The U.S. Desperately Needs To Revamp Its Energy Policies

Editor OilPrice.com

Sat, June 4, 2022

About a decade ago, a friend asked how high I thought gasoline prices might rise. I said “One day you will pay $10 a gallon for gasoline.” He replied that he would refuse to pay that much, and I asked what he would do if the price rose to $10 a gallon tomorrow. He finally conceded that he would, in fact, pay $10 a gallon for gasoline.

Then oil prices plummeted in 2014, and again in 2020. I am sure my prediction looked pretty stupid to him when gasoline fell under $2.00 a gallon.

Why did I make such a prediction? Because I had already seen gasoline prices approach that level when I was living in the Netherlands in 2008, and the roads were still packed with cars. Energy demand just isn’t that elastic in the short term, so people pay what they have to pay to get to work.

Here is how I saw things playing out. I imagined that energy demand would continue to grow, but supply would have a hard time keeping up. At times, there would be supply/demand imbalances that would spike prices higher and higher.

However, over the past decade supply has managed to keep pace most of the time. At times, the market was oversupplied and prices crashed. There have also been periods of spiking prices, but then demand growth would slow down and supplies would catch up.

At the same time, alternatives like electric vehicles, and to some extent biofuels have helped mitigate oil demand growth. But it wasn’t enough. Oil demand kept growing (until the Covid-19 pandemic hit), albeit a bit slower than if there had been no alternatives.

Related: Oil Prices Rise As EU Leaders Agree On Partial Russian Crude Ban

The risk I always saw was that if policymakers believed alternatives would scale fast enough to replace oil demand growth — and they passed policies unfriendly to our domestic oil companies — they could be setting up a very nasty price shock in the future.

This is why I was so adamant that canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline was the wrong decision. It’s not because I love fossil fuels, it’s because I recognize the risk of needing supplies and not having them. We have seen that it doesn’t take much of a shortfall in oil supply to have a disproportionate impact on the price.

Hence, what we are seeing right now is one of the possible consequences of the energy transition. When alternatives don’t scale up fast enough to fill the gap between oil supply and demand, oil prices skyrocket.

I know that many people who have opposed any additional fossil fuel development saw a different scenario unfolding. They believed that alternatives would scale up fast enough, and that we wouldn’t need the oil.

Here’s the thing, though. If we invest in fossil fuel development — and we don’t need the oil and gas because alternatives do scale up rapidly — that’s a loss the fossil fuel companies would take. That is the risk they are taking, for the potential reward that demand will be there in the future.

What’s the downside of continuing to support our domestic oil industry? That it will simply continue our addiction to fossil fuels?

That’s where we have to also make sure we are doing as much as possible to encourage alternatives. Today’s fossil fuel investments would be ready to supply the market if needed, but alternatives will be trying hard to make sure they aren’t needed.

That’s the win-win energy policy we need.

By Robert Rapier

Biden Administration Considers A Windfall Tax On Oil And Gas Profits

Sat, June 4, 2022

The Biden administration is considering a proposal to tax oil and gas windfall profits to provide a gas subsidy for American consumers struggling with high energy prices, said Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the National Economic Council at a panel sponsored by the Roosevelt Institute think tank on June 2.

The news follows a similar move in the U.K. by Chancellor Rishi Sunak on May 26, to impose a 25 percent windfall tax on North Sea energy producers to provide a 15 billion pound ($18.9 billion) energy fund subsidy for Britons paying for soaring fuel costs.

The White House has been examining proposals from Congress that would hike taxes on energy producers in order to provide a subsidy or tax rebate to households.

“We are very much open to any proposal that would provide relief to consumers at the pump,” said Ramamurti.

“There are a variety of interesting proposals and design choices on a windfall profits tax. We’ve looked carefully at each of them and are engaging in conversations with Congress about design.”

The proposal, backed by 15 Democrats in the Senate and the House, would impose a new quarterly tax on American oil companies for crude produced domestically or imported from abroad.

The revenue would be siphoned off to consumers below a certain income in the form of a tax rebate that would amount to a few hundred dollars per year, but the bill does not appear so far to have support in Congress.

The bill is being sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who announced on MSNBC in March, “I’m co-sponsoring … a bill on windfall profits tax. We get it, supply and demand, prices go up, but profit margins should not go up, that’s just oil companies gouging.”

“Big oil companies are making higher profits off Putin’s war,” tweeted Warren.

The “windfall tax on oil would guarantee $200 oil,” responded Dan Rosenblum, a financial analyst at Sharkbiotech.com, in a tweet, explaining that a tax on gas producer profits would cause U.S. fuel prices to skyrocket.

Ramamurti admitted that there would be a potential impact on supply if a windfall tax on producers was imposed, but he said he did not see this as an “insurmountable hurdle.”

“One thing you want to be aware of when you are looking at those types of proposals is how is it going to affect supply as well,” said Ramamurti.

“I don’t think that’s an insurmountable hurdle, but it is an important question at a time when there’s clearly a supply issue.”

