Chenoweth’s have established that nonviolent resistance to tyranny is far more likely to succeed, and the success far more likely to be lasting, than with violent resistance.³ So if we look at something like the nonviolent revolution in Tunisia in 2011, we might find that it meets as many criteria as any other situation for a Just War, except that it wasn’t a war at all. One wouldn’t go back in time and argue for a strategy less likely to succeed but likely to cause a lot more pain and death. Perhaps doing so might constitute a Just War argument. Perhaps a Just War argument could even be made, anachronistically, for a 2011 U.S. “intervention” to bring democracy to Tunisia (apart from the United States’ obvious inability to do such a thing, and the guaranteed catastrophe that would have resulted). But once you’ve done a revolution without all the killing and dying, it can no longer makes sense to propose all the killing and dying — not if a thousand new Geneva Conventions were created, and no matter the imperfections of the nonviolent success.

Despite the relative scarcity of examples thus far of nonviolent resistance to foreign occupation, there are those already beginning to claim a pattern of success. Here’s Stephen Zunes:

“Nonviolent resistance has also successfully challenged foreign military occupation. During the first Palestinian intifada in the 1980s, much of the subjugated population effectively became self-governing entities through massive noncooperation and the creation of alternative institutions, forcing Israel to allow for the creation of the Palestine Authority and self-governance for most of the urban areas of the West Bank. Nonviolent resistance in the occupied Western Sahara has forced Morocco to offer an autonomy proposal which — while still falling well short of Morocco’s obligation to grant the Sahrawis their right of self-determination — at least acknowledges that the territory is not simply another part of Morocco.

“In the final years of German occupation of Denmark and Norway during WWII, the Nazis effectively no longer controlled the population. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia freed themselves from Soviet occupation through nonviolent resistance prior to the USSR’s collapse. In Lebanon, a nation ravaged by war for decades, thirty years of Syrian domination was ended through a large-scale, nonviolent uprising in 2005. And last year, Mariupol became the largest city to be liberated from control by Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine, not by bombings and artillery strikes by the Ukrainian military, but when thousands of unarmed steelworkers marched peacefully into occupied sections of its downtown area and drove out the armed separatists.”⁴

One might look for potential in numerous examples of resistance to the Nazis, and in German resistance to the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923, or perhaps in the one-time success of the Philippines and the ongoing success of Ecuador in evicting U.S. military bases, plus of course the Gandhian example from India. But the far more numerous examples of nonviolent success over domestic tyranny also provide a guide toward future action.

To be morally right, nonviolent resistance to an actual attack need not appear more likely to succeed than violent. It only need appear somewhat close to as likely. Because if it succeeds it will do so with less harm, and its success will be more likely to last.

KP: And if you and your allies engage in defense, does that mean that you are a “warmaker”?

DS: That would depend on whether your defense uses war.

KP: Sorry, I should have elaborated. If you use the physical violence characteristic of warring to defend against a war launched against you, does that make you a “warmaker”?

DS: Yes, if you wage war you wage war.

which does not mean Hitler = Roosevelt = Castro

it just means if you wage war you wage war

KP: In the case of Syria, the legitimate government (meaning that it governs the country and is recognized as the government by other countries) found itself under physical attack, (and for the sake of argument whether we agree or not on this point) is that government not allowed to defend itself from physical threat?

DS: The simple answer of yes or no in a particular circumstance as well as the answer to “How much mass slaughter is acceptably characterized as defense”? is not empirically answerable by a scientist or a lawyer and, as you know, is answered by the U.S. and allied nations as they see fit. What I would consider a moral answer is of course a completely different one.

KP: You wrote: “If the United States and Russia escalate a joint bombing campaign in Syria, things will go from very bad to even worse for those not killed in the process.”

With all due respect, this comes across as an assertion; one could equally assert the opposite: if fanatical “insurgents,” “rebels,” “mercenaries,” etc. (whatever monikers one wishes to attach to the forces seeking to depose the government) are allowed to attack without resistance and depose the government then the situation will surely become a hell, and the evidence for this is the smoldering carcass of the formerly leading African nation of Libya.

