Chelsea Manning Spent Most of the Last Decade in Prison. The U.N. Says Her Latest Stint Is Tantamount to Torture.
Natasha Lennard January 2 2020

Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning addresses reporters before entering the Albert Bryan U.S. federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., on May 16, 2019.
Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

ON NEW YEAR’S Eve, as personal reflections on the last decade flooded in, Chelsea Manning’s account tweeted that she had spent 77.76 percent of her time since 2009 in jail. That same day, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer publicly released a letter from late last year accusing the United States of submitting Manning to treatment that is tantamount to torture.

“Such deprivation of liberty does not constitute a circumscribed sanction for a specific offense, but an open-ended progressively severe measure of coercion.”

It does not take a U.N. expert to recognize the current conditions of Manning’s incarceration as a form of torture. It is the very definition of torture to submit a person to physical and mental suffering in an effort to force an action from them. Since May, Manning has been held in a Virginia jail for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning has not been charged with or convicted of a crime. And her imprisonment on the grounds of “civil contempt” is explicitly coercive: If she agrees to testify, she can walk free. If she continues to remain silent, she can be held for the 18-month duration of the grand jury or, as the U.N. official noted, “indefinitely with the subsequent establishment of successive grand juries.”

Each day she is caged, Manning is also fined $1,000. If she is released at the end of the current grand jury, she will owe the state nearly $500,000 — an unprecedented punishment for grand jury resistance. And Manning has made clear, she would “rather starve to death” than comply with the repressive grand jury system, a judicial black box historically deployed against social justice movements.

“Such deprivation of liberty does not constitute a circumscribed sanction for a specific offense, but an open-ended progressively severe measure of coercion,” Melzer, the U.N. special rapporteur, wrote of Manning’s treatment. Melzer’s November letter, which was made public this week, stated that Manning’s coercive imprisonment fulfills “all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” and “should be discontinued or abolished without delay.” The letter asks that the U.S. government provide factual and legal grounds for Manning’s ongoing imprisonment and fines, “especially after her categorical and persistent refusal to give testimony demonstrates the lack of their coercive effect.”

Manning’s supporters and legal team have long stressed that no such legal grounds exist. Manning has proven again and again that her grand jury resistance is unshakeable; the coercive grounds for imprisonment are thus undermined and her jailing is revealed to be purely punitive. Federal Judge Anthony Trenga, who ordered Manning’s torturous incarceration, should be compelled to release her as a point of law, regardless of U.N. censure. This is not to say, however, that coercive incarceration is defensible in cases where it works to compel testimony — it is not. Manning’s resistance has highlighted the brutality of the practice tout court.
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Letter on Chelsea Manning6 pages

MANNING’S ATTORNEY, CIVIL rights lawyer Moira Meltzer-Cohen, said that she hopes the U.N. official’s letter calls greater attention to the use of coercive detention generally, as well as the specific cruel treatment of her client. “While the United States has failed to live up to its human rights obligations, I remain hopeful that the government will reconsider its policies in light of the U.N.’s admonition,” Meltzer-Cohen said in a public statement. She also told me that the U.N. special rapporteur’s recognition of Manning’s refusal to be coerced can serve as further evidence to the judge.

In a statement from jail, Manning said, “I am thrilled to see the practice of coercive confinement called out for what it is: incompatible with international human rights standards.” The grand jury resister is, however, under no illusions about the U.S. government’s willingness to flout its purported human rights obligations in the face of admonitions from the international community. As she put it, “even knowing I am very likely to stay in jail for an even longer time, I’m never backing down.”

“I am thrilled to see the practice of coercive confinement called out for what it is: incompatible with international human rights standards.”

Indeed, as the U.N. special rapporteur noted, his predecessor wrote a number of appeals to the U.S. government from 2010 onwards regarding the cruel and torturous treatment to which Manning was subjected prior to and during her confinement in military prison. Yet her 35-year sentence was not commuted until 2017 by President Barack Obama. Manning noted in her New Year’s Eve tweet that she spent 11.05 percent of the last decade in solitary confinement and over half of her years behind bars “fighting for gender affirming care.” She attempted to take her own life twice during her time at the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Suffice it to say, U.N. appeals have never secured Manning’s liberty or safety. And as, Meltzer-Cohen noted in her statement on the U.N. official’s letter, “In the two months since the letter was conveyed to the United States, Ms. Manning has remained confined, and the daily fines imposed upon her have continued to accrue.”

If the letter fails to sway the government, it should, at the very least, serve as a public reminder to support a political prisoner. Though the last decade of Manning’s life has been marked by torture, she has responded with fierce resistance and struggle for liberatory social justice at every turn. In the tweet tabulating her last 10 years, Manning ended by noting that she devoted “0.00%” of her time “backing down.” The U.N. special rapporteur’s recognition of her refusal to be coerced is welcome. Our solidarity is more than deserved.

Republicans Attack Democrats for Saying Qassim Suleimani Was Assassinated, and Reporters Play Along
Robert MackeyJanuary 9 2020, 3:33 p.m.


THE EXTENT to which Republican talking points shape the political debate on American television was on full display on Tuesday’s edition of “The View,” when Meghan McCain falsely accused Sen. Elizabeth Warren of a “flip-flop” on the killing of Qassim Suleimani. Why, McCain demanded to know, had Warren first referred to the Iranian general killed last week in Baghdad by an American missile as “a murderer” and later as “a senior foreign military official” who was “assassinated”?

Given that Suleimani’s support for militias in Iraq made him “responsible for hundreds of American troops’ deaths,” McCain asked, why was it “so hard” for Warren to just “call him a terrorist?”



There was, in fact, no contradiction between the statements Warren made last Thursday and Friday, and she told McCain that everything she had said about Suleimani and the manner of his killing was true. As the historian Kevin Kruse observed on Twitter, Warren had no more flip-flopped than a politician of the 1940s who referred to Hitler as a genocidal maniac one day and as the head of the German government the next.

It is similarly incorrect to suggest, as McCain seemed to, that describing the killing of a political or military leader as an assassination implies some sympathy for the targeted person. Hitler, for instance, was nearly killed by his aides in 1944, in a bomb plot everyone from Angela Merkel to the U.S. Holocaust Museum refers to as an “attempted assassination.”

But it is worth unpacking the exchange between Warren and McCain because it can help us understand the news media’s obsession with hounding Warren — and, to a lesser extent, fellow Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg — for accurately describing the killing of a general from a nation the United States has not declared war on, at the express direction of the American president, as an assassination.

After she dismissed McCain’s false claim that she had somehow backed away from criticizing Suleimani by describing his killing as an assassination, Warren patiently explained that two things can be true at the same time: The Iranian general had equipped Iraqis to kill American soldiers in the past, and yet Donald Trump’s decision to risk war with Iran by killing him now was reckless.

“Think about Saddam Hussein,” Warren said to McCain. “You want to talk about a bad guy, right? However, going to war in Iraq was not in the interests of the United States. We lost thousands of American lives; it cost us here at home, it has cost us around the world.”

“The question, for the president of the United States,” Warren added, “is to understand what’s going on, have an overall strategy and pick an appropriate response.”



