Saturday, December 07, 2024

The Tectonic Shift: The Gaza Genocide and the Limits of Israeli Hasbara


 December 6, 2024
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Image by Dylan Shaw.

The ongoing war and genocide in Gaza is unprecedented. Nothing that Israel and its supporters can say or do will avoid the historical accountability of the extermination of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.

The above assertion is critical, both for ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and achieving Palestinian freedom. This is why.

In all past wars and adjoining war crimes, Israel managed to push the reset button in its relationship with occupied Palestinians.

Following each war, the Israeli hasbara, propaganda machine, would start – utilizing the always-willing western mainstream media – to paint Palestinians in a negative light and to present Israel, a country that is supposedly in a permanent state of self-defense, as the victim, or even the lone defender of western civilization.

This campaign is always paralleled with the whitewashing of Israel in popular entertainment, from Hollywood movies to TV sit-coms, to magazine covers with such titles as “Gorgeous Photos Capture The Unseen Lives Of Female Soldiers In Israel”.

Generally, Western politicians of varied ideologies, along with intellectuals, news talking heads and church leaders all praise, in tandem, the miracle that is Israel.

At the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war in October 2023, for example, British playwright Tom Stoppard said that “before we take up a position on what’s happening now, we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilization and barbarism.” He, of course, leaned towards the latter.

This Israeli tactic always includes the demonization of Palestinians as well, where the victim becomes the ‘terrorist’ and those under siege become the besiegers. This last claim, in particular, was expressed in the words of former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright who said, in an interview with NBC in August 2000, that “the Israelis feel under siege from the Palestinian rock throwers and the various gangs that have been roaming around.”

Why will those same Israeli tactics fail this time? Indeed, they will fail, not due to Israel’s lack of trying. In fact, Israel is already bracing for the fight of a lifetime.

One new tactic that Israel is already employing in ‘friendly’ countries, like the United States, is the passing of laws to block the mere conversation on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, so that it will have exclusive access to the American public.

On November 14, the US House of Representatives passed two bills: H.R.6408 and H.R.9495. The latter, in particular, aimed at giving the Treasury Secretary the authorization to revoke an organization’s tax-exempt status and decide when the designation would end.

Once these bills pass the Senate and are approved by the president, the most democratic and peaceful expressions of rejecting the Israeli occupation of Palestine and demanding sensible US foreign policy will be equated to a direct violation of the law and, in some cases, to terrorism – as defined by the Department of Treasury, at the behest of the pro-Israeli lobby.

But even these desperate attempts will not quell the anger or distract from the conversation, for the following reasons:

One, not only did Israel commit genocide in the Gaza Strip, but this genocide and extermination are being investigated and are acknowledged by the world’s largest legal institutions, namely the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Two, unlike previous investigations, for example, the Goldstone Report probing the 2008-09 war on Gaza, the international community has already taken some practical steps to hold Israeli war criminals accountable, including an arrest warrant issued on November 21 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Three, those who routinely come to Israel’s defense, the US and other Western governments, are now directly clashing with the very international law they helped articulate after World War II, depriving them of any credibility as ‘neutral’ parties in this conflict.

For example, Biden said that the warrants were “outrageous” while the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs claimed that Netanyahu and other ministers enjoy immunity since Israel is not a party to the ICC.

Four, despite the inherent bias of western media, Palestinian journalists, isolated and killed in large numbers, managed to communicate the genocide to the rest of the world, making it impossible for Israel to hide its crimes.

Five, the impact of the Israeli genocide on Gaza has already penetrated the various layers of public opinion, unprecedented in history.

Typically, the conversation on Palestine is confined to specific strata of society, reaching academics, social justice activists and other groups interested in politics and global issues.

Today, ordinary people have been made aware of the conversation, to the extent that it is widely believed that anger over Gaza has contributed in determining the outcome of the latest US elections.

