It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Britain’s direct involvement in NATO raid that killed a Montenegrin civilian revealed for the first time.
PHIL MILLER 29 APRIL 2024 Blair welcomed Montenegro’s president Milo Djukanovic to Downing Street, a year after bombing his country. (Photo: PA via Alamy)
Montenegro opposed Serbia’s conduct in the Kosovo war of 1999 but was not spared from NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
Future head of MI6 gave clearance for “precision guided munitions” to be dropped on Montenegro’s capital
Royal Air Force has bombed eight different countries or territories since 1999
Twenty five years ago today NATO bombed Montenegro’s main airport.
It came amid airstrikes on Yugoslav forces in Kosovo, where Bill Clinton and Tony Blair waged a “humanitarian intervention” ostensibly to save ethnic Albanians from Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic.
Yet a 61-year-old woman, Paska Juncaj, was killed in the strikes on Montenegro’s capital Podgorica, which lasted for 24 hours.
“Shrapnel hit her in the head while she was on the way to an air raid shelter with her son,” a hospital official told Reuters.
Three others were injured – one seriously – and two houses destroyed after a cluster bomb missed its target.
Bombing Montenegro at all was controversial, because the country was friendly to NATO.
And although it remained in Yugoslavia with Serbia, its president Milo Djukanovic was anti-Milosevic and took a neutral stance on Kosovo.
The country would eventually join NATO as a member in 2017. Approving air strikes
The Atlantic alliance did not specify which of its members had taken part in the air strikes on Montenegro at the time.
Such secrecy would become a common feature of future NATO air wars, making it hard for victims to hold individual states responsible.
But a formerly classified document reveals that Britain was heavily involved in the attack on Montenegro.
Blair’s defence secretary, George Robertson, believed an attack on Podgorica’s airport was justified because “it was being used as a base for operations in and over Kosovo” by Yugoslav jets and helicopters.
John Sawers, Blair’s foreign affairs adviser and future head of MI6, gave clearance for “precision guided munitions” to be dropped at 4 points of the airfield, which had both civilian and military functions.
“The risk of casualties was low, for both civilian and military, and of collateral damage, medium”, Robertson’s private secretary Christopher Deverell noted in a memo to Downing Street marked, “Secret – Personal” and “Limited distribution”.
On the same day, a Cabinet Office meeting of legal advisors recorded “some concern about the acceptability of explanations that have been given by NATO and national spokesmen for attacks by non-UK NATO forces on certain targets which were on the face of it civilian in character.”
Sawers concluded: “I think it would be right to continue to plan on the assumption that the Prime Minister is almost certain to agree to targets where collateral damage is assessed as high but civilian casualties remain low.”
The file has since been declassified and was passed to the National Archives in London this December.
The MoD, NATO and Lord Robertson did not respond to requests for comment. Culture of impunity
Dr Iain Overton from campaign group Action on Armed Violence told Declassified: “The lack of transparency displayed by the Ministry of Defence over its air strikes is long and concerning. They repeatedly deny civilian harm even in the face of detailed evidence. This revelation just adds to the proof that this culture of opacity and impunity prevails at the highest level.”
It is unclear whether Britain had any involvement in another NATO attack on Montenegro the following day – 30 April 1999 – when a bridge in the village of Murino was struck by ten missiles.
Six civilians died in that airstrike, including three children, sparking a long running campaign for justice.
British aircraft did participate in the wider bombing of Serbia and Kosovo. The 78-day campaign by NATO left around 500 civilians dead, according to Human Rights Watch.
Milosovic was later overthrown and died while on trial at The Hague. Blair’s ally in the conflict, Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) leader Hashem Thaci, is currently on trial for war crimes.
Over the next 25 years, Britain conducted airstrikes in eight countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.
The list does not include military interventions like in Sierra Leone, as they did not feature aerial bombardments.
This month the RAF flew missions to protect Israel from Iranian drones. ‘My enemy’s enemy’
Britain’s military intervention in Kosovo produced mixed results. Although it allowed the return of ethnic Albanian refugees, it sparked reprisals against ethnic Serbs and empowered the KLA.
During the air war, Sawers pushed for Britain to deepen ties with the KLA, who were fighting Serb forces on the ground.
Sawers said Britain risked being “too sniffy” towards the KLA and that: “Our starting point in a conflict like this should be that your enemy’s enemy is your friend. We can sort out our differences later.”
Sawers also suggested a “minimalist interpretation” of the UN arms embargo. Blair replied: “I agree”. The KLA had easy access to small arms from their bases in Albania, where the collapse of pyramid schemes had left the state in tatters.
The file gives an important insight into the mindset of Sawers, who went on to run MI6 a decade on from the Kosovo war. In 2011 he oversaw a similar strategy in Libya where British intelligence sided with banned terrorist groups to topple Muammar Gaddafi.
Narco-state
In both cases, the Machiavellian policies have left a troubled legacy. Kosovo became virtually a narco-state on the edge of Europe, while Al Qaeda spin off groups like ISIS flourished in Libya’s power vacuum and spread terrorism to the UK.
