It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
AMERIKA
A fight over SNAP funding could derail the farm bill
A partisan fight over federal food support programs is posing a major challenge to both chambers as they try to craft a mammoth farm bill ahead of an early fall deadline.
Congress has just four months until a Sept. 30 deadline to finish work on the bill, after both parties agreed to kick the can last year on the bill.
Last year’s failure to pass a five-year farm bill amid ferocious divides represented just the second time in the program’s nearly centurylong history that Congress failed to pass the legislation.
This year, a successful bill must walk a tightrope across the stark divisions between a Democrat-controlled Senate and a sizable far-right contingent in the House.
In the House side, Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) is pushing to increase welfare payments and insurance subsidies to commodity farmers, primarily those growing cotton, rice and peanuts.
Thompson wants to pay for these increases in part by freezing the ability of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to spend more money on food aid in the future — a measure that Democrats consider a dealbreaker.
“The question is, you know, do members want to do the right thing and support which is a really good bipartisan chairman’s mark to move us ahead, or do they want to play politics?” Thompson asked The Hill. “And I can’t make that choice for them.”
Last week, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack warned accused House Republicans of “robbing Peter to pay Paul” by funding their proposed subsidy increase with back-door cuts that wouldn’t cover the difference.
Now both sides are digging in their heels over changes pertaining to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as the food stamps program.
In recent remarks to The Hill, Senate Agriculture Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) identified SNAP as one of the biggest hangups lawmakers are facing in striking a bipartisan farm bill.
“They have the largest cut in 30 years in SNAP,” she told The Hill on Thursday as both chambers prepared to head home for Memorial Day recess.
Pressed on the chances of a bipartisan deal in the months ahead, the chair noted lawmakers “still have time,” but she added “what we need is something that brings people together.”
“There’s a lot in the chairman’s mark in the House and in mine, we just have to be willing to get together and not do those things that pull people apart,” she said.
Her comments come as Democrats have been targeting a proposal in the GOP-dominated House’s version of the $1.5 trillion omnibus farm bill, which was unveiled earlier this month.
That bill was marked up in an explosive hearing last week, when both sides went back and forth in a heated debate over GOP-backed changes to the program.
But beyond disagreements over policy lie a yawning gap over how much these cuts could save — and even whether they are cuts at all.
In a summary of the 900-plus page bill, House Republicans argued the measure “disallows future unelected bureaucrats from arbitrarily increasing or decimating SNAP benefits,” while targeting actions taken under the Biden administration that led to a sharp increase in costs for the program.
Democrats argue that these increases, which added to the list of covered foods, were necessary to make up for how healthy foods like fruits and vegetables tend to be more expensive than unhealthy processed foods.
The GOP plan, they argue, amounts to cuts through the back door. Thompson’s proposal would ban a future administration from adjusting its future math on SNAP coverage based on anything other than inflation.
Republicans “cannot have it both ways,” said Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) ”I have heard my colleagues say that this is not a SNAP cut. But dozens of outside experts disagree.”
“If the committee’s considering it a pay-for then that is funding you are taking away from hungry families.”
Republicans have specifically targeted the Biden administration’s 2021 reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), which is used to determine benefit amounts for the SNAP program.
The TFP is the lowest of the USDA’s four food plans. It serves as a baseline “market basket” that marks the minimum a household can spend on food without lapsing into food insecurity.
Prior TFPs had just considered the foods bought by the absolute lowest-income families, which moved the list of covered products towards the cheapest, least healthy packaged foods.
While the GOP has sought to cast this as a Biden-administration initiative, the reason the TFP was reevaluated in the first place is because the Republican-controlled Congress ordered the USDA to do so in the 2018 farm bill.
In that legislation, Congress for the first time in its history freed the USDA from making the TFP cost-neutral.
Now focused on including more healthy groceries, USDA officials raised the amount of money given to each SNAP recipient by about $1.40 per day, or an average of $42 per month.
The Urban Institute found that the reevaluated Thrifty Food Plan “dramatically reduced the share of counties with inadequate benefits to 21 percent, compared with 96 percent in 2020.”
However, the think tank also noted that benefits were still too low for many families to keep up with inflation as Americans felt the squeeze of rising price stickers.
A study in Frontiers in Public Health found that the increase may have helped to blunt the impacts of inflation, but that the reevaluation of the TFP had “no significant effects” “on food insecurity, diet quality, and mental health outcomes among SNAP participants relative to non-participants.”
The Urban Institute research additionally found that SNAP benefits fell short of “covering monthly food costs by $49.29 for families with zero net income” at the end of last year, compared to $58.59 short in the first three quarters of 2023.