DS: It’s not an assertion. It’s a guarantee. But it’s not exclusive of your worry, as the U.S. is not setting aside overthrowing the government and throwing the region into chaos and likely putting ISIS in power. Clinton says Obama was wrong not to bomb and overthrow the government three years ago, and she intends to do so.

KP: You wrote: “Of course the U.S. went ahead with arming and training and bombing on a much smaller scale. Of course Russia joined in, killing even more Syrians with its bombs than the United States was doing, and it was indeed deeply disturbing to see U.S. peace activists cheer for that. Of course the Syrian government went on with its bombings and other crimes, and of course it’s disturbing that some refuse to criticize those horrors, just as it’s disturbing that others refuse to criticize the U.S. or Russian horrors or both, or refuse to criticize Saudi Arabia or Turkey or Iran or Israel.”

By trying to come across as evenhanded in your criticism, I submit a bias arises. Do you agree or disagree that if Saudi-, Qatari-, western-backed “rebels” had not launched/supported an attempted coup that there would have been no need for the Syrian government to defend the country (and, of course, the government) and there would have been no need to ask Russia to intervene or Iran or Hezbollah?

DS: The Syrian government cracked down on a mostly Syrian opposition before it became such a proxy war — which excuses the ongoing mass murder by absolutely nobody. [This narrative by Swanson has been compellingly refuted by independent journalist Eva Bartlett who has often been on the ground in Syria during the fighting.⁵ ]

KP: If my contention is factual, then why focus equal blame on the resistance to the “rebels”? The rebels made war, and this gave rise to resist the “rebels.”

DS: Blaming everyone engaged in making a situation worse does not mean blaming them all equally, and I have certainly never tried to imply such a thing which would of course be ridiculous.

Part 4: Ending war for once and all.

1. George Orwell, “Pacifism and the War.”
2. Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Grove Press, 1965): 138.
3. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2012).
4. Stephen Zunes, “Alternatives to War from the Bottom Up.”
5. From Eva Bartlett, “Deconstructing the NATO Narrative on Syria,” Dissident Voice, 10 October 2015:

   Yet, it is known that from the beginning, in Dara’a and throughout Syria, armed protesters were firing upon, and butchering, security forces and civilians. Tim Anderson’s “Syria: how the violence began, in Daraa” pointed out that police were killed by snipers in the March 17/18 protests; the Syrian army was only brought to Dara’a following the murder of the policemen. Additionally, a storage of protesters’ weapons was found in Dara’a’s al-Omari mosque.

   Prem Shankar Jha’s, “Who Fired The First Shot?” described the slaughter of 20 Syrian soldiers outside Dara’a a month later, “by cutting their throats, and cutting off the head of one of the soldiers.” A very “moderate”-rebel practice.

   In “Syria: The Hidden Massacre” Sharmine Narwani investigated the early massacres of Syrian soldiers, noting that many of the murders occurred even after the Syrian government had abolished the state security courts, lifted the state of emergency, granted general amnesties, and recognized the right to peaceful protest.

   The April 10, 2011 murder of Banyas farmer Nidal Janoud was one of the first horrific murders of Syrian civilians by so-called “unarmed protesters.” Face gashed open, mutilated and bleeding, Janoud was paraded by an armed mob, who then hacked him to death.

   Father Frans Van der Ludt—the Dutch priest living in Syria for nearly 5 decades prior to his April 7, 2014 assassination by militants occupying the old city of Homs—wrote (repeatedly) of the “armed demonstrators” he saw in early protests, “who began to shoot at the police first.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Canada, Nunavut Territory, Repulse Bay, Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) stands on melting sea ice at sunset near Harbour Islands

For starters, several aspects of global warming are at all-time highs, for example, coal use is at an all-time high and not surprisingly all three of the major greenhouse gases CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O hit record highs in 2022. According to the Global Carbon Project: Carbon emissions from fossil fuels hit a new record of 37.5B tons. Topping off these all-time records, the International Energy Agency expects fossil fuel emissions to possibly peak in 2025 but remain at a “high plateau at a high level” for a decade or more with no significant decline expected in the foreseeable future. Good luck with Net Zero.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessments: “There is no longer a credible path to holding warming below 1.5°C without massive immediate cooling interventions, which are not on any policymaking agendas.” Moreover, the experts quoted in the Code Red study believe anything less than 1.5°C is already out of reach.