A memo on the KLA written by a Whitehall staffer in 1999 noted it “does contain unsavoury elements…Links to drugs/crime.”
It added that the UK “do not support their goal (independence) or methods,” although Britain would be the first country to recognise Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008.
The MoD and Foreign Office warned: “Not all the Kosovo Albanians support the KLA. And the KLA is prone to feuding, and not incapable of atrocities itself. NATO cannot be seen to be in alliance with them…KLA rule might not be a liberal experience.”
Another document warned they were “not much better than the Serbs”.
Two months after Milosevic agreed to pull his forces out of Kosovo, leaving Thaci in control, the Independent reported “around 30 people a week are being killed in Kosovo as organised gangs take advantage of the UN’s failure to police the province.”
A NATO spokesman admitted there was a “law and order vacuum” with Western diplomats saying “gangs, some of which are suspected of having links to the Kosovo Liberation Army, are taking apartments, real estate, businesses, fuel supplies and cars from Kosovo Albanians and Serbs, who have little recourse to justice.”
A declassified British government file written shortly after the war said a senior KLA veteran was “up to his neck in smuggling and organised crime”. Kosovo was described in the media as a “smugglers’ paradise” and “the Colombia of Europe”, supplying up to 40% of heroin on the continent.
Sex trafficking and forced prostitution also rose in post-war Kosovo as gangs supplied NATO peacekeepers with “hundreds of women, many of them under-age girls”, Amnesty International warned in 2004. Organised crime
Thaci became Kosovo’s first prime minister, despite NATO believing he was among the country’s “biggest fish” in organised crime.
An investigation by the Council of Europe accused Thaci of organ harvesting, with his inner circle allegedly murdering Serb captives to sell their kidneys on the black market.
It also cited reports from anti-narcotic agencies who identified Thaci as having “violent control over the trade in heroin”.
Kosovar gangs often have close familial links with the wider Albanian mafia. The National Crime Agency said in 2017 that “Albanian crime groups have established a high profile influence within UK organised crime, and have considerable control across the UK drug trafficking market, particularly cocaine.”
Drug deaths in Britain have now reached a 30-year high, with almost 5,000 fatalities in 2022.
After decades of impunity, Thaci is now on trial for 10 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity relating to the KLA.
The degree of corruption and intimidation is so high in Kosovo that his trial has to be held at a special court in The Hague.
Tougher rules on prison visits had to be implemented in December after prosecutors complained that visitors tried to compel “witnesses to withdraw or modify their testimony in a manner favorable” to the defendants.
Thaci denies all the charges against him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Phil Miller is Declassified UK's chief reporter. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes. Follow him on Twitter at @pmillerinfo
Sunday, April 14, 2024
Come For the Satanic Eclipse, Stay For the Commie Earthquake, Illegal Invaders and Bootlegged Baby Parts A Swiss student in faux spacesuit flies a paper rocket during a Mission to Mars project (Photo by STEFAN WERMUTH/AFP via Getty Images)
Lordy. Our apocalyptic circus of bigots, morons, loudmouths and clowns has stayed in town too long. To wit: a ceaseless GOP House "shit show," racists freaking out at too-tanned NCAA players "invading," pastors cancelling autism awareness as "demonic," Klan Mom decrying black market harvesting of baby organs - thanks Dr. Fauci! - and now, from God or the Gazpacho police, an earthquake and end-of-the-world eclipse telling us to "repent." First, maybe repent for an electoral college that gave us this lunacy.
The seedy grandstand for the mayhem is the (barely) GOP-controlled House, which for a while has been "imploding in plain sight." After skipping town for Easter, they left behind yet more flops earning yet more declarations of "Republicans in disarray." Amidst a "Great Resignation" that's seen the highest number of lawmakers quitting in 40 years, two more Reps - Gallagher and Buck - are bowing out, leaving the GOP a paltry one-seat majority. The showboats of what Raskin calls the "chaos-and- cannibalism caucus" still don't like their Speaker for (five months late) keeping the government open with a $1.2 trillion spending bill, Comer's Biden impeachment effort has crashed and burned like his other "investigations," the sole accomplishments of the shortest and least productive House session since the Great Depression are re-naming some Veterans Affairs clinics and authorizing a coin to mark the Marine Corps' 250th anniversary, and even George Santos says he's (inexplicably) running again as an Independent 'cause the GOP is too "embarrassing."
For once, he has a point. Self-righteous blowhards venting ignorance and hate, they seem to do nothing but voice imaginary grievances when grownups do things they don't like. When the effort to remove Fani Willis from Trump's election interference case failed, they shrieked, "It's all rigged!" and "There is no justice in America today." When Kamala Harris touted an effort to keep guns away from dangerous people, yahoos who send out Christmas cards of their kids cradling AR-15's bayed, "What the hell is this evil?" When a Transgender Day of Visibility coincidentally fell on Easter, they ranted it was part of a "years-long assault on the Christian faith" and the Catholic Biden - to Trump, one of "MANY PEOPLE THAT I COMPLETELY & TOTALLY DESPISE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA," would now "commandeer" Christmas with a Trans-Siberian Orchestra playing and say what? When a Florida school planned Autism Awareness Week, the pastor cancelled it as "demonic" (like "Santa Clause") because "anything that exalts itself above the name of Christ should be brought down."
