The order was based on plainly dubious claims about national security, targeting for scrutiny some of the most heavily vetted visitors to the United States. But the tangible purpose it did serve, before being at least temporarily frozen by the courts, was to divide Americans from millions of people in the Muslim world by sending the latter a message of gratuitous insult and contempt — and emboldening the very extremist movements the order was ostensibly directed against.

That kind of polarization may be exactly what some members of the White House want. High-ranking members of the current administration — most notably its chief strategist, Steve Bannon — have publicly espoused apocalyptic theories of history that center on a forthcoming clash between Western countries and the Muslim world, a conflict that many of them seem to perceive as both inevitable and desirable.

There are striking parallels between Bannon’s worldview and the perspective of terrorist groups like the Islamic State, which see the world divided in similarly binary terms — hence their reported enthusiasm for the executive order that Bannon helped author.

A proponent of pseudoscientific theories of history like the “Fourth Turning,” Bannon has predicted the coming of another major U.S. war in the Middle East and a military conflict with what he calls an “expansionist China.” In interviews during the election campaign, Bannon openly described Trump as a “blunt instrument” for his ideological goals.

A 2014 speech that Bannon delivered to an audience at the Vatican provides a hint of what kind of program he might want to use Trump to achieve. In that address, delivered via teleconference, Bannon called for a revival of the tradition of the “church militant,” describing a vague yet apocalyptic threat he claims that Western countries face from both “Islamic jihadist fascism” and their own loss of religious faith.

We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict … to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.

Now consider how Bannon’s hysterical view of history was echoed that same year in a speech by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who issued a similarly vague, yet no less frenzied call to arms:

So let the world know that we are living today in a new era. Whoever was heedless must now be alert. Whoever was sleeping must now awaken. … You will face tribulation and fierce battle. … So prepare your arms, and supply yourselves with piety.

Nowhere are these types of ideas particularly popular. While the Islamic State is held up by anti-Muslim activists in the United States as the quintessential expression of Muslim beliefs, in reality the group is deeply loathed in Muslim-majority countries. In the United States, though Trump won the election, his voter base comprised a distinct minority of the electorate. Even among those who did vote for him, few appear to have done so in enthusiasm for the apocalyptic theories of history held by advisers like Bannon. Huge numbers of people have also taken to the streets in opposition to Trump’s executive orders, which has helped to counteract the administration’s anti-Muslim message to the world, showing that it does not represent the views of all Americans.

But it doesn’t take much for a highly motivated minority to spark a broader conflict.

President Donald Trump pauses as he signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House, on Feb. 3, 2017, in Washington.

Photo: Aude Guerrucci/Press Pool/Getty Images

ISIS attacks have been deliberately calibrated to shock and offend the sensibilities of Western publics, a strategy that the group openly refers to as “eliminating the grayzone” of coexistence between societies. Many 19th- and 20th-century revolutionary movements were also led by small, militant vanguards that used violence and provocation to help advance their political programs. In their time, these movements achieved real tactical successes. And even today, despite widespread public war-weariness in the United States, ISIS has accomplished its goal of dragging American troops back into armed conflicts in Iraq and Syria that show little sign of abating.

After a series of improbable successes, the radical right-wing vanguard of U.S. politics has now taken control of the government, along with the most powerful military on the planet. In its enthusiasm for civilizational war, it is just the enemy that a group like the Islamic State needs to help validate its desperate and fanatical narrative.

An early example of the kind of harm that the Trump administration can do came in the form of the first special operations forces raid authorized by Trump after his inauguration. In that operation — reportedly promoted to him over dinner with his advisers — a total of 25 civilians were reportedly killed, including nine children under the age of 13. Among those killed was an 8-year-old U.S. citizen, Nawar al-Awlaki, the daughter of deceased al Qaeda proselytizer Anwar al-Awlaki. Images of Awlaki’s daughter and other victims of the raid were broadcast around the world, fueling widespread outrage.

Days later, the Yemeni branch of al Qaeda publicly denounced Trump for carrying out a “massacre” of civilians. The group promised vengeance, saying that global outrage over the deaths meant that “the flame of jihad has ignited and reached all over the world.”

While that may be an overstatement, it is not hard to see how a cycle of tit-for-tat violence, already tacitly established since the start of the war on terror, could accelerate dramatically under an administration that actively seeks to escalate conflict. Where President Obama sought to calm public fears in the aftermath of ISIS attacks, Trump and his administration will undoubtedly seek to inflame them for political gain. It’s only a matter of time before such an attack occurs, and Trump’s reaction could have consequences that quickly spiral out of control.

In his memoirs, published after his suicide in 1942, the exiled Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig described his feelings of despair upon realizing that a “tiny but loud-mouthed party of German Nationalists” had succeeded in seizing power and dragging humanity into a global conflict it had neither wanted or expected. “The personal cause to which I had lent the force of my convictions, the peaceful union of Europe, had been wrecked,” Zweig lamented. “What I feared more than my own death, war waged by everyone against everyone else, had been unleashed for the second time.”

Seven decades after Zweig penned these words, small, well-organized groups of right-wing radicals are once again ascendant across the world. The best hope to stop them may be the popular opposition movements that have begun to stir in the United States. But most importantly, it will take a rejection of the logic of revenge and collective blame on both sides to prevent the apocalyptic visions of extremists from becoming reality.

Top photo: Senior counselor to the president, Steve Bannon, arrives at the presidential inauguration at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2017.

The post As Tensions Rise, Steve Bannon and ISIS Get Closer to Their Common Goal: Civilizational War appeared first on The Intercept.

When it began to dawn on Marjan Vayghan that her uncle Ali had been detained by customs enforcement at the Los Angeles International Airport, she hadn’t even heard about President Trump’s Muslim ban. On the evening of January 27, the same day Trump signed the executive order, Ali Vayeghan (he and his niece spell their names differently), an Iranian national with an American green card, was scheduled to arrive at LAX on a 7 p.m. flight. It wasn’t until 2 a.m. that a customs official confirmed to Marjan’s distraught family what they already suspected: that Ali was being held prisoner at the airport.

Marjan didn’t get any sleep until seven that morning. Before she crawled into bed, she put up a post on Facebook, describing to her friends what had happened to her uncle.

When she woke up at noon and checked her newsfeed, Marjan told me, “my friends had just gone crazy.” Her post had caught fire. Her friends were livid about the travel ban, which Marjan now learned was what was behind her uncle’s predicament. Her father called and told her that all her friends were there at the airport already. “The angry feminist friends from your art shows who don’t wear makeup are hugging your mom,” he told her. A few hours later, while she was on her way to LAX, her father called again. “It’s not just your friends anymore,” he said. By now, protesters had begun to arrive at the airport to show their solidarity with the detained travelers and their opposition to the executive order. By the time Marjan left LAX late that night, the crowd had grown to hundreds. By the following day, it would be thousands.

After 20 hours in detention, with no provision of food or sleeping accommodations, during which time Customs and Border Protection tried to get him to sign away his residency (he refused), Ali was put on a plane to Dubai, where he was expected to connect to a flight back to Tehran, and to somehow get through customs in both countries with “REVOKED” written across his visa with a red sharpie.

Peter Bibring, an ACLU attorney, had rushed to file a request for an injunction when he heard about Ali’s deportation order. But by the time the court received it, there was no time for a ruling before Ali’s flight took off. The plane left Los Angeles to Dubai with Ali on it.

On the afternoon of February 2, Ali Vayeghan, apparently the first person to be deported out of LAX under Trump’s executive order, became the first person to be brought back into the country under a court ruling that rejected the legal and constitutional basis of Trump’s ban. The ACLU hadn’t been able to prevent Ali’s removal from the United States, but it had managed to secure his return.

Ali stepped off the plane and into the embrace of his niece. The mayor was there to shake his hand. So was a giant, frenzied scrum of reporters (myself among them), holding their cameras and their phones aloft to get even a passing shot of the family’s reunion. Protesters were there, too, holding up signs welcoming Ali Vayeghan to the United States of America.

“He is now a lawful permanent resident of the United States,” Bibring told me. “We’re hopeful that the government will respect that.”

The post Ali Vayeghan Was Deported Under Trump’s Executive Order. Now He’s Back in the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

Though Drake was largely vindicated, the central question he raised about technology and privacy has never been resolved. Almost seven years have passed now, but Pat Eddington, a former CIA analyst, is still trying to prove that Drake was right.

While working for Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., Eddington had the unique opportunity to comb through still-classified documents that outline the history of two competing NSA programs known as ThinThread and Trailblazer. He’s seen an unredacted version of the Pentagon inspector general’s 2004 audit of the NSA’s failures during that time, and has filed Freedom of Information Act requests.

In January, Eddington decided to take those efforts a step further by suing the Department of Defense to obtain the material, he tells The Intercept. “Those documents completely vindicate” those who advocated for ThinThread at personal risk, says Eddington.

The controversy dates back to 1996, when Ed Loomis, then a computer systems designer for the NSA, along with his team worked to move the NSA’s collection capabilities from the analog to the digital world. The shift would allow the NSA to scoop up internet packets, stringing them together into legible communications, and automating a process to instantly decide which communications were most interesting, while masking anything from Americans. The prototype, called GrandMaster, would need to ingest vast amounts of data, but only spit out what was most valuable, deleting or encrypting everything else.

Then in the fall of 2001, four passenger airliners were hijacked by terrorists as part of a suicide plot against Washington, D.C., and New York City. The U.S. intelligence community faced a disturbing wakeup call: its vast collection systems had failed to prevent the attacks.

Yet, in response, the NSA simply started collecting more data.

The NSA sent out a bid to multiple defense contractors, seeking a program that could collect and analyze communications from phones and the internet. Science Applications Internal Corporation, or SAIC, won the contract, known as Trailblazer. Meanwhile, internally, NSA employees were developing a similar, less costly alternative called ThinThread, a follow-on to GrandMaster. ThinThread would collect online communications, sort them, and mask data belonging to Americans.

Those involved in ThinThread argue that their approach was better than a collect-it-all approach taken by NSA.

“Bulk collection kills people,” says Bill Binney, a former NSA analyst, who rose to be a senior technical official with a dream of automating the agency’s espionage. “You collect everything, dump it on the analyst, and they can’t see the threat coming, can’t stop it,” he says.

Binney built a back-end system — a processor that would draw on data collected by ThinThread, analyze it, look at whether or not the traffic was involves American citizens, and pass on what was valuable for foreign intelligence.

“Bulk acquisition doesn’t work,” agrees Kirk Wiebe, a former NSA senior analyst, who was trying to help convince NSA of ThinThread’s value at the time.

The analysts are drowning in data, and Binney and Wiebe believe ThinThread would have solved the problem by helping the NSA sort through the deluge automatically while protecting privacy using encryption.

But Binney and Wiebe say advocates of ThinThread hit every possible bureaucratic roadblock on the way, sitting in dozens of meetings with lawyers and lawmakers. In the meantime, Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the NSA at the time, said he decided to fund an outside contract for a larger effort, focused on gathering all communications, not just those over the internet, as ThinThread was designed to do.

Additionally, while ThinThread masked American communications, Hayden’s legal and technical advisors were concerned the collection itself would be a problem. Some of Hayden’s senior officials at the NSA came from SAIC, the company that won contract to design a proof of concept for Trailblazer.

“A tiny group of people at NSA had developed a capability for next to no money at all to give the government an unprecedented level of access to any number of foreign terrorists,” Eddington says. “Instead that system was shut down in favor of an SAIC boondoggle that cost taxpayers, by my last count, close to a billion dollars.”

He argues the contract, and the “incestuous” relationship between the NSA chief and the contractor never received the scrutiny it deserved. “It was clearly an ethical problem,” Loomis said.

Ultimately, however, the NSA went with Trailblazer. Hayden rejected the ThinThread proposal because the intelligence community’s lawyers were concerned it wouldn’t work on a global scale, and that it would vacuum up too much American data. Hayden has continued dismissing concerns years later as the grumblings of disgruntled employees. Hayden told PBS Frontline ThinThread “was not the answer to the problems we were facing, with regard to the volume, variety and velocity of modern communications.”

In 2002, Wiebe, Binney, Loomis, Drake, and Diane Roark, a Republican staffer on the House Intelligence Committee who had been advocating for ThinThread, united to complain to the Defense Department’s inspector general, arguing that ThinThread, while still a prototype, would be the best surveillance system. The oversight body completed its report in 2004, which included major concerns about Trailblazer.

“We talked about going for the nuclear option,” Wiebe said, referring to discussions at the time about contacting the press.

But Drake went it alone, however, never telling his colleagues what he planned to do. Stories about the disagreements started showing up in news headlines based on leaks. The Bush administration in 2007 sent the FBI after the whistleblowers, raiding each of the whistleblowers’ homes who raised complaints to the Pentagon inspector general. Drake faced espionage charges after speaking to a reporter from the Baltimore Sun about the alleged mismanagement and waste in the NSA.

Though Drake wasn’t sent to prison, he lost his career in government, and now works at an Apple store. The question of whether ThinThread would have provided a better capability than Trailblazer was never resolved.

While ThinThread never made it to production, some of the analytic elements, minus the privacy protections, made it into Fort Meade as part of a massive surveillance program now known as Stellar Wind.

But there may be a way to settle the debate. The watchdog agency tasked with oversight of the Department of Defense completed a full investigation into the battle between ThinThread and the Trailblazer. The Pentagon inspector general published a heavily redacted version of that investigation in 2011; that report is now the only public record available, aside from the account of the whistleblowers who exposed it.

Despite everything that’s come out about its surveillance programs, the NSA still won’t release the full ThinThread investigation. “I don’t really know what they’re trying to hide,” said Loomis.

Loomis says he thinks those redactions were more for the sake of Hayden’s reputation than protecting real classified information. He eventually documented the saga in a self-published book called “NSA’s Transformation: An Executive Branch Black Eye.”

Drake told The Intercept in an email that efforts to uncover the Pentagon inspector general’s ThinThread investigation were a large part of his defense. Since then, the Office of Special Counsel concluded last March that the Department of Justice may have destroyed evidence that might have helped exonerate him.

In the meantime, however, hope is fading that the entire story of ThinThread will emerge from behind the government door of secrecy. “We’ve been trying for 15 or 16 years now to bring the U.S. government the technical solution to save lives, but they fight us left and right,” said Wiebe.

Eddington says the ThinThread controversy demonstrates the lack of oversight of the intelligence community. “The mentality that gave us this system is still in place,” he says. “We could see this become de facto permanent,” he said.

The post Former CIA Analyst Sues Defense Department to Vindicate NSA Whistleblowers appeared first on The Intercept.

The operation — which Trump reportedly approved over dinner — also failed to catch its reported target and severely damaged a local clinic, mosque, and school.

It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump making the situation worse in Yemen, but he did.

Impoverished to begin with, Yemen is two years into a civil war that has killed 10,000 people and displaced millions. A U.S.-supplied bombing campaign has turned schools, hospitals, essential infrastructure, and ancient heritage sites into rubble. And a U.S.-backed blockade is preventing the trade of food and basic goods, starving a country that previously relied on imports for 90 percent of its food.

Armed Yemenis walk on the debris at a wedding hall reportedly hit by a Saudi-led coalition air strike in the capital Sanaa on July 10, 2015.

Photo: Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images

As a result, the United Nations this week declared that Yemen is on the brink of famine. Officials held a news conference Wednesday to announce that 19 million Yemenis — more than two-thirds of the country’s population — need some form of humanitarian assistance, 7.3 million people do not know where their next meal will come, and more than half of the country’s medical facilities have closed.

Jan Egeland, a former UN official and chair of the Norwegian Refugee Council, described the situation by saying “if bombs don’t kill you, a slow and painful death by starvation is now an increasing threat.”

Even so, the toll of Trump’s botched raid was so high that it drew criticism from the ousted government-in-exile of Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi — the party supported by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia in Yemen’s civil war. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Hadi’s ministers had withdrawn their support for the U.S. to conduct ground missions in Yemen. The Pentagon and the Hadi government quickly denied the report, but Hadi’s foreign minister then said the government is conducting a “reassessment” of the raid.

Trump is evidently so sensitive to the criticism that he has tried to smother it by shamefully smearing critics and trying to stifle dissent.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer accused critics of being disrespectful of Chief Special Warfare Operator William “Ryan” Owens, the Navy SEAL Trump sent to his death. “I think anybody who undermines the success of that raid owes an apology and does a disservice to the life of Chief Owens,” Spicer said.

On Thursday, after Sen. John McCain, R.-Ariz., described the raid as “a failure,” Trump — who repeatedly insisted it was a success — lashed out on Twitter, saying McCain’s criticism “emboldens the enemy” — likening congressional truth-telling to sedition.

And signs are that Yemen is in for more suffering at Trump’s hands. Trump’s Defense Department is reportedly considering a proposal to designate Yemen a formal battlefield in the war on terror, which would allow for an “intensified pace of operations, rather than one-off raids or drone strikes.”

Yemen is one of seven countries included in Trump’s immigration ban. In New York City, Yemeni-Americans have led strikes and large protests against the ban, which separates many from their extended families.

And the Washington Times reported on Wednesday that the administration is set to approve an arms transfer to Saudi Arabia that the Obama administration denied to them on human rights grounds.

The shipment contains hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons guidance systems that would allow Saudi Arabia to convert dumb bombs into precision missiles.

Saudi soldiers from an artillery unit stand behind a pile of ammunition at a position close to the Saudi-Yemeni border, in southwestern Saudi Arabia, on April 13, 2015.

Photo: Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images

Targeted bombing is normally safer for civilians than indiscriminate bombing. In fact, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said during his confirmation hearing that the U.S. should provide Saudi Arabia with “better targeting intelligence” and “better targeting capability” in order to minimize “collateral damage.”