Not only is the 1.5°C target unachievable, but it’s unachievable regardless of almost any foreseeable mitigation efforts. This fact is also emphasized by the UK publication The Economist, which discussed the lag effect of greenhouse gases, to wit: “But greenhouse-gas emissions do not cause an instantaneous rise in global temperatures, and neither does cutting them result in instantaneous cooling. Instead, it will take decades for today’s policy efforts to result in measurable impacts on global temperature.” (Source: “Emissions Slashed Today Won’t Slow Warming Until Mid-Century,” Economist, July 11, 2022)

The Economist article dovetails with the opinion of James Hansen, Earth Institute, Columbia University, who is one of the planet’s leading authorities on global warming: “Global warming of at least 2°C is now baked into Earth’s future.”

Code Red goes on to remind people that, according to paleoclimate evidence, the last time CO₂ levels were similar to today’s with temperatures at 1.2°C and up to 3°C sea levels fluctuated by 20-40 meters, or equivalent to 65-130 feet. Of course, this is a frightening number that readers prefer to gloss over, or forget, but so sorry, it’s factual, it happened and could happen again. Although numbers of 65-130 feet won’t occur during the current generation; it’ll take much longer. Nevertheless, we’re not worried about 65 feet. It’s only the first few feet that’ll sufficiently flood the world’s largest coastal cities, like Mumbai and Miami. By the time 65 feet rolls around, who knows what’ll be happening.

Code Red claims that even sharp reductions in emissions will not be enough to avoid 2°C, or higher temperatures because of record-breaking fossil fuel forecasts. According to Will Steffen, executive director, Australian National University Climate Change Institute, it’s a mistake to assume we can even stabilize at 2°C. “Rather, it’s a signpost on a road to a hotter planet.”

Moreover, “When projections in late 2021 showed future warming of around 2.7°C, Potsdam Institute Director Johan Rockström said: ‘I barely even want to talk about 2.7°C… If we go beyond 2°C, it’s very likely that we have caused so many tipping points that you have probably added another degree just through self-reinforcing changes. And that’s without even talking about extreme events.”

Of equal concern: “Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: “If the [climate system] tipping elements interact and cascades develop, then the heating could become independent [i.e. self-sustaining] at 2°C. Whether that is the case is perhaps the most important question of science right now because it would mean the end of our civilization.”
Those statements are from climate analysts that are widely considered to be at the top of the class and should not be taken lightly. Frankly, it’s a fair statement that world leaders and the public have no idea how far along the global warming threat has progressed, especially since the start of the 21st century. After all, according to the Institute for European Environmental Policy: One-half of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since 1750 have been emitted over the past 30 years alone. Early-stage evidence of its impact is easily identified, for example, according to NASA: Antarctica and Greenland combined lost 82B tons of ice mass, on average, per year during the 1990s versus 475B tons per year during the 2010s. That’s an extraordinary statement of fact as it’s the fuel behind sea level rise, and it is expanding in short order.

According to the study, permafrost across the Arctic is beginning to “irreversibly thaw and release carbon dioxide and methane.” Alas, we’re not even at 1.5°C yet. Hmm.

The study discusses the status of the world’s major glaciers. All of them are at various stages pointing towards tipping points that could cascade ice sheets and glaciers much more rapidly than any climate models currently indicate, to wit: “Events at both poles are not properly incorporated into current climate models. The evidence suggests that sea-level rises this century will be greater than currently considered feasible by policymakers. Based upon evidence from climate history the current global average temperature increase is enough for 5–10 metres (16-33 feet) of sea-level rise in the longer term, inundating small island states, agriculturally rich alluvial deltas, and vulnerable coastal cities.”
This article covers the first two parts of Climate Code Red’s three-part series. The third will be covered later.