And when racist moron and Michigan state rep Matt Maddock - who boasts he's America's "Most Conservative" pol, tried to imprison "war criminal" Gretchen Whitmer for requiring masks during COVID, got kicked out of the House GOP Caucus as too conspiracy-y even for them, posts things like "the left hates farmers," "government controls your air conditioning," "bail reform kills people," "communists are lonely, bitter, angry cowards with sad kids," and whose wife is under indictment as one of Michigan's fake electors - saw three buses at Detroit Airport and some scary dark guys alight, squawked they were "illegal invaders" and "everyone knows" Whitmer is "bussing in illegals and asking (us) to shack them up in their homes for $6,000 a year." Except they were the Gonzaga Bulldogs basketball team there to play in the NCAA Mens Sweet 16 March Madness against Purdue. Confronted with his "spectacular stupidity" and the facts, even by supporters, he snarled back - “Sure kommie. Good talking point" - and doubled down with replacement theory: "How long till the #HostileMedia calls the invaders homesteaders?" He seems nice.
The implausible queen of this GOP rabble is grandstanding, hate-mongering, self-promoting "purveyor of political pageantry" Marjorie Taylor Greene, a useless, performative troll most recently appointed to chair the "useless, performative impeachment" of Homeland Security's Alejandro Mayorkas by Mike Johnson in hopes of shutting her up as she tries to oust him for keeping the government running, or something. Among other memorable ventures since her Jewish Space Laser and school-shooting-survivor-harassing days: Inventing an Antifa plan for a "Trans Day of Vengeance," arguing 8-to-10-year-old Uvalde victims should've been armed with JR-15 rifles, spreading a replacement theory video about "the Democrat (sic) open border plan to entrench single party rule," and after Mexico's president proposed several U.S. actions to ease border crossings, refuting them with a "Declaration of War" against Mexican cartels for fentanyl trafficking, even though it's mostly produced in China and smuggled into this country not by migrants but U.S. citizens or other legal visitors.
Last month she also hosted, with live stream, a "Hearing Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting" to explore "the "aborrent (sic) truth of the industrial abortion complex (to) profit off the murder of unborn babies." She'd announced the event, based on repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue for profit - including grafting "the scalps of unborn babies onto the backs of rodents in a study funded by Anthony Fauci under the NIH" - with a beaming photo of herself that, noted one observer, "looked oddly bubbly for a hearing on dead babies." Her two speakers were David Daleiden, who in 2015 released heavily edited videos of himself as a fake biomedical researcher trying to buy fetal tissue, after which Planned Parenthood successfully sued him for $2 million; and Terrisa Bukovinac, who in 2022 was convicted with another anti-abortion activist of blocking access to a health clinic, stealing 115 aborted fetuses from a medical waste truck, burying most of them, and keeping five they claimed without evidence were "born alive and then murdered."
Greene said she wanted the hearing, attended by five people though she invited every member of Congress, to be a graphic, gory, in-your-face rebuttal to genteel talk of "women's health care." And so it was, with her use of pointedly incendiary language and images: "abortionists," not doctors, "babies sucked out while still alive" by an instrument "more powerful than a household vacuum," "tiny brains and hearts," "over 63 million people murdered in the womb" - misinformation so prevalent House Dems created a website to refute it - and no mention of vital medical advances facilitated by fetal tissue research. Still, wise-acres weren't buying it: "Baby Organ Harvesting is my Norwegian Death Metal cover band," "Marge hungry," "Do you know how many fetus livers it would take to make a single kabob?", "Curious how she'll tie it into Hunter's dick pics," "She should do her genealogy - she would have led lots of witch trials if she was alive back then," and, "This is absolutely ridiculous. No one harvests baby organs. Infants are only run through hydraulic presses to make baby oil, and THAT'S IT!"
But not even abortion, or terrorists collapsing Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, or earthquakes in what Rudy Giuliani called "the communist states" of New York and New Jersey - with its epicenter at Trump's Bedminster golf course deemed "Ivana's revenge" -come close to the "Super Bowl for Conspiracists" that is an eclipse. Marge was on it: "God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent." So was her squinty-eyed, right-wing boyfriend Brian Glenn - Wonkette calls him "the dude she has been having what we assume is very sweaty, pale, Godly white-person sex with" - who very scientifically "explains astronomy" and eclipses with, “I think we're going to see where the largest kind of a spiritual awakening in this country that people are realizing how much evil has creeped (sic) into (our) lives." He also warned of its fallout, "combined with earthquakes, and this infestation of locusts that have been dormant for years that all of a sudden will attack mankind, and oh then throw in Joe Biden trying to get into a war with eye-ran." He seems nice too, also smart.