In Africa, the growing political and public interest in the Palestinian struggle have re-enlivened the spirit of anti-colonial, liberation struggles on the continent, bringing many countries, from South Africa to Algeria, back to the frontlines of global solidarity.

No amount of Israeli propaganda, unjust laws, unfair categorizations of Palestinians or the hardly-clad models of the IDF, will ever succeed in reversing these realities.

Now, there can be no reset buttons. Rather, the global momentum of Palestine’s liberation will accelerate in the coming months and years.

The price exacted from the Palestinian people for this earth-shattering moment has been high and painful, but the history of all national liberation struggles, Palestine included, demonstrates that the price for freedom is always high.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net


Piers Morgan – Normalizing Israel’s Genocide


December 6, 2024

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Piers Morgan, Youtube screenshot.

Since October 7, 2023, white settler propaganda has ramped up through two insidious tactics targeting western audiences. The first rationalizes Israel’s brutality under the pretext of “self-defense” of a supposed “civilized” western democracy in a barbaric region, exploiting the conflation of Zionism with Judaism and dehumanizing all Palestinian people as “terrorists” to legitimize the ongoing genocide in Palestine and suppress dissent in the United States. The second aims to normalize genocide and Zionism, making mass violence more acceptable by breaking societal taboos, delegitimizing and attempting to destroy international law and weaving them seamlessly into the fabric of Western capitalist, liberal and consumerist culture.

Driving this normalization campaign is the mainstream media, with platforms like the talk show Piers Morgan’s Uncensored and the liberal Zionist outlet Haaretz playing pivotal roles.

The role of dehumanization in genocide

Recent research has advanced understanding of why people participate in genocide. Influences like peer pressure, group norms and obedience to authority often outweigh deeply held beliefs or ideologies. Class, economic inequality and lack of resources also make some individuals more vulnerable to coercion.

Several studies highlight the role of dehumanizing propaganda in promoting and shaping genocidal violence. While such rhetoric may not convince everyone, it shifts social dynamics by promoting the repression of dissent, normalizing violent ideas and emboldening those with pre-existing biases to act on them. This propaganda does not always create hatred though it can legitimize and create consent to deadly aggressive solutions, making them seem acceptable although they are illegal, morally abhorrent actions.

Dehumanization also plays a role after participation in violence. While many genocidaires initially experience intense emotional and physical distress, repeated acts of violence dull these reactions. Dehumanizing narratives then play a critical role in reframing and normalizing such actions, helping participants justify continued violence and view it as morally acceptable.

Spreading lies and debating mass murder

White settler societies, including Zionist society in Palestine, construct their identity through misinformation, dehumanization of “the other” and a commitment to expansion and dispossession, with media shaping public opinion and influencing policy to sustain these narratives. Since October 7, 2023, the mainstream media has perpetuated what may be one of the most elaborate and insidious misinformation campaigns in modern history. This includes the widespread dissemination of fictitious atrocity propaganda dehumanizing Palestinian people, such as claims of mass rape, beheaded babies, infants hanging on a clothesline, a baby baked in an oven and other fabricated horrors.

British media personality Piers Morgan has used his extremely popular News Corp platform to amplify debunked atrocity propaganda, facing no accountability. Through his debate show, he has provided a stage for Islamophobes, official Israeli state and military spokespersons and unapologetic antisemites to air their abhorrent, fascistic and bogus viewpoints.  These reactionaries have been featured alongside anti-war, anti-apartheid, anti-genocide, pro-humanity, progressive, liberal and leftist activists, politicians and media personalities as a supposed counterbalance, muddying the waters of acceptable debate.

Morgan’s show trivializes atrocities by framing genocide as a topic for “debate” rather than the moral and legal outrage it is. This process of normalization, as defined by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, makes the inherently abnormal, illegal and repugnant apartheid, genocide and settler colonialism – seem ordinary and acceptable, while diverting focus from the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The BDS movement opposes normalization, viewing it as a tool used by oppressors to legitimize oppression and suppress resistance. Normalisation enables Israel to whitewash its apartheid, genocidal regime and weaken global solidarity with Palestinian liberation through manipulative rhetoric.