Sea Level Warnings

Separate from, and coincident with, the Climate Code Red article, according to several recent studies on sea level: “The time available to prepare for increased exposure to flooding may be considerably less than assumed to date,” analysis by Dutch researchers Ronald Vernimmen and Aljosja Hooijer. (Source: “Worst Impacts of Sea Level Rise Will Hit Earlier Than Expected,” American Geophysical Union, January 24, 2023)

New studies have concluded: (1) ice sheets that threaten to expand oceans “will likely crumble with another 0.5°C increase in global warming” (2) ice sheets “are fragile in ways not previously understood.” (Source: “Climate, Ice Sheets & Sea Level: The News is Not Good,” Phys.org, February 16, 2023)

The studies found flaws in prior research because of misinterpretation of satellite data and inaccurate resources regarding some underlying countries. As a result of new calculations: “The number of people threatened by sea levels has been underestimated by tens of millions,” Ibid.

A study by Jun-Young Park, Fabian Schloesser, et al, “Future Sea-Level Projections with a Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean-Ice-Sheet Model,” Nature Communications, February 14, 2023, concluded: “Our model has a threshold between 1.5C and 2C of warming – with 1.8C as a best estimate – for acceleration of ice loss and sea level increase.”

The Park-Schloesser study claims that 1.8°C brings on runaway disintegration of ice sheets. This is the first known study of this kind to correlate a specific global temperature increase with more rapid acceleration of ice loss. It, therefore, begs the question of how soon 1.8°C hits?

As for example, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), if all the pledges made by countries at COP26 in Glasgow, November 2021 were met, global temperatures would “hold to 1.8C.” One-hundred-twenty (120) countries pledged at Glasgow. Net Zero by 2050. But as is always true with pledges, implementation, implementation, implementation is all that counts. However, even if the 120 countries meet Glasgow commitments, according to new research, runaway disintegration of ice sheets still starts at 1.8°C.

Which brings forth the report card for COP26, as of October 2022, which is not necessarily encouraging: “Progress made on COP26 commitments since Glasgow is mixed at best. But to be fair, countries and others often save up their exciting announcements for major international moments. Hopefully we are in for some nice surprises when world leaders gather in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt for COP27. The world will be watching carefully to see if countries, companies and cities back up their commitments with real action.” (Source: “Where Do We Stand on COP26 Climate Promises? A Progress Report,” World Resources Institute, October 13, 2022)

By the following month, November 2022, COP27 deflated all expectations. Experts on climate change give UN-sponsored COP27 an F-grade. “A collective failure,” according to the Lancet, which is the world’s highest impact academic journal.

Therefore, if countries are not enthusiastically involved in commitments to limit/cut emissions, the consequences are found far afield. For example, Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, the world’s most iconic image of global warming. According to Ted Scambos, Senior Research Scientist ESOC, University of Colorado: “Each visit underscores how fast Thwaites is changing, seeing this huge ice shelf moving towards you at about a mile every year is unsettling. And all by itself, this one glacier is big enough to impact sea level significantly,” Scambos, head of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, funded by the US and UK to a tune of $50M. How many glaciers of the world have funds dedicated to specific research, and what does this imply about the shaky status of Thwaites, which continues to alarm scientists?

Two new studies, with commentary on Thwaites, are found in Nature: “Models of how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and glacier flow respond to climate change are missing some important details. Incorporating these insights should clarify how and why the ice will change in the future.” (Source: “Glimpse Beneath Iconic Glacier Reveals How It’s Adding to Sea-Level Rise,” Nature, February 15, 2023)

Thwaites is key to future sea level rise because it is massive and increasingly unstable. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that sea levels will probably rise by between 38 and 77 centimetres, or 1.3 feet-to-2.6 feet, by 2100, but the collapse or melting of some of the ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic could theoretically contribute an additional metre (3.3 feet),” Ibid. Which can only be categorized as disastrous for 8 of the top 10 largest cities in the world, which are coastal.