Stabenow said in the recent interview that she would “rather get a farm” bill, as opposed to another short-term extension, but she also told The Hill, “We’re not gonna go backwards.”
U$ Nursing home industry sues Biden administration over staffing rule
new mandatory minimum staffing requirements, “impose such onerous and unachievable mandates on practically every nursing home in the country,”
Tina Sandri, CEO of Forest Hills of DC senior living facility, left, helps resident Courty Andrews back to her room, Dec. 8, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)
An industry lawsuit is urging a federal court to overturn the Biden administration’s new mandatory minimum staffing requirements on nursing homes, arguing the federal Medicare agency exceeded its authority.
The complaint argues Congress never gave the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) the authority “to impose such onerous and unachievable mandates on practically every nursing home in the country,” so the rules are a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.
It was filed last week in the Northern District of Texas by the American Health Care Association (AHCA), its Texas counterpart and the operators of three nursing homes in the state.
“Setting one-size-fits-all staffing requirements that will require some four-fifths of the nation’s nursing homes to hire additional personnel, even though almost no state has deemed those higher levels necessary … is the height of arbitrary and capricious agency action,” the complaint stated.
The lawsuit argues the requirements will force facilities to close or downsize, displacing tens of thousands of residents and “forcing countless other seniors and family members to wait longer, search farther, and pay more for the care they need.”
Under the requirements unveiled last month, all nursing homes that receive federal funding through Medicare and Medicaid will need to have a registered nurse on staff 24 hours per day, seven days per week and provide at least 3.48 hours of nursing care per resident per day.
The rules will cost nursing homes $43 billion over the next decade, according to estimates from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The requirements of the rule will be introduced in phases, with longer timeframes for rural communities. Limited, temporary exemptions will be available for both the 24/7 registered nurse requirement and the underlying staffing standards for nursing homes in workforce shortage areas that demonstrate a good faith effort to hire.
Nonrural facilities must meet the requirements by May 2027, and rural facilities have five years, until May 2029.
But according to the lawsuit, the staffing requirements “flunk basic principles of administrative law at every turn.”
“We had hoped it would not come to this; we repeatedly sought to work with the Administration on more productive ways to boost the nursing home workforce,” Mark Parkinson, President and CEO of AHCA, said in a statement.
Notably, the lawsuit was filed in federal court in Amarillo, Texas. Texas is a popular venue for groups looking to get favorable rulings against the Biden administration, and the district court in Amarillo has only one judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Trump, is the same judge who suspended approval of the abortion pill mifepristone and has ruled against the Biden administration on several other issues, including immigration and LGBTQ protections.
A router and internet switch are displayed in East Derry, N.H., June 19, 2018.
Ransomware payments skyrocketed in 2023, hitting a record-high $1.1 billion extorted from targets of the schemes, according to a Chainalysis report released Wednesday.
The New York-based firm’s report details ransomware actors going after companies such as British Airways, as well as targeting infrastructure that yielded a surge of ransom payments.
The 2023 figure is a vast increase from the $567 million extorted in 2022, indicating that ransomware is “an escalating problem,” according to the report.
Cybercriminal groups have targeted schools, hospitals and casinos. The groups have also gone after wealthier companies. They’ve utilized a “big game hunting” strategy, deploying fewer attacks, but getting bigger payloads with each strike, according to Chainalysis.
Caesars Entertainment, the casino company, was hit with a cyberattack last September, days after MGM Resorts International, another casino company, reported having “cybersecurity issues,” causing a shutdown of some of the hotel and casino computer systems.
MGM Resorts had $100 million in recovery costs from the attack. The Chainalysis report does not detail additional losses that often surpass millions of dollars after a break-in occurs. U.S. fuel operator Colonial Pipeline had to shut down operations for several days in May after a ransomware attack.
On Thursday, the State Department announced a reward of up to $10 million to those who have information that could help identify or locate leaders connected to Hive, a global ransomware gang, known for extorting more than $100 million in ransom payments. The Department of Justice dismantled the group in January last year.
The Brennan Center for Justice accused Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito of misconstruing its research in a South Carolina gerrymandering case.
Last week, the Supreme Court upheld a Republican-drawn congressional district in South Carolina, reversing a lower court decision that said the district’s boundaries were an unconstitutional form of racial gerrymandering.
A three-judge panel found race was the predominant factor in why the new map was drawn the way it was, shifting about 30,000 Black Charleston-area voters to a new district.
Republican state lawmakers said the boundaries were changed because of politics, not race, and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.