But the Obama administration, despite its reluctance to offend the Saudis, halted the guidance-systems sales after concluding that the Saudi-led coalition was targeting civilians deliberately.

Saudi Arabia began bombing Yemen in March 2015 after Houthi rebels overran the capital and deposed Hadi, the Saudi-backed leader, who now splits his time between the Saudi capital and southern Yemen.  The U.S. has been a silent partner in the kingdom’s campaign against the Houthis, refueling warplanes, supplying targeting intelligence, and resupplying the coalition with more than $20 billion in weapons.

Since the beginning of their campaign, Saudi Arabia has destroyed vital civilian infrastructure including farms, fisheries, water infrastructure, roads, and hospitals. Other targeting decisions have sparked global outrage: the bombing of a children’s school and a school for the blind, and the October attack that turned a funeral at a community center into a “lake of blood.”

Congress has not yet been notified of the weapons shipment, and the Pentagon declined to comment on it.

The Saudi-led bombing campaign has also allowed al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate — the target of Trump’s botched raid — to grow exponentially in personnel and finances. According to State Department reports, the group quadrupled in size the year that Saudi Arabia started bombing. The same year, al Qaeda seized a prominent port city, which netted them an estimated $5 million a day off customs tariffs and smuggled goods. Al Qaeda in Yemen is also fighting the Houthis.

While Trump ramps up U.S. militarism in Yemen, Democrats have largely ignored the plight of the Yemenis. When a Yemeni refugee who had lost her father to Saudi bombing questioned Nancy Pelosi at a CNN town hall on January 31, Pelosi condemned Trump’s Muslim travel ban — but said nothing about U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war. “Your family is suffering because our president is reckless” she said.

Pelosi to Yemeni refugee: "Your family is suffering because our president is reckless" https://t.co/qzremhe9fS https://t.co/UMhQJr7Ua2

— CNN (@CNN) February 1, 2017

Top Photo: A Yemeni man walks past flames rising from the ruins of buildings destroyed in a Saudi-led airstrike on Feb. 10, 2016 in Sanaa.

The post Trump Intends to Follow Up Botched Yemen Military Raid By Helping Saudis Target Civilians appeared first on The Intercept.

Along with Tennessee Republican Rep. Diane Black, Ernst has become the new face of the defunding movement — a mantle typically held by those among Congress’s white male contingent, including Vice President Mike Pence.

Despite that change, the message remains the same: Because some Planned Parenthood clinics provide abortion care, none should be allowed to use federal funds to provide unrelated health services to women, despite the fact that no federal funding (except in rare circumstances) pays for abortion.

“We as a pro-life community honor the civil liberties, independence, and strength of a woman — all women,” Ernst told the crowd on the National Mall. “And that means both supporting mothers and rising up to protect the most vulnerable in our society — the innocent babies who are unable to defend themselves.”

But advocates for women’s reproductive health warn that should the defunding proceed, the intertwined networks of providers that offer women’s health services could be seriously damaged — leaving thousands of women without access to birth control and other preventive care.

March for Life participants gather around the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 27, 2017.

Photo: Astrid Riecken for the Boston Globe/Getty Images

At the march in late January, Ernst promised to file a measure that would forbid any funds from going to Planned Parenthood; she has vowed that nothing about the bill — the Protect Funding for Women’s Health Care Act — would reduce overall federal funding available to support women’s health.

In practice, the measure means not only blocking Planned Parenthood from reimbursements for services provided to Medicaid patients, but also denying Title X grants to the group’s clinics. While Medicaid reimbursements represent a larger share of the federal funds at issue — Planned Parenthood receives roughly $390 million per year to cover the costs of providing care to some of the nation’s poorest women — withholding Title X grants could deal a far more immediate and lasting blow, not only to clients, but to the program itself.

Title X, passed with strong bipartisan support and signed into law in 1970 by President Richard Nixon, is the only pot of federal funding dedicated to providing family-planning care — which includes counseling, access to birth control, testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, and cancer screenings.

A Planned Parenthood clinic in Austin, Texas, provides health care information for women, Feb. 6, 2017.

Photo: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The Intercept

While there are more than 20 million women in need of publicly funded contraceptive and family-planning care in the United States, the Title X allocation has never covered all of them. In 2015, the program was funded with roughly $287 million and served 4 million individuals.

Title X funds are apportioned among nine regions of the country and are directly granted to state and local health departments or nonprofit family-planning groups that disburse the money across a network of ground-level providers who in turn operate any number of individual clinic sites. As a result, grantees in each state have the flexibility to create a specific network of providers that works as a cohesive system to serve as many patients as possible.

Although Ernst and others have asserted that federally qualified community health centers would be able to pick up the slack if Planned Parenthood is eliminated from Title X, experience on the ground suggests otherwise. In states like Vermont, for example, Planned Parenthood is the only provider of Title X services — in 2014, the state’s 10 funded clinics saw nearly 8,000 women, all of whom would lose access should the defunding take place.

Moreover, community health centers are tasked with providing a panoply of services and are often at capacity. “They have a huge workload — ranging from newborns to old people — and they don’t have the capacity to absorb a huge hit to another part of the health care safety net,” Sara Rosenbaum, founding chair of the Department of Health Policy at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, told The Intercept.

That would likely be the case in Ernst’s home state of Iowa. Jodi Tomlonovic is the executive director of the Family Planning Council of Iowa, one of two grantees that distribute Title X funds. Her network of seven provider groups includes Planned Parenthood as well as primary care providers and county health departments. Her annual allocation is $2.5 million, and in 2015, that money served 30,000 clients — only a percentage of those in need.

Because of funding issues — federal money for Title X has been in decline — the FPCI recently lost two providers. “We’ve had whole agencies shut down and we’ve had satellite clinics close down. And trying to replace them in the network is very difficult, especially in rural states,” Tomlonovic said. “Saying, ‘Oh, well, we can make you give up these providers, and those clients can just be absorbed by other providers’ — that’s not always true. A lot of our federally qualified health centers are filled to capacity and overflowing” — a circumstance likely to be exacerbated if the Affordable Care Act is dismantled.

It’s not only in rural states where need outpaces funding and Planned Parenthood plays an integral role in the quest to serve as many people as possible.

The Arizona Family Health Partnership has been the Title X grantee since 1983 in Arizona and a portion of southern Utah that is part of the Navajo Nation. The AFHP’s $5 million allocation covers care for roughly 35,000 clients per year — out of more than 800,000 in need of services. Planned Parenthood clinics are major providers in Arizona’s urban areas, and severing them from the network would deal an immediate blow to the AFHP’s mission.

“Finding somebody else to provide those services, while it could be done, it’s also labor intensive, and in that process we’re not sure who could pick up all of those clients,” said Brenda Thomas, CEO of the AFHP. “The community health centers have great care, but their focus is primary care and not reproductive health care.” They’re also at capacity “and don’t necessarily have the bandwidth to be able to take over all of the care that is provided at our Planned Parenthoods.”

And that’s problematic, providers say, because reproductive care is often time-sensitive. “Delaying care around reproductive health oftentimes can lead to an unintended pregnancy” or a sexually transmitted infection, like chlamydia, which can cause infertility, “so that person wouldn’t be able to have a child when they are able and ready to do so,” said Thomas.

Federal funding for family planning significantly reduces government costs — including those associated with Medicaid-paid births and negative health outcomes, such as undiagnosed cancers or sexually transmitted infections. In 2014, Title X prevented more than 900,000 unintended pregnancies that would have resulted in 439,000 unplanned births and 326,000 abortions. In 2010, the most recent year for which statistics are available, Title X providers prevented 87,000 preterm or low birth-weight births, 63,000 sexually transmitted infections, and 2,000 cases of cervical cancer. In all, every dollar invested in Title X returns more than $7 in savings — an estimated $7 billion in total savings in 2010 alone.

Although Planned Parenthood clinics accounted for just 10 percent of those funded by Title X in 2010, they served 36 percent of program clients.

“It is deeply troubling that at a time when more women are in need of publicly funded care in this country, we’re bracing for attacks on the very provider network that is charged with delivering the high-quality family-planning services that communities count on,” Audrey Sandusky, director of advocacy and communications for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, wrote in an email to The Intercept.

Traffic moves along Interstate 65 past an HIV awareness billboard in May 2015.

Photo: Christopher Fryer/News and Tribune/AP

Unfortunately, there are already examples of how health outcomes can go sideways when Title X money is hijacked for political purposes and Planned Parenthood is defunded.

When Indiana effectively closed down several Planned Parenthood clinics, including in Scott County, where the facility did not provide abortion care, the state saw an HIV outbreak.

Perhaps the most potent example comes from Texas, where lawmakers in 2011 slashed two-thirds of the state’s budget for family planning, leaving only $19 million in Title X funding left to serve more than 200,000 clients per year (out of more than 1 million in need of services). The state also reworked its matrix for how to use the remaining funds such that it effectively shut out Planned Parenthood clinics.

But the damage was in no way contained to its intended target. In the wake of the 2011 defunding, a number of other clinics shuttered operations as well, and venerable providers — like Parkland Hospital in Dallas, which prior to the cuts served some 38,000 family-planning patients per year — also saw their budgets drastically slashed. Seventy-six facilities across the state closed because of the cuts and another 55 providers were forced to reduce hours of operation. None of the clinics that closed were abortion providers. In all, the program went from serving nearly 203,000 clients in 2011 to about 47,000 in 2013 — a dramatic 77 percent decrease in services.

The cuts also led to a rise in abortions in some areas of the state. In Gregg County in East Texas, the federally qualified community health center lost more than 60 percent of its family-planning funding. In 2012, there were just 59 abortions in the county; in 2014, there were 191.

Equally disturbing, the maternal mortality rate skyrocketed following the defunding — doubling from 2011 to 2014. Texas now has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. Though the fault can’t all be placed at the feet of those who worked to withhold family-planning services from women, those decisions have almost certainly played a role.

“I think the perspective from Texas is what we need to talk about,” said Thomas. “I think it’s really important because that’s what happens when you try to defund a section of the network as well as impose political beliefs on the reproductive health care that women deserve.”

Top photo: A Planned Parenthood clinic in Austin, Texas, on Feb. 6, 2017.

The post Sen. Joni Ernst Puts Planned Parenthood — and Access to Birth Control — on the Chopping Block appeared first on The Intercept.

But the campaign, called the Partnership for Open & Fair Skies, is in reality a cutthroat bid to block certain Arab airlines from U.S. airports — a decision analysts say would limit the choices for consumers while increasing market consolidation for the big three.

This comes after a similar request for protection during the Obama administration — which sought to prevent foreign competitors from offering lower prices — was largely rebuffed.

But now that there’s a president who has promised to crack down on foreigners, the airlines are at it again, hoping to harness “America First” rhetoric for profiteering protectionism.

The day after Trump won the election, the Partnership for Open & Fair Skies campaign issued a statement saying, “We look forward to briefing President-elect Donald Trump and his new administration on the massive, unfair subsidies that the UAE and Qatar give to their state-owned Gulf carriers.” Jill Zuckman, a managing director at SKDKnickerbocker, the public relations firm helping to orchestrate the partnership, did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept.

The big three U.S. airlines maintain that Emirates, Etihad Airways, and Qatar Airways — airlines backed by governments of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — are unfairly subsidized and that their expansion into the U.S. market represents unfair competition that should be blocked by regulators.

“The Gulf carriers have received over $50 billion in documented subsidies from their government owners since 2004,” the chief executives of the big three wrote in a recent letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. “Mr. Secretary,” the letter continues, “we are confident that the Trump Administration shares our view on the importance of enforcing our Open Skies agreements, ensuring that U.S. airlines have a fair and equal opportunity to compete in the international market, and protecting American jobs.”

But the Gulf carriers counter that they provide flights to the Middle East, Europe, and India that have been long ignored by U.S. airlines and that the charge of unfair subsidies is boldly hypocritical given the tens of billions dollars in subsidies granted to the airline industry by various U.S. government agencies for decades.

Travel industry writer Gary Leff scoffs at the lobbying campaign, arguing on his blog Boarding Area that the “U.S. airlines are highly subsidized, and subsidies do not in any way violate our treaties.” Leff has previously detailed the ways in which the U.S. airline industry receives far more government subsidies than their Middle East competitors. Leff notes, citing a 1999 Congressional Research Service study, that the U.S. government has provided subsidies to airlines worth over $150 billion to purchase commercial jets, to serve remote communities, in the form of state and federal fuel subsidies, in the tax code, and through military and postal flights, among other generous programs since 1918.

Qatar Airways in a 2015 filing, listed the subsidies that benefit the U.S. airlines. It noted that U.S. carriers have received upwards of $30 billion alone in cost savings from Chapter 11, using the bankruptcy system to restructure, offloading pension obligations and other liabilities to the taxpayer. The filing argues that Qatar’s services are vital and that their flights offer “one-stop travel options to cities and parts of the world that never have been served by U.S. carriers.”

Meanwhile, recent studies show that market consolidation has led to increased profits for the industry and higher prices for consumers.

But the blatant hypocrisy of the big three is eclipsed in Washington by a formidable lobbying apparatus.

United, Delta, and America, along with their trade group Airlines for America, spent over $20 million on federal lobbying last year. Lobbyists on retainer include former senators John Breaux and Trent Lott. SKDKnickerbocker, the firm managing the campaign, is run by senior Democratic operatives including Anita Dunn, Obama’s former White House communications director. The airlines have also enlisted their respective unions, with the powerful Airline Pilots Association working to advance the campaign to block the Gulf carriers.

They have also used nativism to push the campaign.

In 2015, at outset of the campaign to pressure the Obama administration to squeeze out foreign competition, CNN’s Richard Quest asked Delta Airlines Chief Executive Richard Anderson about Gulf carriers’ claims that the big three received favorable government treatment using bankruptcy protection.

“It’s a great irony to have the United Arab Emirates from the Arabian Peninsula talk about that given the fact that our industry was really shocked by the terrorism of 9/11 which came from terrorists from the Arabian Peninsula that caused us to go through a massive restructuring,” Anderson responded.

Invoking 9/11 to attack the Gulf carriers makes no sense beyond an appeal to bigotry. None of the 9/11 hijackers were from Qatar. Two were from the UAE, but the vast majority — 15 — were from Saudi Arabia, the home of state-subsidized airline Saudia, which is a Skyteam partner with Delta Airways. Saudia has not pushed to compete directly with the big three, and therefore has not been targeted by the Partnership for Open & Fair Skies.

During the meeting Thursday, according to pool reports, Trump discussed changes to the air-traffic-control system and upgrades to airports. The chief executives of United, Delta, Southwest, Alaska, and executives from airport operators were among the participants.

But the campaign to block Gulf carriers has gained new urgency.

In recent weeks, the Partnership for Open & Fair Skies lashed out at Emirates for opening a flight between Athens and Newark, a route that United plans to operate as a seasonal flight from May 24 to early October. The Partnership claims that the route is a violation of U.S. treaty agreements, and is asking regulators to block the competitive route.

“We look forward to working with President Trump and his team to enforce these agreements and protect American jobs — something that the Obama administration failed to do,” Zuckman told The Street in January.

Correction: Feb. 10, 2017
An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the nationalities of the 9/11 hijackers. The story has been updated to reflect that two were from the UAE.

Top photo: A United plane starts its engines at National Airport in Washington in 2016.

The post CEOs of Delta, United and American Hope Trump Will Block Arab Competition appeared first on The Intercept.

Connie, who asked that her last name and the name of her employer be withheld, since speaking publicly about the travel ban would lead to repercussions at work, was born in South America, arriving in the U.S. when she was 2. She has lived in different parts of the country and traveled all over the map, but for the past few years, she’s been based in Atlanta. As a flight attendant, she has developed a sense of empathy for her passengers. “We encounter so many people on a day-to-day basis,” she says. “You always wonder what kinds of walks of life people come from and what experiences they’ve had.” Beyond the initial shock and confusion, the fallout from Trump’s travel ban has been severe on airport workers, she says, many of whom share in the heartbreak and outrage that have led to mass protests, but are unable to express it. “It definitely takes a toll on us.”

The ban, which was immediately challenged in courts nationwide, was halted last week following a ruling by a federal District Court judge in Seattle. On Tuesday, at a hearing before a three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Department of Justice lawyers fought to reinstate it. In oral arguments that were live-streamed for the public, DOJ attorney August Flentje argued that the president has vast powers in assessing terrorist threats; when asked by one judge if such determinations are “unreviewable,” Fientje answered yes. The judges seemed unconvinced by the Trump administration’s argument but whatever the ruling, many speculate the matter will reach the U.S. Supreme Court. In the meantime, even as families cleared to enter the U.S. are reunited with relatives and loved ones, much fear remains about what comes next.

Connie was working at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport on Sunday, January 29, when thousands of protesters arrived to rally against the ban. Eleven people had been held at the airport over the weekend, including a young child and an elderly woman, who had since been released. People came in droves, chanting, waving signs, and staying until it got dark. Inside the airline lounge, employees quietly discussed the protests. Many were supportive, Connie said, but were cautious about saying so. “It’s a really weird environment when you’re in uniform, because you have to be very careful about the way you word things, especially when you’re out in public.”

Protestors write letters to Donald Trump in opposition to his travel ban during an interfaith rally for Muslims and refugees at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer on Feb. 4, 2017, in Atlanta, Ga.

Photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

As a progressive, Connie is not new to politics or organizing. She went to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., and has spent the past several weeks making phone calls to her local representatives in Georgia. But Trump’s executive orders shook others she knows out of their complacency. “You can definitely see people waking up — people that weren’t talking about Trump pre-election, who are taking what he says seriously. And they’re getting nervous.” Among her co-workers, many of whom carry foreign passports, people worry about their own families as well as their passengers, wondering what other countries Trump might try to target. “We worry about the places that we go and how they’re going to treat us being Americans.”