Programs like Morgan’s claim to be neutral platforms, yet his overt pro-Trump stance and role as a henchman for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Fox News expose the façade, steering the narrative behind his so-called “uncensored” approach. Similarly, another Trump aficionado, now appointee Elon Musk claims to champion “free speech” while actively suppressing dissenting voices on his increasingly reactionary X platform.

Morgan’s show exemplifies Orwell’s concept of “newspeak,” as described in 1984. This distortion of language, repackaged as seemingly innocent discourse, aligns with what Italian philosopher Umberto Eco termed “Ur-fascism,” warning in his 14th point that such manipulations can even manifest in the guise of popular talk shows. Morgan positions himself much like Israeli war-criminal Netanyahu and US President elect Trump, who embrace a cult of tradition, whether rooted in the myth of a once “great” America or an expansive Greater Israel, syncretizing diverse and often contradictory beliefs into an immutable “truth,” while rejecting modernism and intellectual, academic critique.

Haaretz and justice

The foremost liberal Zionist media outlet – Haaretz (“the land” in Hebrew) – serves a particularly noxious normalization function; to present Zionism as aligned with human rights, claiming to encompass a political spectrum from right to left, with democratic, progressive values and a commitment to peace and justice. This façade legitimizes a hollow “peace process” of fruitless negotiations, all while Israeli bulldozers and developers persist in stealing Palestinian land, with some of it even marketed in the U.S. at Zionist land sales cynically hosted in synagogues.

Much like its portrayal of the anti-Netanyahu protests in the spring of 2023 as indicative of Israeli so-called “democracy,” Haaretz obscures the genocidal foundation of Zionism by framing the intensified violence against Palestinians since October 7, 2023, as a symptom of the Netanyahu government’s extremism – a bug rather than a feature of Zionism. Additionally, similar to Piers Morgan’s program which fosters open collaboration with genocidal entities, Haaretz has featured reports from regime-aligned journalists embedded within the Israeli military. It played a key role in amplifying the fabricated Hamas mass rape narrative, among other regime agitprop.

Piers Morgan Uncensored and Haaretz are not merely examples of media manipulation; they are instruments of societal conditioning designed to sustain global systems of oppression. Resisting this insidious normalization demands critical engagement with media narratives and a steadfast refusal to accept these atrocities as unavoidable.

Reclaiming the language of justice is essential, standing in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation as a critical front in the global fight against white supremacist imperialism.

Yoav Litvin is a Doctor of Psychology/ Behavioral Neuroscience. For more info, please visit yoavlitvin.com/about/  


Netanyahu’s Diabolical Undeclared War Objectives in Gaza


 December 6, 2024
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Youtube screenshot.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel’s war on Gaza will continue until achieving what he terms “total victory.” Instead of critically examining Netanyahu’s vague and open-ended objectives, much of the Western media and many governments frame the onslaught as self-defense, and some even normalize the genocide as a “humane” attempt to “free” Israeli captives.

At the same time, the same pundits decontextualized the Palestinian right to self-defense by ignoring that the October 7 revolt was a direct response to over two decades of Israel’s imposed “starvation diet” blockade on Gaza. Exactly, as the West turns a blind eye, and continues to enable Israel’s theft of Palestinian-occupied land in the West Bank to benefit Jewish-only colonies.

Meanwhile, these media outlets downplay or dismiss Israel’s treacherous undeclared war objectives, even to the detriment of Israeli captives and the immense civilian suffering in Gaza.

For over a year, Netanyahu has prioritized an agenda to reoccupy and to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza rather than engage in negotiations for prisoner’s swap. Especially since the release of Israeli captives would undermine one of Netanyahu’s primary pretexts for pursuing his sinister objectives.