In his opinion on the case, which was decided 6-3, Alito cited 2021 research from the Brennan Center that showed the racial voter turnout gap will worsen with restrictive voting laws.
Alito questioned why a nonpartisan staffer with reapportionment experience would have drawn the congressional lines based on racial data “as a proxy for partisan data” when he had access to sub-precinct-level partisan information.
Kevin Morris, a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar at the center, wrote in a report that it’s “necessary to add some clarity to Alito’s thinking.”
Morris noted that in South Carolina, voters do not register with political parties. Under a person’s voter file, it indicates which partisan primary they participate in. He said it should be a good proxy for voting habits but isn’t as reliable as self-identifying.
“Alito accepts that race could be a better predictor of vote choice than party affiliation in South Carolina, but he cites our study to speculate that lower relative turnout of nonwhite voters probably renders racial data unhelpful in map drawing,” Morris wrote. “Quite the opposite.”
In South Carolina, voters self-identify their race when they register to vote, and their voter files hold data on how they voted dating back to the 1990s.
“Put plainly, an ideal place to predict a party nominee’s likely votes in South Carolina is in exactly the sort of place the evidence indicates the state looked: files with racial data,” Morris argued.
Morris questioned why Alito cited their 2021 research when the center released a more comprehensive report just months ago that found South Carolina is the prime example of how race and voting have differed across the country — and how the court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision has affected voting trends over the last decade.
Since 2014, South Carolina’s white and nonwhite voter turnout has grown more quickly than the rest of the country. And in Charleston County, where the Supreme Court case is focused, the gap has grown quicker than anywhere else in the state, the center found.
“In sum, we agree with Alito when he noted that ‘non-white voters turn out at a much lower rate than white voters.’ But his conclusion that this fact means that racial data cannot be used to draw maps that could discriminate is simply not the case,” Morris wrote.
“What this data can and does establish, however, is that the Court’s retreat from protecting voting rights for people of color has resulted in increasing gaps in participation in places like South Carolina,” he concluded.
Trump, GOP are early favorites for White House, Congress
Former President Trump and the GOP are the favorites to win the races for the White House and for both chambers of Congress a little more than five months before Election Day, according to a forecast model released Wednesday by Decision Desk HQ and The Hill.
The model gives Trump a 58 percent chance of winning the presidency, and shows him with slight leads in most of the key swing states in the presidential race.
Republicans are a more comfortable favorite in the House and Senate, the model says. The GOP holds a 79 percent chance of winning the Senate majority and a 64 percent chance of holding its House majority.
The model is based on the framework that Decision Desk HQ used for past elections in 2020 and 2022 but with some changes.
Decision Desk HQ points to about 200 different data points that are factored in to reaching the probabilities, including voter registration numbers for each party, demographics, past election results, fundraising totals and polling averages.
Scott Tranter, the director of data science for Decision Desk HQ, emphasized that the data and projections represent a snapshot in time that could change between now and Election Day.
“This is like taking a test that doesn’t count, like getting a grade in school that doesn’t count,” he said. “No one’s voting today, no one’s picking a president or picking a senator. If they did pick them today, this is probably how I’d hand it out.”
But the projections may amplify the already high anxiety felt within the Democratic Party over where they stand as spring turns to summer.
Polls have consistently found President Biden trailing Trump in swing states, and the conflict in Gaza has amplified the Democrat’s problems with young and minority voters, two key parts of the coalition that helped him win election in 2020.
Polls also show voters are unhappy with the economy and Biden’s handling of economic issues.
Trump is facing a number of legal issues, and a jury could deliver a verdict as early as this week in his New York criminal trial. Yet the cases have not prevented Trump from holding a lead in polls over Biden, both nationally and in swing states.
In the battle for the Senate, Democrats are dealing with a difficult map that has them defending seats in two states, Montana and Ohio, where Trump is the heavy favorite in the presidential race. Without victories in both of those states, Democrats will almost certainly lose the Senate.
Democrats have been hopeful about winning back the House majority, but the forecast from Decision Desk HQ/The Hill shows they are an underdog in that race as well.
Decision Desk HQ and The Hill’s forecast model shows the probabilities of each presidential candidate winning in each state, taking into account the polling average that they have been tracking for months along with various other factors.
Tranter said the organization then takes an “ensemble approach” in which various algorithms consider the data and those results are averaged out to create the probabilities seen in the maps. Decision Desk HQ looks at how predictive different variables have been in past elections to determine which to weigh more heavily in reaching the probabilities for this year.