“Thwaites Glacier is a fast-moving block of ice, the size of Florida, in the West Antarctic. Satellite studies have shown that its ‘grounding line’ — where ice attached to bedrock transitions to ice floating in the sea — has shifted 14 kilometres (8.7 miles) inland since the late 1990s, and some parts of it are retreating as fast as 1.2 kilometres (0.75 miles) per year,” Ibid.

What’s moving Thwaites’ ice sheet? Warm ocean water is melting the underside because of climate change, which has shifted wind patterns in the region, bringing warm ocean water to West Antarctica that was not there before. The water temperatures below Thwaites’ ice shelf are about 1.5C above the freezing point.
Researchers achieved the closest look ever at the underside of Thwaites Glacier as well as “the first-ever glimpse at the spot where the ice meets the land,” Ibid.

Prior field research indicated that giant fractures in the “floating ice” of Thwaites “could shatter part of the shelf within five years.” (Source: “Giant Cracks Push Imperiled Antarctic Glacier Closer to Collapse,” Nature, December 14, 2021) This would open an avenue for a much faster flow of glacial ice on land into the ocean, contributing to sea-level rise. Already Thwaites accounts for 4% of sea-level rise.

“If Thwaites’s eastern ice shelf collapses, ice in this region could flow up to three times faster into the sea, Pettit says. And if the glacier were to collapse completely, it would raise sea levels by 65 centimetres (2 feet),” Erin Pettit, glaciologist at Oregon State University, Ibid.

“Thwaites flows off the Antarctic continent into the Southern Ocean. At 120 kilometres (75 miles) across, it is the world’s widest glacier. Across about two-thirds of that expanse, ice flows relatively quickly into the ocean. The remaining one-third is the eastern ice shelf, where ice had been flowing more slowly. In part, that’s because the ice grinds to a halt when it reaches an underwater mountain about 40 kilometres offshore. The submerged mountain holds back the ice flow like a cork in a bottle. Earlier this year, members of the Thwaites collaboration reported that the glacier is becoming unstuck from that mountain, causing cracking and fracturing across other parts of the ice shelf,” Ibid.

Based upon what scientists observed at Thwaites, it’s amazing that the metaphor “like a cork in a bottle” describes what may be holding back much more rapid breakup of one of the world’s largest, most menacing, glaciers.

Meantime, sea level researchers deal with a target that moves up, never down, with each passing year. What’ll stop it?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

Ted Olson—the former U.S. solicitor-general in the George W. Bush administration who argued against basic legal rights for Guantánamo Bay prisoners and defended their indefinite detention and torture—made a stunning admission Thursday: The Gitmo military commissions don't work and should be shut down, and the government should strike plea deals with 9/11 defendants held at the prison.

In a Wall Street Journalopinion piece, Olson—perhaps best known for his consequential reversal on the issue of same-sex marriage equality—wrote that he "led a special team of lawyers tasked with overseeing all court challenges to the government's policy of detaining terrorism suspects" at Gitmo.

In that capacity, Olson—whose wife was a passenger on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11—argued in the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the "unlawful enemy combatants" who were imprisoned, and often tortured, at Guantánamo were not entitled to protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions. Nor were they subject to U.S. law or allowed a defense in American courts, Olson asserted, because the men (and children) were "stateless terrorists" and the prison is located on Cuban soil—even though Cuba has no jurisdiction over the military base.

"In retrospect, we made two mistakes in dealing with the detained individuals at Guantánamo," wrote Olson. "First, we created a new legal system out of whole cloth. I now understand that the commissions were doomed from the start. We used new rules of evidence and allowed evidence regardless of how it was obtained."

Evidence obtained through torture led to cases being declined or more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought. Susan J. Crawford, the Bush official in charge of deciding which terrorism suspects to try before Gitmo military commissions, declined to prosecute Mohammed al-Qhatani, the alleged would-be 20th 9/11 hijacker because, as she admitted in 2009, "we tortured" the defendant.