Long before the election, Connie had been deeply dismayed by videos and reports of people being escorted off airplanes just because they were speaking Arabic. As a flight attendant, she says, “that’s where you’re kind of at a crossroads between your own personal human decency and respecting that you’re not representing yourself when you’re in uniform, you’re representing a multibillion dollar corporation.”

In the days after Trump won the presidency, she says, she confronted a colleague who whispered concern about a pair of Arabic-speaking men during a flight to Chicago. The flight had been delayed for hours due to mechanical issues, Connie says; one of the men had approached her, saying they were going to a funeral and were worried they might miss it. The plane eventually took off; as they approached the city, one of the men asked if they could move from their seats in the far back rows to empty seats closer to the front, so that they could exit quickly. “I was like, ‘Absolutely,’” she said. Moments later, her fellow flight attendant quietly asked about the men, telling her that passengers were expressing suspicion. Connie was angered by the insinuation. “If I felt like I was in a position where I was going to put my passengers, my job, my life in danger, then I would say something,” she said. “And this is not what’s going on here.”

With people constantly fed so much misinformation by Trump, it is inevitable that some will feel paranoid, she says. Especially in the South, in the states where people voted for Trump, “I think that now it’s so important for people to stand up and say, ‘No, that’s wrong.’”

Protestors crowd the sidewalks at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport to denounce Donald Trump’s executive order restricting refugees and travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, Jan. 29, 2017.

Photo: Tami Chappell/AFP/Getty Images

One week after the protest in Atlanta, across the state border to the north, Fuad Sharef Suleman and his family were scheduled to arrive at Nashville International Airport, after an 18-hour journey from Iraq. It was Super Bowl Sunday and the game was well underway, yet some 200 people had come to the airport that night to greet them. Suleman had been traveling to Tennessee with his wife and three children when Trump’s ban was announced; they found themselves stopped by authorities in Cairo and sent back home. Suleman was devastated. He had worked as a translator in Iraq following the U.S. invasion, which turned him and his family into a target. They waited two years for a special immigrant visa to come to the United States. When the visas came through, Suleman and his wife sold their home, quit their jobs, and took their kids out of school, ready to settle in Nashville.

In the days after they were barred entry, attorneys, elected officials, and activists with the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition called on U.S. officials to allow the family into the country. Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish population in the United States; many city residents wrote letters and called politicians to voice their opposition to the ban. At an evening rally and vigil on February 1 — part of a statewide day of action that saw events from Memphis to Chattanooga — a speaker announced to cheers that the pressure had worked: The Suleman family would be arriving in Nashville within days.

Among those who came to the airport Sunday night was Suyapa Faulk. She stood at the very front of the crowd, holding a sign that said “Welcome” in Kurdish. Faulk is originally from Honduras, but she moved to Nashville in 1993, speaking English with a slight Southern twang. The year she arrived, the city received an influx of Iraqi Kurds targeted by Saddam Hussein, who had waged chemical warfare against the country’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Working at the Head Start program in Davidson County, Faulk got to know a lot of the small children who arrived with their families. She came to love them all, she says, but “I can’t deny it, my very favorite one was a child named Beimal.”

Born in a refugee camp in Turkey, where her parents lived for years, Beimal grew up in Nashville. As the years passed, Faulk occasionally ran into her around the city: at the middle school where she tutored for a time; at Edwin Warner park, a go-to gathering spot for Nashville’s Kurdish community. Last year, Faulk was hospitalized at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center when she spotted one of her former Head Start students, now an adult, who told her that Biemal was there too, just a few floors away, now working as a nurse in the intensive care unit.

“It was Biemal that taught me how to write Latin Kurdish,” Faulk said, showing me her sign. To Faulk, Trump’s travel ban felt personal, not just because of her own immigrant background, but because of the kids who defined her arrival to the U.S. almost 25 years ago. She realized how much it meant to her that she had helped welcome refugee children to her adopted home. “I am so proud to be able to welcome this Kurdish family,” she said about the Sulemans. “I just wish I could take them into my home and let them live there.”

At Nashville airport, where Fuad Sharef & his family just arrived after being sent back to Iraq last week. Huge crowd came to welcome them. pic.twitter.com/lLzV8Kxz9b

— Liliana Segura (@LilianaSegura) February 6, 2017

Just before 8 p.m., the crowd broke out in cheers as Suleman and his family came into view. They began to wave; his wife, Arazoo Ibrahim, held a bouquet of flowers, their daughters held large pink teddy bears, and their 19-year-old son carried a football. As the family received hugs and handshakes, people began chanting, “Welcome home! Welcome home!”

Looking happy and tired, Suleman spoke briefly in the ticketing area. “Today is a very important day in my and my family’s life,” he said. “It marks the first day of my new life in Nashville, Tennessee, in the United States of America.” He thanked everyone who had supported him and his family over the previous week — “especially my fellow Nashvillians,” like Mayor Megan Berry and Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper, who stood by as he spoke. Nawzad Hawrami, of the Salahadeen Center, a mosque in South Nashville, welcomed the family to “small Kurdistan.”

With the family exhausted, TIRRC co-director Stephanie Teatro said good night to the crowd, thanking them for their “Southern hospitality.” As people left the airport, Nashville Metro Council Members Brett Withers and Mina Johnson lingered. Withers, one of two LGBTQ elected officials in the city, recalled the struggles of the gay community decades ago. “We had a saying then, ‘Silence Equals Death,’” he said. “And that’s where we are today.” Johnson, the first Japanese-American member of Nashville’s Metro Council, invoked the upcoming anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 executive order that led to the internment of Japanese people on U.S. soil. “We have to make sure that never happens again,” she said. “I’m so happy that Nashville is leading as a welcoming city. I just want to be sure that’s what we are.”

Top photo: Kareema Sabdah, a Palestinian immigrant and American citizen, hugs her daughter, Jenna, during an interfaith rally for Muslims and refugees at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer on Feb. 4, 2017, in Atlanta, Ga.

The post “You Can Definitely See People Waking Up” — Scenes of Red State Resistance appeared first on The Intercept.

As the world’s attention was occupied with the chaotic implementation of the travel ban and its dramatic domestic and international impacts, the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security have quietly moved forward with elements of the earlier executive orders, according to internal communications obtained by The Intercept.

Trump’s orders on border security and public safety in the interior of the U.S. resurrect some of the most controversial immigration enforcement programs of recent years, seek to deputize state and local law enforcement as immigration officials across the country, and threaten major cuts to federal funding for cities that fail to fall in line with the administration’s vision.

In order to address the massive strain those efforts would place on the nation’s already overburdened immigration system, Trump has called for the construction of new immigrant detention facilities along the U.S. border with Mexico — including through private contracts — as quickly as possible. Trump has also directed DHS to “allocate all legally available resources to immediately assign asylum officers to immigration detention facilities” for the purpose of conducting so-called credible fear hearings for asylum seekers. According to internal DHS communications obtained by The Intercept, this latter step is already underway.

In an email sent to personnel on Monday, Kathy Valerin, chief of staff at the Arlington Asylum Office for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, put out a call for asylum officer volunteers to conduct screening interviews at two for-profit immigrant detention facilities in Arizona as part of an ongoing effort to support the president’s orders beginning this week.

“In response to the recent Executive Orders, asylum offices have been instructed to immediately begin sending employees to conduct in-person CF and RF interviews [at] several detention facilities,” Valerin wrote, referring to “credible fear” and “reasonable fear” interviews, which are legally required in asylum cases, depending on the status of the individual. Specifically, Valerin added, USCIS was looking for volunteers to take up posts at private immigrant detention centers in Eloy and Florence, Arizona, “for two-week minimum increments through mid-March.”

USCIS confirmed to The Intercept that the call for volunteers was a response to Trump’s border security order.

“Prior to the EO, USCIS deployed staff on a continuous basis to a number of detention facilities across the country to conduct its credible and reasonable fear work,” Joanne F. Talbot, a USCIS spokesperson, wrote in an email. “We are currently assessing and planning for additional deployments to further advance the directive contained in the Executive Order. USCIS officers will continue to make all credible and reasonable fear screening determinations in a manner that is consistent and in full compliance with the applicable statute and regulations.”

A senior U.S. immigration official, speaking to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, said the volunteer posting would likely involve five or so trained asylum officers, conducting five interviews each per day, at the Arizona detention centers  — a total of roughly 125 interviews each week. When asked what the purpose of the call-out for volunteers might signify, the official responded, “I can’t think of any other reason than preps for processing a lot of expedited removal cases.”

Immigrant detainees walk through the ICE detention facility in Florence, Ariz., on Feb. 28, 2013.

Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Immigration attorneys who spoke to The Intercept largely agreed with that assessment, though they were careful to stress that the call for volunteers alone does not necessarily point to a particular outcome.

Expedited removal is the process for deporting people who have come to the country without the proper paperwork. If individuals in expedited removal ask for asylum or say they fear being returned to their country of origin, they have the right, under U.S. law, to describe their situation before a U.S. asylum officer. If the officer finds that an individual’s claim passes a low threshold of credibility, then the case may be heard before an immigration judge. If not, Immigration and Customs Enforcement takes control of the case and deportation proceedings can move forward.

In its domestic immigration enforcement order, the Trump administration said the executive branch will “end the abuse of parole and asylum provisions currently used to prevent the lawful removal of removable aliens,” raising concerns among some immigration attorneys that asylum seekers could be prioritized for deportation. If that’s the case, credible and reasonable fear hearings would need to be held, and detention centers along the border could be one place to start, though it would still be up to individual asylum officers to determine whether detainees pass or fail their screenings.

The administration’s focus on the early stages of the expedited removal process has some attorneys worried that individuals who have already passed their screenings could end up languishing in the system, while deportations of those who have not are prioritized. “I think it’s just going to be long waits for people from this point on,” Greg Siskind, a Tennessee-based immigration attorney, told The intercept.

The Arizona detention facilities where USCIS is currently directing volunteers — Florence and Eloy — are well-known among local immigration attorneys and activists. Both are owned by one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison corporations, CoreCivic, formally known as Corrections Corporation of America. According to the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to immigrants in Arizona’s detention system, more than 3,000 “immigrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking women and men [are] detained daily in Florence or Eloy.”

Eloy has been called the “deadliest immigration detention center in the nation” ever since an investigation by the Arizona Republic newspaper found 15 detainees had died at the facility since 2003, including three since October.

Beyond the potential implications of an increased number of asylum officers at Eloy and Florence, which at this point remains to be seen, Lauren Dasse, executive director of the Florence Project, said her organization harbored profound fears that Trump’s domestic immigration directives could make longstanding problems in the state even worse.

“The Florence Project is the only organization providing free legal services to detained immigrant children, women, and men in Arizona,” Dasse wrote in an email. “Based on the executive orders, we are deeply concerned about possible increases to detention, prolonged detention of immigrants including asylum seekers, and threats to individuals’ due process rights. We advocate that every person is treated with dignity and respect and understands their options under immigration law.”

In another dramatic sign that officials in Arizona are beginning to move forward with Trump’s domestic enforcement orders, immigration agents in Phoenix arrested Guadalupe García de Rayos on Wednesday. For eight years, the 35-year-old, who has lived in the U.S. since she was a teenager, had regularly checked in with a local ICE office after being arrested in 2008 for using a fake social security card number in order to work. Under the Obama administration, that kind of offense was not prioritized for deportation — that’s no longer the case under President Trump.

“That is precisely what the alarming problem is with Trump’s internal enforcement order,” Cecillia Wang, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the New York Times.

Migrant rights groups participate in a vigil to protest President Donald Trump’s crackdown on “sanctuary cities” outside City Hall in Los Angeles on Jan. 25, 2017.

Photo: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

In interviews with The Intercept, immigration lawyers and advocates echoed those concerns, noting that while Trump’s domestic enforcement orders face congressional hurdles that his travel ban did not, the president’s plans lay the foundations for an aggressive mass deportation apparatus — one that could take the historically high levels of immigrant detention and deportation under Obama to new heights by drastically expanding the range of targeted individuals. Current and former law enforcement and immigration officials, meanwhile, added that the administration’s plans could easily intensify fear in immigrant communities, elevate the risk of racial profiling, and strain the relationship between state and local authorities and the federal government.

Parts of Trump’s domestic immigration enforcement plan, particularly those related to so-called sanctuary cities, have already faced pushback, with mayors of several major cities saying they will fight efforts to withhold federal funding. Last week, San Francisco became the first city to file a lawsuit challenging the order — others are expected to follow. And while Trump has enjoyed support from unions representing the nation’s immigration enforcement agencies, other corners of the law enforcement community are less than enthused about his vision.

Since 2013, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organization made up of dozens of senior law enforcement executives from the nation’s largest cities, has publicly rejected efforts to enlist state and local law enforcement as ad hoc immigration officers and has opposed measures that would punish cities financially if they fail to cooperate with such initiatives.

Darrel Stephens, executive director of the association, said his organization’s concerns with Trump’s directives were multifaceted. First, Stephens said, the administration fails to define what it considers a sanctuary city to be — beyond a city that fails to abide the White House directives. Second, and more broadly, he said, recruiting state and local law enforcement to act as immigration officials instills fear in immigrant communities, which makes solving crimes more difficult and puts more people — regardless of their immigration status — at risk.

“The funding is a big concern of ours,” Stephens told The Intercept. “Lack of clarity on what the definition is is a big concern of ours. Local police being involved in immigration enforcement creates some enormous challenges from a resource perspective. It’s complicated law. It is very difficult to understand and interpret. And as a practical matter, arresting illegal immigrants, the federal government has no capacity to process them. The detention centers are full. The courts have a two-year backlog.”

Art Acevedo, chief of police for the city of Houston, shared Stephens’s concerns, telling The Intercept that implicit in Trump’s messaging were two false notions. The first is that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime — experts have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not, and Acevedo said his decades of law enforcement experience supported those conclusions. And second is the suggestion that local and state law enforcement aren’t already focused on arresting individuals who violate criminal laws.

“We are charged with keeping people safe from predators and from thieves and from violent members of society,” Acevedo explained. “We’re not charged with going out and wasting and spending our very limited resources booking a day laborer or somebody that, but for their immigration status, have done nothing that would harm our society.”

Rather than engaging in “political theater” designed to please its base, Acevedo suggested the administration instead listen to the concerns of local and state law enforcement executives on the ground, who have long rejected seeing their officers used as de facto deportation forces.

“Sadly, if these type of ill-advised, poorly thought out public polices were to go through — where they try to take away my ability to control the workforce, to control the priorities of my workforce — there are going to be unintended consequences and those unintended consequences are going to result in additional crime,” Acevedo said.

“You cannot be the party of law and order and not listen to your police chiefs and your police executives,” he added. “You can’t. Doesn’t add up.”

“This is a nightmare scenario,” Heidi Altman, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center, told The Intercept. Altman pointed to three elements of the administration’s initial orders as key areas of concern. The first is the range of individuals to be targeted by Trump’s immigration enforcement agents, which grows increasingly broad as the order on public safety in the interior unfolds and, according to a recent analysis by the Los Angeles Times, could ensnare as many as 8 million people.

In the view of the administration, any “removable alien” who has broken a law or been suspected of breaking a law is fair game for deportation — regardless of whether that person was convicted or even charged with a crime. The order goes on to say that any person from that category who authorities believe “committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense” can and should be targeted as well. Whether that person is a young student suspected of a traffic violation or a grandmother who’s lived in the country for decades is immaterial; both are on par with a violent criminal in Trump’s America and can expect to face the same consequence: removal from the country.

Second, Altman explained, Trump’s order calls for the revitalization of two deeply controversial immigration enforcement initiatives: the widely reported program known as Secure Communities and a lesser known, though arguably more aggressive program known as 287(g).

Spearheaded by the Bush administration and expanded under Obama, the DHS-administered Secure Communities program partnered ICE with local jails to facilitate the sharing of biometric data between detention facilities and ICE officials. After years of criticism from immigration advocates, who argued that the program routinely went far beyond targeting violent offenders, the Obama administration ended Secure Communities in November 2014, replacing it with a similar initiative known as the Priority Enforcement Program.

The second program slated for expansion under the Trump administration, 287(g), permits partnerships between local jails and ICE agents as well, but also goes a step further, allowing local and state law enforcement officers on the street to be deputized as immigration officials. Investigations by the Department of Justice and the ACLU have repeatedly linked implementation of 287(g) to systemic patterns of racial profiling and constitutional rights violations in Latino communities.

The third element of the Trump domestic enforcement plan Altman pointed to is the administration’s targeting of sanctuary cities — described in the order as “jurisdictions across the United States [that] willfully violate Federal law in an attempt to shield aliens from removal from the United States.” Under the order, cities that refuse to comply with the administration’s enforcement directives will be cut off from federal grants “except as deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes by the Attorney General or the Secretary [of DHS].” According to an analysis by Reuters, implementation of this component of Trump’s order would threaten $2.27 billion in annual funds for the nation’s 10 largest cities, including hundreds of millions of dollars intended for Head Start preschool programs, public housing, and HIV prevention and relief.

Combining the broadened categories of people prioritized for enforcement, the enlistment of local and state authorities to execute that enforcement, and the “coercive threats against sanctuaries or restrictions” makes for a “very toxic” brew, Altman argued.

“When you put the three of them together, you just have the most fertile ground possible for racial profiling and terrorized immigrant communities who are going to be too frightened to cooperate with their local police,” she said.

Altman is not alone in her grim assessment. In a legal breakdown following the signing of the order, immigration attorney David Leopold argued that Trump’s directive is a loaded gun with millions of immigrants in its crosshairs. “Trump’s plan is a blueprint to implement his campaign promises of mass deportation, and it puts in place the Deportation Force to carry out his plan,” Leopold wrote on Medium. “It’s clear that the executive orders were crafted by the most extreme anti-immigrant zealots in Trump’s orbit.”