Trump leads Biden in Decision Desk HQ/The Hill’s polling average in each of the six battlegrounds that will likely decide the election, though the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are razor-tight and within 2 points. If Biden holds all three of those states, he could afford to lose the swing states of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada and still win the election.
Biden’s low approval ratings have sparked concern among Democrats that Biden could not only lose the White House but be a drag on other candidates. Some Senate Democrats running in tough reelection fights this year have distanced themselves from Biden.
The Biden campaign and allies have said Election Day is still too far away to be concerned with polls, as many voters are still not paying close attention to the race.
Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright said one of Biden’s strengths is he has experience, and that he and the campaign veterans around him have learned “not to panic when everybody else is panicking.”
He pointed to the 2022 midterm elections in which many commentators predicted a “red wave” in congressional elections that did not materialize.
“The worst thing you can do is peak too soon in politics,” he said, arguing that many have not yet tuned in.
Trumpism hasn’t been defined in the way it will be by the fall, and Trump has not yet hit the “most extreme” that he will before November, he said.
Republicans, however, are bullish on their chances.
GOP strategist Ron Bonjean said the trend is “moving in Trump’s direction” and the legal battles Trump is facing have not hurt him.
“Having said that, the election is still months away, and the one person that can get in Trump’s way is himself,” he said.
In a good sign for Democrats down ballot, many are running ahead of Biden. The Decision Desk HQ/The Hill model found that Democratic Senate candidates have a higher chance to prevail in all but one of the Senate battlegrounds — Montana, where Sen. Jon Tester (D) faces a difficult battle.
Even in Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) is favored in the Decision Desk HQ/The Hill model. It finds Brown now has a 62 percent chance of winning, in large part due to his strong polling.
Tranter noted that ticket splitting has become more significant since Trump entered the political scene.
The fact that Democratic candidates for the Senate are running ahead of Biden suggests some portion of the electorate in those states could be ready to split their tickets, he said.
2024 Election Coverage
In addition, he said the strong fundraising totals by some Democrats could be another sign of future ticket splitting.
In the end, Tranter suggested Republicans should feel good about where they are but not take anything for granted. Even a change of 2 or 3 points in polling in a few states could dramatically affect the model’s forecast, he said.
“This is a good reference point,” he said. “This is a good thing, if you’re a Democrat or Republican candidate, to say, ‘Hey, this is where I’m at today, but I still got six months to go.’”
Ramaswamy calls for changes to BuzzFeed after acquiring activist stake
Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is calling for major changes to BuzzFeed — from adding new board members to cutting staff to bringing in right-leaning talent — after acquiring an activist stake in the company.
In a letter to BuzzFeed’s board of directors on Monday, Ramaswamy argued that the company “has lost its way” and “requires a major shift in strategy.”
The conservative entrepreneur now owns an 8.37 percent stake in BuzzFeed, making him the second-largest Class A shareholder in the company, according to the letter.
The former GOP candidate urged BuzzFeed in Monday’s letter to invest in talent from “across the political and cultural spectrum,” such as conservative commentators Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, as well as NFL player Aaron Rodgers, who has been known to dabble in conspiracy theories.
Ramaswamy also called on BuzzFeed to admit that it “repeatedly lied on issues of national importance, and so did the rest of the media” and urged the company to add three new directors to the board to increase “intellectual diversity” in its leadership.
“While your competitors focus on racial and gender diversity in the boardroom, you can become the first media company to expressly select for a diversity of viewpoints in your ranks,” he wrote.
“The three new directors who have expressed interest in joining your board will represent a first step in the right direction,” Ramaswamy added.
He also argued that BuzzFeed needs to “get back to startup size,” which he noted will likely require “large-scale headcount reductions.” The company already slashed 16 percent of its workforce earlier this year.
BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti responded to Ramaswamy’s letter, suggesting that he had “some fundamental misunderstandings about the drivers of our business, the values of our audience, and the mission of the company.”
“I’m very skeptical it makes business sense to turn BuzzFeed into a creator platform for inflammatory political pundits,” Peretti said in an email. “And we’re definitely not going to issue an apology for our Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism.”
“That said, I welcome outside perspectives from shareholders and am open to hearing more from you,” he added.
The conservative entrepreneur now owns an 8.37 percent stake in BuzzFeed, making him the second-largest Class A shareholder in the company, according to the letter.
The former GOP candidate urged BuzzFeed in Monday’s letter to invest in talent from “across the political and cultural spectrum,” such as conservative commentators Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, as well as NFL player Aaron Rodgers, who has been known to dabble in conspiracy theories.