His comments came just a day after he told reporters that the administration’s plan to combat inflation included shrinking the Federal budget deficit, by raising taxes on high-income individuals and major corporations.

“What the president has done and made clear is that we are dedicated to doing everything we can to stop and push back on that Russian aggression, but it’s going to cause pain for American consumers in the short term, and gas prices are one unfortunate example,” Ramamurti told local media.

High energy prices due to the war in Ukraine, declining U.S. energy supplies, and supply chain logjams have pushed oil producer revenue to record highs this year.

Exxon Mobil, the largest U.S. oil producer, earned $5.48 billion in the first quarter and said that it would triple its expected stock buybacks through 2023 to $30 billion.

The Biden administration has blamed energy producers for not investing in further output and for not passing on more of their earnings to consumers, despite White House policies that have discouraged investment in energy production and supply.

President Joe Biden is under intense pressure from his party to ease gas prices before the midterm elections in November, as the approval ratings for the Democrat-controlled Congress continue to sink in the polls.

Related: Could Iraq Dethrone Saudi Arabia As Largest Oil Producer?

U.S. President Joe Biden at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington on June 1, 2022. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

U.S. consumer price growth slowed down in April after gas prices dipped below the March record high, while consumer prices were up 8.3 percent in April from the year prior, according to the Labor Department.

As a cyclical industry, taxing windfall energy profits during a good cycle is likely to discourage investment in energy production.

The U.S. energy sector has been the worst-performing part of the market over the past decade, despite major increases in total output.

An energy producer tax could be a two-way street for energy market investors, especially if producers reduced through-the-cycle investment in the United States, which may lead to sustained higher global oil and natural gas prices.

There was similar criticism of the proposed U.K. tax on energy producers, “We understand the worry for millions of people about how high energy costs are challenging their household budgets—and the need for support to help make ends meet,” said a Shell spokesperson, “but at the same time, we must sustain investment in securing supplies of oil and gas the U.K. needs today, while allocating future spend for the low-carbon energies we want to build for the future.”

The national average for a gallon of gasoline in the United States hit $4.715 on June 2 up from $4.671 the day before, according to AAA.

Brent Crude was at nearly $118 and West Texas Intermediate crude stood at $117 at the end of trading on June 2.

By Zerohedge.com

Dehcho First Nations seek repudiation of Doctrine of Discovery

Ahead of an anticipated papal visit in late July, the Dehcho First Nations called on the Vatican and Canada to reject the international law widely considered a legal justification for colonialism.

The law, which first appears in a papal bull issued by the Catholic Church in the 15th century, defines land unoccupied by Christians as "vacant" and seizure of those lands to be "discovery."

It has been used by Canadian courts as recently as 2011 and by then-Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in the United States in 2005, and forms the legal basis for what is considered to be Crown land.

"The Dehcho First Nations, representing eight Dene First Nation communities and two Métis communities in the N.W.T., now call on the Vatican, the Government of Canada and the Crown to clearly and unequivocally reject and repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery and acknowledge what we all know to be true: that the land now known as Canada was not vacant or ungoverned when Europeans arrived and that it was actually governed by sovereign nations with our own institutions and laws," a Dehcho First Nations news release stated on Friday.

In 2012, the United Nations called the doctrine "shameful." It has been repudiated by the Presbyterian, Episcopal and Evangelical Lutheran churches.

Following the Pope's historic apology for the actions of some Catholics in April, delegation leader Gerald Antoine spoke of the importance of the issue.

"One thing that is quite clear: when you look at residential schools, if you trace the seed back to where it started from, you will find the Doctrine of Discovery," he told Cabin Radio at the time.

"The apology is not good unless the seed is destroyed. So the real need is to have the Doctrine of Discovery revoked completely. That is one specific part of the equation that needs to be done away with."

The Pope is expected in Canada from July 24 to 29.

Caitrin Pilkington, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Cabin Radio

California drought is pushing Latino farmers and workers to make difficult decisions

Nicole Chavez - Yesterday


Joe Del Bosque roamed the 2,000 acres of his California farm knowing he couldn’t touch nearly half of the land he’s owned for decades.

“I got the land, I got the people. I have everything but no water. I can’t do it,” said Del Bosque, a 73-year-old farmer in Firebaugh, California.

Del Bosque is one of the many Latino farmers and workers whose lives revolve around California’s agriculture industry and who have been forced to make difficult decisions due to the ongoing water crisis.

Years of low rainfall and snowpack in the state have now led to rapidly draining reservoirs. Last month, the state’s two largest reservoirs reached “critically low levels” just as extreme drought conditions expanded from covering 40% to 60% of the state, according to the US Drought Monitor.

Federal officials dealt a large blow to farmers in the state’s Central Valley when earlier this year, they significantly reduced allocations for irrigation. Many of these farmers rely on underground reservoirs for their operations and officials said only a limited number of agriculture customers would receive water deliveries. They are serviced by the Central Valley Project, a complex water system made of 19 dams and reservoirs as well as more than 500 miles of canals across the state.