This is only possible in the wake of Western leaders embracing Netanyahu’s racist perspective, focusing only on the well-being of Israeli captives, while ignoring the over 10,000 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli jails, and the welfare of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. For instance, Joe Biden has expressed recently his concern over Netanyahu potentially delaying action to secure the release of Israeli captives until January 20, 2025, while expressing no sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians in 2024 and beyond.

With the conspicuous silence or impotence of world bodies, the Israeli captives became a convenient fig leaf under which Netanyahu saw as an opportunity to reoccupy Gaza. It is worth recalling that in 2005, Netanyahu resigned from the Israeli government in protest against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to “disengage” and remove the Jewish-only colonies from the Gaza strip.

Immediately following October 7, Netanyahu launched a genocidal war, disregarding the Palestinian Resistance’s proposal for prisoner’s exchange. His decision to pursue war instead of negotiations was motivated by several factors:

a) Deflect responsibility for the intelligence failure under his watch.
b) Evade scrutiny of his role in facilitating external funding to Hamas.
d) Execute a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing to reoccupy Gaza.

The strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza was openly advocated by Israel’s racist Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who three months following October 7 called for Palestinians to leave Gaza. The scion of an Ukrainian immigrant repeated the century-old European Zionist myth of blooming the desert⎯a narrative that not only ignores historical and geographical realities but also contradicts his own Old Testament that once described Canaan, the land of the Filastin (Palestine), as the “land of milk and honey,” before the ancient Hebrews migrated from their original homes to Palestine.

Further, and on January 1, 2024, Smotrich’s fellow racist National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, declared in a Knesset speech that Israel should never withdraw from any territory it occupies and explained that the establishment of new Jewish-only colonies in Gaza as “an important thing.” The following day, on January 2, Ben Gvir doubled down, stating that displacing “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians from Gaza would help pave the way for the creation of the new Jewish-only colonies.

More recently, on Monday, November 25, Smotrich declared to the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing the Jewish-only colonies in the occupied West Bank, “We can and must conquer the Gaza Strip.” He claimed there is “a unique opportunity” with Donald Trump’s election to halve Gaza’s population—a veiled euphemism for ethnic cleansing. On Thursday, November 28, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir echoed similar calls to “reoccupy the Gaza Strip.”

On the ground inside Gaza, the tools of occupation were more explicit in defining the meaning of Netanyahu’s ostensible mantra: “total victory.” Israeli soldiers posed before an orange banner that read, “Only (Jewish-only) settlement (in Gaza) would be considered victory!” Notably, the orange color harkens back to the banners used by the settler movement in 2005 to protest Sharon’s decision to evacuate the Jewish-only colonies from Gaza.

To this end, and starting October 1st, Israel initiated a new phase of targeted genocide by starvation, blocking food aid trucks from entering northern Gaza, particularly the towns of Beit LahiaBeit HanounJabalia and camp Jabalia. And where trucks were allowed in, food aid was swapped with sand bags. Starvation has become so widespread in these areas, women and children are forced to scavenge through mounds of trash for food.

On November 29, Ajith Sunghay, head of the U.N. Human Rights Office for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, stated after visiting Gaza that the “U.N. had been unable to deliver any aid to northern Gaza” due to “repeated impediments or outright rejections of humanitarian convoys by the Israeli authorities.”

Regarding the genocide by terror, U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk reported that residents of northern Gaza are subjected to “non-stop” bombing. Simultaneously, hundreds of thousands have been ordered to evacuate, likely to make way for new Jewish-only settlements.

As part of the forced depopulation of Gaza’s northern region—the most fertile land in the strip—Israel is constructing a topographic barrier to isolate this area from the rest of Gaza. Beginning in early October, Israel carried out extensive controlled explosions, demolishing multi-story buildings to clear a path for a 5.6-mile road cutting across the strip. This road divides Gaza City from the northern towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has characterized this widespread forced displacement as part of an official government policy amounting to “crimes against humanity.”