There are about three, mathematically predictable solar eclipses a year, and many unpredictable earthquakes caused by shifting tectonic plates, not God being mad about gay marriage; both have occurred since creation, and you can read about them here and here. Regardless, news of these events made the right wing lose whatever's left of their minds. Alex Jones - not much left there - called the eclipse "a dress rehearsal" for declaring martial law if Trump wins the election. He cited “Major Events" like "Masonic rituals (to) usher in a New World Order," noting the eclipse trajectory in the U.S. forms an “Aleph” and “Tav,” the first and last Hebrew letters, signaling end times. Another genius saw a "perfect cover story if our terrorist government wanted to take down the power grid and cause mass chaos while blocking citizen communications (to) unleash a dictatorship" before Trump can win. And to ensure "no Satanic forces come through" during the eclipse, Steve Bannon hosted a live Mass with newly fired, financially sketchy, MAGA Bishop Joseph Strickland "in prayer and penance for our country."
It didn't help that a nerdy NASA project in Virginia measuring changes in electric and magnetic fields - Project APEP, short for Atmospheric Perturbations Around the Eclipse Path, referencing the snake god of darkness - planned to shoot rockets at the moon during the eclipse. To one wise wingnut, that meant there would be "rituals performed by Masonic, Satanic, Esoteric, Gnostic, Brotherhood of the Snake and other occult-like groups." And because if it's Monday, it must be the frog-raining end of days, several red states, Oklahoma and Texas among them, issued various disaster warnings and executive orders because when in doubt or fear just go totalitarian. In Arkansas, "out of an abundance of caution," lying Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency over a possible "backlog of deliveries by commercial vehicles transporting essential items of commerce" during maybe four minutes of darkness. In truth, noted one of her constituents, "The real emergency is that "the governor of an entire state is a fucking moron."
In honor of the fraught occasion, Fox News took its usual, balanced, erudite approach and went with racist paranoia on the subject of the dangers of an eclipse at the border even though it was so cloudy it wouldn't have much effect. Host Dana Perino: "A rare celestial event collides with a policy failure on the ground." Host Bill Hemmer: Officials bracing for higher traffic under cover of darkness "means a real opportunity for smugglers and cartels and migrants to come right in..." Vile correspondent Bill Melugin: "While everybody is gonna be looking up, if you're looking down here at the border, here's some of what you're gonna see." He offers video of "a surge of illegal alien evaders" (two poor guys scrambling through brush) with, "You'll see illegal immigrants dressed in dark clothing, sometimes camouflage...And you'll see outnumbered border agents trying to respond as these guys flood in" (one sad guy gets caught) "as they're trying to sneak into the United States." Cruelty, as usual, is the point here, and the eclipse gives us one more ugly, feckless chance to flaunt it.
Four years ago, amidst a pandemic needlessly killing hundreds of thousands, the "leader" of all these loathsome, inept people was showing them how it's done, sputtering nobody's thanking him for the great job he's doing, yet more tests bring more cases: "So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.'" Somehow, now it's worse. For the eclipse, he released a deeply weird, insanely narcissistic ad declaring, to the soaring music of 2001, "The Most Important Moment In Human History." As awe-struck crowds watch, we see the sun slowly eclipsed by....his wattled, blubbery, grotesque silhouette. Comments: "The most accidentally honest ad Trump's team ever put out," "this fucking moron won't even let himself be upstaged by the solar system," "what a freak," "not a cult," "how can I make this about me?," "going all in with the anti-Christ thing," "Stephen Miller is no Leni Riefenstahl," "fat boy ate the sun," "total eclipse of the brain," "dark side of the buffoon," "totalitarian eclipse." For a laugh, someone added light passing ear to ear. Not a laugh: "So, Trump will bring darkness to us. Got it."
Common Dreams is powered by optimists who believe in the power of informed and engaged citizens to ignite and enact change to make the world a better place. Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
ABBY ZIMET has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: azimet18@gmail.com Full Bio >
Sunday, July 09, 2023
Twitter Blue accounts fuel Ukraine War misinformation
Published
IMAGE SOURCE,REUTERS
By Shayan Sardarizadeh
BBC Verify
False and misleading posts about the Ukraine conflict continue to go viral on major social media platforms, as Russia's invasion of the country extends beyond 500 days.
Some of the most widely shared examples can be found on Twitter, posted by subscribers with a blue tick, who pay for their content to be promoted to other users.
We have also been unable to find any online articles with the headline and picture as above, and there is no evidence any weapons provided to Ukraine by the US have been used during the recent unrest in France.
No evidence of 'baby factories' in Ukraine
Several Twitter accounts with a blue tick have recently promoted a claim that Russia has discovered "baby factories" in Ukraine.
Children between the ages of two and seven are said to be "factory farmed", and either sent to "child sex brothels" or to have their organs harvested and sold in the West.
IMAGE SOURCE,TWITTER
BBC Verify has traced the origin of the claim to an article published in March by The People's Voice, an alternative name for YourNewsWire, which has been described by fact-checking organisations as one of the biggest producers of fake news on the internet.