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McCain, however, was not satisfied with an answer that hinted at the complexity of the U.S. conflict with Iran’s proxies in Iraq, where Shiite militias armed by Suleimani regularly attacked American forces before 2012, but are now aligned with Iraq’s government and were key allies in the American-led campaign to shatter the ISIS caliphate. Echoing a Republican effort to smear Democratic critics of the Suleimani assassination as soft on terror, McCain prodded Warren to describe the general in simple terms. “Do you think he’s a terrorist?” McCain asked.

When Warren began by saying that Suleimani, who led a brigade of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was “part of a group that has been designated,” McCain interrupted impatiently: “But is he a terrorist?”

“He’s part of a group that has been designated for terrorism,” Warren began again, at which point McCain cut in again to say, smugly, “So he’s not a terrorist?”

“Of course he is,” Warren replied. “He’s part of a group that our federal government has designated a terrorist. The question, though, is what’s the right response? And the response that Donald Trump has picked is the most incendiary and has moved us right to the edge of war, and that is not in our long-term interests.”

On social media, ABC News reported that part of the exchange on the talk show as news, implying that it was something of a triumph for McCain, who had badgered Warren into admitting that the general was, according to the U.S. government, also a terrorist.



Asked several times by @MeghanMcCain if Gen. Soleimani was a terrorist, Sen. Elizabeth Warren says, "Of course he is. He's part of a group that our federal government has designated as a terrorist. The question, though, is what's the right response?" https://t.co/tmqF9En73W pic.twitter.com/kr7By0AyEl— ABC News (@ABC) January 7, 2020


But McCain was acting less like a hard-hitting interviewer and more like a political operative by basing her questions on Republican talking points attacking Warren and trying to reduce the complexity of Suleimani’s role by labeling the general a terrorist.
To Defend a Reckless Assassination, Republicans Smear Critics Who Even Use the Word, and Reporters Play Along

In the week since Suleimani was killed, the Trump administration has refused to accept that the president’s order to kill one of Iran’s most senior government officials amounted to an assassination, and his political allies have attacked anyone who dares to speak the plain truth.

After the Republican National Committee’s rapid response director, Steve Guest, bizarrely accused Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg of parroting “Russian talking points” by calling an assassination an assassination, Nikki Haley, Trump’s former U.N. ambassador, turned the bad-faith dial up to 11 by going on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program to claim that “the only ones that are mourning the loss of Suleimani are our Democrat leadership and our Democrat presidential candidates.”

What’s instructive is to see how political reporters, sensing that Republicans would attack Democrats for using the word assassination, responded by pressing the presidential candidates who used the word to say they were wrong to do so, and asking those who did not use it to comment on those who did.

On the trail in Iowa on Saturday, for instance, Jeff Zeleny of CNN seemed to think it was more important to talk about the potential Republican attacks on Warren’s use of the word assassination than her persuasive case that Trump’s decision to kill Iran’s most revered general in a third country was a dangerous provocation. So Zeleny suggested to Warren that the word implied some sympathy for the general. “Given everything that Suleimani has done, if you believe that he has done bad deeds, why is this an assassination?” Zeleny asked.



Warren took question after question on Soleimani after not referencing the killing once during her town hall. When pushed on why she called it an assassination, @ewarren responds: “Yes, it is...he has ordered the assassination of a high-ranking gov official in the gov of Iran.” pic.twitter.com/nYHskBAxi4— Tara Prindiville (@taraprindiville) January 4, 2020


“Donald Trump has ordered the killing of a government official of Iran,” Warren replied matter-of-factly. “But is assassination the right word, given his deeds?” Zeleny asked again. “Yes, it is,” Warren said, nodding. “He has ordered the assassination of a high-ranking government official in the government of Iran.”

After Sanders immediately described Suleimani’s killing as an assassination, a Fox News reporter asked Michael Bloomberg if that was appropriate. “This is a guy who had an awful lot of American blood on his hands,” Bloomberg replied. “I think that’s an outrageous thing to say. Nobody that I know would think that we did something wrong in getting the general.”



When asked if he would call Suleimani's death an assassination (by @alexrego_tweets) @MikeBloomberg said "that's an outrageous thing to say." On the proper way to speak about his death, MB "I don't know, get a dictionary and take your pick." https://t.co/JMOgO4zqVd pic.twitter.com/38IfwjTELP— Tim Perry (@tperry518) January 3, 2020


When Anderson Cooper in turn asked Sanders to respond to Bloomberg’s response, the senator suggested that it was self-evidently true that “it was an assassination” and “in violation of international law.” “This guy was a bad news guy, but he was a ranking official of the Iranian government,” Sanders explained. “And you know what? Once you get into violating international law in that sense, you can say there are a lot of bad people all over the world running governments. … Once you start this business, of a major country saying, ‘Hey, we have the right to assassinate,’ then you’re unleashing international anarchy.”

Buttigieg answered a question about the killing at an event in New Hampshire on Saturday by saying, “When you do something as provocative as assassinate a significant foreign official on the soil of a third country, you better think through all of the things that are going to happen next.” By the next morning, when Jake Tapper asked him to comment on Warren and Sanders using the word, the former mayor appeared to sense danger and retreated. “I am not interested in the terminology,” Buttigieg said. “I’m interested in the consequences, and I’m interested in the process. Did the president have legal authority to do this? Why wasn’t Congress consulted? It seems like more people at Mar-a-Lago heard about this than people in the United States Congress who are a co-equal branch of government.”
The Trump Administration Copies the Obama Administration’s Claim That a Legal Killing Cannot Be an Assassination

Beyond the obvious political motives for Republicans to describe the killing of Suleimani as no different from the killing of any terrorist plotting an attack on Americans, there are legal reasons for the administration to reject the word assassination — namely that American policy, spelled out in a series of executive orders, has explicitly banned the practice since 1976.

As my colleague Jim Risen explains, “The ban was put in place following disclosures by the Church Committee in the 1970s, which revealed that the CIA had secretly attempted to kill a series of foreign leaders, most notably Cuba’s Fidel Castro.”

At that time, he adds, “no one in the American government or media publicly defended assassination as a tool of a modern nation-state. It was simply not the accepted practice of a democracy that wanted to serve as a role model for the world.”

The Trump administration’s rationale, that Suleimani was not assassinated because he was killed while allegedly planning an “imminent” attack on Americans, making his killing an act of national self-defense, is almost identical to the Obama administration’s argument for why the killing of Osama bin Laden did not violate the assassination ban.

Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, told law students and faculty at Northwestern University in 2012, “It is entirely lawful — under both United States law and applicable law of war principles — to target specific senior operational leaders of al Qaeda and associated forces.”

“This is not a novel concept,” Holder continued. “In fact, during World War II, the United States tracked the plane flying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto — the commander of Japanese forces in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway — and shot it down specifically because he was on board. As I explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee following the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the same rules apply today.”

“Some have called such operations ‘assassinations,’” Holder added. “They are not, and the use of that loaded term is misplaced. Assassinations are unlawful killings. Here, for the reasons I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self defense against a leader of al Qaeda or an associated force who presents an imminent threat of violent attack would not be unlawful — and therefore would not violate the Executive Order banning assassination or criminal statutes.”