Ramaswamy also called on BuzzFeed to admit that it “repeatedly lied on issues of national importance, and so did the rest of the media” and urged the company to add three new directors to the board to increase “intellectual diversity” in its leadership.
“While your competitors focus on racial and gender diversity in the boardroom, you can become the first media company to expressly select for a diversity of viewpoints in your ranks,” he wrote.
“The three new directors who have expressed interest in joining your board will represent a first step in the right direction,” Ramaswamy added.
He also argued that BuzzFeed needs to “get back to startup size,” which he noted will likely require “large-scale headcount reductions.” The company already slashed 16 percent of its workforce earlier this year.
BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti responded to Ramaswamy’s letter, suggesting that he had “some fundamental misunderstandings about the drivers of our business, the values of our audience, and the mission of the company.”
“I’m very skeptical it makes business sense to turn BuzzFeed into a creator platform for inflammatory political pundits,” Peretti said in an email. “And we’re definitely not going to issue an apology for our Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism.”
“That said, I welcome outside perspectives from shareholders and am open to hearing more from you,” he added.
CLIMATE CRISIS
Indian capital records highest-ever temperature of 49.9 Celsius
Children run behind a truck spraying water along a street on a hot summer day in New Delhi on Tuesday - Copyright AFP Arun SANKAR
Temperatures in India’s capital have soared to a record-high 49.9 degrees Celsius (121.8 Fahrenheit) as authorities warn of water shortages in the sprawling mega-city.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD), which reported “severe heat-wave conditions”, recorded the temperatures on Tuesday at two Delhi suburbs stations at Narela and Mungeshpur.
The weather bureau said the temperatures were nine degrees higher than expected.
Forecasters predict similar temperatures Wednesday for the city of more than 30 million people, issuing a red alert warning notice for people to take care.
In May 2022, parts of Delhi hit 49.2 degrees Celsius (120.5 Fahrenheit), Indian media reported at the time.
India is no stranger to searing summer temperatures.
But years of scientific research have found climate change is causing heatwaves to become longer, more frequent and more intense.
– ‘Water scarcity’ –
New Delhi authorities have also warned of the risk of water shortages as the capital swelters in headache-inducing heat — cutting supplies to some areas.
Water Minister Atishi Marlena has called for “collective responsibility” in stopping wasteful water use, the Times of India newspaper reported Wednesday.
“To address the problem of water scarcity, we have taken a slew of measures such as reducing water supply from twice a day to once a day in many areas,” Atishi said, the Indian Express reported.
“The water thus saved will be rationed and supplied to the water-deficient areas where supply lasts only 15 to 20 minutes a day,” she added.
The IMD warned of the heat’s impact on health, especially for infants, the elderly and those with chronic diseases.
Many blame the soaring temperatures on scorching winds from Rajasthan state, where temperatures on Tuesday were the hottest in the country, at 50.5 degrees Celsius.
Rajasthan’s desert region of Phalodi holds the country’s all-time heat record, hitting 51 degrees Celsius in 2016.
At the same time, West Bengal state and the northeastern state of Mizoram have been struck by gales and lashing rains from Cyclone Remal, which hit India and Bangladesh on Sunday, killing more than 38 people.
Bangladesh’s Meteorological Department said the cyclone was “one of longest in the country’s history”, blaming climate change for the shift.
The Message of Israel’s Torture Chambers Is Directed at Us All, Not Just Palestinians
On a misty November morning 21 years ago, I was desperately trying to remain camouflaged. Concealed in the foliage of an orange grove in Israel’s rural Galilee, I hurriedly took photos of a drab concrete building not marked on any map.
Even the original road sign identifying the site as Facility 1391 had been removed after a local Haaretz newspaper investigation revealed it housed a secret prison.
I was the first foreign journalist to track down Facility 1391, most of it hidden within a heavily fortified complex built in the 1930s to suppress resistance to British rule in Palestine.
For decades, Israel had secretly held mostly Arab foreign nationals captive at the site, unknown to the Israeli courts, the Red Cross and human rights groups. Many were Lebanese citizens kidnapped during Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. But there were also Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians and Iranians.
This site would soon be known as a “black site”, a term popularised by Washington’s invasion of Iraq that year. Drawing on techniques refined by Israel at Facility 1391, the US would, in the coming months and years, torture Iraqis and others at Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo.
No one knew how many captives were held in Israel’s Facility 1391, how long they had been there or if there were more such prisons.