While farmers have previously made numerous changes in response to the drought, this year’s water limits have pushed them to leave more portions of their land idle and reduce the number of workers they hire. Del Bosque says he stopped growing asparagus and sweet corn, solely focusing on melons and almonds, which most of the world’s crops are produced in California.

Without those crops, Del Bosque was not able to hire about 100 people to work on his farmland.

“These are people who had worked for us for many years, and they’re highly skilled people,” Del Bosque said.


California drought is pushing Latino farmers and workers to make difficult decisions

Joe Del Bosque is the owner of Del Bosque Farms. - Terry Chea/AP

Researchers at the University of California, Merced estimate the drought had a $1.1 billion impact in the state’s agriculture industry last year.


Their report, released in February, says roughly 385,000 acres were drought idled in the Central Valley. They also linked the loss of nearly 8,750 full- and part-time jobs across the state to the drought.

Hernan Hernandez, executive director of the California Farmworker Foundation, said many farmworkers are now struggling to find jobs that will keep them working all year long.

Because there is less farmland being harvested or grown, some farmers are opting to hire larger crews than usual. While they are doing it to keep more people employed, Hernandez says, the work is getting done faster and farmworkers end up hunting for their next job sooner than anticipated.

“Many people come to the Central Valley because they feel like this is an area where they can have steady work throughout the year. Whether they were documented or undocumented. Now, the drought continues to plague this area and work is more scarce, it’s more limited,” Hernandez said, referring to workers who come from Mexico and other parts of California.

Worried about being able to afford rent, childcare and higher gas prices, farmworkers are starting to look outside agriculture to supplement their income.

“In the daytime, some will be at a farming operation and in the nighttime, they’ll be at packing houses. Some are now entering restaurant and retail businesses. We’ve heard of some being Uber drivers after work. There’s less work and they got to find a way to make ends meet. They’re now doing various things just to pretty much continue to live in the state,” Hernandez said.

Del Bosque, whose parents and himself were farmworkers, says he worries about the future of his farm and the potential of a massive exodus of workers.

There are more than 112,000 producers in the United States who identify as Hispanic and 60% of them live in Texas, California and New Mexico, according to the USDA’s 2017 Census of Agriculture.

California employs the most agricultural workers in the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. An estimated 77% of all farmworkers are Hispanic, according to the latest National Agricultural Worker Survey.

“They can’t sit here and wait ‘till next year. They have to do something to support their family and because the whole valley is dry there’s probably other farmers in the area like me that don’t have the jobs. Some of them (farmworkers) may have to move to another state,” Del Bosque said.

Lawmakers in California are considering new legislation aimed at supporting farmworkers who lose work due to drought conditions.

Senate Bill 1066, proposed by State Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat, aims to create a state-funded project that would provide a monthly $1,000 cash payment for three years to households with at least one farmworker.

“SB 1066 will provide much needed help, and assistance to those struggling to feed their families, in an environment of increasingly rising food costs and uncertainty. Supporting our farmworkers is just the tip of the iceberg; we need to provide additional drought relief and ensure water is available for homes, and for health, and that it is truly available to all,” Hurtado previously said about the bill.

PRO LIFE POLITICIANS

Congress fails to extend free lunch waivers, putting meals for 10 million students at risk

ktangalakislippert@insider.com (Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert) - 

© Tetra Images/Getty ImagesTetra Images/Getty Images

A free school lunch program passed at the onset of the pandemic is set to expire June 30.

 
It provides free lunch to all US students but is not included in the latest spending bill.

 
One single mom told the Guardian she would skip meals herself to feed her kids without the program.

A free lunch program passed at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic is set to expire June 30 and Congress has not included it in its latest spending bill, putting meals for 10 million students at risk.

"I think we're going to see in real time the summer hunger crisis grow, and that's going to give us a preview of what's going to happen next school year," Jillien Meier, director of food access advocacy group No Kid Hungry, told The Guardian.

The latest funding bill included $29 billion of nutrition programs for children but cut the $11 billion free lunch program that provided waivers to schools to reimburse costs of providing free lunches to all students and removed the family application process to receive free meals.

The program was initially passed in March 2020 at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and was extended in June and October 2020 and once again in April 2021.

The immediate impacts of the cuts will be felt by families who have relied on the program to ensure their kids are fed. In the US, 22 million students get free or reduced lunch during the school year — a number that has only increased since the pandemic, according to the USDA.

Without the extended programs, "I would take the blow, like not eating myself just to make sure my kids had enough to eat," A single mom of two told The Guardian. "No child should have to be hungry in school or anywhere else."

I’m Pro-Second Amendment. But if the Libs Want to Get Rid of It, Here’s What They’d Have to Do.

Mary Katharine Ham
Fri, June 3, 2022


Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Library of Congress

Gun-control advocates in the United States are experiencing quite a bit of Canada envy, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced this week that he will be banning import, sales, and transfers of handguns. He also announced legislation to require citizens to turn over their “military-style assault weapons” in a mandatory buy-back program. As of now, there is no legal definition of “military-style assault weapon,” so Canadians with guns will presumably be alerted when they become criminals on a TBD basis.