Hours after last week’s killing of Suleimani, senior State Department officials, speaking to reporters anonymously, suggested that it was glaringly obvious why the strike was not an illegal assassination, and cited the targeting of the Japanese admiral in 1943 as precedent. “It’s shooting down Yamamoto,” one official said. “Jesus, do we have to explain why we do these things?”

The parallel with Yamamoto is, however, less than exact, given that the United States was at war with Japan when he was killed, but did not declare war on Iran before killing its most important general on a foreign visit.

The weakness of the case for describing Suleimani as a legitimate target based on his official role in Iran’s military, given the lack of a declaration of war, makes it even more important for the administration to convince people that he was a terrorist.

To that end, another unnamed State Department official told reporters that the Iranian general was a “devilishly ingenious” terrorist comparable to bin Laden and claimed that “very solid intelligence” suggested that Suleimani “was planning imminent attacks against American diplomats and our armed forces members in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and in the region,” so “this was an action taken in self-defense.”

“The conditions were met to take decisive action to eliminate a very, very, very effective terrorist in the heart of the Middle East to save hundreds of American lives,” the same official said.

Patrick Granfield, who worked in the State Department and the Defense Department under Obama, pointed out that another way of looking at the change in the behavior of Suleimani’s militias in Iraq is to say that Iranian-backed militias were not linked to a single American death from the time the Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2015 until more than a year after Trump sabotaged the deal in 2018 by withdrawing from it and beginning his campaign of “maximum pressure.”
Attacks on U.S. Soldiers Are Classified as Terrorism to Justify the Assassination

One overlooked aspect of the administration rationale for killing Suleimani is the claim that, as a senior State Department official put it last week, he was “the architect of Iran’s major terrorist attacks over the last 20 years.” As evidence, the official pointed to one recent estimate of how many U.S. service members were killed by Iraqi Shia militias trained and equipped by Suleimani’s Quds Force. “He’s killed 608 Americans in Iraq alone,” the official told reporters on Friday.

That number was a slight misstatement of a Pentagon estimate of deaths attributed to proxies sponsored by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was released on April 4, 2019 — just four days before the IRGC was officially designated a terrorist groups by Trump.

“During Operation Iraqi Freedom, DoD assessed that at least 603 U.S. personnel deaths in Iraq were the result of Iran-backed militants,” Navy Cmdr. Sean Robertson, a Pentagon spokesperson, told Military Times in an email last April. “These casualties were the result of explosively formed penetrators (EFP), other improvised explosive devices (IED), improvised rocket-assisted munitions (IRAM), rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades (RPG), small-arms, sniper, and other attacks in Iraq,” the spokesperson added.

Another supporter of the assassination, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, pointed to an earlier Defense Department estimate, produced during the Obama administration in 2015, that about 500 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines had been killed in Iraq by explosives or groups linked to Iran. Suleimani “was a terrorist directly responsible for the murder of over 500 US service men & women,” Cruz wrote on Twitter. “Why” he asked, are congressional Democrats “outraged that he’s finally dead?”

Suleimani had been “conducting terrorist activities against us and our coalition partners for over 20 years,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Tuesday. “He has the blood of hundreds of Americans, soldiers, on his hands and wounded thousands more.”

All of these statements suggest that the description of Suleimani as a terrorist rests mainly on the hundreds of deadly attacks on American soldiers by the Iraqi militias he armed during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. combat mission which began with the initial invasion in March 2003 and concluded in August 2010. Obama withdrew all U.S. combat forces from Iraq at the end of 2011. American service members only returned to Iraq in 2014 to confront ISIS.Read Our Complete CoverageTargeting Iran


Although Trump has referred to the killing of an American defense contractor by rocket fire attributed to an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq last month as just the latest in a series of intolerable attacks, an analysis of a Pentagon casualty database, cross-referenced with the official death toll from the Department of Defense and news reports and obituaries, reveals the surprising fact that none of the nine American service members killed in action in Iraq since 2014 appears to have died at the hands of Iranian-backed militias. All of the fatalities came in connection with the fight against Islamic State militants.

In other words, not one American soldier was killed in Iraq by the proxy network under Suleimani’s control in at least the previous eight years before he was assassinated last week in Baghdad while allegedly planning an “imminent” attack on Americans.

A spokesperson for the American-led coalition confirmed to The Intercept on Friday that all nine U.S. service members killed in action while serving in Iraq from 2015 through 2019 were battling ISIS.

Although it might surprise anyone who has listened to the administration and its supporters justify the assassination of Suleimani to learn that Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have not killed an American soldier in nearly a decade, it is well-known among policymakers in Washington that when American troops began to depart Iraq in earnest in 2011, some leaders of Shia militias pushed to launch revenge attacks on them on the way out. Suleimani ordered them not to, arguing that the contest had been won and that the best strategy was to leave American troops alone.

Shia militia leaders over the next decade would regularly press to launch attacks for one reason or another, but Suleimani consistently held them back. That changed recently, as the Trump administration walked away from the Iran nuclear deal and implemented crippling sanctions, sending the Iranian economy into a nosedive.

Asked on Wednesday by my colleague Ryan Grim about Suleimani’s moderating influence on Shia militias over the last decade, Esper, the defense secretary, insisted that recent history that mattered more. “I think you should look at the uptick in attacks that have happened in the last few years. That doesn’t look very moderating,” he said as he left a closed-door briefing in the Capitol.

Former Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in a recent BBC documentary, said that it was a mistake to think of Suleimani as “evil,” but rather as an Iranian patriot carrying out Iranian foreign policy, as odious as that may be to American policymakers. Asked about McChrystal’s comments, Sen. Ted Cruz said that Suleimani was a “terrorist madman.”

“Murdering Americans, murdering over 603 U.S. service men and women, targeting civilians, targeting women and children, plotting a bombing of the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., at Cafe Milano — which, had it been successful, could have killed over 100 civilians in the United States — those are the actions of a terrorist madman, and murdering women and children for political ends is evil,” Cruz told The Intercept.

There is no doubt that the Quds Force under Suleimani’s command supported militant groups like Lebanese Hezbollah that have killed civilians in terrorist attacks, and a huge number of civilians have died in Syria at the hands of the government he backed. Still some experts, like the political philosopher Michael Walzer, have argued persuasively that attacks on soldiers — particularly soldiers occupying foreign nations — should not be considered terrorism.

Indeed, terrorism is defined in U.S. law as, “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”

And while the death or life-changing injury of every American service member killed or wounded by Iranian-backed militia forces in Iraq is undoubtedly tragic, Walzer has argued that it is important to distinguish that sort of violence from attacks on civilian noncombatants.



“Terrorism is the deliberate killing of innocent people, at random, in order to spread fear through a whole population and force the hand of its political leaders,” Walzer wrote in 2002. “The common element is the targeting of people who are, in both military and political senses, noncombatants: not soldiers, not public officials, just ordinary people. And they aren’t killed incidentally in the course of actions aimed elsewhere; they are killed intentionally.”

“I don’t accept the notion that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,’” Walzer wrote. “In the 1960s, when someone from the FLN put a bomb in a cafe where French teenagers gathered to flirt and dance and called himself a freedom fighter, only fools were fooled,” he added, in reference to excuses once made for terror attacks aimed at French civilians by Algerian militants.