On November 30, former Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon confirmed HRW findings, stating that Netanyahu and “far-right” (racist) elements are waging a war of “occupation, annexation, and ethnic cleansing.” He added, “There is no Beit Lahia, there is no Beit Hanoun.”

The live documented ethnic cleansing in Gaza, much like in 1948, alongside the expansion of Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank, underscores the true undeclared objectives in Israel’s ostensible “total victory.” In this contest, Netanyahu’s deliberate undermining of U.S.-led negotiations for prisoner’s swap exemplifies his quintessential diabolical persona: exploiting the predicament of his own Israeli captives to further his cynical undeclared agenda of slaughtering the “Amalek,” and ethnically cleansing Gaza to pave the way for new Jewish-only colonies.

Jamal Kanj is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries.



‘Cracked under the pressure’: Alarm sounded as US postal worker suicides quadruple


Alexandria Jacobson, Investigative Reporter
RAW ST0RY
December 6, 2024 

A U.S. Postal Service letter carrier makes a delivery in Fullerton, Calif. in August 2020 (Shutterstock/Matt Gush)

Content warning: This article discusses suicide and self-harm. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis and needs emotional support, help is available 24/7 via call or text at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.


Over the course of nearly 20 years, Carlos Ulloa has worked for the United States Postal Service in a range of capacities — from starting as a letter carrier to delivering parcels to driving trucks and serving as a supervisor of distribution operations.

But after two mental health episodes in the last four years due to work-related stress, Ulloa, of Belleville, N.J., transitioned to a custodial role at a national distribution center in Jersey City.

“My plans were to move up, to keep going up and not to end up as a custodian, cleaning bathrooms and floors and stuff like that,” Ulloa told Raw Story. “I was supposed to continue to grow up and stay into management after I was promoted.”

But about four years ago, Ulloa said a new plant manager “started putting me down in front of my own suit, my own employees, yelling and screaming and whistling and pointing his finger at me.” The manager would talk to him like he was “some kind of dog” and expected him to give up his weekends and work overtime — when he was already frequently late getting his grandkids to school and providing transportation for his daughter, Ulloa said.

One day Ulloa showed up to work intoxicated and ended up being reported missing after leaving the building and hiding in his attic.

“I guess I cracked under the pressure,” Ulloa said.

Postal inspectors, postal police officers and ambulance crews came to his home and took him to a hospital, where he was later put in a psychiatric ward for trying to run away, he said. Ulloa began seeing a psychiatrist every day for about five months where he said they discussed “any sadness, any problems, that we want to take our lives, alcohol, drugs.”

When Ulloa was ready to return to work, he was told that he couldn’t return to the same facility and was asked where he might want to be transferred to continue as a supervisor or potentially grow into other leadership roles.


That’s when Ulloa decided he didn't want to be in management anymore with “too much stress, too much going on.” He decided he’d be better off working as a mechanic or in maintenance.

However, the new custodial job didn’t provide the stress relief Ulloa was seeking either as he said his new supervisor bullied and harassed him, too. Last December, Ulloa told a supervisor he was considering ending his life due to work pressure.

One of Ulloa’s friends, a postal police officer who was off-duty at the time, was able to calm him down over the phone and drove to the facility to ensure Ulloa didn’t harm himself and was given medical attention. He spent another week in a psychiatric hospital.


“I used to never have a depression problem. Now, I gotta take pills for the depression problems,” said Ulloa, adding that he would like to see the Postal Service “be more supportive, maybe more aware of, especially upper management, to see their own supervisors or other managers how they treat employees.”

Ulloa isn’t the only Postal Service employee to recently deal with suicidal ideation. The latest annual report for the United States Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement branch of the Postal Service, revealed that 201 suicides were reported in its fiscal year 2023.

That’s more than quadruple the 47 suicides reported by the Postal Inspection Service in fiscal year 2022.