“I don’t want to say one order is more important than the other one,” Leopold told The Intercept, noting that the dramatic human impact of Trump’s travel ban is self-evident, not to mention the deep legal concerns raised by the order. But, he added, Trump’s order on internal immigration enforcement is “just as important” and has unfortunately slipped beneath the public’s radar.

“I shudder to think about what’s going to happen once that’s implemented, and we’re already seeing signs,” Leopold said. “He has made, or I want to say Steve Bannon has made, every immigrant in this country a priority.”

“That thing is vicious,” Leopold added. “It’s vicious.”

Correction: Feb. 9, 2017

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Donald Trump’s executive actions on border security and immigration as his first executive order.

The post Trump Administration Prepares to Execute “Vicious” Executive Order on Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.

An endless array of stunning statistics can be marshaled to demonstrate the extent of that collapse. But perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence is that even one of the U.S. media’s most stalwart Democratic loyalists, writing in an outlet that is as much of a reliable party organ as the DNC itself, has acknowledged the severity of the destruction. “The Obama years have created a Democratic Party that’s essentially a smoking pile of rubble,” wrote Vox’s Matthew Yglesias after the 2016 debacle, adding that “the story of the 21st-century Democratic Party looks to be overwhelmingly the story of failure.”

A failed, collapsed party cannot form an effective resistance. Trump did not become president and the Republicans do not dominate virtually all levels of government because there is some sort of massive surge in enthusiasm for right-wing extremism. Quite the contrary: This all happened because the Democrats are perceived — with good reason — to be out of touch, artificial, talking points-spouting automatons who serve Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the agenda of endless war, led by millionaires and funded by oligarchs to do the least amount possible for ordinary, powerless citizens while still keeping their votes.

What drove Bernie Sanders’s remarkably potent challenge to Hillary Clinton was the extreme animosity of huge numbers of Democrats — led by its youngest voters — to the values, practices, and corporatist loyalties of the party’s establishment. Unlike the 2008 Democratic primary war — which was far more vicious and nasty but devoid of any real ideological conflict — the 2016 primary was grounded in important and substantive disputes about what the Democratic Party should be, what principles should guide it, and, most important of all, whose interests it should serve.

That’s why those disputes have not disappeared with the inauguration of Trump, nor should they. It matters a great deal, perhaps more than anything else, who leads the resistance to Trump and what the nature of that opposition is. Everyone knows the popular cliché that insanity means doing the same thing over and over and expecting different outcomes; it illustrates why Democrats cannot continue as is and expect anything other than ongoing impotence and failure. The party’s steadfast refusal to change course even in symbolic ways — We hereby elevate by acclamation Chuck “Wall Street” Schumer and re-install Nancy “I’m a multimillionaire and we are capitalists” Pelosi — bodes very poorly for its future success.

In sum, demanding that one refrain from critiquing the Democratic Party in order to exclusively denounce Trump over and over is akin to demanding that one single-mindedly denounce cancer without worrying about who the treating doctor is or what type of research is being conducted to cure it. Trump happened because the Democrats failed. And he and similar (or worse) phenomena will continue to happen until they are fixed.

The obvious determination of Democratic establishment leaders to follow the same failed and dreary course explains why the race for DNC chair has become so heated. In reality, that position is little more than a functionary role — mostly focused on fundraising and building the party apparatus at the state level — but whoever occupies it does serve as a leading public face of the party.

For the last five years, the face of the DNC was the living, breathing embodiment of everything awful about the party: the sleazy, corrupt corporatist, and centrist hawk Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who — as a result of WikiLeaks’ publication of DNC emails — had to resign in disgrace after she got caught engaging in sustained cheating in order to ensure that Hillary Clinton would be the party’s nominee.

But her disgrace was short-lived: Upon resigning, she was quickly rewarded for her corruption by being named to a high position with the Clinton campaign, as well as having the D.C. establishment Democrats, led by Joe Biden and Clinton herself, support her in vanquishing a Sanders-supported primary challenger for her seat in Congress. As a result of the support from the party establishment (as well as massive funding from corporate and banking interests), she defeated that challenger, Tim Canova, and the nation rejoiced as she returned for her seventh term in Congress.

Wasserman Schultz was replaced as DNC chair on an interim basis by longtime party operative Donna Brazile, who was quickly engulfed by her own scandal when she got caught secretly passing CNN debate questions to the Clinton campaign, then repeatedly lying about it by denying it and insinuating the emails were forged by the Russians. For that misconduct, CNN fired her, as anchor Jake Tapper denounced her cheating as “horrifying” and CNN said it made the network “completely uncomfortable.”

But Brazile continues to this day to run the DNC. Think about that: Her behavior was so unethical, dishonest, and corrupt that Jeff Zucker-led CNN denounced it and publicly disassociated itself from her. But the DNC seems perfectly comfortable having her continue to lead the party until the next chair is chosen.

Perhaps worse than the serial cheating itself was that it was all in service of coronating a candidate who — as many of us tried to warn at the time — all empirical data showed was the most vulnerable to lose to Donald Trump. So the very same people who bear the blame for Trump’s presidency — by cheating to elevate the candidate most likely to lose to him — continue to dominate the Democratic Party. To describe the situation is to demonstrate the urgency of debating and fixing it, rather than ignoring it in the name of talking only about Trump.

Early on in the race for DNC chair, Keith Ellison — the first American Muslim ever elected to the U.S. Congress and an early Sanders supporter who resides on the left wing of the party — emerged as a clear favorite. He racked up endorsements not only from progressives like Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Jesse Jackson but also party stalwarts such as Walter Mondale, John Lewis, and even Schumer himself, who seems to recognize that throwing a few symbolic crumbs to the Sanders wing of the party is strategically wise in light of the enduring bitterness many of them harbor toward the DNC’s behavior and the party’s centrist, neoliberal, pro-war policies.

Photo: AP

The knives were then out for Ellison, as operatives began dumping controversial college-age comments about Louis Farrakhan and Israel into the media. The New York Times began running articles with headlines such as “Jewish Groups and Unions Grow Uneasy With Keith Ellison” — a strange headline given that Ellison has been endorsed by multiple unions, including the AFL-CIO, the United Steelworkers, UNITE HERE, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, among others. Even unpaid parking tickets from the 1990s made an appearance thanks to Democratic slime artists.

The assault on Ellison’s candidacy was formalized when the Obama White House recruited and promised to back one of its loyalists, Labor Secretary Tom Perez. As he did with his endorsement of Wasserman Schultz, Biden made the establishment’s support for Perez official by publicly endorsing him last week.

Perez is a pleasant liberal and loyal party stalwart: Before the first primary vote was cast, he endorsed Clinton over Sanders and became one of her most outspoken surrogates. Despite claiming to be devoted to American workers, he was a loyal supporter of TPP even after Clinton was forced into insincere opposition.

It’s not hard to see why the Obama and Clinton circles want him to run the party instead of Ellison. He’s acceptable to big donors. He has proven himself loyal to the party establishment’s agenda. He is a reliable party operative. And, most importantly of all, he will change nothing of substance: ensuring that the same policies, rhetoric, and factions that have prevailed continue to do so, all while protecting the power base of the same people who have run the party into the ground.

Two recent incidents vividly highlight why Tom Perez so perfectly embodies the Democratic Party status quo. The first occurred two weeks ago, when my colleague Zaid Jilani attended an event where Perez was speaking and politely but repeatedly asked him about Israeli human rights abuses — which had been in the news that week because of new demolitions by the IDF of Palestinian homes, and because Perez had been asked about his views on boycotting Israel as a way of stopping its decadeslong occupation.

With the domination of the Democratic Party by Saban and others looming, just watch how this profile in courage who wants to lead the Democratic Party responded to being asked about his opinions on this matter:

Tom Perez condemned BDS at the DNC Chair Debate so I asked him what he thought about Israeli home demolitions.. pic.twitter.com/8QI8FRVhHl

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) January 21, 2017

An even more illustrative episode occurred late Wednesday. Perez was in Kansas campaigning for votes from county leaders and was asked about the need for the party to retain the support of the Sanders contingent. Perez unexpectedly blurted out a truth that party functionaries to this day steadfastly bury and deny even in the face of the mountain of evidence proving it. This is what Perez said:

We heard loudly and clearly yesterday from Bernie supporters that the process was rigged and it was. And you’ve got to be honest about it. That’s why we need a chair who is transparent.

That’s quite an admission from the party establishment’s own candidate: “The process was rigged.” And he commendably acknowledged how important it is to admit this — “to be honest about it” — because “we need a chair who is transparent.”

But Perez’s commitment to “transparency” and “being honest” had a very short life-span. After his admission predictably caused controversy — with furious Clinton supporters protesting the truth — Perez demonstrated the same leadership qualities that were so evident when Zaid Jilani asked him about Israeli human rights abuses.

He quickly slinked onto Twitter with a series of tweets to retract what he said, claim that he “misspoke” (does anyone know what that word means?), apologize for it, and proclaim Hillary Clinton the fair and rightful winner:

I have been asked by friends about a quote and want to be clear about what I said and that I misspoke.

— Tom Perez (@TomPerez) February 9, 2017

As I've said repeatedly, we can't have a primary process where it is even perceived that a thumb was on the scale.

— Tom Perez (@TomPerez) February 9, 2017

Hillary became our nominee fair and square, and she won more votes in the primary—and general—than her opponents.

— Tom Perez (@TomPerez) February 9, 2017

To ensure there was no mistaking his loyalty oath, he made that last tweet his pinned tweet, ensuring it would sit at the top of his Twitter page. (He also included a couple of scripted, empty banalities about the importance of transparency, objectivity, and “fighting like hell.”)

So in Tom Perez’s conduct, one sees the mentality and posture that has shaped the Democratic Party: a defense of jobs-killing free trade agreements that big corporate funders love; an inability to speak plainly, without desperately clinging to focus-group, talking-points scripts; a petrified fear of addressing controversial issues even (especially) when they involve severe human rights violations by allies; a religious-like commitment never to offend rich donors; and a limitless willingness to publicly abase oneself in pursuit of power by submitting to an apology ritual for having told the truth.

That is the template that has driven the Democratic Party into a ditch so deep and disastrous that even Vox acknowledges it without euphemisms. That is the template that has alienated voters across the country at all levels of elected office and that enabled the Donald Trump presidency. And it is the template that Democratic Party establishment leaders are more determined than ever to protect and further entrench by ensuring that yet another detached, lifeless functionary who embodies it becomes the next face of the party.

One can spend all of one’s time and energy denouncing Donald Trump. But until the systemic causes that gave rise to him are addressed and resolved, those denunciations will do little other than generate social media benefits and flattering applause from those already devoted to opposing him. Focusing on and attempting to counter the fundamental flaws of the Democratic Party is not a distraction from #TheResistance; it is a central priority, a prerequisite for any kind of success.

The post Tom Perez Apologizes for Telling the Truth, Showing Why Democrats’ Flaws Urgently Need Attention appeared first on The Intercept.

The memo, distributed inside the administration on Friday afternoon and obtained by The Intercept, directs the Securities and Exchange Commission to temporarily waive the requirements of the Conflict Mineral Rule, a provision of the Dodd Frank Act, for two years — which the rule explicitly allows the president to do for national security purposes. The memorandum also directs the State Department and Treasury Department to find an alternative plan to “address such problems in the DRC and adjoining countries.”

The idea behind the rule, which had bipartisan support, was to drain militias of revenue by forcing firms to conduct reviews of their supply chain to determine if contractors used minerals sourced from the militias.

The impending decision comes as Trump held a meeting Wednesday with Brian Krzanich, the chief executive of Intel, one of the leading firms impacted by conflict mineral regulations. At the White House today, Krzanich appeared with the president to announce a new manufacturing plant in Arizona.

Thank you Brian Krzanich, CEO of @Intel. A great investment ($7 BILLION) in American INNOVATION and JOBS! #AmericaFirst???????? pic.twitter.com/76lAiSSQ1l

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017

Human rights advocates — who had celebrated the conflicts rule as a major step forward — were appalled. “Any executive action suspending the U.S. conflict minerals rule would be a gift to predatory armed groups seeking to profit from Congo’s minerals as well as a gift to companies wanting to do business with the criminal and the corrupt,” said Carly Oboth, the policy adviser at Global Witness, in a statement responding to a Reuters article that first reported the move.

“It is an abuse of power that the Trump administration is claiming that the law should be suspended through a national security exemption intended for emergency purposes. Suspending this provision could actually undermine U.S. national security.”

Advanced computer chips, including technology used in cell phones and semiconductors, contain minerals often sourced from war-torn countries in central Africa. Firms such as Intel, Apple, HP, and IBM use advanced chips that contain tantalum, gold, tin, and tungsten — elements that can be mined at low prices in the the DRC, where mines are often controlled by militias fueling a decadeslong civil war.

American tech companies, such as Intel, lobbied directly on the rule when it was proposed. But since passage, tech firms have largely used third party business groups to stymie the rule. Trade groups representing major U.S. tech firms and other manufacturers, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, attempted to block the rule through a federal lawsuit. In 2014, a federal court struck down a part of the rule that forced firms to reveal DRC conflict minerals on their corporate websites.

Intel is also one of the firms that has touted its effort to comply with the law, publishing a report that notes the company has conducted 40 on-site reviews of smelters in the eastern DRC.

Reuters also reported that acting SEC chief Michael Piwowar has taken steps to also weaken enforcement, asking staff to “reconsider how companies should comply.”

Read the draft memo here:

Top photo: Mining workers stand on a muddy cliff as they work at a gold mine in north eastern Congo in 2009.

The post Leaked Trump Presidential Memo Would Free U.S. Companies to Buy Conflict Minerals From Central African Warlords appeared first on The Intercept.

Less than a month into the new administration and not even a presidential bath robe can protect President Trump’s orange from becoming the new anti-black. This week on Intercepted we sit down with intrepid investigative reporter Allan Nairn, who breaks down Trump’s relationship with the CIA, the president’s murderous affection for Vladimir Putin, and the killer assembly of establishment neocons and right-wing conspiracists running the U.S. war machine. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Princeton professor and author of “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation,” dismantles Obama’s problematic legacy, offers strategic advice for resisting Trump, and shares her scorecard on Nazi punching. The Intercept’s own distinguished alt-historian, Jon Schwarz, offers a (morbid) lesson on the origins of presidential executive orders. And singer-songwriter Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches performs a powerful song about racism and the police state.

Subscribe to the Intercepted podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, and other platforms.

The Doors [music]: This is the end, beautiful friend.

Anthony Atamanuik: Washington. Shit. I’m still only in Washington. Every time I think I’m going to wake back up on the set of The Apprentice.

When I was at Mar-a-Lago after the inauguration, it was worse. I’d wake up in the morning and there’d be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to the divorce.

When I was in D.C., I wanted to be at Mar-a-Lago. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back to Trump Tower and calling into Fox and Friends. Maybe Sean Hannity.

I’ve been here three weeks now, waiting for a mission. Getting softer, smaller. Every minute I stay in the Oval Office, I get weaker, and every time some moron on Twitter calls me Fuckface von Clownstick, he gets stronger.

I call my own shots, mostly on the accumulation of data. Each time I watch fake news CNN, the walls move in a little tighter.

Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission. And for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up like room service with a taco bowl. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I’d never want another. Believe me.

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

[Music interlude]

JS: I’m Jeremy Scahill, coming to you from the offices of The Intercept in New York City, and this is episode three of Intercepted. Well, we are not even a month into Donald Trump’s reign, and we’re getting reports that the White House has become a strange dystopic land of empty corridors, scores of unfilled positions in the West Wing and elsewhere, visitors wandering around after their meetings not able to find the exist. When Trump is not lounging around in his bathrobe watching television.

Sean Spicer: I don’t think the president owns a bathrobe. Definitely doesn’t wear one.

JS: Or on Twitter, denouncing the so-called federal judge who ruled against his not-Muslim-ban Muslim ban.

Donald J. Trump: It’s common sense. You know, some things are law, and I’m all in favor of that, and some things are common sense. This is common sense.

JS: Trump has continued on a strangely schizophrenic policy agenda. Now, on some policies, such as the building or expansion of Israel settlements, he now seems to be veering toward Obama’s policies, which he’ll probably try to say, “Oh, well, this was my policy all along.” His administration claims to be backing off of the pledge to relaunch or reconstitute CIA black sites, where a lot of torture happened under the Bush/Cheney regime. Trump also, from his Twitter feed and the attacks on the federal judge, seems to actually not understand how the federal government works, the system of checks and balances, the fact that we have three branches of government.

Schoolhouse Rock: Talking ‘bout the government and how it’s arranged.

Divided in three like a circus.

JS: Trump also has been very active on the military front in some ways. At a dinner last week with some of his top advisors, including former head of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, who now is on the National Security Council, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a famed warrior with decades of military experience.

DJT: Wrong!

JS: Trump authorized his first known covert action, and that was this disastrous raid in Yemen. And of course, we know that one Navy SEAL was killed. Several other U.S. service members were wounded, and more than a dozen women and children were killed.

SS: This was a very, very well thought out and executed effort.

JS: And one of the more serious things that happened in recent days is that Trump sent his national security advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn, out to speak to the White House Press Corps. And Flynn basically, in a kind of scene reminiscent of Al Haig saying, “I’m in charge,” Flynn basically took us to the brink of a war with Iran.

Gen. Michael Flynn: As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice. Thank you.

JS: Just before the Super Bowl last Sunday, the world witnessed the latest chapter of “Donald Trump says something bluntly accurate about the United States’ role in the world?” Just as he did with his critique with the U.S. invasion of Iraq during the election campaign, Trump, in this big pumped up special that Fox News was doing, spoke to Bill O’Reilly.

Bill O’Reilly: Putin’s a killer.

DJT: A lot of killers. We got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent? Do you think our country’s so innocent?