However, the first testimonies from inmates revealed horrifying conditions. For most of the time, they were kept in a state of sensory deprivation, made to wear blacked-out goggles, except for when being tortured. In one case that later came to court, a Lebanese captive had been sodomised with a baton by “Major George”, the facility’s torturer-in-chief.
Major George would go on to become head of Israeli police relations with the Palestinian population of Jerusalem.
Another secret prison
It was difficult not to recall Facility 1391 this month, as CNN published an investigation into a new Israeli secret prison, Sde Teiman.
This prison was set up months ago to process not foreign nationals but thousands of Palestinian men and boys, victims of Israel’s occupation, seized from the streets of Gaza and the West Bank since Hamas carried out a one-day attack on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed and 250 were dragged back into Gaza as hostages.
As with Facility 1391, revelations of the horrors taking place at Israel’s new black site have garnered barely any attention from the western media establishment.
CNN, known for excising Israeli atrocities from its coverage on the orders of executives, should be applauded for finally doing what western media often falsely claims is its role: holding power to account.
Headlined “Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers”, the lengthy article details the degrading, brutal conditions Palestinians kidnapped from Gaza and the West Bank are being subjected to.
The number of Palestinians passing through the secretive detention camp, located in the Negev desert, is unknown. But satellite photos show the site is rapidly expanding, presumably to accommodate ever more “prisoners”.
Some Palestinians who have emerged, utterly broken from this incarceration system – where the world saw men and boys being paraded zip-tied, near-naked and blindfolded in Gaza’s streets and stadiums back in November and December – began telling of their experiences months ago.
Predictably, the western media largely ignored the testimonies.
Even when staff from Sde Teiman started coming forward weeks ago to divulge horror stories, western outlets collectively yawned – apart from CNN.
Pattern of media failure
This pattern of failure has been noted in the pages of Middle East Eye for months.
For example, the western media establishment has studiously averted their gaze from Israeli reports that a proportion of those killed on 7 October were not victims of Hamas but of the Israeli army’s notorious “Hannibal procedure”, a protocol to kill fellow Israelis rather than let them be taken captive.
Western journalists still mostly avoid highlighting the fact that Israel is actively starving the entire population of Gaza of food and water, an unquestionable crime against humanity. Instead, journalists echo their own governments by labelling this Israeli-induced famine a “humanitarian crisis”, as if it were an unfortunate natural disaster.
The media also obscures the fact that western powers, especially the US and UK, are directly assisting Israel in its mass starvation of Gaza’s population – both by denying funding to the UN’s main relief agency, Unrwa, and by refusing to put any significant pressure on Israel to allow in aid.
Echoing the Biden administration, the media still hesitates to call Israel’s actions in Gaza what they are, preferring an occasional mealy-mouthed assessment that Israel “may be at risk” of committing war crimes. None point to the bigger picture that all of these individual “possible” war crimes indisputably amount to genocide.
That obfuscation has become even harder to maintain with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) applying this week for arrest warrants for suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.
Nonetheless, the media have stressed Israel’s and the Biden administration’s indignation at the court rather than the substance of its charges, including the allegation that Israel is exterminating Palestinians in Gaza through planned starvation.
The media avoids clarity on these topics because clarity would be inconvenient. Why? Because, as we shall see, the western media’s purpose is to create a narrative that serves western governments in pursuing their overarching foreign policy goals in the oil-rich Middle East, not ending the boundless suffering in Gaza or holding Israel to account for its crimes.
Used as lab rats
As a handful of whistleblowers revealed to CNN, Palestinians are incarcerated for weeks on end in Sde Teiman as they are tortured – both through formal interrogations and through the conditions they are held in.
They are forced to sit blindfolded outdoors on a thin mattress through the desert heat of the day and sleep in the cold of the desert night. Continuously cuffed, they are forced to remain motionless and silent. At night, dogs are set on them. Anyone who speaks or moves risks being savagely beaten till bones are broken.
People’s hands and legs are tightly zip-tied for so long that, according to the report, some have needed limbs amputated.
As one Israeli whistleblower recounted to CNN, none of these abuses are about intelligence gathering. “They were done out of revenge,” he admitted. The inmates are punching bags for the Israeli soldiers and guards.
But this is about more than simple vengeance. Understanding what is happening at Sde Teiman provides a clearer picture of what is happening on a far bigger, even more industrial scale in Gaza.
Especially revealing are the conditions in a field hospital at the detention camp, housing Palestinians either maimed in Israel’s savage destruction of Gaza or injured by beatings from Israeli soldiers.
They are handcuffed to gurneys in row after row, blindfolded and naked apart from an adult nappy. They are not allowed to speak.