In an interview in 2006, Walzer was asked if it was ever possible for attacks on soldiers to be acts of terrorism. He answered:


My instinct is to say that attacks on soldiers are not terrorist attacks. That does not make them right, terrorism is not the only negative moral term in our vocabulary. I did not think that the plane that flew into the Pentagon in 2001 was a terrorist attack or, better said, it was a terrorist attack only because the people in the plane were innocent civilians who were being used and murdered. But if you imagine an attack on the Pentagon without those innocent people in the plane, that would not have been a terrorist attack — whereas the attack on the Twin Towers was terroristic.

I feel the same way in the Israeli cases: Whatever you want to say about Palestinian resistance to the occupation, there is a difference between attacking soldiers and killing civilians, and it is an important moral difference.
Amid Doubts About the Intelligence Leading to an Act of War, Mike Pompeo Emerges as This Administration’s Dick Cheney

The transcript of the initial State Department briefing also gives a sense of how genuinely shocked the senior State Department officials were to hear a reporter say that they had assassinated Suleimani.

When the reporter asked if the administration was concerned, in the aftermath of killing Suleimani, who had close ties to senior Iraqi government officials, including the current prime minister, “about managing now relations with Iraq … to be able to keep U.S. forces based there,” one of the American officials replied: “I’ve never heard anybody argue that we shouldn’t defend ourselves if we’re, like, attacked. I just — is there a question behind the question?”

“Well, I mean, it’s an assassination of an Iranian Government official,” the reporter answered.

“It’s not an assassination. Come on,” the unnamed State Department official said. “That is not true.”

“No, no, no, hold on,” a second official said. “Hold on, hold on. I did this for two years in the Bush administration. Assassinations are not allowed under law. Revenge killings, non-judicial executions are not. The criteria is, Do you have overwhelming evidence that somebody is going to launch a military or terrorist attack against you?”

However, the focus on Suleimani’s role in a campaign of attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq that concluded at least eight years ago, and Trump’s threatening tweet connecting the current standoff to the hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 suggests that the assassination might well have been primarily about revenge.

In the days since that initial briefing, the administration has repeatedly refused to share any intelligence to support its claim that Suleimani was engaged in planning an imminent attack on Americans, even to members of Congress. Two American officials who received classified briefings after the strike on Suleimani told New York Times correspondent Rukmini Callimachi that “the evidence suggesting there was to be an imminent attack on American targets is ‘razor thin.’” The next day, a senior U.S. official told the Washington Post that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a military veteran who was previously in charge of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been pressing Trump to assassinate Suleimani for months.

As Joe Cirincione, a nuclear policy expert and former congressional staffer, observed on Twitter, the reporting suggested “that Pompeo was pushing to assassinate Soleimani for months or longer. This was not about an imminent attack. He just wanted him to kill him. It’s the kind of political assassination the CIA used to do in secret.”

At a public briefing this week, Pompeo responded to questions about the imminence of the threat posed by Suleimani by stating, illogically, that it could be found in his past acts, including the killing of a translator for the U.S. military in a December 27 attack linked to an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia.



This is the Trump administration conceding that there was no imminent threat. Not even under the broad & controversial definition of “imminence” that the Justice Department has sometimes used. The strike was illegal as well as astoundingly reckless. https://t.co/qNPDmTsGYd— Jameel Jaffer (@JameelJaffer) January 7, 2020


It was in retaliation for the killing of that translator, a recently naturalized American citizen employed by a defense contractor, that Trump first escalated the confrontation with Iran by ordering airstrikes on the Iraqi Shia militia blamed for the attack killing 25 of its members. In response, the militia led a protest at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad which was covered extensively on cable news, apparently enraging Trump and prompting him to order the assassination of Suleimani.

Pompeo was reportedly behind Trump’s decision, in April of last year, to add Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including the Quds brigade that Suleimani led, to the State Department list of foreign terrorist organizations, the first time that the United States designated part of another nation’s government as a terrorist group.

A month later, amid heightened tensions following Trump’s decision to sabotage the Iran nuclear deal, the administration claimed, without presenting evidence, that new intelligence indicated that Iran was preparing its proxy groups in Iraq and Syria to attack American forces. The following day, the spokesperson for U.S. Central Command rebuked a senior British officer, Maj. Gen. Christopher Ghika, the deputy commander of the American-led coalition fighting ISIS, who cast doubt on that intelligence, by telling reporters, “We’ve seen no change in the posture” of Iran’s proxy groups.

After a classified briefing on the Suleimani killing from administration officials including Pompeo on Wednesday, Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican and a Trump supporter, emerged from the secure facility in the Capitol where it was held to tell reporters that he was outraged by the flippant attitude of the briefers, and deeply disappointed that they did not provide more information about “the legal, factual, and moral justification for the attack.”



.@SenMikeLee
: "It is not acceptable for officials within the executive branch of government…to come in and tell us that we can't debate and discuss the appropriateness of military intervention against Iran. It's un-American. It's unconstitutional and it's wrong." pic.twitter.com/fVSE6b3EM0— CSPAN (@cspan) January 8, 2020


As a result, Lee said, he had decided to back a war powers resolution demanding that the president get Congressional authorization for any further military attacks on Iran.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington who supports legislation introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna to cut off funding for offensive action against Iran absent congressional approval, told reporters: “President Trump recklessly assassinated Qassim Suleimani. He had no evidence of an imminent threat or attack and we say that coming from a classified briefing where again, there was no raw evidence presented that there was an imminent threat.”



Rep. Pramila Jayapal: "President Trump recklessly assassinated Qasem Soleimani. He had no evidence of an imminent threat or attack." pic.twitter.com/htYowEvXOM— The Hill (@thehill) January 8, 2020


“Just as we were led into Vietnam and Iraq by lies, the Trump administration is misleading us on Iran,” Sanders said on Thursday. “They have justified the assassination of Qassim Suleimani by claiming that he was planning ‘imminent attacks’ on hundreds of Americans in the region, and yet they have produced no evidence that would justify this claim, even in a classified setting.”



Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders said that the Trump administration had not provided evidence to justify the killing of Qassem Soleimani, even under classified settings pic.twitter.com/vQMozwe9BI— Reuters (@Reuters) January 9, 2020


On Thursday evening, as my colleague Alex Emmons reports, the House passed a war powers resolution which instructs Trump “to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces to engage in hostilities in or against Iran or any part of its government or military” unless Congress makes a declaration of war or there is “an imminent armed attack upon the United States.” The measure, as the PBS NewsHour correspondent Yamiche Alcindor noted, “is not binding on the president and would not require his signature.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters that the resolution has “real teeth” because “this is a statement of the Congress of the United States, and I will not have that statement diminished by whether the president will veto it or not.” A vote in the Senate is expected next week.

Ryan Grim contributed reporting from Washington.

Updated: January 10, 2020, 7:30 p.m. ET
This article was updated to note that the Pentagon has now confirmed The Intercept’s reporting that all nine U.S. service members killed in Iraq since the end of 2011 died fighting ISIS, not Iranian-backed militias directed by Gen. Qassim Suleimani.