BO: I don’t know of any government leaders that are killers in the American –

DJT: Well, take a look at what we’ve done to — we’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve been against the war in Iraq from the beginning.

BO: Yeah. Mistakes are different than —

DJT: Made a lot of mistakes. Okay, but a lot of people were killed, so a lot of killers around, believe me.

JS: Now, I will give Trump credit. Trump is right about U.S. hypocrisy and the U.S. record of mass killing and killing innocent people. But this is similar to Trump’s opposition to the Iraq War. Trump, yes, he condemned it. He — although his record is a little bit cloudy on when he condemned it and how much he condemned it, but he did condemn it during the campaign. But now he’s saying, “Oh, well, we should go back into Iraq and take its oil by force.”

DJT: Well, we should have kept the oil when we got out, and you know, it’s very interesting. Had we taken the oil, you wouldn’t have ISIS.

JS: And his comments to Bill O’Reilly about the U.S. this time around, they were right, historically accurate. But they were offered in defense of his relationship with Vladimir Putin, who is indisputably a thug and a murderer. While the Trump carnival plays out on Twitter, and on Fox News, and at the White House press briefings, and on Saturday Night Live.

Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer: You said ban! You said ban! Now I’m saying it back to you.

Bobby Moynihan as Glenn Thrush: The resident tweeted, and I quote: “If the ban were announced with a one-week notice…”

MM: Yeah, exactly. You just said that. He’s quoting you. It’s your words. He’s using your words. When you use the words and he uses them back, it’s circular using of the word, and that’s from you. [Audience laughing]

JS: The more important story is actually happening behind the scenes. And it’s not on Trump’s Facebook page, and it’s not on his Twitter feed, and it’s not coming out of some thought that popped into his head while he’s lying around in his bathrobe. It’s who Donald Trump has tapped to run the vast national security apparatus, the U.S. war machine. To discuss this, I’m joined by journalist Allan Nairn. Allan is one of the best investigative journalists in modern U.S. history. When I first got into journalism, he was one of my role models. Since the 1980s, Allan has investigated CIA-backed death squads in Guatemala, in El Salvador. He exposed the CIA’s death squad in Haiti in 1994. Allan also survived, along with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, a massacre in East Timor in 1991 at the hands of U.S.-backed Indonesian forces.

Amy Goodman (1991): The Indonesian Army converged in two places.

Allan Nairn (1991): Hundreds and hundreds of troops.

JS: Some 270 East Timoris were gunned down, and Allan had his skull split open by Indonesian troops wielding U.S.-supplied M16 rifles. Allan has regularly exposed the CIA’s role in the killing of civilians and in crushing popular movements. Allan, let’s begin with looking at who Trump has tapped. What’s your analysis of who these people are and how it’s going to impact U.S. policy?

Allan Nairn: Well, the idea that Trump is more peaceful, a maverick, is just nonsense. His team consists of old establishment killers and neo-cons, and some conspiracy nuts. Gen. Mattis, his secretary of defense, was invited to speak at both the Democratic and Republican conventions. He was the preferred candidate for president of Bill Kristol’s #NeverTrump movement. He decided not to take the plunge. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, is a virtual protégé of Jim Baker, the co-chair of the Bush establishment. Vice President Mike Pence was the point man in the House for Dick Cheney, who endorsed Trump. Pence was Cheney’s appointment in the House on both Iraq and the Patriot Act.

And then you have Gen. Flynn and Pompeo, who are rabid rightwing partisans, conspiracy nuts. Flynn is a bitter harsh critic of Obama. But his criticism is that Obama didn’t do enough assassinations. Obama dropped more than 100,000 bombs and missiles. That wasn’t enough for Flynn. And Pompeo comes from a similar angle. He wants unbridled surveillance. He wants a domestic, massive database on Americans. He wants to expand Guantanamo. He wants more torture. If necessary, he wants to rewrite the Army Field Manual, which would allow more torture, not just by the CIA, which uses it as a guideline, but also within the Army and the Armed Forces as a whole.

When Trump talks about working together with Russia to fight terrorism, that means more operations, more violence. And probably more significantly, the Trump people want to rip off the constraints. They want to adopt, essentially, the Russian Grozny rules, which essentially says kill them all and kill their families too. Gen. Flynn in particular is a great admirer of that. And Gen. Mattis became famous in the military for his open advocacy of killing. He has a whole string of very colorful quotes where he talks with great gusto about how wonderful it is to kill.

JS: Yeah. It’s “fun to shoot some people.”

AN: Yeah. And in particular, as an illustration of his approach, he presided over the Mukaradeeb wedding party massacre in Iraq, up near the border with Syria, in 2004, in which more than 40 people were civilians at a wedding party, were massacred by his U.S. forces. And when he was asked about it, he was unapologetic. He was asked, “How long did you deliberate before ordering the attack?” He said, “30 seconds.” So the idea that this is a shift in a less — and you could go on down the list — some kind of less bloody direction is just not accurate.

JS: Is there really, in your view, a rift between Trump and the CIA, the likes of which is just nonstop being pushed by the Democrats and on television?

AN: No. Not on significant matters. There certainly is on the emotional level. There are tremendous hurt feelings. The CIA people are furious. Nobody likes to be called — compared to the Nazis. But on basic matters of policy, whether you’re allowed to kill civilians; whether aggressive, not legally sanctioned actions in foreign countries are permitted; they’re in complete agreement. It’s ironic that Trump is making this move of entente with Russia at the moment, when Russia has temporarily surpassed the U.S. because of their operations in Syria, as the number one mass killer of civilians in the world. I mean, for decades, the U.S. has clearly and unambiguously held that title because of all the paramilitary and regular Army and intelligence forces around the world that the U.S. supports who kill civilians.

But now, because of what Russia has one on the side of Assad in Syria and with their own direct bombing operations, which indiscriminately crush civilians, they have clearly surpassed the U.S. as the number one mass killer at this moment. But you have to keep your eye on the hard facts. And the hard facts are that Trump is clearly going to continue the U.S. policy of being willing to kill civilians. And if anything, his alliance with Russia will only make that worse.

JS: Given that you’ve spent basically your entire adult life pursuing the CIA and its clients, pursuing generals and war criminals and paramilitaries, what do you say to people who are — who seem to be now promoting the idea that the CIA, that they’re the good guys?

AN: You shouldn’t be defending people who kill civilians. The liberal and Democratic shift away from probing criticism of the U.S. military and the CIA started years ago. It started in the ‘80s, really. And for just tactical political reasons, they decided to start celebrating the military and the intelligence agencies. And now, it’s reached this really absurd point where, for one thing, they’re making a differentiation between Trump and the intelligence agencies, when on matter of substance, there is none. And for another, they’re holding these agencies, which systematically commit crimes against defenseless civilians, up as paragons. And it’s just nuts. And I think one of many reasons why Trump was able to break through politically, in addition to his being a master propagandist and a master liar — I mean, he ranks with the master propagandists of history, with Goebbels, with Bernays, with Roger Ailes. I mean, he’s up in the pantheon. But one reason was that he would occasionally blurt out truths that hit home with people, like when in the Republican debate, he stood up and started denouncing the invasion of Iraq and saying it was based on lies.

We now have this situation where some people think that Trump is somehow going to shake up the system for the better. And all indications that he’s going to shake it up for the worse, because this is really the most radical elements of the oligarchy, kind of the criminal fringe of the U.S. oligarchy, the crudest criminal fringe, embodied in Trump himself and his old associates taking over the government. And they’re basically unconstrained. They will be especially unconstrained two years from now if they’re able to win a veto-proof Senate majority, which they may well, because it just so happens there are many more Democratic seats exposed than their are Republican seats in that Senate election.

And, if he succeeds in getting in, first, his new Supreme Court nominee to replace Scalia, which will restore the old balance, which will put Kennedy in the driver’s seat in the Supreme Court; but then, if he gets a second Supreme Court nomination — and I predict that in short order, they’re going to start a massive campaign against Ruth Bader Ginsburg, attacking her as old, crazy, infirm, has to be moved off the bench. Remember years ago, there was the Rightist campaign to impeach Justice Douglas? I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar move made against Bader Ginsburg.

JS: When Trump chose Mike Pence — I’ve been looking at Pence for a number of years — some of the things that came to my mind were Pence’s incredible proximity to Dick Cheney.

AN: Right.

JS: His relationship with the neo-cons and with the real career lifer powerbrokers like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who really sought out, on one of their life’s missions, which was to create a dictatorship of the executive branch when it came to counterterrorism, policy, foreign policy, military policy, CIA. They wanted nothing to do with oversight from the Congress. When you heard that Mike Pence was selected as Trump’s running mate, what message do you think that was sending to the establishment in the national security apparatus, and within the broader Republican Party?

AN: Well, I mean, the message was, don’t worry, I’m one of you. Appearances to the contrary and insults to the contrary.

JS: Well, I think you know the story of how this happened, because I don’t think Trump went through a Rolodex and said, “Oh, let’s get my buddy Mike Pence here.” It seemed to me like there was a deal made where, this is your running mate. ‘Cause I don’t think Trump even knew much about Mike Pence at all before this.

AN: Well, you know, who knows how it came about? There’s always very complex bargaining involved in these things, and all these reports saying at the last minute, Trump had regrets and wanted to pick Chris Christie, who was kind of his buddy. But Trump dragged the ultra-right oligarchs kicking and screaming into power. They could never win an election on their own. Paul Ryan is never going to be elected president on his platform of destroying Social Security and Medicare and all programs for the poor. That’s a loser. So in order to implement their program, they need a degree of popular support. And Trump provided that. But he provided that in ways that weren’t entirely to their liking.

For example, they had to sacrifice the TPP. It was a painful but lucrative bargain for them, because yes, that hurts their interests to an important extent, but they get even more back in massive corporate and state and personal income tax cuts, and in a massive wiping away of environmental labor, consumer protection, antidiscrimination, financial regulations. It’s a huge net plus for the corporate class. Trump was constantly denouncing the rigging of the system. His basic message was the system’s rigged. Our system is a killer system, and it’s corrupt. All of which is true, except the rigging took place in the opposite direction, which he portrayed. But it’s uncomfortable for the establishment types to hear that, especially coming out of the mouth of their own candidate. And Pence was a bit of a reassurance to them, I think, that don’t worry, it’s going to be okay. You have your inside man. And you see, as he’s picking his Cabinet, there’s no one, absolutely no one in there who clashes with their program.

JS: What about Trump’s relationship with the heads of state of other nations? Specifically, I’m referring to the longstanding U.S. system of client states around the world. One of the first things they did was to throw their support, the Trump administration, behind Gen. Sisi in Egypt. What do you see happening with the Trump administration’s relationship with some of these key client states around the world?

AN: Part of Trump’s attack on the existing world order, the order that was created by the U.S. in the wake of World War II, Trump attacks that whole world order. But he attacks it because, in his view, it’s not harsh enough. It’s not repressive enough. Trump says that the U.S. is being ripped off by its clients, by its satellite states, by its allies. So he wants to impose even harsher exploitation. In Jerusalem, Trump is talking about moving the U.S. embassy there, a move that is not going to go unanswered by the Palestinians in the street. Trump is moving toward a system where force is used more directly. When it comes to repressive rulers to el-Sisi of Egypt and Duterte, who was democratically elected, but who got elected on a death squad platform, and he and his forces have so far murdered thousands of people, what we can expect to see is that forces like this, death squad forces, repressive militaries, repressive paramilitaries, which have been backed for many decades by the U.S. — the U.S. has already been backing these forces. The U.S. will continue backing these forces, but without constraint.

Now with Trump, I don’t think the reaction among the worldwide killer forces has been that immediate, partly because around the world, a lot of people are a little confused about Trump. But as it becomes clear, as people like Pompeo and Flynn and Mattis go into action, I think we’ll see a similar increase of killings by local death squad and military and paramilitary forces, just because they feel unconstrained, just because they feel the support from Washington, as opposed to what has been the traditional U.S. posture for a number of years, which is give them weapons and training with one hand, but admonish them with the other. The Obama administration was helping Saudi Arabia. There were actual U.S. personnel there helping them with targeting of their bombing runs, where they were hitting one Yemeni civilian target after another, and —

JS: And refueling the Saudi planes.

AN: Yeah, and refueling. And it was U.S. munitions and U.S. plans, and —

JS: Cluster bombs.

AN: In this mass slaughter operation. But as some of the worst atrocities got publicity, the Obama administration felt compelled to pull back some of the advisors, and to issue critical statements, even though the flow of military aid was never completely stopped. It was just temporarily cut back. Now that –

JS: Or the audacity of Samantha Power, who was Obama’s ambassador to the UN. I mean, the kind of gall to stand there and denounce the war crimes that are being committed with the full support of the United States, it’s — I mean, it’s not stunning, but it is — it’s just dripping blood of hypocrisy.

AN: Yeah. But hypocrisy has a certain virtue, and that is, at least it’s advancing or acknowledging — and to a certain extent, advancing some good values.

JS: Well, that’s kind of a metaphor for the entire Obama time in office.

AN: Yeah, it is. Well, the whole — the recent path of the U.S. establishment, because some constraints have been imposed on them by popular pressure, by human rights activism. So they feel obliged to say publicly, yes, killing civilians is a bad thing. But under the table, here are some guns. And we see you killed a thousand civilians last month. Okay, here’s some more guns. Maybe try to be a little more careful. It’s been that mixed stance. And that kind of mixed stance is something that local generals sometimes find infuriating. But even more significant, it’s something that they find they can exploit politically. So you have these officers standing up a demagogically denouncing the United States because the United States is criticizing them on human rights grounds, even though they’re pocketing one U.S. weapons shipment after another, and they’re all going to Fort Benning and Fort Bragg for their training, and they have CIA personnel sitting in their intelligence centers helping them with their operations.

But the Trump people clearly favor an approach which strips away the hypocrisy, and more — in a more straightforward fashion, says support our friends like el-Sisi, like Duterte. And what de facto that means is full speed ahead on the killing without constraint.

JS: All right. Allan, thank you very much for being with us.

AN: You’re welcome.

JS: Allan Nairn is an investigative journalist. His website is News and Comment. It can be found at allannairn.org.

[Music interlude]

DJT: I’m establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America. We don’t want ‘em here.

JS: Donald Trump has been signing executive orders like bad checks. And much to our disappointment, the definitive source for all things law and history that is Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, it didn’t provide us with any insight into the veracity of these little presidential grenades. So we asked Intercepted’s distinguished alt-historian Jon Schwarz to educate us on the roots of this mysterious, yet often-used, presidential prerogative.

Jon Schwarz: You’re a concerned citizen. So recently, you’ve been wondering, maybe for the first time ever, what are presidential executive orders? Given that we’ve learned they can change the lives of thousands of people in one second, you might not be happy to find out that the answer is, no one really knows.

The Congressional Research Service — it’s their job to tell Congress about the history of the United States — says about executive orders that the term has no exact meaning. That’s because executive orders are not defined in the Constitution, and also, there is no specific provision in the Constitution authorizing them. So therefore, the Congressional Research Service says, “ambiguity behind executive orders poses a great concern for Congress and the public.” Okay. So all we really have is 200 years of presidents issuing executive orders and seeing if the other two branches of government, which means Congress and courts, will let them get away with it. Every single president has come up with at least a few executive orders, with only one exception, which was William Henry Harrison, America’s ninth president, elected in 1940. But he probably also would have signed some if he hadn’t, after exactly one month in office, died.

Executive orders can be extremely good. The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order from Lincoln. Harry Truman used an executive order to abolish racial discrimination in the military. Executive orders can also be extremely bad. FDR used an executive order to create the legal authority for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, our West Coast became a potential combat zone.

Jon S: Truman used another executive order at the start of the Cold War to create loyalty tests for government employees, which was really the birth of McCarthyism.

Joseph McCarthy: The thing that the American people can do is to be vigilant day and night to make sure they don’t have Communists teaching the sons and daughters of America.

Jon S: If you look at modern executive orders, you’ll see that presidents claim their authority is based on two things. First is Article 2 of the Constitution, which gives them executive power, and requires that they take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and then a claim that they are in fact executing some specific law passed by Congress. In the case of Donald Trump’s executive order, shutting the door temporarily or maybe otherwise on refugees and immigrants from seven countries, it was the Immigration and Nationality Act.

DJT: It’s not a Muslim ban, but we are totally prepared. It’s working out very nicely. You see it at the airports. You see it all over. It’s working out very nicely, and we’re going to have a very, very strict ban, and we’re going to have extreme vetting.

Jon S: If you don’t like what Trump did, the good news is that the Supreme Court has famously said about executive orders that, “when the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb.” And it looks like that’s what Trump was doing here, because the law he cited bans discriminating among immigrants on the basis of a person’s place of birth or place of residence.

Also, whoever it was who wrote this executive order was super, super incompetent, because the executive order probably violated a 1962 executive order about how you produce executive orders. So it’s possible courts will strike down parts of it, or maybe all of it. And Congress might, might also try to take back some of the power they’ve given the executive branch. But really, the only way that will happen is if Democrats ever have a majority again while a Republican is president. Congressional Democrats have never been interested in taking back power from the president if the president’s a Democrat.

And just in general, don’t be discouraged. Scientists now believe that William Henry Harrison, the president with no executive orders, died because there was no sewage system at the time in Washington. This meant that a few blocks upstream of the White House water supply, there was, as the New York Times puts it, a field of human excrement. This gave Harrison typhoid fever. And then the same swamp probably also killed another president, Zachary Taylor, just nine years later in 1850. So never let anyone tell you that regular people don’t have any power.

JS: That was the Intercept’s Jon Schwarz. Coming up, we’re going to talk to Princeton University Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Stay with us.