Col. Stuart Crouch, a Guantánamo prosecutor whose Marine Corps buddy was a pilot on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, refused to prosecute Mohamedou Ould Slahi—who allegedly helped organize the plane's hijacking—because Ould Slahi was tortured.

In another example, seven out of eight members of a military jury convened to hear the case against Guantánamo detainee and alleged terrorist plotter Majid Khan recommended total clemency after the defendant testified how he endured torture including rape, being hung from a ceiling beam, and being subjected to the interrupted drowning method known as waterboarding while he was held at a CIA "black site" in Afghanistan.

Olson wrote that the U.S. legal system would have been more than capable of handling the cases of terrorism defendants, "but we didn't trust America's tried-and-true courts."

"In the 20 years since this ordeal began, no trial has even begun. There have been years of argument in pretrial hearings, which have produced no legal justice for the victims of 9/11," he noted. "Instead of helping Americans learn more about who carried the attacks out and why, they have produced seemingly endless litigation largely concerned with the treatment of detainees by government agents and the government's attempts to suppress certain information."

After Bush-era Pentagon General Counsel Jim Haynes allegedly told lead Guantánamo prosecutor Col. Morris Davis that acquittals were unacceptable, Morris resigned over concerns the process was "rigged." Other Gitmo prosecutors, including Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr, and Capt. Carrie Wolf, also requested transfers from the "rigged" military commissions.

"Our second mistake," Olson wrote in his Journal piece, "was pursuing the death penalty through the commissions. Death penalty cases are the most hotly contested legal proceedings, given their irreversible nature. We doomed these newly created commissions to collapse under their own weight."

Olson continued:

While prosecuting these individuals in federal civilian courts would have been the right decision 15 or 20 years ago, Congress foreclosed that option in 2010 by banning the transfer of detainees to the U.S. for any purpose. Even if Congress were to lift that ban—which seems extremely unlikely—the only guarantee that federal court prosecution brings is years of appeals resulting from the legal morass of the past two decades. This is no resolution.

"If the 9/11 defendants held at Guantánamo are willing to plead guilty, and accept a life sentence at the military prison instead of the death penalty, we should accept that deal," OIson argued.

"Nothing will bring back the thousands whose lives were so cruelly taken that September day," Olson stressed. "But we must face reality and bring this process to an end. The American legal system must move on by closing the book on the military commissions and securing guilty pleas."

"The U.S. must bring these legal proceedings to as rapid and just a conclusion as possible."

Last year, military prosecutors and Guantánamo defense attorneys began negotiating potential plea deals that could spare 9/11 suspects from being executed in exchange for guilty pleas that would result in life imprisonment—and the continued operation of Gitmo for the foreseeable future.

Olson's admission is remarkable because it stands alone among top Bush, CIA, and Pentagon lawyers like Haynes, Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and John Rizzo who designed, deployed, and defended the administration's policies regarding indefinite detention, torture, extraordinary rendition, and denial of basic legal rights.

Nearly 800 men and boys have been imprisoned at Guantánamo since it opened in January 2002. According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, the majority of Gitmo detainees were innocent and then-President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld knew it.

Although Bush's successor, President Barack Obama, took steps toward closing Guantánamo and ending torture, both endured, even as Gitmo's population decreased dramatically during the Bush and Obama administrations.

Five Guantánamo detainees have been released during the tenure of President Joe Biden, including Khan, who was transferred to Belize earlier this week. Biden—whose former press secretary said closing Guantánamo is "our goal and our intention"—has been criticized for failing to close the prison after 21 years in operation.

As Olson noted in his opinion piece, 20 of the 34 remaining Guantánamo prisoners have been cleared for release. NBC News reported Thursday that "two brothers from Pakistan, Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani and Mohammed Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani, are also nearing transfer, according to two senior U.S. officials."

"Nine of the remaining men, including the 9/11 defendants, face charges in the military tribunals," Olson wrote. "To date, there have been a total of nine convictions, several of which have been overturned in whole or in part on appeal, mostly by U.S. federal courts. Today, there are no trial dates set for any of the still-pending cases."