This is in addition to the banning of 1,500 rifle models in the wake of a 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia, were 22 people were killed. It’s part of an “ever-expanding” list of prohibited models maintained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The proposed legislation also includes tighter red-flag restrictions, provisions for confiscation and disabling of banned guns, and a blanket restriction of magazines to only five rounds.

Why can’t we enact Canada’s wish list of restrictions in the U.S.?—our gun control activists wonder.

Well, it’s not the gun lobby. The National Rifle Association (NRA) has been seriously weakened, is floundering in corruption accusations, and has filed for bankruptcy in the past two years. But it was also never the primary strength of gun-owners’ side of the argument. That strength lies in the Second Amendment, which whatever you think of its protections of Americans’ right to a firearm, is a hard fact with which activists must contend.

If the goal is to significantly curtail the number of guns—or even slow its growth, which is the purported goal of many activists—they must deal with the Constitution. No matter how “commonsense” you might consider some gun regulations, they have to pass constitutional muster to become a reality.

Take for instance a California law banning sales of semiautomatic rifles to adults under the age of 21. The San-Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that particular regulation to be unconstitutional. A three-judge panel in May ruled 2-1 that the Constitution “protects the right of young adults to keep and bear arms, which includes the right to purchase them,” though it upheld a requirement that adults under 21 acquire hunting licenses to purchase said guns.

It is the Second Amendment, and the majority of Americans’ agreement with its protections, that foil most efforts at gun control. And yet, there has never been a sustained effort to amend the Constitution to eliminate this impediment to gun control.

There should be.

But don’t get me wrong. I love the Second Amendment’s protections, and like many law-abiding citizens of the U.S., cherish the right it enshrines for my family to have a means to protect itself. I don’t wish it gone anymore than I do the First Amendment—another protection our neighbors to the North are without.

But dealing with the facts of the Constitution, doing the hard work to convince Americans of the error of its text, and dealing honestly with gun owners about the left’s desires on this subject would be better than what we’re doing now.

I am unabashedly on the other side of this issue from liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, yet I agree with him on this part of the equation. He advocates for the repeal of the Second Amendment and replacement with the Twenty-Eighth, which he proposes would allow for a National Guard, highly restrictive private gun ownership, and a new right to freedom from gun violence.

“For those who believe it will be impossible to do this,” Moore offers stats on gun ownership. “We are not a country of gun nuts. 77 percent of all Americans do NOT own a gun! If three-quarters of the country has decided they have no need for a gun, three-quarters of the country may also decide they have no need for an archaic amendment that allows retired accountants to own 47 assault weapons. LET’S ORGANIZE THE 77 percent!”

Go for it. The coalition of Americans that would have to be convinced grows larger and more diverse by the day. Surely, some of the energy of Brady, Everytown, One Pulse, Guns Down, and other gun control groups can be put toward a long-term project of this kind.

Moore is not the only prominent person to suggest such a change. Former Chief Justice Warren Burger said in 1991 if he had his druthers, there’d be no Second Amendment at all.

None other than Justice John Paul Stevens, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Heller decision affirming the individual right to keep and bear arms, declared amending the Constitution would be the “simple” way to “weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”

He’s a bit breezy on the matter for my tastes. The process would be simple but by no means easy. The Constitution is quite straightforward about how to change the Constitution, but it takes a lot.

An amendment may be sent for ratification by 38 states after it has either been deemed necessary by a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress or a national convention called by the legislatures of 34 states.

Some would dismiss this as an impossibility, but again, I’m in improbable agreement with Moore. I think believing this could never happen is a cop-out. Yes, Americans love their guns. They also love alcohol and we banned that via a constitutional amendment for quite a few miserable years.

Even if you’re the kind of activist who believes the problem isn’t the Constitution, but the interpretation thereof, the remedy is the same. Once more—I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I agree with Elie Mystal, who wrote in The Nation, “If Republicans tell us it’s the Second Amendment that stands in the way of reasonable gun reform, then it’s the Second Amendment that we should be coming for.”

Amendments frequently travel unlikely paths. The most recent amendment to the Constitution took 200 years to ratify, and the push to get it over the finish line in 1992 can be traced to a sophomore at the University of Texas, who got a C on the term paper suggesting the amendment was still pending.

It’s a refrain of pro-Second Amendment types like myself to tell gun-control activists, “Come and take it.” The original Greek phrase, “Molon labe” was said to have been uttered by the Spartan leader Leonidas in response to Xerxes’ request that they surrender their weapons at the Battle of Thermopylae.

In their wisdom, the Founding Fathers set up a significant barrier between the federal government and the people’s arms. Without dealing with that very hard fact, most gun-control efforts will be, to borrow from another Greek story, Sisyphean.

CANCEL NUCLEAR WEAPONS

US Navy, Electric Boat, lawmakers and workers celebrate start of construction of Columbia-class submarine, a ‘critical piece of the U.S. nuclear deterrence’

Stephen Singer, Hartford Courant
Sat, June 4, 2022, 

Members of Congress, U.S. Navy brass and submarine manufacturing workers on Saturday celebrated the start of construction on the U.S. Navy’s next-generation Columbia-class nuclear ballistic submarine.