It has previously promoted a wide range of false and misleading stories, including anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and false claims about the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, a post by an account with a Twitter Blue subscription, which positions itself as a legitimate news source, claimed the strike was mistakenly launched by Ukraine and hit a military barracks housing Nato troops and foreign mercenaries.
IMAGE SOURCE,TWITTER
"Storm Shadow missile suddenly changed trajectory dramatically, hitting Kramatorsk obliterated a Ukrainian military barracks housing foreign soldiers and mercenaries," the tweet claimed.
The post was viewed more than a million times.
There is no evidence that a missile launched by Ukrainian forces was responsible, nor that a military barracks was hit.
Zelensky has not cancelled elections
Posts claiming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has "cancelled" elections in Ukraine have recently gone viral on Twitter.
Asked whether there will be elections in Ukraine next year, Mr Zelensky responded: "If we win [the war], there will be. It means there will be no martial law, no war. Elections must be held in peacetime, when there is no war, according to the law."
Commenting on the statement, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who's been critical of US aid for Ukraine, said in his recently launched Twitter show that Mr Zelensky's comments proved he'd ended democracy in Ukraine.
Twitter Blue accounts on a similar theme have been shared hundreds of thousands of times.
IMAGE SOURCE,TWITTER
The Ukrainian constitution prohibits the dissolution of parliament and national elections during martial law, meaning the current president and parliament will remain in charge until the period of martial law comes to an end.
Oleksii Danilov, secretary of Ukraine's national security and defence council, recently confirmed that based on the Ukrainian constitution, "no elections can take place" while martial law is in effect in the country.
Contacted by BBC Verify for a response to the false and misleading Twitter Blue posts highlighted in this article, Twitter's press office acknowledged receipt of our enquiry, but declined to comment.
Monday, January 02, 2023
Reservation Dogs: Strange diseases are spreading in Blackfeet Country. Can canines track down the culprits?
Sully is a black-haired border collie and retriever mutt. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
BY ZOYA TEIRSTEIN, GIST
LONG READ
The sun is setting in Glacier County, Montana. Souta Calling Last guns her diesel-powered white GMC pickup truck east on Highway 2.
The car following her can barely keep up as she hurtles across the dimming prairie, one hand resting lightly on the steering wheel, her eyes scanning the side of the highway. Calling Last, a researcher and an enrolled member of the Blood Tribe — one of the four nations that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy — grew up on the Blackfeet reservation. She knows this landscape by heart.
“There it is,” she says and yanks the steering wheel to the right, sending a plume of dust into the air as she brakes hard on the gravel shoulder. The Two Medicine River, sacred to the Amskapi Pikuni, the Blackfeet, rushes nearby. A couple of minutes later, a gray Toyota slowly pulls in behind the GMC and rolls to a stop. The words “Working Dogs for Conservation” are printed on its side in block letters. A volley of excited yips and whines rings out from the truck bed.
Calling Last has brought Working Dogs for Conservation, or WD4C, a nonprofit that trains dogs to hunt down invasive species and poachers, to the Blackfeet reservation to help her solve a mystery. In recent decades, unusual cancers and thyroid issues have bloomed in clusters across the Nation. Some Blackfeet stopped harvesting wild plants and animals — like mint, huckleberries, and elk — suspecting that traditional sources of sustenance for countless generations had become contaminated and diseased. But so far, there’s been limited empirical research linking the tribe’s public health woes to its environment. Calling Last aims to change that by conducting a comprehensive scientific survey of environmental contaminants in Blackfeet territory. If it works, her experiment will give the community peace of mind and the freedom to harvest wild edibles safely.
Her success relies on two restless dogs waiting in crates in the back of the gray truck.
Sully is a black-haired border collie and retriever mutt.Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Frost is a rust-and-cream-colored Springer spaniel-pit mix.Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Frost is a rust-and-cream-colored Springer spaniel-pit mix, Sully is a black-haired border collie and retriever mutt. Sully, who was trained to track down human remains before he came to WD4C, was part of an unplanned litter. Frost was surrendered by his former owners for being too excitable, too energetic, and too obsessed with balls — traits that made him a perfect candidate for professional service.
Freed from the back of the truck, Frost and Sully zigzag from bank to bank, their tails wagging furiously. They’ve been trained to pinpoint mink and otter droppings, or scat, which can contain toxins because of processes called bioaccumulation and biomagnification, when substances move through the food chain and get concentrated in organisms. Insects like mayflies and dragonflies pick up toxins from their environment and accumulate them in their exoskeletons, then they’re consumed in vast numbers by trout and other fish, which in turn get eaten by mink and otters. The mammals leave their scat, infused with whatever toxins were originally in the insects, on the sides of the Two Medicine and other water bodies on the reservation.