Unlike Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert, Gitmo's first commander, Olson does not go so far as to call for the prison's closure. However, Olson concludes that "the U.S. must bring these legal proceedings to as rapid and just a conclusion as possible."

"True justice seems unattainable," he wrote. "The best the U.S. government can do at this point is negotiate resolutions of the remaining Guantánamo cases."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Remember that time, in 1980, when paramedics were summoned to the home of a major female rock star? Once there, the medical professionals found two young girls with the rock star. A 15-year-old was arrested on a drug-related charge and a 16-year-old was charged with prostitution.

The rock star in question was not a woman, of course. It was Don Henley of The Eagles (net worth: $200 million) and he was fined a mere $2,500 and only given probation for these transgressions.

How about the hard-rockin’ chick who pulled strings to become the legal guardian of a 17-year-old girl in Hawaii rather than face kidnapping charges?

Or the once-iconic female pop star who invited a Norwegian “escort” to her home under the guise of doing a nude photoshoot but ended up handcuffing him to a wall fixture and beating him with a chain?

Surely you’re familiar with that pantheon four-piece girl band who once gave a press interview in the backroom of a music club — all the while being serviced by underaged “baby groupies” under the table?

Those would actually be Ted Nugent (net worth: $30 million), Boy George (net worth: $50 million), and Led Zeppelin (collective net worth: $900 million).

 
Okay, one more try. Have you read about the female hip-hop hero who was accused of participating in a gang rape, was subsequently convicted of first-degree sexual abuse, and did a mere nine months? The victim is still labeled “accuser” while the rapper is posthumously worshipped to the point of hologram status. Remember that?

Yeah, me neither.

Because it was Tupac Shakur (net worth of estate: $40 million).

This is not to say a female pop star would never engage in any kind of criminal abuse. It is to say that the default setting for male musicians is “creep” (at best) and more likely: sexual predator.

But their talent — coupled with deeply embedded societal misogyny — excuses us for “not knowing” about their crimes and/or giving them a pass when we do find out.

Consider Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. Legendary rocker. Hall of Fame member. Net worth: $160 million. Career revived multiple times — including on television:

In 1975, Tyler met 15-year-old Julia Holcomb and decided he wanted to bring her on the road with him. To do so, the 27-year-old singer coerced the girl’s mother to sign over guardianship of her daughter to him so he could travel across state lines with her without fear of being arrested.

“I was subordinate to him as in a parent relationship and felt I had little control over my life,” Julia Holcomb later explained. “I remember my surprise when Steven told me, and trying to take this in mentally. A sense of vulnerability came over me, knowing that I was his ward, but we were not married. He had not expressed his intentions of a long-term relationship with me.”

Holcomb eventually became pregnant and when Tyler’s apartment caught on fire, she ended up in the hospital where the singer forced her to get an abortion. Soon after, they split.

“When I returned home to my mother, I was a broken spirit,” Holcomb remembers. “I could not sleep at night without nightmares of the abortion and the fire. The world seemed like a dark place.”

 
Tyler still refers to the whole thing as an “affair” — describing the teen as “a skinny young mall chick who had more legs than a bucket of chicken.” In his memoir, Tyler calls Holcomb “my Little Oral Annie,” adding: “She lost her childhood. I lost my mind.”

But the Rock God clearly did not lose his reputation, his money, or his enduring legacy. I mean, he somehow still gets invited to sing at Nobel Peace Prize concerts and is glowingly interviewed by Oprah (net worth $2.5 billion).

As “Sir” Paul McCartney (net worth: $1.2 billion) gushes: “Steven Tyler is one of the giants of American music, who’s been influential for a whole generation of Rock ’n’ Roll fans around the world. Long May He Rock!”

Reminder: None of this will change until we collectively choose to identify and address the root problems.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

The post The Story of Ted Hall, the Atomic Spay appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert C. Williams.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz took a thrashing from progressives on Friday after he underhandedly acknowledged that President Joe Biden's move this week to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt per borrower is likely to help Democrats in the upcoming 2022 midterm elections.