There they lie day after day, night after night, in a state of utter sensory deprivation, with nothing to distract from their wounds and pain. In the midst of this, Israeli medical interns can use their exposed, vulnerable flesh as a canvas for experimentation.
According to one whistleblower, the detention centre has quickly gained a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”.
There, they are allowed to use Palestinians as little more than lab rats and encouraged to carry out medical procedures they are not qualified to perform.
A whistleblower told CNN: “I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise.”
Such procedures were frequently done without anaesthesia. Unlike doctors in Gaza, Israeli doctors have ready access to painkillers. It is a choice not to use them.
Medical staff missing
With western media so readily colluding in the dehumanisation of Palestinians, it is important to remember who these “prisoners” are.
Israel wishes us to believe it is targeting Hamas and those it “arrests” – the widely accepted euphemism, used by CNN in this article, for those Israel takes hostage – are Palestinians suspected of ties to the militant group.
However, one of the most significant testimonies of abuse from Sde Teiman reported by CNN comes from Dr Mohammed al-Ran, the grey-haired head of surgery at Gaza’s now-destroyed Indonesian hospital.
He was “arrested” – kidnapped – by Israel in December and taken to Sde Teiman. There is no suggestion al-Ran was engaged in armed combat against invading Israeli troops or was associated with Hamas in any other way. He was seized, along with other medical staff, while working a three-day shift at another medical centre, the al-Ahli al-Arabi Baptist Hospital.
He had been forced to flee the Indonesian hospital after it was bombed by Israel and staff there were severely beaten.
Untold numbers of medical personnel have been murdered or disappeared by Israel during its systematic attacks on Gaza’s hospitals. The destruction of the enclave’s health sector is another glaring crime against humanity the western media has carefully avoided identifying.
The contrast with the media’s unrelenting certainty about Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine a short time ago is stark indeed.
Human rights groups are desperately trying to track down these Palestinian hostages with habeas corpus writs, just as they earlier tried to find the foreign nationals held captive in Facility 1391. The Israeli courts have been wilfully obstructive.
In one test case, the Israeli human rights group HaMoked, which was central to identifying Facility 1391, has been petitioning Israel’s supreme court – whose judges include some living in illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank – to find a Palestinian X-ray technician missing since February.
He was seized by Israeli troops at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. The suspicion is that he is being held in Sde Teiman.
According to HaMoked, more than 1,300 Palestinians from Gaza are missing, presumed to be in Israeli detention, including 29 women.
Another surgeon, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, is known to be among more than two dozen Palestinians who have died in mysterious circumstances in Israeli captivity. He was most likely tortured to death or possibly killed in a failed medical procedure.
‘Unprecedented’ abuses
In further proof that this wave of violence against prisoners is entirely unrelated to suspicions that they belong to Hamas or participated in the 7 October attack, details emerged last weekend of relentless and savage abuses of the most prominent Palestinian prisoner held by Israel.
Marwan Barghouti, from the Palestinian National Liberation Movement led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas – Hamas’s arch-opponents – has been locked up for the past 22 years. Sometimes referred to as the “Palestinian Mandela”, Barghouti is considered a potential future leader of the Palestinian people.
According to fellow inmates and human rights groups, Barghouti is barely recognizable after a series of beatings, one of which has left him struggling to see out of his right eye.
He is reported to be in constant pain from a suspected dislocated shoulder resulting from one assault, an injury that has not been treated.
According to his Israeli lawyer, he has been dragged across the floor handcuffed and naked in front of other inmates at Ayalon Prison.
Barghouti has lost significant weight due to the severe food restrictions imposed on all Palestinian prisoners since October and has been denied access to books, newspapers and television.
Tal Steiner, of the Israeli human rights group the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, told the Guardian that Barghouti was being subjected to “unprecedented” abuses and that such torture had become “standard” for the 8,750 Palestinians known to have been jailed since October.
The government minister overseeing Israel’s prison service, Itamar Ben Gvir, belongs to the avowedly fascist party Jewish Power, whose ideological roots in Kahanism explicitly regard Palestinians as little more than vermin.
Bargaining chips
The western media have focused endlessly on the suffering of the 100 or more Israeli hostages still held in Gaza, though it remains unmentioned that much of that suffering derives from Israel’s actions.
The hostages, like the Palestinians of Gaza, are under Israel’s rain of bombs. And like Palestinians, they face sustained food shortages caused by Israel’s aid blockade. The indiscriminate violence against Gaza affects both hostages and Palestinians alike.