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Lee Fang, Paul Abowd

Donald Trump Murdered Qassim Suleimani

James Risen January 9 2020, 


President Donald Trump departs after addressing the nation
 from the White House on Jan. 8, 2020. 
Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images


DONALD TRUMP HAS DRAGGED America into a moral abyss. And yet Congress, the press, and the public are unwilling to admit that we are now standing in blood. The nation is enabling a murderous demagogue, and we are all complicit.

The president of the United States has murdered a high-ranking official of a foreign government. The assassination last week of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani was a state-sponsored murder.

But no one in the Washington establishment seems prepared to come out and say the hard truth: Donald Trump is a murderer.

This criminal moment has been a long time coming.

The United States has an assassination ban. The ban was put in place following disclosures by the Church Committee in the 1970s, which revealed that the CIA had secretly attempted to kill a series of foreign leaders, most notably Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

At the time of the Senate committee’s investigation, no one in the American government or media publicly defended assassination as a tool of a modern nation-state. It was simply not the accepted practice of a democracy that wanted to serve as a role model for the world.

But the reform-minded 1970s now seem quaint in a nation whose greatest military innovation in the 21st century has been the targeted killing of individuals by remote control.


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With Suleimani Assassination, Trump Is Doing the Bidding of Washington’s Most Vile Cabal


For the last two decades, both Republican and Democratic presidents have worked quietly to skirt the assassination ban in order to take advantage of new aviation, missile guidance, and surveillance technologies to find and kill individuals all over the world. To launch targeted killings without violating the assassination ban, presidents have counted on compliant government lawyers to issue secret legal opinions that rubber-stamped their actions.

The Clinton administration started this process in 1998, in the wake of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa by Al Qaeda. In response, the White House decided to launch cruise missile strikes against what they claimed were terrorist training camps near Khost, Afghanistan. The primary target was Osama bin Laden.

At the time, I was covering national security and intelligence for the New York Times. I asked White House officials whether the action had violated the assassination ban. They responded that it had not because the target was the “command and control infrastructure” of Al Qaeda. When I asked them what they meant by “command and control infrastructure,” they reluctantly admitted that the “command and control infrastructure” of Al Qaeda was its leadership, meaning bin Laden. I realized that the Clinton administration’s lawyers had prepared a euphemism-laden opinion to provide legal cover for Bill Clinton and his advisers. That was the beginning of what has become a very long pattern.

After 9/11, political concerns about the assassination ban went by the boards because there was such overwhelming public support for the new, so-called global war on terror. But the government’s lawyers still worried about the assassination ban and other rules and regulations governing the use of state-sponsored violence.

That’s why the congressional legislation known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force has been so important to government lawyers. The AUMF, passed by Congress just days after 9/11, has provided the basic legal authorization for counterterrorism strikes ever since.

Armed with the AUMF and other legal backstops, the Bush and Obama administrations began to kill at will. The killing has never stopped. It has been a vicious campaign that has claimed countless innocent lives, destabilized nations, and been almost entirely counterproductive. It has made Americans numb to endless war.

But the United States gained public and legal support for targeted killings only for what it described as the asymmetric fight against terrorism. It targeted suspected terrorists: “non-state actors.”

That is where Trump has now crossed a clear line. He conducted a drone strike to murder the official who served as Iran’s viceroy in Iraq. Qassim Suleimani was most definitely not a “non-state actor.”

Suleimani was the head of the Quds Force, the elite external operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which operated with impunity throughout Iraq under his leadership. He ran Iran’s ground campaign against ISIS in Iraq, in parallel to the American air campaign, and employed Shia militias and their ruthless tactics to defeat the cult-like group. The United States has been happy to take credit for the victory over ISIS in Iraq, without admitting that it relied heavily upon Suleimani’s horrific paramilitary actions and his strategic acumen.

But he was much more than a special forces commander or spymaster; he was Iran’s most important envoy, and he served as Tehran’s intimidating political fixer throughout the Middle East. 

Read Our Complete CoverageTargeting Iran

He dominated the political landscape in Baghdad. In November, The Intercept and the New York Times reported on leaked Iranian intelligence cables that publicly documented Iran’s deep influence in Iraq from Iran’s perspective for the first time. What jumped off the pages in the leaked cables was Suleimani’s personal political power in Iraq and his hold on many of Iraq’s top political, military, and security officials.

Last October, Suleimani intervened at the highest levels of Iraqi politics to keep Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi in office amid massive protests and calls for his resignation. American officials serving in Iraq always thought they heard Suleimani’s footsteps.

In April 2019, the Trump administration designated the Revolutionary Guards, and Suleimani’s Quds Force, terrorist organizations. It was the first time the United States had ever designated a unit of another government a terrorist group.

At the time, the long-debated action was broadly portrayed as just another step in Trump’s reckless campaign to ratchet up economic sanctions on Iran and Iranian leaders. But I believe that the terrorist designation was Suleimani’s death warrant. I would not be surprised if the drone strike against Suleimani was supported by a secret legal opinion claiming that since he was the leader of a designated terrorist organization, he was a legitimate target in the war on terror under the AUMF and other counterterrorism legal guidelines. I’m sure that the lawyers at the National Security Council, the White House, and the Justice Department are sleeping well, knowing that they found a quick legal fix to allow Donald Trump to murder a foreign government official.

If we had a real Congress, there would be a congressional investigation into whatever lame, paper-thin legal rationalizations have been written by government lawyers to back up this murder. Instead, we are left with the nagging realization that Trump has just found a new loophole to circumvent the assassination ban.

But such actions prompt responses. Iran’s parliament has passed a bill designating all U.S. military forces terrorists.

The threat of retaliation has always been one of the most potent arguments against the use of assassination as a national security tool: It can prompt other countries to target Americans for assassination. And if international strictures against assassination are eliminated, we will be one step closer to the abandonment of the laws of war.

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TRUMP ADMINISTRATION FAILED TO CONVINCE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS ITS ASSASSINATION OF SULEIMANI WAS JUSTIFIED

Alex Emmons January 8 2020


FOLLOWING CLASSIFIED BRIEFINGS in the House and Senate, members of Congress said the Trump administration had failed to present evidence that the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani had averted an “imminent threat” to Americans in the Middle East.

“We did not get information inside that briefing that there was a specific, imminent threat that we were halting through the operation conducted last Thursday night,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told reporters. “And I can say I was surprised and saddened to not have that information before us, I think it is likely because it doesn’t exist.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters that 97 senators attended the briefing, and 15 got to ask questions. “There were so many important questions that they did not answer,” said Schumer of Wednesday’s briefers, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, CIA director Gina Haspel, and Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“As the questions began to get tough, they walked out,” Schumer said. “I’ve asked for a commitment that they all come back within a week; we have not gotten that commitment.”

This was the Trump administration’s first briefing to all members of Congress on the operation, which was carried out last Thursday. It comes after Iran retaliated Tuesday night by firing ballistic missiles at an Iraqi military base, which houses some U.S. military personnel. President Donald Trump announced in remarks Wednesday morning that no Americans or Iraqis had been killed in the Iranian strike. The Pentagon suspects that the Iranians intentionally avoided killing people, according to news reports.

The claim that the assassination was in response to a forthcoming “imminent threat” to American troops or diplomats in the region has been central to forming the Trump administration’s legal justification for the operation.