General Dynamics Electric Boat, the Connecticut- and Rhode Island-based manufacturer, organized a symbolic keel-laying ceremony, reminiscent of early shipbuilding when the central timber, the backbone of a ship, was put in place, marking the start of construction. The future USS District of Columbia was the focus of the gathering at Electric Boat’s Quonset Point, R.I., shipyard.

The Columbia is a top priority of the Navy’s and represents a “critical piece of the U.S. nuclear deterrence and national security strategy,” said Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2, and chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee. It will replace 14 Ohio-class submarines due to begin to retire from service in 2027 following a more than 40-year run.

The District of Columbia is the first ship in the new class of ballistic missile submarines being built for the U.S. Navy by Electric Boat.

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, D.C.’s representative in the U.S. House of Representatives, reminded the audience that Washington, D.C., does not have voting representation in the House and no senators represent the district’s more than 700,000 residents.

She said she was informed by the Navy in 2016 the Columbia would recognize residents of the District of Columbia “with this great honor and in particular our service members and veterans who have fought in every American war since our nation’s founding, all without voting representation in Congress.”

“It is fitting that it recognizes the jurisdiction that will become the 51st state of the United States of America,” Norton said to applause.

She later signed her initials that were welded onto a ceremonial plate.

U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Quonset Point and Groton shipyards have grown over the past 30 years into “massive complexes.” A 200,000 square foot assembly building is going up at the Groton shipyard as part of an $850 million expansion to accommodate a significant increase in construction related to the Columbia and Virginia-class submarines.

Electric Boat can’t hire fast enough. It said in January it plans to hire more than 3,000 workers this year, a 20% increase over 2021 as U.S. military strategy faces rising threats in the North Atlantic from Russia and the South Pacific from China.

At 560 feet and displacing 20,810 tons, the District of Columbia will be the largest submarine ever built by the U.S., Electric Boat said. Its reactor will not require refueling during the lifetime of planned service, maximizing its time on deployment. In addition to the missiles the District of Columbia will carry, it will be armed with Mk 48 torpedoes and feature superior acoustic performance and state-of-the-art sensors to make it the most capable and quiet submarine ever built, according to Electric Boat.

The Navy’s fiscal year 2023 budget estimates the total cost of a 12-ship class of Columbia at $112.7 billion, according to an April report by the Congressional Research Service.

The research agency identified several risks, including a a delay in designing and building the lead Columbia-class boat that could jeopardize the Navy’s ability to have it ready for its first scheduled patrol in 2031, cost increases that could have an impact on funding of other Navy programs and potential supplier challenges related to building Columbia-class and Virginia-class submarines at the same time.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

Gina Haspel Observed Waterboarding at CIA Black Site, Psychologist Testifies


CIA nominee Gina Haspel is seated for a confirmation hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, May 9, 2018 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)


Carol Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes
Sat, June 4, 2022, 

WASHINGTON — During Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing to become director of the CIA in 2018, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked her if she had overseen the interrogations of a Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, which included the use of a waterboard.

Haspel declined to answer, saying it was part of her classified career.

While there has been reporting about her oversight of a CIA black site in Thailand where al-Nashiri was waterboarded, and where Haspel wrote or authorized memos about his torture, the precise details of her work as the chief of base, the CIA officer who oversaw the prison, have been shrouded in official secrecy.

But testimony at a hearing last month in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, included a revelation about the former CIA director’s long and secretive career. James E. Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the agency’s interrogation program, testified that the chief of base at the time, whom he referred to as Z9A in accordance with court rules, watched while he and a teammate subjected al-Nashiri to “enhanced interrogation” that included waterboarding at the black site.

Z9A is the code name used in court for Haspel.

The CIA has never acknowledged Haspel’s work at the black site, and the use of the code name represented the court’s acceptance of an agency policy of not acknowledging state secrets — even those that have already been spilled. Former officials long ago revealed that she ran the black site in Thailand from October 2002 until December 2002, during the time al-Nashiri was being tortured, which Mitchell described in his testimony.

Guantánamo Bay is one of the few places where America is still wrestling with the legacy of torture in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Torture has loomed over the pretrial phase of the death penalty cases for years and is likely to continue to do so as hearings resume over the summer.

Defense teams have been asking military judges to exclude certain evidence from the war crimes trials of accused al-Qaida operatives as tainted by not just torture but also cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In May, that meant revisiting what happened nearly 20 years ago at the secret prison in Thailand.

Mitchell described how in late 2002, he and another CIA contract psychologist, John Bruce Jessen, waterboarded al-Nashiri, who is accused of orchestrating the bombing of the Navy destroyer USS Cole in 2000. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed in the attack.

During three separate sessions, Mitchell held a cloth over the man’s face and adjusted it to direct the water as Jessen poured.

Mitchell testified that al-Nashiri was so small that they thought he might slide out of his Velcro restraints during portions of the waterboarding. To let al-Nashiri breathe between pours, interrogators pivoted him 90 degrees, from lying on his back to a standing position, still strapped to a gurney.