[Break]

Kali Tribe (rap): You raped my grandma, you whipped my grandpa,

A century goes by and you became a street cop

My parents sharecropped, but you didn’t share

Because I don’t have blue eyes and long blond hair

The red, white, and blue reeks like onion

I praise John Henry, you love Paul Bunyan

So brothers and sisters, beware of who you trust

‘Cause they don’t want justice, they want just us.

DJT: All right, folks. You’re gonna hear this, you’re gonna hear it once. You’re gonna hear this, you’re gonna hear it once.

Crowd: All lives matter! [Crowd chanting]

DJT: All right, folks. You’re gonna hear it once. All lives matter. All lives matter. [Crowd cheering]

JS: Okay, we’re back, and you’re listening to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill. And that was the President, Donald Trump, being disrupted by black lives activists when he was running for president. And he did not like that. Orange is the new anti-black. You know, in figuring out what to do this week on the show, it was like going through a catalogue of fucking horrors. We could go down the line. His atrocious billionaire Christian supremacist Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. His Muslim ban. His ridiculous allegation that news organizations are somehow covering up terror attacks, even as journalists die in record numbers. It’s a veritable cornucopia of sad lies and pathetic memes that are not even worthy of Twitter.

In this horrid ocean of terror, I decided to sit down with the brilliant Princeton professor, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Now, she’s unapologetic socialist. She’s an activist, and she’s the author of an urgent book called “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation”. Now, I’ve known Keeanga for several years, and I remember how we both witnessed the air being sucked out of the anti-war and anti-corporate globalization room in the 2004 election when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry and served a second term. But we both regrouped, and we jumped right back into the struggle. Keeanga and I sat down and discussed the Trump moment, the Obama legacy, the politics of resistance, and the failures of the Democratic Party.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: In the last 40 years, when we look at the increasing conservative posture of the Democrats, at the heart of that is the way that they take for granted the votes of their base, whether that’s black people, whether that’s working class women, working class people in general, students. They take that for granted, and consistently try to appeal to more rightwing forces in the country, and do nothing to appeal to the people who are actually turning out and voting for them. And so, the 2004 election was certainly perhaps a low point. I mean, to lose to George W. Bush. But then when you think that you’ve hit the bottom, that you could actually lose an election to the dithering idiocy of Donald Trump, it really — it should be a soul-searching moment for what that party is. But it doesn’t actually appear to be.

JS: Well, and four years after that, you have Barack Obama, who ran on a pledge to operate the most transparent administration in history. This was the first black person elected as president of the United States, and to this day, a lot of people — when you get into arguments with them about policy, and how did we get here, and look at the drone program, and look at the war on black people in cities throughout this country — people say, “Oh, well, you know, well, but that wasn’t Obama.” And there’s still this, I think, idolizing of the Obama era, particularly within these liberal circles in the United States.

KYT: Well, I think that we get completely consumed in the symbolism of Barack Obama and ignore his record, and ignore the actual history of his candidacy.  And so, I wrote the book in large part as a way to understand the meaning of Barack Obama’s presidency, really beginning with the question of, how do we explain the emergence of this black social movement, the sort of longest, most enduring black social movement, really, since the 1960s and ‘70s, with a black president, and with the highest concentration of black political power in American history? So not just the black president, but the black attorney general. And part of it was understanding the way that Obama sort of raised the expectations of African-Americans in a very cultivated way.

I mean, people now say, well, we shouldn’t have expected too much, and that was unrealistic, and he never could have met those expectations, when during 2007 and 2008, it was David Axelrod and Obama who were stoking those expectations, who transformed his campaign. Because African-Americans originally were much more supportive of Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama was someone that people didn’t know and were not familiar with. And he transformed — he was smart enough to understand that if he transformed, if he could transform his campaign to make it seem insurgent, to make it seem as if it were a movement from below that was disrupting the status quo — that he could get people to come along with him. And he did this. I mean, I had never heard a mainstream Democratic Party candidate, you know, give speeches where he’s talking about the Abolitionist movement. He’s talking about sit-down strikes in the 1930s. He invoked the Stonewall Rebellion in the 1960s, and then of course, the Civil Rights Movement, and sort of described his campaign as the logical conclusion of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

So there was a great effort in raising the expectations of people. And so, I think that for millions of African-Americans who mobilized to vote for Obama in ways that were historically unprecedented, believed that they would do something in return, as any constituency does who is a key factor in the election of a president. And almost as soon as he got into office, the sort of backsliding, the qualifications, the hemming, the hawing. There was no sort of ten days that shook the world. There was no succession of executive orders and actually following through on anything. Instead, when Obama actually did have a mandate in a way that there’s nothing resembling that with Trump, he did absolutely nothing with it, and instead, sort of wasted that opportunity to just step on the throat of the Republican Party, and put them in a can and bury it in the backyard for a generation, he refused to do it. And we are now living with the consequences of that.

JS: What do you say to the not so uncommon line from Democratic pundits or policymakers or their surrogates on social media that, “People like you were part of the problem because you spent all this time bashing Hillary Clinton. You wouldn’t come out and say people should be voting for her because she’s the lesser of two evils?” What would you say to people who say, “Well, then why weren’t you fighting to get Hillary Clinton in instead of Donald Trump?”

KYT: Part of the problem with that take, and I’ve heard many different iterations of it, is that it doesn’t actually account for why, on a much broader level, people were so uninspired with Hillary Clinton. It’s as if — if a few people on the left had been sort of more excited about Hillary Clinton, then that would have somehow compensated for the tens of millions of people who weren’t. And so, it’s important to look at why that is. I think that what people forget is that Hillary Clinton, one, had a record, and that it did make an impact on a new generation of black activists, who didn’t know about the Clintons in the 1990s, to discover this history of the particular role that the Clintons played in the rise of mass incarceration and the rise of law and order under a Democratic regime. That was a revelation to many young people.

And then when the tape came out with Hillary Clinton calling young black people superpredators.

Hillary Clinton (1996): They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.

KTY: You know, there was a way in which the Democratic Party apparatus and the liberal establishment that hangs on to it just tried to dismiss that as another day and age, as if it were the 1930s and not the 1990s. And what I’ve found most pernicious about that was that I don’t think Hillary Clinton thought that. I don’t think she thought young black people were predators. But Hillary Clinton stuck her finger in the wind in the 1990s and decided to make a political calculation that that would be politically expedient to use that kind of language to describe young black people, and that’s why she said it. And so, I think that for people who have been chastising those of us on the left, I did not vote for Hillary Clinton. I have never voted for a Democrat, and I never will, because I think that that is a party of war. It’s a party of the market. It’s a party of poverty, a party of police violence, of executions and the death penalty, and I will never vote for it.

I understand why people do, but I think that as long as the Democratic Party believes that they have your vote in their pocket, they’ll continue to move and act in the same ways. That is a deep problem with the politics and the orientation of the Democratic Party, which is a pro-capitalist, pro-market party in the United States. And so one of the questions that I ask in my book is whether or not this whole — can black people be free in a country that has, as its political, economic, and moral ethos, trenchant support of free market capitalism? As Nancy Pelosi said the other night, “We’re capitalists. Deal with it.”

Nancy Pelosi: Well, I thank you for your question, but I have to say, we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.

KYT: I think there’s a basic contradiction between what free marketers and the capitalism and black liberation, or women’s liberation, or LGBTQ liberation, or what liberation would look like for poor and working class people. I think that those two things are in dire conflict with each other. And so, when you have a political party that is steeped in that system and loves it, and does everything in its power to maintain and uphold it, then there’s a basic contradiction in being able to come through for the things that ordinary people need to maintain, let alone improve, any standard or quality of life.

JS: But I wanted to ask you something. So the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer was punched twice, and there’s all these memes on — you can find on Twitter and YouTube.

KYT: No tears here.

JS: And right, no tears for you. Richard Spencer gets punched twice. Then you have this Breitbart acolyte, Milo Yiannopoulos, who — he’s clearly trying to provoke people by going and speaking at these universities, recently speaking in Berkeley. And Antifa activists and others go after that speech. We understand, though, that Milo was going to be calling out undocumented students, and so that’s much more of a complicated narrative than has been out in the media. But I wanted to get your take on this. There are people even on the left who are saying, “These anarchists are part of the problem.” The people that are setting fire and throwing these things, or punching Richard Spencer, that those people also have a right to free speech, even if we hate it. And punching Richard Spencer or torching something outside of a Milo Yiannopoulos speech is not helping the issue. What’s your take on this kind of debate that we’re having right now?

KYT: Most of us support absolutely the right of a free exchange of ideas, particularly on college campuses, even with people that you don’t necessarily — or don’t agree with at all. So, I think with Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, that it’s a different ballgame, because what they are doing is not just going out to have a fruitful exchange, or even an unfruitful exchange of ideas. What they’re actually trying to do is to recruit people to their cause. They are trying to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation for anyone who is not a white heterosexual male who thinks like they do.

I saw a brief documentary — it’s like a CNN thing — where this trans woman made a really poignant point, which is that if Milo comes to campus and gives a talk, he’s somewhere else the next day. But the people who organized it, the people who came, the people who applauded, I have to sit next to in class. And that’s a problem, because these are people who absolutely support violence. They support the extermination of entire groups of people. And so, I think in that case that it’s not just a simple matter of free speech, that it’s really not being naive and understanding what it is for fascists and Nazi sympathizers, what it is that they are actually trying to do.

Now in terms of black bloc tactics, I don’t think that they’re necessary, and I don’t think that they’re particularly helpful. If we are trying to build a mass movement, which I believe is what we need to form a resistance to the Trump regime on many different fronts, there’s — almost everyone is in the crosshairs, then we need a mass movement. And when you’ve got people who are — whose main intent at a demonstration is to create property destruction, is to create a kind of violent spectacle that invites a confrontation with the police, then that in and of itself is necessarily limiting. It means that undocumented immigrants can’t come on to that demonstration. It means that many African-Americans can’t come on to that demonstration. It means that people who want to bring their families can’t come to the demonstration, and to me, that there’s something fundamentally wrong with that.

Now, it doesn’t mean that we should conflate that with police violence or see it as the same thing as the tactics of the state, because that’s not their intent. These are anti-capitalists who want to confront the system. And I’m obviously very sympathetic with that. So they’re not the same thing. But as a movement, as a left, I think that we have to say something about tactics that imperil the right for the vast majority of people to freely participate in that movement.

JS: From your perspective, what should resistance and mobilizations and organizing look like under the Trump/Pence administration?

KYT: So, I think the first thing is that we have to start with an understanding and an analysis that all of these issues are connected. And so, the whole kind of, I have my issues over here, and they’re wholly separate and have nothing to do with your issues, is insufficient, and it’s incorrect. For people who are concerned about police terrorism and police violence, that is not just a black issue. That is an issue that Latinos have to deal with. That is an issue that Arabs and Muslims have to deal with. And we have to highlight the ways in which those things are connected. The attack on women’s rights is not just an issue for middle class white women who were the majority at the Women’s March in D.C. and around the country, but the attack on immigrants. This is a woman’s issue. The attack on low-wage workers is a woman’s issue. Fifty-five percent of black workers make under $15 an hour in this country, and most of them are black women.

And so, we have to see how all of these working class issues are women’s issues. And so, I think the main thing is that we have to see how these issues are connected, and that is the basis upon which we can build a broad movement. it has to be mass, it has to be broad, and there need to be easily identifiable entry points for people, for all these millions of people who are going to demonstrations. They need to know where it is that they can go locally to then get involved. So there are many different dimensions to this. But it will take all of them to be able to create a resistance to the Trump regime.

JS: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, thank you very much.

KYT: Thank you.

JS: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a professor at Princeton University and author of the book “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation”.

[Music interlude]

JS: Before we end today’s show, we are going to go to a spoken word segment. And I just want to say this. Part of the reason why we’re asking musicians and artists and others to contribute to the show is that when you live in times of authoritarian rule, one of the first things that ends up in the crosshairs is culture. And we believe firmly that artists and writers and dramatists and actors and musicians play a vital role in defending the integrity of who we are as human beings.

And so for today’s show, to end it, we turn to the incredible singer, Kimya Dawson. Many of you probably know her songs from the movie Juno. But how many of you knew that these were her politics? Here is Kimya Dawson.

Kimya Dawson: Jeremy, this is Kimya Dawson from The Uncluded and The Moldy Peaches. Thanks for having me. This song was written for Black Lives. Black people who maybe aren’t so shocked by where we’re at right now because we’ve been targeted all along. But I also stand in support of the Muslims, Mexicans, Native Americans, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, women, poor folks, children, and everyone else who’s going to suffer greatly at the hands of this current administration. It’s imperative that we all rise up together and resist and make noise. This song is called “At The Seams”.

Left hands hold the leashes and the right hands hold the torches

And the grandpas holding shotguns swing on porch swings hung on porches

And the grandmas in their gardens plant more seeds to cut their losses

And the poachers with the pooches and the nooses preheat crosses

And the pooches see their grandpas

And they bare their teeth and growl

While their owners turn their noises up

Like they smell something foul

And they fumble with their crosses

And they start to mumble curses

And they plot ways to get grandpas off of porches into hearses

But the grandpas on the porches

Are just scarecrows holding toys

And the grandmas in the gardens

Are papier-mâché decoys

While the real grandmas and grandpas

Are with all the girls and boys

Marching downtown to the City Hall

To make a lot of noise

Saying, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!

Black lives matter,

No justice, no peace!”

I know that we can overcome

Because I had a dream

A dream we tore this racist, broken system

Apart at that seams

Sometimes it seems like we’ve reached

The end of the road

We’ve seen cops and judges sleep together

Wearing long white robes

And they put their white hoods up

Try to take the black hoods down

And they don’t plan on stopping

Till we’re all in the ground

Till we’re dead in the ground

Or we’re incarcerated

‘Cause prison’s a big business form

Of enslavement

Plantations that profit

On black folks in cages

They’ll break our backs

And keep the wages

It’s outrageous that there’s no place

We can feel safe in this nation

Not in our cars, not at the park

Not in subway stations

Not at church, the pool, the store

Not asking for help

Not walking down the street

So we’ve got to scream and yell

Hands up, don’t shoot

I can’t breathe,

Black lives matter,

No justice, no peace

I know that we can overcome

Because I had a dream

A dream we tore this racist broken system

Apart at the seams

If you steal cigarillos

Or you sell loose cigarettes

Or you forget your turn signal

Well, they see your skin as a threat

Will they kill you and then smear you

And cover it up and lie

Will they call it self-defense

Will they call it suicide

Hands up, don’t shoot

I can’t breathe

Black lives matter

No justice, no peace

I know that we can overcome

Because I had a dream

A dream we tore this racist, broken system

Apart at the seams

And if the altars are torn down

We’ll keep on placing flowers

For the boy whose body was in the road

For more than four hours

We will honor the dead of every age

and every gender

‘Cause we can’t just have it be

The brother’s names that we remember

Black boys with skateboards

And black boys with hoodies

And little black girls

Who are on the couch sleeping

And all of the black trans women massacred

Too many black folks killed and brutalized

Too little justice served

After the lynchings of our people

By the murderous police

Who stand like hunters ‘round their pray

Gasping helpless in the street

Feet from the teen girl that they tackled

And locked handcuffed in the car

Right by her 12-year-old brother dying

And no one did CPR

Hands up, don’t shoot

I can’t breathe

Black lives matter

No justice, no peace

I know that we can overcome

Because I had a dream

A dream we tore this racist, broken system

Apart at the seams

JS: That was the amazing Kimya Dawson. If you want to hear her full a cappella song, you can find it at theintercept.com/podcasts.

[Music interlude]

JS: Intercepted is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. We’re distributed by Panoply. Our producer is Jack D’Isidoro, and our executive producer is Leital Molad. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Our music was composed by DJ Spooky. Special thanks for our apocalyptic Donald Trump, Anthony Atamanuik. Until next week, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

[Music interlude]

KYT: Four million people protesting one day after the president is elected is absolutely unprecedented.

JS: Losers.

KYT: Yeah, I know. [Laughing]

JS: Sad.

KYT: Very sad.

The post Intercepted Podcast: President Trump’s Cabinet of Killers and Why Orange Is the New Anti-Black appeared first on The Intercept.

The federal government dismissed those concerns in its filing. “I have determined that there is no cause for completing any additional environmental analysis,” Douglas Lamont, the acting assistant secretary of the Army, wrote in a memorandum. “The COE has full responsibility to take the reasonable steps necessary to execute the requested easement.”

Two weeks earlier, after only four days in office, Trump signed two memoranda instructing federal officials to ram forward approvals for the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, both of which had been halted by the Obama administration after people mobilized across the U.S. to stop them. On Dakota Access, the Army Corps did just what the president demanded, waiving the standard 14-day waiting period before such a permit becomes official. The tribe has been left with just one day to rally a legal response.

Lawyers for the tribe say they will argue in court that an environmental impact statement, mandated by the Army Corps under Obama, was wrongfully terminated. They will likely request a restraining order while the legal battle ensues. Pipeline company lawyers have said that it would take at minimum 83 days for oil to flow from the date that an easement is granted.

Although the tribal government once supported the string of anti-pipeline camps that began popping up last spring, leaders have since insisted that pipeline opponents go home and stay away from the reservation. “Please respect our people and do not come to Standing Rock and instead exercise your First Amendment rights and take this fight to your respective state capitols, to your members of Congress, and to Washington, D.C.,” tribal chairman Dave Archambault said in a statement.

Still, the easement announcement is already activating pipeline opponents to return. A “couple thousand people” are headed back to the camps, including contingents of veterans, said former congressional candidate Chase Iron Eyes, a member of the tribe, in a video posted to Facebook.

Cedric Goodhouse, a Lakota elder who lives on the reservation and has been involved in fighting the pipeline since last spring, said it’s inevitable that the fight will spill outside the courtroom. “It’s going to come here to the drill pad. That puts us in a different spot,” he said. “It’s going to come to a head, and people are probably going to get hurt.”