After the operation last week, Pompeo told CNN that Suleimani was plotting an action that would put “dozens if not hundreds of America lives at risk.” Esper told reporters this week that it was “more fair to say” that the threat was “days,” as opposed to weeks, away. But when asked for details this week about what the imminent threat was, Pompeo sidestepped the question by referring to a previous December 27 rocket attack by an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq that killed an American contractor.

Reactions from Democrats in the House were similarly critical of the lack of evidence Trump apparently had before ordering the assassination.

“Every time we were told, ‘Absolutely, there was an imminent threat you should just see the information, it’s really imminent.’ And nothing was shown to us,” said Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., at a news conference following the House briefing. “Over and over and over the question was asked. And nothing more was given to us about this.”

Following the House briefing, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said Trump “had no evidence of an imminent threat or attack, and we say that coming from a classified briefing. Where again, there was no raw evidence presented that there was an imminent threat.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Wednesday that the House will vote on a war powers resolution that would direct Trump to terminate any hostilities by U.S. armed forces against Iran, unless Congress authorizes them.

Even some Republican senators, most prominently Utah Republican Mike Lee, said they were open to a war powers resolution after the briefing, which Lee found infuriating in its lack of specifics. “I walked into the briefing undecided; I walked out decided,” said Lee. “Specifically because of what happened in that briefing.”

Fox News cut away from Lee as he told reporters that the briefing was “probably the worst [briefing] I’ve seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I’ve served in the U.S. Senate.”

“What we were told over and over and over again was, ‘Look, this action was necessary, this was a bad guy, we had to do it, and we can’t have division, we can’t have dissension within our ranks, within our government, or it sends the wrong signal to the Iranians,’ and I think that’s completely wrong,” Lee told reporters.

Read Our Complete CoverageTargeting Iran


Hawkish members of the Republican Party stood by the reasoning presented by the Trump administration. Speaking to reporters afterward, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., cited a “string of intelligence that shows there was ‘near-term planning’ at a different level than what we have seen in the past.”

“Combined with recent in events, just in the last couple months, an increase not just in the volume of attacks but in the lethality of the weapons they chose to use, combined with that string of intelligence, combined with the fact that he was traveling across the region, all of it put together combined with the fact they had just tried to storm our embassy, you put all of that together and you reach the reasonable conclusion that something really bad could happen in the near term, and if we don’t act now, dozens if not hundreds of Americans could die,” Rubio said.

Members of Congress also said that the briefers invoked the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force Resolution as the legal basis for the strike. The resolution, originally passed 17 years ago, was meant to sanction military force against Saddam Hussein’s government, and the text of it only authorizes force to defend “against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., told reporters following the briefing that it was unacceptable for the 2002 AUMF to serve as the legal basis for the strike against Suleimani. “First of all, probably less than 25 percent of members of Congress here today were here in 2002,” Lee said. “Which means they have not had the opportunity to voice their opinion or cast their vote for any authorizations to use military force for their constituents.”

The Search for Clean Air Amid Australia’s Smoky Fires

Eric Byler January 15 2020


THE BACKGROUND DIN of sadness drones loudest when the air in Canberra is safe to breathe. The first two weeks of 2020 have been a pendulum swing between fighting and fleeing from smoke, and a near-perfect likeness of the idyllic life we had before fire season. With the sadness, there is also relief on the good days and hope that the worst is over. And then the city is blanketed in smoke again. We see it. We smell it. This fog of death, loss, terror, and suffering stretching for miles in every direction. How long will it stay this time? And beneath it all, another uncertainty: What is all this smoke doing to my children?

To measure the health risks of air pollution, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) uses an Air Quality Index (AQI) based on measurements of the concentration of particulate matter. An AQI of 67 to 99 is considered “fair,” 100 to 149 is “poor,” 150 to 200 is “very poor,” and 200+ is “hazardous.”




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The AQI hit 4,650 on New Year’s Day in Canberra, the capital city of Australia. That was the day that fires chased us home from the beach. When we got to our house, I stuffed paper towels in the crevices of the doors, but it was wasn’t enough. That night, I didn’t sleep. It was sweltering. And every breath tasted like sticky tar.

It got better for a few days. Then on January 4, soaring temperatures and high winds meant another stretch of losing battles for our firefighters. In came the smoke, and the AQI reached 4,400 on January 5.

The workers who cooked our fish and chips were wearing breathing masks. We’d left ours in the car.


Our kindly landlord had fitted all of our doors with foam sealing, and he’d told us of a DIY air-filtration technique: hanging wet towels over fans. But our house could not withstand the onslaught. We fled. Old Parliament House and the science museum, our favorite places to take Audrey, age 4, and Julian, age 2, on bad weather days, had shut their doors due to air quality. As I drove past new Parliament House, I asked my wife, Ariane, to shoot video on her phone. She could barely see it through the smoke.

We ended up at Canberra Outlet Centre, an indoor mall that looks exactly like you would imagine it. It was a lot better than outside, but the smoke had permeated every inch of it. More than half of the stores had closed. We fed the children and left. The workers who cooked their fish and chips were wearing breathing masks. We’d left ours in the car.

From there, we drove to the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Its soaring lobby, too, was filled with smoke. I realized that any building with a door would suffer the same fate, especially hotels and malls with doors that are used by many. But our room on the second floor smelled clean. We’d found our haven for the night.

The air was still bad the next morning. It was Monday. The Department of Home Affairs, which is responsible for emergency management, had told staff to stay home due to the hazardous air. The National Gallery of Australia sealed its doors, not only to protect staff and patrons, but also the priceless paintings on display.

When we got home, the house smelled OK. Maybe I was just used to it. I put a TV show on for my daughter. My son began playing with the toys from which he’d briefly been separated. The towels I’d hung over the fans were of course dry by now. The blades of the fans were coated with fine, black powder. The eastern-facing doors had been rammed by high winds overnight. When I opened the main entrance, dirt and debris fell to the floor.

A few days later, our air purifier was delivered. As glad as I was to have it, my heart sank when the ring circling the control panel showed red. This meant our house’s air quality was “poor.” But it smelled fine.

When I related this to our landlord, he said, “Yeah, when it’s really thick like that, those fine particles find a way in no matter what you do.”

The fine particles, known as PM2.5, contain toxins linked to respiratory ailments, cancer, and heart disease. They are small enough to penetrate the blood system and the body’s tissues. They have no odor, and health experts say they are harmful in particular to the infirm, the elderly, and children.

An elderly woman had died from respiratory distress upon setting foot on the smoke-filled tarmac at the Canberra airport. An asthmatic teenager had died after bushfire smoke inundated Glenn Innes, New South Wales.

Air purifiers remain sold out everywhere in town, but my wife had found one online. Now, our little air-cleaning robot was puffing up a storm. Before long, the light turned from red to orange (fair). Then yellow (good). Then blue (very good).

With a blue ring of light atop its knee-high, cylindrical frame, the air purifier reminded me of R2D2, who saved Luke Skywalker’s life countless times. We’ve turned the corner, I thought. R2 is here. From then on, if I saw blue, we were winning. Any other color, we were losing, or at least that became my view and, soon, my preoccupation.


Eric Byler’s air purifier glows with an orange light, which signifies “fair” air quality on Jan. 11 2020.  Photo: Eric Byler for The Intercept


“IT’S FUNNY the things you get used to,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Bill, a baseball coach and longtime player for the Ainslie Gungahlin Bears. We were on the ball field at Madura Oval, looking at our phones to check the air quality before a round of batting practice.