"I've interviewed many 'slacker baristas' who work much harder and are MUCH smarter than Ted Cruz."

"If you are that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, now has loans, and can't get a job, Joe Biden just gave you 20 grand," Cruz said on his Verdict podcast.

"Maybe you weren't gonna vote in November," he added, "and suddenly you just got 20 grand, and if you can get off the bong for a minute and head down to the voting station, or just send in your mail-in ballot that the Democrats have helpfully sent you, it could drive up turnout, particularly among young people."

Responding to Cruz's remarks, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted "this is what a leading Republican thinks of young 'slacker' Americans who took out loans to go to college."

Educator Chris Williams tweeted: "Apparently myself, a public school teacher who joined the Peace Corps out of college, and currently with over 20k in student loans after graduating in 2009, is a slacker according to Ted Cruz. Good to know."

Status Coup podcaster Jordan Chariton said on Twitter, "I've interviewed many 'slacker baristas' who work much harder and are MUCH smarter than Ted Cruz."

Cruz has been a vociferous critic of student debt relief. On Wednesday, he issued a statement condemning Biden's move and dubiously claiming on Twitter that it would "cost every taxpayer an average of $2,100."

It was far from Cruz's first questionable—if not downright false—tweet, which have run the gamut from defending former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election to claiming that the Biden administration was going to fund the distribution of free crack pipes.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, was among those who refused to hide his fury at the right-wing lawmakers whose allegiance to the powerful gun lobby has allowed mass killings like the one in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday to continue.

On Twitter Wednesday, Guttenberg railed against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who took $300,000 in donations from the gun lobby during his last Senate race, after the senator said he was "fervently lifting up in prayer" the victims of the shooting.

"Ted Cruz, FUCK YOU," said the gun control advocate. "This is on your hands. Don't put out messages like this."

"I'd like to tell them all to go F-off because of what they did, what they do. The way they politicize guns and violence led us to this day."

Guttenberg's comments came a day after he appeared on MSNBC to offer support to the 21 families who lost loved ones in the southwest Texas town before saying pro-gun politicians "fucking failed our kids again" and calling on Cruz to work with Democrats to pass gun control legislation.

"You be the Republican who says, 'I've had enough,' because if you don't, get your ass out of office, you don't belong there," he said.

Cruz is scheduled to speak at the National Rifle Association's (NRA) conference taking place in Houston this weekend.

The senator has told activists in recent years that "it's not that easy" to pass gun control legislation such as universal background check requirements—which are supported by the vast majority of Americans, including 72% of NRA members.

"I guess cashing his check from the NRA this weekend will be pretty easy, though," writer and gun control advocate Ben Jackson said.

In addition to Murphy, who angrily asked Republican lawmakers, "Why are you here?" in his Senate floor speech, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) unleashed on his right-wing colleagues including Cruz and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). Along with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Sinema has objected to filibuster reform, making it impossible for her own party to pass gun control legislation as well as other Democratic agenda items.

"Fuck you, Ted Cruz, you fucking baby killer," Gallego said.

At the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, civil rights attorney Sherilynn Ifill cautioned the majority of Americans who support gun control against believing Cruz's claim that "nothing can be done" to keep mass shootings from happening.

"It is designed to make you give in to the exhaustion of this moment," Ifill said. "Don't believe it. It's a lie. We have power if we mobilize it."

"Every lawmaker at every level who has refused to adopt reasonable gun control—who has allowed guns and high-capacity magazines to fall into the hands of those who should not have them—who has ignored the safety of our children and communities—should search their hearts and recalculate their priorities," said Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of MomsRising.

"America's moms do not want to raise our children in a country with so much violence, where our children are not safe, where mass shootings are commonplace, where there are more guns than people," she said.

"We deserve better. We will work to make sure lawmakers who protect our children and communities are elected, we will push hard for gun safety measures, and we will hold each other close and love and care for each other," Rowe-Finkbeiner added. "We do all this because no mother, father, child, son, daughter, or community should ever have to endure losses like those that happened today."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

The post Authors Greg Palast and Ted Rall appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.