All of a sudden, Frost stops running and starts sniffing around a beaver dam. Michele Vasquez, a canine field specialist who is leading the Blackfeet project for WD4C, isn’t sure whether the dog is excited about scat or if he’s trying to rouse an animal hiding in the dam, but she hangs back a few feet to let him work. Seconds later, Frost sits and makes eye contact with Vasquez. “Yeah? You think you’ve got something?” she asks him, and leans forward for a closer look.
Sure enough, a small, jet black dropping is perched precariously on a twig a few inches inside the beaver dam: mink scat. “What a guy!” Vasquez exclaims. She pulls Frost’s reward, a yellow ball on a rope, out of her fanny pack and chucks it into the river. Frost dives after it, ecstatic. Vasquez’s colleague, forensic field specialist Ngaio Richards, walks over and dons a plastic glove before reaching her hand into the dam to collect the sample and put it in a paper bag. Vasquez marks the place where Frost found the scat on her GPS. They’ll send the scat, and all the other samples they collect on this trip, to a lab for testing. When the results come back, Calling Last will share the data with her community. Clean scat means it’s safe to harvest wild edibles from this part of the river; toxic scat means it’s better to harvest somewhere else.
Calling Last has heard stories about contaminants buried on the reservation her whole life: whispers about a web of toxic hotspots, the legacy of decades of illegal dumping of trash, electronics, and other hazards. Rumors that a company paid the tribe a paltry sum to bury a cache of nuclear waste somewhere on the Nation’s rolling plains in the 1960s. Snatches of information about the chemicals companies used for fracking in the Bakken shale formation, which runs beneath part of the reservation and contains billions of barrels of oil and natural gas. The threat of oil extraction still looms today. The tribe is currently fighting to stop an oil company, Solenex, that wants to drill near the Badger and Two Medicine Rivers, which hold some of the tribe’s most sacred and culturally significant sites.
These scattered reports have contributed to a sense of unease among the Nation. “I feel like there’s a lot of fear on the reservation,” Celina Gray, a Little Shell and Blackfeet mother of four and a graduate student at the University of Montana studying wildlife biology, said. She wants to take her kids out hunting and foraging with her, but she doesn’t want to expose them to the environmental health hazards she suspects are lurking in the soil.
Celina Gray is a Little Shell and Blackfeet mother of four, a graduate student at the University of Montana studying wildlife biology, and a WD4C intern.Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Rates of cancer are higher on the Blackfeet Nation than elsewhere in Montana. Six in 1,000 Blackfeet were diagnosed with some type of cancer, on average, every year between 2005 and 2014, compared to 5 in 1,000 Montanans per year over the same period. An assessment of health risks among Blackfeet shows cancer was the leading cause of death on the reservation between 2014 and 2015 — 16 percent of overall deaths during that time period. But the tribe lacks the data it needs to get a fuller sense of how the disease is impacting Blackfeet and what could be causing these higher rates.
Calling Last says it’s not just the higher rate of cancer that concerns her, but the way the disease and its warning signs appear, in clusters, that makes her think people may be exposed to unknown health risks from the environment.
Kim Paul, the founder of a public health nonprofit called the Piikani Health Lodge Institute, tried to track down the source of the cancer when she was a graduate student at the University of Montana in the 2010s. Because she’s a member of the community, she knew about a 10-mile-long portion of the reservation, 40 miles north of the Blackfeet headquarters in the town of Browning, where every family but one had developed multiple forms of cancer. She remembered her grandmother’s warnings, when Paul was just a little girl, not to collect bear grass or flowers from that part of the reservation. “There was a lot of death in that stretch of road,” Paul said. At the University of Montana, she started collecting samples from the area to conduct a study, but quickly ran out of money and was forced to abandon the project.
Now, Calling Last is picking up the mantle. She was awarded a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to devise a project that will establish a database of environmental stressors at sites across the reservation that are both important harvesting spots and hold cultural significance to the Nation. Calling Last expects to find trace amounts of uranium and other nuclear energy byproducts, heavy metals that leached from illegal and legal dumpsites, pharmaceutical residue flushed or tossed by members of the tribe, and flame retardants and other pollutants carried into waterways by urban runoff. Then, she’ll add that data to a virtual map she’s making for her community.
When it’s complete, her map will have more than 30 layers — sites of cultural importance, traditional names for rivers and valleys, toxic dumps, areas where it is dangerous to harvest plants and animals, and more. Each layer will serve a different role in achieving an overarching goal: to help the Blackfeet protect their health, preserve their traditional ways of life, and strengthen their hold on cultural identity and knowledge.
But first, Calling Last needs to find mink and otter scat. Or rather, the dogs do.
Frost and Sully get food and love from their trainers. They affectionately call Frost “melon butt,” because of the dense bunches of muscles at the top of his stocky legs. And in return, WD4C gets access to the dogs’ secret weapons: their noses.
Humans can see well and we have big brains, but we don’t have very many scent receptors in our nostrils — at least, not compared to dogs. All of the scent receptors from a human’s nose, laid side by side, would fit on the surface of a postage stamp. All the scent receptors from a dog’s snout would fill a handkerchief. “Let’s say you walk into a house and you smell spaghetti dinner being cooked,” Hugh Murray, a K-9 handler for the Quapaw Nation of Oklahoma. “You smell the product. They smell the individual ingredients, the flour, the sugar, the tomato. They break things down individually.”