“What app do you use?”

“It’s called Air Matters.”

“Mine is CanberraAir,” I said.

I downloaded Air Matters and later found that it allowed me to monitor air quality in other cities in Australia and around the world on a single dashboard. For the next few days, I periodically compared Canberra’s air quality to that of the notoriously polluted city of Delhi, India. Ours usually was worse, and not by a little.

At the National Arboretum, I befriended a man named Chris, who, like me, was stupid enough to accompany his children through narrow tunnels made of rope that climb steeply up to a corkscrew-shaped slide. It was a good-air day.

Chris told me that he had extended family members now living with him because they had lost their homes, or abandoned them hoping that they can still be saved. To rescue stranded relatives, he’d driven four hours through some of the most-affected, coastal areas of New South Wales in a pickup truck loaded with fuel containers.

“It’s like this only once every 20 years,” he said.

It had been 17 years since bushfires engulfed the mountains on which we stood. On January 18, 2003, three fires combined into one and roared into Canberra’s suburbs, destroying nearly 500 homes, killing four people and injuring 470. Fire experts said it was the fastest-moving bushfire ever documented, advancing 20 kilometers per hour on a panicked and unprepared city thanks to 80 kilometer-per-hour winds.

When the kids were asleep, I positioned R2 in the hallway, equidistant from their bedroom doors. I let it run for hours. I re-taped the doors and taped up some windows I hadn’t done before.


January 10, 2020 was a good-air day. Our day care center was open, and, even better, the air was safe enough for the children to play outside. As normal as things looked, we couldn’t forget that 150 bushfires were still burning and that the weekend forecast included very hot temperatures and swift wind currents. And of course, we followed the news reports. Twenty-seven people had lost their lives, all the lost homes, the wildlife, the farm animals. What can I say? It’s mind-numbing.

“Blue!” I announced as we entered the house after bringing the kids home from the pool. We’d left just as the smoke was rolling in.

When the kids were asleep, I positioned R2 in the hallway, equidistant from their bedroom doors. I let it run for hours, then moved it to other parts of the house, just briefly, to check the air quality. It was yellow in places: “good” as opposed to “very good.” I re-taped the doors and taped up some windows that I hadn’t done before.

Ariane awakened me at 9:30 a.m. She needed me to watch the kids as she was off to the farmers market. I checked my phone and said, “Are you sure? It’s 172 [unhealthy].”

“Yeah, it’s OK, I won’t be long.”

I noticed that R2 was still in the hall and had been switched off, perhaps by my son who loves to push buttons.

I moved it into the room where the kids were: the TV room, which is the largest in the house.

The air quality indicator glowed red.

I texted Ariane: “Air purifier has had a red light for the last 20 minutes. I plugged it in behind where the kids are sitting.”

As the air quality outside worsened and the red light persisted, I got more and more anxious. This was the first time the AQI had reached “very unhealthy” since R2 had arrived. I had already closed two doors: the one to the hallway and the one to the kitchen. The other egress was a wide entryway that had no door. It led to the dining room and the only door we currently use to exit the house.

I began blocking the dining room’s entryway with anything I could find. For the bottom third, I used a quilted blanket draped over two chairs. The top two-thirds: a mosaic of the children’s artwork, including a giant treasure map that Audrey felt was too important for non-treasure-hunting use.

“I need to keep it there to help make the air better,” I explained.

R2 was reading orange: “fair.”

The light turned yellow when I was 95 percent finished with my wall. Audrey said, “How will we eat?”

“We can get to the dining room through the kitchen,” I said. The light soon turned blue.

“What is all this?” Ariane said when she came home from the farmers market.

“It was the only way I could turn things around. It was stuck on red.”

“Did you have to use the kids’ artwork?”

“And some of it is not the right way,” Audrey said, pointing to a drawing of hers that was turned on its side. She’d objected and I’d refused to fix it.

“But Audrey, I think your artwork looks beautiful in this context, while also showing its utility,” I said.

“You can just get a mattress bag,” Ariane said. “It will work a lot better.”

“Guess what, kids? We’re having a picnic!” I said. We’d be eating in the parlor with the kitchen door closed.


By dinnertime, the AQI had reached 550. Worse than Delhi. Ariane wanted us to eat like a normal family at the dining room table.

“It’s right by the door, the air is bad there,” I said.

“Well, put the thing in there for 10 minutes,” she said, referring to R2.

I did, but R2 did not move off red.

“Guess what, kids? We’re having a picnic!” I said. We’d be eating in the parlor with the kitchen door closed.

When I powered up R2 in the parlor, it was red there too. It had only been away for 10 minutes.

As the children ate and the air quality gradually improved, Ariane and I reopened the discussion we’d had about flying to Brisbane for the weekend. It would cost us $2,000, and I didn’t think it was worth the expense.

After dinner, we piled everyone into the master bedroom with R2.

“Oh shit,” I said, when I switched it on. Red.

But that improved over the next 20 minutes, during which I left to borrow a ladder so I could tape plastic over an inward-blowing fan on the ceiling above the toilet. I also rewet the towels and draped them over the fans. When I returned to the bedroom, Ariane informed me that Audrey had repeated my “Oh shit” thrice.

A light-rail station is shrouded in bushfire smoke in Canberra, Australia, on Jan. 5, 2020.
Photo: Chu Chen/Xinhua via Getty Images

MONDAY WAS ANOTHER bad-air day. During a five-minute drive to interview climate scientist William Steffen, I thought briefly about canceling. The AQI was approaching 400 and I’d just dropped off my children with a relative who hadn’t sealed up her house. Sometimes I feel like I’m being a paranoid alarmist — other times, I feel like I’m failing to protect my family from danger.

“For the common good,” I thought to myself and kept driving.

The day before, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had made big news by publicly recognizing the reality of climate change. Professor Steffen was not impressed. “Acknowledgment needs to be followed up with action, of course. And we’ll see what happens there. I’m not optimistic.”

He said Australia needs to increase its targets for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, and take steps to meet them. Since 1997, seven prime ministers had suffered defeats after trying to do that. Australia had signed the 2016 Paris Agreement, promising to reduce emissions by 26 percent by 2030. But emissions have gone up each year since then.

I asked Steffen if he embraced the sentiment expressed by novelist Richard Flanagan in his op-ed, “Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide.”

Steffen agreed with Flanagan’s condemnation of their government’s failure on climate policy — and said that Australia might be “one of the first countries that really comes apart as the climate shifts.” But the word “suicide,” he said, was just a way of saying things have gotten out of hand.

I quoted the prime minister, who had said Australia is responsible for only 1.23 percent of global emissions, and that if Australia shut down its fossil fuel industries tomorrow, China would make up for that in about nine days.

“It’s a collective action problem,” he said. “Just like in any civilized country, you have an income tax. So, if you look at my share of the Australian revenue, my income tax that I pay, it’s tiny. So based on the prime minister’s argument, I should write to the Australian Tax Authority and say I want to no longer pay my income tax. It’s too small to matter.”

I laughed.