The interrogation team shifted to other “coercive techniques,” including forcing the prisoner to spend time in a small confinement box. Mitchell said he had a “general memory of what was done” — the detainee, who was nude and sometimes hooded, was probably slapped and had the back of his head slammed into a burlap-covered wall — but testified that he did not have a “blow-by-blow recollection of any of that stuff.”

It was previously known that by the time al-Nashiri was waterboarded in late 2002, Haspel had taken over as the chief of base at the secret prison in Thailand. It has also been reported that she drafted cables relating what happened to al-Nashiri and what was learned during his interrogations and debriefings.

But Mitchell’s testimony went further. He testified that the chief of base observed the sessions, although she did not participate in them.

The law firm that employs Haspel, King & Spalding LLP, declined to comment and referred questions to the CIA, which also declined to comment.

Mitchell never mentioned the person by name. Instead, because she was in a clandestine role at the time, he was required to refer to the chief of base as Z9A, or, as one lawyer sounded it out, “Zulu Nine Alpha.”

The codes are part of the choreography of the hearings at Guantánamo Bay, where the court has a mute button to protect against inadvertent disclosures of classified information and prosecutors work with the CIA to keep official secrets out of the public record.

Prosecutors in the death penalty cases, working with members of the intelligence community, assigned alphanumeric codes to most CIA staff members who worked at the black sites. Nations where the CIA had prisons are referred to by numbers. For Mitchell’s hearing, prosecutors provided him with a secret list of names and alphanumerics — a key of sorts that lawyers in court called “a crosswalk.”

For example, Mitchell referred to the agency’s chief interrogator in 2002, who died not long after he oversaw some of al-Nashiri’s harshest interrogations, as NX2.

And although Haspel’s role as chief of base at the black site in Thailand is widely known, it is still considered a state secret.

The judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., agreed to allow Mitchell to testify because the CIA had destroyed videotapes that defense lawyers argue showed the psychologists torturing and interrogating al-Nashiri and another prisoner at the black site in Thailand. Defense lawyers said that deprived them of potential evidence, including something they might have wanted to show a military jury deciding whether to impose a death penalty.

The disclosure that the CIA had destroyed the tapes — most of them showing Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee taken into custody and known to be tortured by the CIA after the Sept. 11 attacks — prompted the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate the black site program.

Haspel has acknowledged her role in the destruction of those tapes as a chief of staff to the operations chief, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. At her confirmation hearing, she said, “I would also make clear that I did not appear on the tapes.”

Observers at the site in Thailand watched waterboarding and other interrogations via a closed-circuit video feed to a separate room. At one point, the CIA sent some staff members to the black site to watch the waterboarding of Zubaydah. But, Mitchell testified, Haspel was not among them.

The Senate Intelligence Committee study of the CIA program, only a part of which is public, said that interrogators wanted to stop using “enhanced interrogation techniques” on al-Nashiri because he was answering direct questions, but they were overruled by headquarters.

Al-Nashiri would also be tortured later, after Mitchell had taken him to a different CIA black site. Another interrogator revved a drill next to the naked detainee’s hooded head, apparently to try to get him to divulge al-Qaida plots. At another black site in 2004, the CIA infused a dietary supplement into his rectum for refusing to eat. His Navy lawyer has called the procedure rape.

At her confirmation hearing, Haspel pledged not to set up any similar interrogation programs.

© 2022 The New York Times Company

Putin has awakened a 'dark nationalism he is more and more dependent on,' says Russian political analyst

Matthew Loh
Fri, June 3, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin is less afraid of anti-war protests than he is of a growing pro-war movement, wrote political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya.

Contributor/Getty Images

Vladimir Putin has started a nationalist movement that may backfire, said a political analyst.

Tatiana Stanovaya wrote that such nationalism could force Putin to be more aggressive policywise.

Stanovaya also outlined several assumptions by the West about Putin that she sought to debunk.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has "awakened a dark nationalism" within Russia that he has become increasingly dependent on, said a Russian political scholar and analyst.

"The truth is that Putin is more afraid of pro-war protests and has to take into account the eagerness of many Russians to see the destruction of what they call Ukrainian Nazis," wrote Tatiana Stanovaya — the founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik and a nonresident scholar of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — in an essay for Foreign Policy published on Wednesday.

Since the start of the Ukraine war, Putin has baselessly claimed that Russia's invasion is aimed at the "demilitarization and de-Nazification" of the country.

"This is extremely important: Putin has awakened a dark nationalism he is more and more dependent on," Stanovaya wrote, per the outlet.

She added, per Foreign Policy, that the Russian public's growing penchant for nationalism could eventually prompt Putin to escalate matters and become even more "hawkish and resolute."

"Whatever happens to Putin, the world will have to deal with this public aggression and anti-West, anti-liberal convictions that make Russia problematic for the West," she wrote, per the outlet.

The West's belief that Putin is worried about anti-war sentiment is one of several misguided assumptions about the Russian leader that Stanovaya sought to correct in her piece.