“I’m pissed,” Joye Braun said, reacting to the Army Corps’ announcement as she drove back to Standing Rock. Braun had only returned home the night before to the Cheyenne River reservation in South Dakota to do some laundry when she heard the news. She threw her clothes back in a bag and got ready to return to the camp where she’s been living and resisting the pipeline. On her way out, she grabbed an extra item — her gas mask.

“People might think that it’s naïve, but I’m always hopeful that our laws will prevail. I know that Standing Rock Sioux tribe and Cheyenne River Sioux tribe and Yankton Sioux tribe will do everything that they can legally to stop this,” she said. But, she added, “I came here to support the grassroots people, and the grassroots people are telling me to stay.”

A message titled “This is the #NoDAPL Last Stand” posted by various native-led groups fighting the pipeline called for an “international day of emergency actions” on Wednesday. By Wednesday morning, a website described actions planned in 18 states.

“Water protectors remain on the ground at the Sacred Stone Camp, determined to stop the black snake, and we support them,” the statement added. “If you go, expect police violence, mass arrests, felony charges for just about anything, abuse while in custody, targeted persecution, and racial profiling while driving around the area, etc.”

The camps are in a state of transition, with the biggest, called Oceti Sakowin, in the process of being cleared in advance of spring floods. Two new camps have opened away from the flood plains. But the temperatures are subzero even for those who are at no risk of being flooded. “You really have to ask yourself, Can you withstand the temperature?” said Braun.

The police response is another factor. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is calling for additional federal law enforcement support, even after the Trump administration agreed last week to send more Bureau of Indian Affairs agents.

Burgum’s government is supportive of the pipeline. The day after Trump’s executive pipeline actions, the governor launched a website called North Dakota Response, largely dedicated to publishing PR materials related to the pipeline fight. The site includes a “Myth vs. Fact” page, which includes a passage titled “Myth: Law enforcement fired water cannons on peaceful protestors,” declaring that a weapon used against protesters on November 20 was a fire hose rather than a cannon, despite myriad videos and photos from the incident depicting a crowd-control device indistinguishable from a water cannon, spraying water at demonstrators in below-freezing temperatures over a course of hours.

Posts on NDResponse’s Facebook page include various links to oil industry propaganda, including a site called “Pipelines101,” created by the American Petroleum Institute and the Association of Oil Pipe Lines, which declares, “Pipelines are energy lifelines, making almost every daily activity possible.” Another Facebook post encourages viewers to visit Energy Transfer Partners’ “Dakota Access Pipeline Facts” website.

Braun said the police presence on the ground seems to have intensified even as the population of the camps has diminished. A bright row of lights still illuminates the hills at night along the pipeline’s route above the camps, and low planes still circle the area routinely. But now a new outcropping of police has replaced a short-lived camp that was set up on private property, then cleared by police (via mass arrests) within a day last week. Security officials ride through the outskirts of the camps on snowmobiles.

Meanwhile, on Monday, the North Dakota House of Representatives approved four anti-protest bills, including one that would create a new misdemeanor for wearing a mask while committing a crime. Two others would increase penalties for trespassing and riot charges, which have been liberally bestowed upon Dakota Access protesters by police. A fourth would make it a felony to cause over $1,000 in economic harm while committing a misdemeanor. Still awaiting consideration is a bill that would shield from liability drivers who hit and kill demonstrators protesting on a road.

The post Activists Plan Emergency Actions Across the Country to Protest Approval of Dakota Access Pipeline appeared first on The Intercept.

Never popular in the first place, domestic counterextremism programs are now likely to become much more aggressive and bellicose. President Trump reportedly plans to redirect counterextremism programs to focus exclusively on Muslim Americans to the exclusion of other groups.

While in practice most CVE programs in the United States already target Muslim communities, President Barack Obama did his best to portray these policies as a form self-empowerment, describing them in a 2015 speech as an effort to help “communities to protect [from violent] ideologies and recruitment.” Under the Obama administration, the federal government rolled out CVE pilot programs in Boston, Los Angeles, and Minnesota. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security authorized $10 million in grants to local NGOs working to “counter violent extremism in the homeland.”

Despite their controversial nature, CVE programs did receive some level of interest from communities in the United States during the Obama administration. Counterterrorism experts say that the new administration — which engages in rhetoric and behavior overtly discriminatory toward Muslim Americans — will likely destroy many existing partnerships while generating opposition to new programs.

“There were some people who saw CVE as the ‘good’ or ‘liberal’ version of the war on terror, and they are likely going to feel uncomfortable about [Trump],” said Arun Kundnani, a professor at New York University. “You will see more resistance from some individuals and groups — including Muslim community organizations that had signed up for CVE under Obama.”

Some of that resistance is already starting to materialize.

Last week, the Minnesota-based Somali-American community group Ka Joog announced that it was declining a $500,000 Department of Homeland Security CVE grant, citing concerns about the new administration. The Somali community in Minnesota has been a frequent target of CVE initiatives in the past, including some “community outreach programs” that were covertly used to conduct surveillance. Nonetheless, during the Obama administration there had been a diversity of opinion among Somali-American groups about the merit of working with the federal government. Under Trump, those mixed feelings are turning into outright opposition.

“We work with refugees, immigrants, Muslims, and this administration is against everything we stand for,” Mohamed Farah, executive director of Ka Joog, told The Intercept. “Half a million dollars is a lot of money — we could’ve done a lot of work with youth in our community — but ultimately it comes down to principles. We have relationships of trust and we can’t be associated with this administration.”

Trump’s reported modifications to government-led CVE programs would fulfill his campaign pledge to target “radical Islam” more forcefully. During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly promised that he would take a combative stance against Islamic extremism, in both rhetoric and action. But experts on counterextremism say that Trump’s heavy-handed approach risks antagonizing potential partners, while doing nothing to address the actual causes of extremist violence. It also shifts resources and attention away from the threat of right-wing extremism, despite a number of deadly attacks in North America over the past several years.

“The Trump administration has indicated that they’re going to reframe CVE purely around jihadism and in the process tear down all the relationships that the Obama administration built,” said Mubin Shaikh, a counterterrorism specialist and an academic researcher on radicalization. “But this whole notion of making CVE only about Islamic extremism when you have white supremacists shooting up mosques, Sikh temples, and churches is completely misguided.”

Nonprofit groups focused on right-wing extremism fear a loss of funding as the new administration shifts priorities. Shaikh says that he expects more CVE money to be redirected to Muslim American groups in the future, but only those that align ideologically with the Trump administration’s views on Islamic extremism. Such groups are unlikely to be representative of their communities, and may even encounter a backlash for cooperating with a widely loathed administration.

“The Trump administration is going to give CVE money to people they support, but these people are unlikely to have any connections with communities or individuals who are actually at risk of extremism,” Shaikh says. “If you really want to counter Islamic extremism, you’re not going to accomplish that by trashing Muslims and insulting them.”

Many academic experts on counterextremism have begun making the same point in recent years. A 2016 study by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University cited past failures in approaches to CVE that alienated communities by treating them as targets for surveillance and counterterrorism operations. The study’s authors called on the federal government to abandon this security-centric approach and work to build genuine partnerships with Muslim American communities. As a prerequisite to this, the study also said that government agencies must “redouble efforts to prevent discriminatory treatment, profiling, and harassment of law-abiding citizens at airports and immigration checkpoints.”

Instead of following this guidance and fighting discrimination against Muslims, the Trump administration has been working to institutionalize it. Executive orders targeting immigration from Muslim-majority countries and a pending bill to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group — a measure that many fear is intended to provide cover for a witch hunt against Muslim American organizations — are just a few examples of this inflammatory approach. Experts say that hostile rhetoric and discriminatory policies are likely to backfire, even if they satisfy Trump’s political goals in the short term.

“The people that you’re dealing with in implementing these programs want to be perceived as partners, and they want to build trust with governmental organizations,” said David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center and co-author of its 2016 study on counterextremism. “But it’s not possible to develop relationships of trust between the federal government and Muslim Americans when you’re going to overtly discriminate against them.”

Schanzer cites the recent example of Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries as an example of institutionalized discrimination that will likely stop Muslim Americans from cooperating with government-led programs. As the administration ramps up its hostility, relationships that were already troubled are likely to deteriorate further.

“The rhetoric and actions that have come out of this administration have shown that they view essentially all Muslims as potential terrorists,” he adds. “I see much of the progress made in recent years being lost in the environment that we’re now entering.”

Top photo: Women in Minneapolis listen to the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Jaylani Hussein, speak about the Somali community’s concerns about a government-initiated countering violent extremism program in 2015.

The post Trump’s Rhetoric on “Radical Islam” Undermines Counterextremism Programs in U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

Files turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act include a range of studies that undermines the program’s premise, demonstrating that attempts to look for physical signs of deception are highly subjective and unreliable. Also among the files are presentations and reports from the TSA and other law enforcement agencies that put forth untested theories of how to profile attackers and rely on broad stereotypes about Muslims.

The TSA has deployed behavior detection officers, or BDOs, at security checkpoints and in plainclothes throughout airports to look for travelers exhibiting behaviors that might betray fear, stress, or deception. According to the documents, these officers engage in “casual conversations” such that the passengers don’t realize they “have undergone any deliberate line of questioning.”

These spotters can pick people out for extra screening, refer them to law enforcement or immigration authorities, or block them from boarding a plane.

Looking out for suspicious behaviors is hardly surprising, but TSA’s approach has been roundly criticized by government watchdogs and outside observers who say there’s no scientific basis for the clues the officers rely on as indicators. The program — previously known as “SPOT,” for Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques, and now called “Behavior Detection and Analysis” — has cost $1.5 billion since it was rolled out in 2007, according to a recent inspector general’s report.

In 2015, The Intercept published the TSA’s checklist for behavior detection officers, which included dozens of apparently suspicious indicators, such as “excessive fidgeting,” “strong body odor,” “whistling,” and “exaggerated emotions.” Many of the behaviors on the list contradicted one another, and most seemed like they could apply to any number of travelers going through a security screening and heading to a flight. A former officer in the program told The Intercept at the time that the list was “just ‘catch all’ behaviors to justify BDO interaction with a passenger. A license to harass.”

In an emailed statement, TSA spokesperson Bruce Anderson said that “TSA stands by its Behavior Detection capability.” The TSA’s approach, he said, “is threat-agnostic, and unlike technology, does not become obsolete when the adversary develops a new weapon or tactic. It is one element of TSA’s efforts to mitigate threats against the traveling public, and is critical to TSA’s systems approach to deter, detect, and disrupt individuals who pose a threat to aviation.” He pointed to a TSA report asserting that the agency has relied on “sound and substantial” outside research as well as its own studies to refine and revise the list of indicators. 

Anderson also said that the TSA no longer considered behavior detection a unique program and had incorporated behavior detection officers into the regular workforce.

The TSA has previously been accused of racial profiling in picking out passengers for extra screening. The documents obtained by the ACLU reveal additional details of incidents at airports where the TSA was prompted to investigate. In Newark, for example, a TSA investigation found that officers had been directed to focus on particular nationalities and “to pull Latin American and Arabic looking passengers.” In Chicago, an officer alleged that BDOs were told to “pay particular attention” to passengers flying on Middle Eastern airlines, who were likely to carry large amounts of money and have outstanding warrants.

“In these investigations, it becomes very clear how the indicators can be used for wrongful profiling, how they give them a basis for action against someone they don’t like the look of,” said Hugh Handeyside, an attorney at the ACLU’s National Security Project. “They underscore that these indicators are subjective and can be arbitrarily applied.”

In an internal survey, one behavior detection officer left an anonymous complaint stating that the officer had seen coworkers “make questionable decisions based on the way someone looks I.e. cute, Asian, Black, etc.”

“They are quick to ask ‘Was he Somali or Egyptian?’ when speaking about an airport employee who comes into question: as if these are the only races out to cause harm,” the comment continues. “What’s worse is I’ve heard a BDO officer refer to passengers as ‘towel heads’ when speaking in a meeting with other management AND his subordinates. When I reported it, I was told that was to be expected of him.”

The TSA maintains that many of these instances were unsubstantiated, and that the agency added training and modified certain procedures to address concerns about profiling.

In requesting the documents, the ACLU asked to see any scientific research behind the behavior detection programs. It appears there was none, beyond previously published articles of questionable relevance to the TSA program.

“We got back a ton of academic literature and press articles that don’t provide a scientific basis for the program, and materials from other parts of the government that don’t provide any kind of credibility because they simply aren’t appropriate for airport screening, such as military studies from war zones,” Handeyside said. “The TSA simply has nothing in its files that would suggest that it can validly use these techniques to screen passengers in an unstructured environment like an airport terminal.”

Some of the materials the TSA turned over rely on problematic assumptions. One TSA presentation from 2006, titled “Femme Fatale: Female Suicide Bombers,” says that “females tend to be more emotional and therefore easier to indoctrinate.”

Other materials show generic characterizations of Muslims as prone to radicalization.

It’s not clear whether the agency used these particular documents to train behavior detection officers, but in a 2012 memorandum, the head of the TSA at the time admitted that the training materials for behavior detection officers had a “current exclusive focus on examples on Arab/Muslim terrorists.”

The TSA denied that its policies rely on religion as a factor.

Top photo: A passenger undergoes a full-body scan at El Paso International Airport in Texas in 2010.

The post TSA’s Own Files Show Doubtful Science Behind Its Behavior Screening Program appeared first on The Intercept.

After Brown was arrested in 2012 for work related to hacks on intelligence contractors, a San Francisco-based systems administrator named Kevin Gallagher launched the website Free Barrett Brown, which crowdfunded tens of thousands of dollars for Brown’s legal defense.

Free Barrett Brown is now defunct, because Brown was released to a halfway house in November. But the group on Tuesday challenged the legality of a 2013 subpoena that it says violates their donors’ First Amendment rights to anonymously support political causes. The subpoena was sent to the host of the crowdfunded legal defense fund, directing it to send “any and all information” pertaining to the legal defense fund to the FBI.

“The subpoena claimed that the information it requested would be used at the trial of the jailed journalist. However, the identities of, and the amounts donated by, the journalist’s supporters are completely irrelevant to the charges levied against the journalist,” the group says in its filing. Indeed, no such information was presented at trial. The real purpose was to “unlawfully surveil the donors in violation of the First Amendment,” the suit says.

“Learning that these records were sought and obtained was highly unsettling,” said Kevin Gallagher, Free Barrett Brown’s former director said in a statement. “If we don’t send a message to the government that it’s not okay to target private legal defense efforts, then they will continue to get away with these sort of things.”

“The donations were acts of political expression, showing the donors’ frustrations with what they perceived to be government bullying and prosecutorial overreach,” the lawsuit said. “Donations made in support of litigation are protected by the First Amendment. The donors violated no law by sending money to support Mr. Brown’s legal defense, and instead were exercising their constitutionally protected rights.”

Brown was arrested in 2012 for his reporting related to two major hacks against intelligence contractors by a group sympathetic to the hacker-activist collective Anonymous. One — against the firm HBGary Federal — revealed a plot to target and smear liberal reporters, labor unions, and WikiLeaks defenders.

Federal prosecutors initially saddled Brown with fraud charges, which could have given him a 100-year sentence, all because he shared a link to documents taken in the hacks that contained credit card numbers. Those charges were eventually dropped, but Brown was sentenced to five years in prison, mostly due to his threatening an FBI agent in videos posted on YouTube.

In 2016, Brown won a National Magazine Award for his column in The Intercept, the Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison.

Top photo: The Department of Justice headquarters building in Washington.

The post Barrett Brown Defense Fund Accuses Justice Department of Illegally Surveilling Its Donors appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump’s message was a variation, directed at his largely white constituency, of the you-shall-not-be-beaten-again rhetoric used with malignant effect by Slobodan Milošević during the collapse of Yugoslavia. Trump is not Milošević and the United States is not Yugoslavia, of course, but the echoes between these paragons of national shamelessness reveal the underlying methods and weaknesses of what Trump is trying to pull off.

In 1987, Milošević was sent to Kosovo to soothe angry Serbs who felt threatened by Albanians who dominated the province. A low-profile communist official at the time, Milošević visited a municipal office and spoke to a crowd of unhappy Serbs who had gathered outside. Milošević was uncertain as he addressed them, but everything changed when he voiced a nationalist message they had never heard before: “No one will be allowed to beat the Serbs again, no one!” he said.

The crowd began to chant his name. Even though he remained cold (he had almost no charisma), it was a decisive moment in which he realized the political usefulness of tapping into the resentments of Serbs who felt slighted by other identity groups in Yugoslavia. This had been a taboo, and he broke it. When Milošević returned to Belgrade, he took up the banner of Serb nationalism and ousted his low-energy mentor, Ivan Stambolić. He provoked other republics to secede from Yugoslavia, and this led to years of warfare and war crimes.

Milošević created his own reality. I have never interviewed Trump but I have an unforgettable memory of what it’s like to sit in a room with a gaslighter-in-chief and try to pin him down. I was one of the few American journalists whom Milošević spoke with before he was overthrown and extradited to a war crimes trial in The Hague, where he died of a heart attack in 2006.

Slobodan Milošević is greeted by supporters in front of his house in Belgrade during a gathering of the Socialist Party of Serbia in 2001.

Photo: Couple/Globalphoto.com/Liaison via Getty Images

I visited Milošević on a bright spring day when he was in the full bloom of power. His office was in the center of Belgrade in a former palace that had been chiseled with the less-than-joyous touch of Austro-Hungarian architecture. Plainclothes guards asked me to walk through a metal detector that beeped loudly, prompting one of the guards to ask with a laugh, “Any guns?” He waved me through. A woman then led me through empty hallways to a waiting room. Sit here, she said.