And it’s more than double the national suicide rate for the general population of 14.2 deaths per 100,000 people, according to 2022 figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Postal Inspection Service qualifies all of its crime figures — from burglaries to robberies to homicides, suicides and assaults — by saying in the report, “Though not all of these reports are credible, the Inspection Service takes all reports of violent crime seriously and responds to every reported incident.”

Based on the Postal Service’s reported 635,350 total career and non-career employees in 2023, the suicide rate for postal employees would be about 31.6 per 100,000 people, if all 201 reported suicides involved Postal Service employees.


Spencer Block, a public information officer for the Postal Inspection Service's Chicago headquarters referred Raw Story to the Postal Service headquarters. Spokespeople for the Postal Service and the Postal Inspection Service did not respond to Raw Story’s multiple requests for comment. Neither responded to clarifying questions about the suicide and crime statistics reported.

The need for a volunteer emergency response team

Thirty volunteers from the National Association of Letter Carriers union formed an emergency response team in March due to “concern with the letter carriers being assaulted out there on the street, issues of substance abuse, mental health issues that we saw within our craft,” Mack Julion, assistant secretary-treasurer for the National Association of Letter Carriers, told Raw Story.

Julion, who has been a letter carrier in Chicago since 1997, said the group has seen “quite a few this year” in terms of suicides by letter carriers and has responded to such incidents and other traumatic events by visiting affected facilities where members might be upset. The program is based off of the emergency response team model from the United Steelworkers union, and volunteers received certifications from the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, Inc..

“One traumatic incident could lead to more traumatic incidents, more trauma, if not properly dealt with,” Julion said. “It is healthy to address and deal with these traumatic situations and help people process their grief, because without that, that could lead to more trauma.”

In particular, violence against letter carriers has been an ongoing issue over the last five years, according to a Raw Story investigation that found a 543 percent increase in robberies of postal workers between 2019 and 2022.

Khalalisa Norris, a letter carrier in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, twice experienced gun violence on the job, most recently being robbed in January 2023 at gun point for her arrow keys — the antiquated universal keys that thieves target to unlock numerous mailboxes in a given zip code.


Khalalisa Norris, 46, was robbed at gunpoint while working as a letter carrier on Chicago's West side. Norris met with Raw Story on Feb. 19 in the nearby Chicago suburb, Oak Park, Ill. (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

Norris told Raw Story in November that she still hasn’t been able to return to her full mail route out of fear after her robbery experience and that she still sees a psychiatrist for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She said she’s been working with her union to push Congress for more safety protections for letter carriers.

While the Postal Service offers a “pretty good” Employee Assistance Program, Julion said the emergency response team was “an attempt to go beyond that.”


“When these incidents happen out at the station, EAP comes out, talks to the carriers, and a lot of carriers are kind of skeptical, if you will, because this EAP service seemed like just the arm of the Postal Service or management,” Julion said. “By us having our own people going out, talking with our people and literally getting trained to go out to deal with these situations is very helpful.”

Julion said June was a particularly busy month for the emergency response team, which has two volunteers located in each of its 15 regions. He estimated that four suicides were reported within two weeks.

One incident the team responded to this year involved an attempted suicide at a post office in Aurora, Co., where a man expressed stress about his wife potentially being deported. He was saved when an office door was broken down to stop him.


A Marine Corps veteran committed suicide after “dealing with depression and suicidal ideation for some time,” Julion said. The unadjusted rate of suicide for veterans in 2021 was 33.9 per 100,000 people, according to a 2023 annual report from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

In October 2021, a letter carrier committed a double murder-suicide at a sorting facility in Memphis, killing a supervisor and manager before killing himself, AP reported. Experts said the COVID-19 pandemic added extra stress to Postal Service employees at the time.

Frank Albergo, president of the Postal Police Officers Association, told Raw Story that postal police officers, the Postal Service’s own uniformed police force, formerly patrolled that Memphis facility before the union became embroiled in a four-year-long dispute with the Postal Service about its ability to protect letter carriers and the mail off postal property.