Ngaio Richards collects a scat sample.Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Brown paper bags hold mink and otter scat samples located by the working dogs.Grist / Zoya Teirstein
A dog can also pinpoint a single ingredient in a forest of other smells, a “single drop of perfume in an Olympic size pool,” Amanda Ott, a dog trainer for Working Dogs for Conservation, said, which is what makes them so good at working in the field.
Dogs have been trained to sniff out cancer, bed bugs, COVID-19, even stress. But canine fieldwork has drawbacks, and each working dog has its own idiosyncrasies. Ott, who owns and trains the black lab mix Sully, recently lost him briefly when a moose took after the pup.
And switching dogs from one project to another can confuse them as well. Frost, who had just come back to Montana after three weeks in Wyoming hunting down invasive plant species, would occasionally get sidetracked by a plant that looked like a target from his previous adventure while looking for scat along the Two Medicine River. With gentle coaxing from Vasquez, though, he was able to refocus.
Michele Vasquez points Frost toward an area she wants him to search.Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Over the course of nine days of surveying, the two dogs found more than 70 scat samples. On their last day of work on the reservation, a member of the community told Calling Last that someone had illegally dumped barrels of used motor oil into the water upriver from one of her testing sites. Vasquez said the silver lining is that now the researchers will have data from before and after the incident. “So lies the crux of this work,” she said.
Eight years ago, Calling Last would never have imagined designing research around the vagaries of dogs. She was working as a water training facilitator, teaching Indigenous and non-Indigenous water operators how to manage their systems. She infused her trainings with presentations on the cultural importance of water and the original names for rivers and streams. “I tried to implant in them that they are our communities’ modern day water warriors, because they’re cleaning the water,” she said.
But the work wasn’t fulfilling. She quit her job and set about starting her own organization. After a year, she had cashed in her 401(k) and savings accounts, maxed out her credit cards, and succeeded in forming the group she still runs as a one-woman show today: Indigenous Vision. She holds cultural sensitivity trainings for Native and non-Native groups, runs educational programs for Blackfeet youth, and has spent the past several years building out the multi-layered map.
Calling Last laid out the stakes for me as she drove between surveying spots, pausing once in a while to take swigs of an energy drink and sing along to the mid-2000s hits thumping from a playlist on her phone. Blackfeet Nation is where she was raised, and where much of her family and many of her friends live. She grew up picking mint, sage, and sweetgrass on the reservation’s prairies. Her relatives hunt for buffalo, deer, and elk in its mountains and plains.
Souta Calling Last, a researcher and an enrolled member of the Blood Tribe, grew up on the Blackfeet reservation.Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Hunting and foraging are not only crucial aspects of Blackfeet spiritual and cultural identity, she said, they’re a means of survival for a community that lacks critical resources. Some 36 percent of people on the reservation live below the poverty line, compared to 12.5 percent statewide. More than two-thirds of all Blackfeet are food insecure, meaning they don’t have reliable access to nutritious food. Wild animals and plants are cheaper, healthier, and fresher than the meat and produce available at the grocery store, Celina Gray, the graduate student, said. “The meat we ate all winter long was elk burger,” she said, “I don’t buy hamburger at Costco.”
But Blackfeet will only continue turning to those traditional methods of harvesting as long as they can trust them. Calling Last has watched as, over the years, her friends, family, and wider community developed unusual health problems — and she hasn’t been spared, either.
“Me, a bunch of other people, my mom, all the women in my family, have thyroid issues,” she said. To her, the source of the sickness is clear: “It’s gotta be something from our environment.”
A survey site on the reservation.Grist / Zoya Teirstein
That’s why Calling Last, who has a degree in water management from the University of Montana, has dedicated her life to building this map. “As a scientist, I can read Excel sheets and see data trends just by looking at the numbers,” she said. “But my community can’t. My community doesn’t even know what good or bad exposure limits are to all of these contaminants.”
And there’s a new threat on the horizon, one that further imperils the tribe’s reliance on the environment. The dogs have been brought out to the reservation this year to track down environmental contamination, but next summer, they’ll hunt for traces of an even worse-understood health hazard: chronic wasting disease.
In the winter of 2020, a Blackfeet hunter named Charley Wolf Tail shot and killed a white-tailed deer on his property and, because he had heard warnings about a strange illness percolating in deer in Montana, sent the animal’s lymph nodes to the Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks department for testing. The nodes turned up positive for chronic wasting disease, or CWD, an illness caused not by a virus or a bacteria, but by a baffling phenomenon in the natural world: a misfolded protein, or a “prion.”