But based on reports by CNN and Israeli media, it seems likely that many of the thousands of Palestinians kidnapped by Israel since October are facing a far crueller fate than the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Hamas is invested in keeping the Israeli hostages as safe as possible because they are valuable bargaining chips for getting the Israeli army out of Gaza and freeing Palestinians from torture sites like Sde Teiman.
Israel faces no such pressures. As the occupying power and Washington’s favourite client state, it can inflict any punishment it chooses on Palestinians with little repercussion.
That is another facet of the past seven months that the media refuse to acknowledge.
Destroying aid
Meanwhile, western publics are smeared if they try to name Israel’s crimes as genocide or articulate how the genocide is unfolding. This echoes the suspicions of an overwhelming majority of judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) back in January and is implied by the ICC chief prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants this week.
The West’s recent, perverse and self-serving redefinition of antisemitism – a victory for pro-Israel lobby groups – equates Jew hatred with criticism of Israel more so than actually hating Jews.
Under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s new definition, it is antisemitic to draw a parallel between Israel’s actions and the genocide with which westerners are most familiar: the Holocaust.
Conveniently for Israel, western establishments can now disavow an all-too-obvious lesson of history and human psychology: the victims of abuse are quite capable of committing such abuses themselves.
CNN’s reconstruction of the field hospital at Sde Teiman shows dehumanized Palestinians – bound, blindfolded and naked – in rows of gurneys ready to be experimented on. Why would that not evoke, for western audiences, memories of Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor who viewed concentration camp inmates as less than human, mere fodder for his experiments?
What echoes should westerners feel watching Jewish extremists from Israel’s illegal settlements ambush aid trucks heading to Gaza, smash up the supplies desperately needed by a starving population, burn the trucks and beat the drivers – all while Israeli soldiers and police stand by, allowing the destruction to take place?
How might it be wrong – antisemitic, no less – to ponder whether a similar brutal, genocidal racism drove extremists in Germany in 1938 when they rampaged against Jews on Kristallnacht?
And what about those who have compared tiny Gaza to a concentration camp during Israel’s 17-year siege by land, air and water, with encaged Palestinians deprived of basic freedoms and the essentials of life? Or those who now call Gaza a death camp as Israel starves the population?
Are such assessments really evidence of Jew hatred? Or are they proof that these observers have understood well the lessons of history and the Holocaust? The systematic degrading and abuse of a people should always be viewed as a crime against our shared humanity.
The moral duty facing us all is to stop such atrocities, not to withhold judgement and mutely watch them play out to their logical conclusion.
Torture chambers
The current horrors Israel is inflicting on the inmates of Sde Teiman and, on an even bigger scale, on the Palestinians in the Gaza death camp, are about much more than simple vengeance for 7 October.
Sde Teiman is the small torture chamber, mirroring the much bigger torture chamber of Gaza itself, where bombs and starvation are achieving precisely the same ends.
Until seven months ago, Israel’s goal was to keep the Palestinians a subjugated, enslaved, hopeless people, confined to a series of concentration camps in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They were expected to remain mute in their suffering and invisible to the outside world.
Over the long term, it was assumed that Palestinians would prefer to flee their immiseration in these permanently occupied, colonised lands.
The slave revolt of 7 October – brutal and ugly as such revolts have been throughout history – was a devastating shock. Not just to an Israel wedded to its racist, hands-on colonial project of subjugating the Palestinian people. It was also a shock to the West’s wider colonial project, into which Israel is so tightly integrated.
In Washington’s “rules-based order”, the only meaningful rule is that what Washington and its clients want, they get. The planet, its resources and peoples are viewed as little more than playthings by the world’s superpower-in-chief.
Revolts to this order – whether advanced by Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran – cannot be allowed to become a model. The “rules-based order” must be restored with a savagery necessary to teach the the colonized and enslaved their place.
That was the message of Washington’s own black sites needed in its futile “war on terror”, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo – sites that drew on Israel’s experiences of “breaking” inmates at Facility 1391.
The complicity of western establishments in Israel’s current genocide is not an anomaly. It does not derive from a misunderstanding or confusion. The western political and media class see the genocide in Gaza as clearly as the rest of us. But for them, it is justified, required even. The colonized and oppressed must be taught that resistance is futile.
Sde Teiman, like the Gaza death camp, is serving its purpose. It is there to break the human spirit. It is there to turn the Palestinians into willing collaborators in their own destruction as a people, in their own ethnic cleansing.
And a subliminal message is being directed at the western public at the same time: this could also be your fate if you do not join in cheerleading Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared in the Middle East Eye.