“We rarely patrol it anymore because we just don't have the manpower,” Albergo said. “That would have been something that we might have been able to prevent. Whether or not we could prevent it, we'll never know, but we never even had the chance. That's the problem.”
‘Doesn't surprise me’: A history of postal employee suicides

The circumstances around suicides are “complex” and don’t always involved mental illness, Erich Mische, CEO of suicide education nonprofit, Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, told Raw Story.

Julion agreed that not all of the suicides the emergency response team dealt with were “so much postal related as much as it is life, situations happening, and people not knowing how to respond or deal with them.”

Still, Julion acknowledged that Postal Service employees work in a “high-stress, high-speed workplace.”

“We often tell people the post office is like no other place that you’ve ever worked. We feel we are the best at what we do. We deliver everything, everywhere, every day. Rain, snow, sleet, hail, COVID, we deliver,” Julion said. “It’s what we do, and to have a sort of expectation like that, you can imagine the kind of pace that we work at on the inside and the kind of pressures that can be put on us to deliver, particularly if there's issues of understaffing.”

Letter carriers, particularly, often take pride in servicing the American people and don’t want to disappoint customers, which can “drive people crazy,” Julion said.

Ulloa said he certainly felt that level of pressure.

“The post office is just stressful enough, just to know that you have a time limit to get the mail out or the packages out and stuff like that,” Ulloa said. “I understand that we all push it and everything else, but they always want more with less people, and then the people won't stay because the management just doesn't grow with them.”

Before becoming a postal police officer, Albergo was a letter carrier and still has nightmares about the job due to the “stressful environment,” he told Raw Story.

“All I can tell you is I was a letter carrier for six years. I would not want to be a letter carrier now,” Albergo said.

Harassment and abuse has “always been a problem in the Postal Service,” Albergo said, noting that workplace stress and violence has been an issue for more than 30 years, according to a February 1992 joint statement signed by postal unions. The statement was released in the wake of a quadruple murder-suicide in Royal Oaks, Mich., where a terminated employee fired more than 100 shots at a post office, killing four employees before killing himself.


“We openly acknowledge that in some places or units there is an unacceptable level of stress in the workplace; that there is no excuse for and will be no tolerance of violence or any threats of violence by anyone at any level of the Postal Service; and that there is no excuse for and will be no tolerance of harassment, intimidation, threats, or bullying by anyone,” the statement read.

While Mische wasn’t familiar with the specific statistic of 201 suicides reported in the 2023 Postal Inspection Service report, he said “it doesn't surprise me.”

“Generally speaking, suicide rates with postal employees, I think that's been an issue for a long time. I think you can go as far back as the last 10 or 20 years and find stories about suicide rates in terms of occupation for postal employees and actually federal employees," Mische said.

A December 2023 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called out that the suicide rate for male postal service clerks was 58.2 per 100,000 civilian, non-institutionalized working persons aged 16–64 in 2021.

Mische said “job stress” and “substance abuse issues” are significant factors when looking a suicide rates by job industry.

“Any organization, whether it's a federal government agency, the Postal Service, or it's a construction company, whatever agency or company, public or private, that conversation about suicide and suicide prevention’s got to start at the top with the leadership of any organization saying we are going to make this a priority addressing the issue of suicide,” Mische said.

Leadership needs to be open about the issue of suicides in the workforce despite decades of stigma, which “has cost more lives in our society than had we spent the last several decades being open and honest about the difficult circumstances surrounding suicide,” Mische said.

Institutions that want to provide support to employees struggling with suicidal ideation or related issues should present a message to employees saying, “We're going to make making resources available to help those who may be dealing with suicidal ideation, and get them the help they need. And then, as an organization, we're going to continue to support that individual until they get to a place where they feel as though they are stable," Mische said.