“We have one planet, one climate, and we’re one species,” he said. “We’ve got to get over this stupid nationalistic crap that’s out there stopping us from taking action,” he said.

“It’s really too late to prevent a 2-degree [Celsius] increase?” I asked, referring to global temperature averages.

“No, I think we can just make 2. It’s too late to prevent 1.5.”

My next question assumed that a 2-degree increase would bring bushfires twice as bad as what we have now, with a 1.1-degree increase. Steffen interrupted. “I think it’s going to be three or four times as bad.” He explained that regions with climates similar to Australia’s will be dealing with worsening fires, while other regions will suffer from hurricanes, cyclones, and floods of increasing severity.

“Wherever you are in the world, the climate you are used to is changing.”

As I packed up my video gear, we chatted about the smoke. Steffen said he had gone out jogging that morning, when the AQI was 150. “But once it was up to 350, 400, when I took the dog for a walk, I had my mask.”

“Why is it better in the early morning?” I asked.

“Typically, because it’s calmer. So the wind hasn’t come in yet. And the fires aren’t immediately at our doorstep, so most of the smoke is being blown in from some distance.”

He said the AQI is generally at its lowest around dawn, “unless there is a front and it just blows through the night and the day, so you just have to check it all the time.”

Ariane sent me two text messages: “Air at hazard level now. Better to come home.” Then: “Can you bring Audrey home.”


The AQI had been 78 (moderate) the morning before. We were at a birthday party for a family friend, outdoors, at a tennis club across the street from our house. For the first time, little Julian understood the drill. When he saw that candles were being placed on the cake, he said, “Sing ‘Happy Birthday.’” He and I practiced quietly a few times, and when the real thing came, he landed most of the song in tune.

The CanberraAir app revised its figures in the late morning, and it had only gone up a little, still in the moderate range. I jumped into a doubles tennis match.

Ariane took Julian home for his nap, while Audrey sat on a bench next to the court eating popcorn and watching Netflix on my phone. Shortly after noon, Ariane sent me two text messages:


Air at hazard level now. Better to come home.

Can you bring Audrey home.

I didn’t see them, so Ariane came back for Audrey. As I said my goodbyes, I offered our house to the remaining guests, including three grandparents and four children. No one came. The grandmothers each thanked me but said they’d be going soon anyway. The grandfather grabbed a racquet and took my place on the court.

When I got home, I did not like the state of things. Ariane and Audrey were in the parlor with R2, who was orange. Julian was in the master bedroom still napping.

“How’s the air for Julian?” I asked.

I moved R2 into the bedroom in order to check. Orange there as well. “We’re going back to submarine mode,” I announced. With the constant creep of smoke-poisoned air, there were some rooms we couldn’t afford to protect.

A second air purifier will be delivered to our home soon.

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THE WAR ON THE WAR ON CANCER

Trump’s Gutting of Toxics Regulations Will Mean Higher Profits for Polluters and Higher Cancer Rates for the American People

FEATURE ARTICLE LONG READ

A Polluter’s Paradise

There may be no better place to see the consequences of the unraveling of chemical regulation than in Texas. Home to roughly two-thirds of the nation’s petrochemical industry and a fast-growing number of factories that make plastic and its feedstocks, Texas is a hub for the production of carcinogenic compounds as well as a leader in the movement to weaken regulations of them. For years, Texas has been a polluter’s paradise. As the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries have exploded throughout the state, the TCEQ’s Honeycutt has presided over an easing of restrictions on their emissions even as his staff has been reduced.

With 1.7 million new cases estimated for 2019 in the United States, cancer is a particular problem in Freeport, Texas. Rates of Hodgkin lymphoma are elevated in this small town on the Gulf Coast, as are cancers of the liver and bile duct, lung, stomach, and nasal cavity and middle ear, according to a report that the Texas Department of State Health Services quietly released in 2018.

The report makes no mention of pollution as a possible cause of the elevated number of cancer cases, yet Freeport is home to the largest chemical production facility in the western hemisphere: 12,800 acres of holding tanks, machinery, canals, deep-water ports, and pipelines, owned by Dow. Alongside it are chemical production facilities owned by other companies, including BASF, Shintech, Huntsman, and the Olin Corporation, the largest chlor-alkali producer in the world, which bought part of its Freeport manufacturing site from Dow in 2015.

Dow’s Freeport plant produces more than 40 billion pounds of chemicals and other products, including the components of much of the world’s plastics. In the process, the plant emits hundreds of toxic chemicals. The facility released more than 200 air pollutants in 2017 and has violated its permits in every quarter of the past three years, making it a high-priority violator of the Clean Air Act. Between 2015 and 2018, the complex emitted more than 3 million pounds of unpermitted air pollution on top of what it was allowed to release, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project.

On-site manufacturing releases of 18 of the 19 carcinogens currently being reviewed by the EPA under the revised 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act. All data drawn from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, 2014 – 2018, as reported by manufacturers. Locations include facilities within 50 miles. Data does not include releases at waste disposal/recycling facilities or on-site underground injection wells.

 

Graphic: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

Among the pollutants being released by Dow in Freeport are 11 carcinogens that are now being assessed or considered for assessment by the EPA under the new toxic chemicals law, according to EPA data. Of those chemicals, five have been shown to increase levels of the very cancers that are elevated in Freeport. Over the past five years, the Dow plant released more than 221,000 pounds of these five chemicals, including 1,2-dichloropropane, which causes bile duct cancer and is a probable cause of cancer of the nasal cavity and inner ear; 1,3-butadiene, which has been shown to increase rates of stomach cancers (and was recently released in an explosion at another chemical plant on the Texas coast); 1,1,2-trichloroethane and 1,1-dichloroethane, both of which have been linked to liver cancer in mice; and 1,2-dichloroethane, a probable carcinogen that has been linked to stomach, liver, and lung cancers.

But initial reports that the EPA recently released on the chemicals it’s investigating omit information that the agency has in its own databases about where and in what quantities these chemicals are produced, which companies make them, and how they’re used. As a result, most people in Freeport — and other polluted communities — do not realize that the industrial facilities near them are releasing dangerous amounts of these carcinogens. Also, because they omit this critical information, the assessments themselves may not reflect the true dangers posed by these substances.

Dow has done little to address the prevalence of cancer in the area, though the company did sponsor a “Sparkles and Spurs” fundraiser in 2018 to help buy a CT scanner for the CHI St. Luke’s Health cancer center in Brazosport, Texas, which is just a 15-minute drive from the Dow Chemical plant. Some residents call it the “Dow Cancer Center” because it was built on land donated by the giant chemical company. The evening of food, fun, and “foot stompin’” country music helped the center purchase the CT scanner, which the hospital is still using to diagnose new cancer cases.

Although they are more likely to get certain cancers, residents of Freeport — where the median household income is less than $37,000 a year — may have a difficult time getting care at the local hospital. “The Dow cancer center won’t take indigent patients,” said Melanie Oldham, a Freeport resident and physical therapist who said that she has worked with hundreds of clients in the area who have had cancer. “People who don’t have good insurance end up having to drive back and forth to either Galveston or to MD Anderson, which is an hour away.” Many of them are workers at the Dow plant, according to Oldham. “These are great jobs until you’re 50 or so,” she said. “That’s when a lot of my patients develop cancer.”

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