One prion can infect the proteins in healthy cells by forcing them to fold, too, creating a chain reaction that produces a series of tiny holes in the brains of the hoofed ruminants that are unlucky enough to come across it. The prions create a mushy, spongy texture in the organ. Outwardly, the animals waste away for no discernible reason. Chronic wasting disease is often referred to as “zombie deer disease” because the creatures afflicted with it end up dazed and haggard, walking in aimless circles until they die. CWD could lead to mass die-offs in deer and elk populations on the reservation — whose meat Blackfeet depend on for survival. And experts still don’t know if the illness can spread to humans.
The federal government has detected CWD in 30 states. The deer shot by Wolf Tail is the first documented case of CWD on the reservation. If it spreads, it could further upend the Blackfeet way of life. “Because we live so close to the land and because we’re subsistence hunters,” Calling Last said, “if there is a human impact from CWD, it’s going to be to the tribal people.”
U.S. Geological Survey
Once CWD establishes itself in a given area, it’s nearly impossible to eradicate. A bacteria or a virus, like the coronavirus, can survive on a surface for a limited amount of time before it dies. A prion can exist, in theory, forever. “Once it’s in the environment, it’s there sort of indefinitely,” Cory Anderson, a CWD expert at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Grist.
Some studies show that grasses and other plants can absorb prions from animal saliva and feces and, in turn, impart the disease to other animals that eat the plants. “We use plants for our ceremonies, our sweat lodges, our food, and our tea,” Calling Last said. “If those plants have prions in them, what does that mean for us?”
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have determined that dogs can detect CWD prions in deer feces in the lab. But experts have never attempted putting working hounds on the hunt for CWD in the field. Next summer, WD4C plans to conduct an in-the-field canine search for the prions, right here on the Blackfeet reservation.
It’s a new day in Glacier County and the sun is high in the sky as Calling Last turns right on a long, winding dirt road that leads to a ranch-style house in the middle of a large field. She’s taking the Working Dogs for Conservation crew to one last site on the reservation before this year’s research trip is over — a place she calls “ground zero.”
The women clamber out of their trucks and put on shoes they’ve been saving for this site, their “dirty” shoes. So little is known about the misfolded proteins that cause chronic wasting disease, and Calling Last and the Working Dogs team aren’t taking any chances. When they’re done surveying here, they’ll rinse their shoes with bleach and clean the dogs’ paws with disinfecting wipes in order to prevent rogue prions from hitching a ride back to Missoula with them.
Wolf Tail, the hunter who shot the deer, steps out of his house and walks toward the parked cars. He knows why the researchers are here. He’s just as worried about CWD as they are and is glad to help them prepare for next year’s prion surveys. “Hunting is my way of life,” he said, standing in the driveway and holding his dog, a terrier-pug mix named Uno. Herds of deer amble past Wolf Tail’s front porch every day. He scans them religiously now, looking for sick animals. “It’s something that’s definitely been in the back of my mind now, since the testing,” he said.
Charley Wolf Tail holds his dog, Uno.Grist / Zoya Teirstein
There’s no way Calling Last can search the entire reservation for prions. There are too many acres and not enough money or dogs. But she has figured out a way around those obstacles by making an educated guess. The way chronic wasting disease works is still shrouded in mystery; some ruminants get the disease after encountering prions, while others are exposed and walk away unscathed. Calling Last thinks the determining factor is immune system function — how healthy an animal is at the time of exposure. She’ll test that theory by having the dogs search for CWD in the same areas where they hunted for environmental contaminants this year.
“The main point of the project is to see whether there is a correlation between these contamination sites and CWD. Like, do animals have lower immune systems because of contamination, and are these animals more likely to get sick?” Vasquez said. In short, there may be an overlap between environmental contamination and CWD, which would mean that protecting the community from one threat also protects it from the other.
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Charley Wolf Tail’s house. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
A dead bird floats in the river behind Wolf Tail’s house. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
The otter and mink scat that the dogs find today, at ground zero, will help Calling Last test her hypothesis. Vasquez, a GPS tracking device hanging from a lanyard around her neck and a long leash in her hand, walks to the back of her truck and opens the tailgate. The two rescues peer out at her from their crates.
“Let’s bring Frost out for this one,” Ott says, glancing at the Springer spaniel. Frost lets out a frantic bark at the sound of his name.
“OK,” Vasquez says, opening the door to his crate, “You’re up, bud.”
Vasquez puts a collar and a red vest on Frost, who is standing on the truck bed trembling with excitement. “Free,” she says when he’s suited up, and Frost jumps down from the truck. Vasquez walks around the back of Wolf Tail’s house and down to the stream, Frost bounding a few feet ahead of her. A bright, midday sun is shining. Calling Last, Vasquez, Richards, Ott, and the others who have been running alongside the dogs for three days straight are drained and quiet, slightly diminished by the significance of ground zero. The prions could be lurking anywhere, in the tall grass rippling across Wolf Tail’s backyard or the dark mud that lines the river bank. Frost is unfazed. There’s mink and otter scat to be found, and a squeaky reward to receive.
Vasquez makes him heel and sit before she gives him the command that transforms the excited pup into a laser-focused hunting machine: “Go find,” she says.