Per Foreign Policy, Stanovaya also wrote that the West is incorrect to assume that Putin has been purging his inner circle and senior officials for their failures in the war in Ukraine. She added that rumors of Putin's top officers being arrested have not come from verified sources and that she viewed such speculation with "extreme skepticism."

"Putin is likely upset and disappointed with his staff, but it's not his style to purge his inner circle unless serious crimes have been committed," Stanovaya wrote, per the outlet.

Regarding Putin's view of Russia's progress in the war, she wrote, per Foreign Policy: "In Putin's eyes, he is not losing this war. In fact, he likely believes he is winning — and he is happy to wait until Ukraine concedes that Russia is here forever."

DEMOCRACY NOW!

“Doubling Down”: How Minneapolis Elites Worked to Stop Police Reform After George Floyd’s Murder

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GUESTS Robin Wonsley
longtime activist and Minneapolis’s first Black democratic socialist city councilmember.

LINKS Robin Wonsley Worlobah on Twitter

Wednesday marked two years since George Floyd was murdered by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, setting off worldwide protests against police violence. But has anything in Minneapolis changed? We spoke with longtime local activist Robin Wonsley Worlobah, who is also now Minneapolis’s first Black democratic socialist city councilmember. Wonsley Worlobah says the mayor has “not enacted any meaningful and effective oversight over one of the most dysfunctional, racist and violent policing departments in the country right now.” She says a big-business, pro-police coalition worked with politicians to build a multimillion-dollar campaign against the Black Lives Matter movement, successfully preventing any changes to the city’s police budget and public safety system. “If there was a way to go backwards, we’ve done it.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.


AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

This week marks two years since George Floyd was murdered by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. His death spurred a global movement for racial justice and intensified the push for police accountability and abolition. On Wednesday, the city of Minneapolis renamed the intersection where he was killed as George Perry Floyd Square. On the same day, members of Floyd’s family attended a White House ceremony where President Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to revise use-of-force policies, banning tactics like chokeholds and restricting practices like no-knock warrants, while establishing a national database of police misconduct. Biden’s executive order came as a reform bill, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, remains stalled in the Senate amidst Republican opposition.

On Wednesday, Juan González and I spoke with Robin Wonsley Worlobah. She’s a longtime activist in Minneapolis. Earlier this year, she became Minneapolis’s first Black democratic socialist city councilmember. She was part of a coalition successfully blocking the relocation of the 3rd Precinct police station, where Chauvin was based — which still sits vacant today. I began by asking Robin Wonsley where she was when she heard about George Floyd’s murder Memorial Day weekend in 2020.


ROBIN WONSLEY WORLOBAH: I was like many — you know, many residents at the time. I was, I believe, running errands when I first heard word of it, and then I had, you know, community members share the historic footage of Floyd be pinned against the ground, with Derek Chauvin, officer Derek Chauvin’s knee, you know, forcefully placed upon Floyd’s neck. That image, in itself, forced me to pull over, and I just remember being in a deep paralysis and shaking and crying.


And, you know, as you noted in my intro, I’ve been a organizer in Minneapolis. And unfortunately, a lot of my organizing work has revolved around police-related murders of Black people, from Jamar Clark to Philando Castile. And, you know, I was there with Philando Castile watching as St. Anthony and their officers washed the blood off the sidewalk, or the street, and now here I am watching George Floyd be killed, like millions of others around the world, and, of course, just was forced into a pause of, you know, all the things that have transpired that led to that moment, the failure of our leadership to really address the deep inequities that have been documented, here in Minneapolis specifically, for a number of years, especially around policing, and how, if we had better leadership, willing to exercise even the bare minimum of political will and political courage, especially with our police federation, with our officers, how we would not have had to endure the collective trauma of watching George Floyd be lynched, and then, basically, afterwards seeing our city burn nearly down because of this collective oppression. You know, Martin Luther King says, you know, the riots are the sounds of the oppressed.


You know, I just think there was so much that could have happened, that activists and residents had been organizing around clear demands, public safety demands, for a number of years that could have prevented that. And just the unknown of what was actually going to come in the wake of everything that transpired here in Minneapolis after George Floyd, and now being in this position of power and saying, two years later, we have not made much progress. Actually, if there was a way to go backwards, we’ve done it.


And that’s disheartening to say in this current moment where we’re honoring such a historic moment, in not only U.S. history but global history. As you noted, his murder sparked a national movement, one of the largest civil rights movements in U.S. history, and that will go on to prompt actions and protest in more than 50 countries around the world. And to be able to sit here as an elected official who ran, you know, in the wake of organizing for justice for George Floyd, being tear-gassed by our police in the midst of all that, and now have to see our leadership continue to fail to rise to the occasion to prevent another Black person from being murdered, another working-class person from being murdered — we have failed to rise to that occasion, even two years later, and it just makes you think: What does it take to get justice for Black lives at this point?


JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you — in the wake of those protests after George Floyd’s murder, there did seem to be some attempts by political leaders, not only in Minneapolis but around the country, to institute some changes. There was a reduction of the police department budget initially in Minneapolis. But as often happens with these protests, the system figures out a way to basically let the movement spend its energy and then seizes back its power. I’m wondering how that happened, specifically in Minneapolis. How did the movement backwards occur?


ROBIN WONSLEY WORLOBAH: I think, for one, I do want to note, there was never a reduction in police funding. There has been, you know, years of efforts from residents to say, “Let’s transition dollars from MPD into other, you know, holistic social services that actually deals with the root causes of crime.” And, you know, there have been very small investments into that work. But as we stand right now, of today, two years later, the police budget for the Minneapolis Police Department still stands close to $200 million.


And as you mentioned, the movement backwards, we really saw — in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the uprising, we saw this, you know, broad movement rallied around the demand to defund the police. You know, there was efforts by that coalition of organizations, Black-led organizations, to try to even put something on the ballot that would have allowed us to basically dismantle the police department as it currently stands and create a new Department of Public Safety, that would have, you know, not replicated many of the racist and violent components of policing as it currently stands.


And we had an unelected body, the Charter Commission. And we’ve seen this play out throughout all levels of government. You know, when we tried to pass 15 federally, we had a parliamentarian commission come in and say no. So we always have these unelected bodies that are able to assert themselves and block the changes that working-class people are demanding. We had that with the Charter Commission. They delayed that, and then that forced our movements to have to look into putting a charter amendment forward for the following year, which was our election year.


And what we saw was the status quo of Minneapolis fight tooth and nail to keep any transformative change around public safety from coming into fruition. And when I say “fight tooth and nail,” some of the things that they did was build a broad coalition of some of our most big business — powerful big business actors. We’re talking about the Chambers of Commerce, the downtown council. They formed these PACs where they pulled millions of dollars together to do, you know, repeated media blitzes, saying that, you know, this demand will get rid of police, it will defund the police. And also, we were seeing somewhat of a rise in community violence at the time, and they were leveraging, you know, the justifiable pain and trauma that many of our working-class Black residents were experiencing, you know, as it related to that community violence, and saying, “Look, you can’t have transformative change and be able to keep, like, your community safe. So you have to pick. So, either you’re going to keep the cops, to keep the bullets from flying, from keeping babies from dying, or you’re going to have like a new model of public safety. And that’s too risky. So let’s just keep the cops as they are.”


So, we had this whole powerful coalition. That was tied into an election year. So you had a number of candidates who were tying themselves to this anti-public safety amendment, you know, pro-policing agenda. Our current mayor was also at the helm of a lot of that and basically saying, “We don’t need to make any major changes. All we need to do is trust that our current police chief” — at that time, a well-respected Black man, you know, from St. Paul and Minneapolis. “We just need to trust him to carry out the reforms necessary to rein in the racist and terrorizing dynamics of MPD that led to George Floyd’s murder. Let’s just trust him to do that. Don’t trust these crazy activists.” And they were able to run a successful multimillion-dollar campaign, a fear campaign, to squash any type of efforts to make meaningful change around public safety.


But what I want to know is, while they were successful on November 2nd in defeating the public safety amendment and getting a pro-police majority on City Council, what has happened since is that whole thing has fallen apart. Their whole fear campaign, fear-based campaign promises have fallen apart. A month after we got elected, Chief Arradondo, the chief who was going to save the entire police department, retired. In February, Minneapolis residents watched another police killing of a young man by the name of Amir Locke while he was sleeping in an apartment at 6:30 a.m. Mind you, the officers involved in shooting that young man while he was sleeping have not been charged, and charges will not be brought forward to those officers, and they will likely come back on the force to police our communities.


We also have had a release of a damning human rights report from our State Department, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, which has basically said — you know, confirmed Minneapolis Police Department is entrenched in racist, misogynistic and violent practices, that MPD leadership, as well as city leadership — we’re talking about our current mayor, who’s been there for five years, many of my fellow councilmembers, who have been there for a number of years. This report names that all of those leaders were aware of these human right violations that were taking place in our department, and did nothing. So, we’ve had that report come out.


And we’ve had our current mayor even resist talks — has made public declarations to walk away from all conversations with our state Human Rights Department around entering into a consent decree. We still have a mayor that is championing resistance to any type of reform. We’ve passed a police contract that has further emboldened our officers, given them incentives, monetary incentives, with no level of accountability in which they are being forced to be beholden to by our current leadership.


So, we’ve seen, again, just regression and regression, after communities have continued to rise up and say we must do better. We need a new Department of Public Safety. We need to address the fact that Mayor Frey and many of our council leadership, you have not — and MPD leadership — you have not enacted any meaningful and effective oversight over one of the most dysfunctional, racist and violent policing departments in the country right now. And you, in turn, to those residents are still resisting every effort from councilmembers like myself who ran on a platform for public safety beyond policing. You’re resisting any efforts from community members, even state departments, to create any meaningful reforms. So, we’re just seeing a full doubling down on basically protecting MPD policing as it currently stands.

AMY GOODMAN: Robin Wonsley is a democratic socialist member of the Minneapolis City Council.