The National Association of Letter Carriers’ president was unavailable for an interview. The American Postal Workers Union did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.
News groups sue Idaho prison leader for increased witness access to lethal injection executions


The execution chamber at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution is shown as Security Institution Warden Randy Blades look on in Boise, Idaho, Oct. 20, 2011. (AP Photo/Jessie L. Bonner, File)



BY REBECCA BOONE
 December 6, 2024


BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The Associated Press and two other news organizations are suing Idaho’s top prison official for increased access to lethal injection executions, saying the state is unconstitutionally hiding the actual administration of the deadly drugs from public view.

The AP, The Idaho Statesman and East Idaho News filed the lawsuit against Idaho Department of Correction Director Josh Tewalt in Boise’s U.S. District Court on Friday.

The news organizations contend the public has a First Amendment right to witness the entire execution process, including when execution team members push the lethal injection medications into the IV lines connected to a condemned person. Idaho’s prison officials have kept that part of the execution concealed behind screens or walls in each of the three executions completed in the last half-century.
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“At its core, this case involves the press’s ability to fulfill its ‘significant role in the proper functioning of capital punishment’ by providing independent public scrutiny of the State of Idaho’s execution process,” attorney Wendy Olson wrote in court documents. She noted the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has repeatedly found that the public has the right to view executions from start to finish — including in a similar lawsuit brought by AP and other news organizations against Idaho officials in 2012. In that case, the appellate court ordered prison officials to allow media witnesses to watch as the IVs are inserted.

“The Ninth Circuit has not minced words,” Olson said, quoting from another 9th Circuit ruling from 2002: “An informed decision by the public is critical in determining whether execution by lethal injection comports with ‘the evolving standards of decency which mark the progress of a maturing society.’”

Idaho Department of Correction spokeswoman Sanda Kuzeta-Cerimagic said the department had not yet been formally served with the lawsuit. But she wrote in an email that “our execution practices have been repeatedly upheld, including meeting or exceeding the requirements under the First Amendment to provide an opportunity to observe the processes integral to an execution.”

“IDOC is committed to transparency in the execution process and will continue to provide one of the most transparent execution processes in the country,” Kuzeta-Cerimagic wrote.

Tewalt and other prison officials have told lawmakers in the past that anything threatening the confidentiality of execution team members or the source of the state’s execution drugs could put Idaho’s ability to carry out capital punishment at risk, in part because it would be difficult to find qualified volunteers willing to put someone to death.

The news organizations point out in the lawsuit, however, that media witnesses can already see other execution team members, though their identities are concealed by medical masks, head coverings and other devices. The same solution could be used for the execution team members tasked administering the lethal drugs, the news organizations said.

Idaho has only attempted four lethal injection executions since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a moratorium on executions in the 1970s. When Keith Eugene Wells was executed in 1994, IV lines ran from his arm to a screen, behind which execution team members used a device to deliver a cocktail of lethal drugs. In the 2011 execution of Paul Ezra Rhoades and the 2012 execution of Richard Albert Leavitt, the IV lines ran through an opening in the wall of the execution chamber, into another area that was hidden from view.

The same setup was used in February, when the state attempted to execute Thomas Eugene Creech. But that execution was called off after the execution team members were unable to successfully establish an IV line despite trying eight different locations in Creech’s arms and legs.

In October, the state announced it would begin using central venous lines — threading a catheter through a large, deep vein until it reaches the condemned person’s heart — for lethal injections if attempts to insert standard IV lines fail. Prison officials also remodeled the execution chamber to add a special “execution preparation” room for the central line procedure, and installed closed-circuit cameras so that media witnesses can watch.

The news organizations want a federal judge to order the state to allow media witnesses the same closed-circuit camera access to the “Medical Team Room,” where the lethal drug preparation and administration occurs.

“There is no logical reason why the events that will take place in the Medical Team Room should fall outside the scope of the well settled First Amendment right to view an execution in its entirety,” Olson wrote.

“Simply put, there is nothing more ‘intertwined’ with the execution process than the preparation and administration of the very drugs that will effectuate Idaho’s most severe punishment,” she said.