She returned in a minute and opened a set of double doors into an office that had a long row of windows letting in the day’s sunshine. The office was empty except for Slobodan Milošević, who was standing by the windows. His first words were, “Why do you write lies about my country?” I now realize these words could just as easily come out of Trump’s mouth, or his Twitter account, when he discusses media organizations he does not like, which is most of them.

Milošević was shameless in lying about obvious truths. “We are blamed for a nationalistic policy but I don’t believe that our policy is nationalistic,” he said. “If we don’t have national equality and equality of people, we cannot be, how to say, a civilized and prosperous country in the future.” As we spoke, the military forces he had organized were continuing to lay waste to Bosnia, encircling Sarajevo and other major cities with medieval-style sieges.

We sat together for 90 minutes, with nobody else in the room. Though he didn’t have the bluster of Trump — Milošević was a quiet and controlled speaker, with just occasional flashes of anger that were tactical, not impulsive — he was a master of the alternative fact, even in the face of someone who knew they were lies, because I had reported from Bosnia on the crimes perpetrated by military forces under his control. When I later wrote a book about all this, I described Milošević’s relationship to the truth in a way that I now realize fits Trump, too.

I would have had better luck trying to land a punch on a hologram. Milošević existed in a different dimension, a twilight zone of lies, and I was mucking about in the dimension of facts. He had spent his entire life in the world of communism, and he had become a master, an absolute master, at fabrication. Of course my verbal punches went right through him. It was as though I pointed to a black wall and asked Milošević what color it was. White, he says. No, I reply, look at it, that wall there, it is black, it is five feet away from us. He looks at it, then at me, and says, The wall is white, my friend, maybe you should have your eyes checked. He does not shout in anger. He sounds concerned for my eyesight. I knew the wall was black. I could see the wall. I had touched the wall. I had watched the workmen paint it black.

President Donald Trump raises his fist after speaking during the 58th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2017.

Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Trump’s buffoonery was present, however, in another protagonist of the Balkan carnage — Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb leader who got his start as Milošević’s puppet. Karadžić’s fabulism was more brazen than his fellow Serb’s, if only because like Trump he adored the spotlight and talked so much. Karadžić was a night owl, and one evening I attended a press conference that began after midnight in his small-town headquarters outside besieged Sarajevo. The Muslims were bombing themselves, Karadžić said. The media invented the tales of Serb mistreatment of detainees. There was no ethnic cleansing — Muslims left their homes voluntarily.

Karadžić’s performance was Trumpian in its audacious make-believe, and it conveyed a lesson that’s useful to us today. Tyrants don’t care if you believe them, they just want you to succumb to doubt. “His ideas were so grotesque,” I later wrote of Karadžić, “his version of reality so twisted, that I was tempted to conclude he was on drugs, or that I was. I knew Bosnia well, and I knew that the things Karadžić said were lies, and that these lies were being broadcast worldwide, every day, several times a day, and they were being taken seriously. I am not saying that his lies were accepted as the truth, but I sensed they were obscuring the truth, causing outsiders to stay on the sidelines, and this of course was a great triumph for Karadžić. He didn’t need to make outsiders believe his version of events; he just needed to make them doubt the truth and sit on their hands.”

The terrible experience of the Balkans offers a slit of hope, however: Milošević was overthrown. His world of alternative facts led to a disaster that involved Weimar levels of hyperinflation that sapped his regime of popular support. During one of my stays at the Hyatt Hotel in Belgrade, the nightly rate exceeded 4 million dinars, taxes not included. The defining moment of his overthrow occurred when bulldozers from the working-class town of Čačak smashed into Belgrade at the head of a column of blue-collar workers who realized their hero had conned them.

It wasn’t inertia that caught up with Milošević, nor the liberals and students who opposed him from almost the first day. Well-behaved democrats played important and necessary roles, laying the groundwork for Milošević’s removal, but it was his core constituencies, the working class and the security services, that delivered the decisive blows. The role of Brutus is often taken by insiders who have finally had enough of a failed demagogue. These are early days in the Trump era, but if Milošević’s fate is as much of a guide as his rhetoric, Trump will be undone when the democratic resistance deepens and the voters and party that brought him to power turn on him.

Top photo: Slobodan Milošević appears on a broadcast during a 1999 speech.

The post What Slobodan Milosevic Taught Me About Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

Now, more than 150 former federal prosecutors have expressed their disapproval of Trump’s overreach as well. On Monday, former Assistant United States Attorney Ellyn Marcus Lindsay provided The Intercept with a letter signed by herself and 53 other former AUSAs in California, which referred to the executive order as “a thinly veiled attempt to exclude Muslims from certain countries based on their religion.”

Lindsay worked in the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles for 28 years.

Two similarly worded letters have been signed by former AUSAs in New York and Florida. The New York letter has 65 signatories and the Florida letter has 36. The three letters hold no legal force, but they reflect a strong current of mainstream opinion within the legal profession that is in vocal opposition to Trump’s abortive travel ban.

Also on Monday, the American Bar Association adopted a resolution urging the president to withdraw the executive order. In a speech prior to the vote, ABA President Linda Klein warned that parts of the executive order “jeopardize fundamental principles of justice, due process, and the rule of law.”

“We must avoid sweeping bans based on religion or national origin,” Klein said in her remarks and called for a judiciary “independent from the president of the United States.” She applauded the ABA for launching a website to coordinate legal defense for immigrants affected by the travel ban. Klein also responded directly to Trump’s tweet attacking Judge James Robart, whose temporary restraining order suspended the ban. “There are no ‘so-called judges’ in America,” she said. “There are simply judges — fair and impartial.”

Last week, the San Francisco Bar Association also lambasted the travel ban, calling it “cruel and intolerable, and likely unlawful.”

The AUSA letters argue that Trump’s executive order permits the president to give an unconstitutional “religious preference” to Christians over Muslims in admissions into the country.

Patricia Pileggi, a former federal prosecutor in New York, said, “We entered into agreements with other countries to allow people into the U.S. Without any notification whatsoever, those agreements were revoked. The order initially prevented people from returning to schools, to jobs, prevented scientists from returning to the U.S. to do very valuable research.”

Attorneys general for 15 states and the District of Columbia filed an amicus brief on Monday supporting the challenge to Trump’s Muslim ban by Minnesota and Washington state. Jeff Modisett, a former AUSA who signed the California letter, was the Indiana attorney general from 1996 to 2000. If he were still in that position, he told The Intercept, he would have joined the brief as well. 

The Trump administration also filed a brief with the court, arguing that it was within its authority to issue the ban. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments on the suit on Tuesday.

“Putting aside the inhumanity, bigotry, and ignorance underlying this order,” wrote Lindsay in an email to The Intercept, “you would have to be blind to see the order as anything but absurd. To effect such a broad and sweeping change of the rules (which, to date, have not led to one terrorist attack), without proper vetting or notice to affected persons and agencies shows a recklessness and lack of care that is simply terrifying.”

Top photo: Chella, from Sherman Oaks, holds the U.S. flag in protest of President Donald Trump’s travel ban at the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX on Jan. 29, 2017, in Los Angeles.

The post More Than 150 Former Federal Prosecutors Have Denounced Trump’s Muslim Ban appeared first on The Intercept.

That should get your attention, since Yoo, a fancy law professor at Berkeley, is best known for authoring much of the legal advice claiming the U.S. could legally engage in torture when he served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department.

In fact, Yoo believed this so fervently that in 2005 he said that a president can torture children if necessary, and there’s nothing that Congress or international law can do to stop him.

Yoo explained his perspective during a debate with Doug Cassel, then the director of Notre Dame Law School’s Center for Civil and Human Rights:

CASSEL: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
YOO: No treaty.
CASSEL: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
YOO: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

You can listen to the audio of Yoo making that case here:

Yoo’s legal reasoning, as he (together with his superior Jay Bybee, who’s now a federal judge) advised the Bush White House, is that “the Department of Justice could not enforce Section 2340A [the federal probation against torture] against federal officials acting pursuant to the President’s constitutional authority to wage a military campaign.” In other words, the president can’t crush a 6-year-old boy’s testicles for fun, but if he thinks some child-testicle-crushing is needed to win the war, it’s totally constitutional.

The good news for Trump is that Yoo doesn’t express any concerns about Trump’s actions regarding foreign policy. Moreover, his qualms about Trump’s domestic actions are fairly mild. Yoo feels that Trump can’t pull us out of NAFTA, because that was enacted by Congress, and he can’t put a tariff on Mexican imports by himself. But he does think Trump can legally halt immigration from any countries he wants, although he believes Trump should be sure no one talks about it in public as a “Muslim ban.”

In the end, Yoo’s main quarrel with Trump is that Yoo thinks presidents can go totally hog-wild in foreign policy but should cooperate with Congress domestically — whereas Trump believes he can do whatever he wants overseas and at home. This troubles Yoo, because it could lead to Trump “dissipating his political capital and haphazardly wasting the executive’s powers” to really give foreigners the business.

Top photo: John Yoo in the law library at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, Calif. on Feb. 9, 2009.

The post John Yoo Thinks Presidents Can Legally Torture Children. Even He Has “Grave Concerns” About Donald Trump. appeared first on The Intercept.

The Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule would have forced investment advisers in workplace retirement plans like 401(k)s to operate in their clients’ best interests, rather than recommending high-cost, high-risk products that offer the advisers kickbacks and perks.

The Obama White House estimated in a 2015 report that conflicts of interest cost retirement savers $17 billion annually, though that figure has been challenged.

The fiduciary rule, finalized last year, was to go into effect in April. But the new order directs the Labor Department to review the rule, which is expected to initiate the process of rescinding it.

As Gary Cohn, former Goldman Sachs president and director of the National Economic Council, put it, the fiduciary rule “is like putting only healthy food on the menu, because unhealthy food tastes good but you still shouldn’t eat it because you might die younger.”

Why Trump thinks individual workers must have the freedom to choose poison for their retirement funds is unclear. But one reason could be that his friends in private equity have long sought to add their particular form of junk food to that menu.

And to break into the 401(k) market — especially with financial products that are high-risk, high-cost, and often make their money from ripping established companies apart and selling the pieces — private equity funds would need a lot of help from the advisers who guide ordinary investors in the process. And that would require the ability to offer those advisers considerable perks and kickbacks.

On the same day that he issued his fiduciary rule executive order, Trump met with his White House jobs panel, headed by Steven Schwarzman, CEO of the world’s largest private equity firm, Blackstone.

“We’re getting rid of your regulations,” Trump told Schwarzman and his colleagues on Friday.

Late last month, Schwarzman stressed his craving for Blackstone to get into the 401(k) market. “In life you have to have a dream,” Schwarzman said on an analyst call, “and one of our dreams is our desire and the market’s need to have more access at retail to alternative asset products.”

Traditional pension funds invest heavily in private equity; this makes up about one-quarter of total private equity capital. But defined contribution plans like 401(k)s have traditionally not invested in the asset class. Because 401(k) holders choose how to invest their money and can move in and out of funds quickly, they don’t fit mechanically with private equity, which locks in investors over several years. Also, private equity usually asks for large minimum investments, not less than $5 million, to open their funds to investors.

But with pension plans now a rarity compared to defined contributions retirement plans, private equity wants to crack the 401(k) market to unlock trillions of dollars in potential capital. Americans hold $6.8 trillion in individual retirement plans like 401(k)s. The Wall Street Journal describes this as “something of a Holy Grail quest” for the industry.

Large firms like Carlyle, Blackstone, Partners Group, and Kohlberg Kravitz Roberts (KKR) have developed a series of 401(k)-friendly products over the past couple years. Most enable plan advisers to offer private equity stakes to investors as part of a “target fund,” in a diversified portfolio with other investments. “That’s where we believe private equity should go,” said Kevin Albert, global head of business development for Pantheon Ventures, on a Wall Street Journal podcast.

If plan advisers take this up, it would flood more money into private equity. “Five percent of the estimated $6.8 trillion and growing in 401(k)s is $340 billion — a nice chunk of change,” said Eileen Applebaum, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Private Equity at Work.

But these investments are far riskier than most 401(k) offerings. Contrary to popular belief, private equity firms do not outperform the market. Fees are also often opaque and much larger than those in passive funds, usually extracting 1 to 2 percent of the total capital invested and 20 percent of the profits. A 2014 SEC study found that over half of the private equity firms examined shifted costs to benefit themselves, like billing investors for legal and compliance costs without their knowledge, or forcing investors to pay for “consultants” who are actually former employees of the companies. Giant fees guarantee private equity profits regardless of the performance of their portfolio.

Last week, Pantheon introduced a new performance-based offering to plan advisers, with Pantheon only benefiting if they outperform the benchmark S&P 500. Albert claimed this would relieve the threat of class-action lawsuits over high fees. Pantheon will also partner with KKR and other firms to ensure they have sufficient funds to invest in companies, regardless of whether 401(k) investors pull their money out on a moment’s notice.

But private equity has been accused of deliberately reporting exaggerated returns to harvest fees. And even if the returns were legitimate, this would still throw millions of retirement dollars into an industry that has been sharply criticized for its predatory version of capitalism.

Private equity firms buy out companies and load them with unsustainable debt, forcing severe cost-cutting to maintain survival. Because private equity serves as manager and investor, they favor short-term gain over a company’s health, whether through using bankruptcy, favorable tax strategies, or monetizing assets. Workers often get left behind, with lower wages, lost jobs, or restructured union contracts.

The destruction of the Mervyn’s department store chain provides a salient example. Once a major retailer with 30,000 employees, Mervyn’s was bought out in 2004 by a consortium of private equity firms, who split off the company’s real estate assets and forced stores to pay exorbitant rent to service $800 million in debt. Within four years, Mervyn’s liquidated the entire operation in bankruptcy. The private equity managers, however, earned profits through the real estate deals and came out ahead.

Individual investors would therefore be using retirement dollars to fund an industry that terrorizes workers and sucks value from their employers.

How does sidelining the fiduciary rule facilitate this? Plan advisers would not be required to act in the best interest of their clients when promoting target funds, enabling them to include private equity, regardless of the fee structure or threat of losses.

“It could put retirement income at risk and may be more costly than the individual investor recognizes,” said Eileen Applebaum. “The financial adviser will know, but they’re now under no obligation to divulge.”

Advisers could also receive hidden kickbacks for including these investments in the target funds. There’s already a large cottage industry of perks for financial advisers, most of them obscure to individual 401(k) subscribers. Few would be able to outbid wealthy private equity firms for the privilege of peddling complex financial products to ordinary investors.

According to a study from researchers at Indiana University, the University of Texas and the Federal Reserve last October, plan advisers routinely present limited choices to 401(k) investors, to steer them into unnecessary or risky options. This favoritism benefits affiliated funds, and with private equity perks in the waiting, advisers would have yet another incentive to tout their products.

Top photo: Trump at a policy forum with business leaders chaired by Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman on February 3

The post Donald Trump’s Executive Order Will Let Private Equity Funds Drain Your 401(k) appeared first on The Intercept.

The couple wanted a child no older than 6 years of age. They were willing to adopt a child with chronic, treatable diseases such as diabetes or fetal alcohol syndrome, but not one with untreatable conditions — such as blindness or paralysis — which they believed themselves financially and emotionally incapable of supporting.

And, unlike many prospective parents in Brazil — where a substantial portion of adopting parents only want a white child — they had no preferences when it came to race or gender. About 70 percent of the children eligible for adoption in Brazil are black or mixed race, which means that many parents who want to adopt are closed off to the possibility of taking most of the ones who need a home.

To the extent that Alexandre and Francisco, both 39 and together for 10 years, had any inflexible desire, it concerned the number of children they intended to adopt on the first go: just one. Indeed, after taking years of discussion and contemplation before finally pronouncing themselves ready, they never considered, let alone discussed, adopting more than one child at once. But as they navigated the adoption process, and learned that most Brazilian children eligible for adoption are together in shelters with siblings, they were eventually persuaded to be open to the possibility of adopting two siblings at the same time.

But in July 2015, roughly 1 1/2 years after they formally initiated the process, the couple ended up simultaneously adopting three children, all boys. Their sons are likely half brothers, sharing the same biological mother but, they speculate, with different biological fathers. At the time of the adoption, Gabriel, the youngest, was 6; the middle child, Pablo, was 9; and the oldest, Patrick, was 12. All three are black. Alexandre is white, and his husband, Francisco, is what Brazilians refer to as “moreno,” or mixed race.

Reported by Glenn Greenwald, Juliana Gonçalves, and Thiago Dezan. Film: Thiago Dezan for The Intercept

Their adoption of three children, rather than one or two, happened because of an unexpected but very common quandary: After being told that adoption authorities had located a child who met their age and health preferences — the youngest, Gabriel — and that he had an older sibling, Pablo, whom they had decided they would also adopt, they learned soon thereafter that the two boys had another, older brother, 12-year-old Patrick, who had been lingering for years in adoption shelters. With Patrick, they faced a heavy dilemma: leave him in the shelter — where, given his age, he would be extremely unlikely ever to be adopted, then would be expelled at the age of 18 — or adopt him, as well as his two younger brothers, all at once.

Children over 6 have a very low likelihood of ever being adopted, which all but guarantees a grim future. According to the journalist Gilberto Scofield’s account in the magazine Piaui of his and his partner’s adoption, only 6 percent of adopting couples are open to adopting a child over the age of 6, while 85 percent of eligible children are in that age group.

Declining to adopt Gabriel’s brothers would almost certainly have consigned them to a life of heinous deprivation, or worse. Children in shelters who end up not being adopted face great hardships even in the best of circumstances. But in the poorest states of Brazil, itself a poor country, they have almost no societal support. Upon expulsion from the shelter at 18, boys commonly end up selling drugs and living on the streets, while girls turn to prostitution.

The choice this couple unexpectedly faced — adopt one or two children as intended while leaving their brother, or adopt the three siblings together despite uncertainty about how it could work — is a common one in Brazil. Because most Brazilian children eligible for adoption were removed from their biological parent due to serious abuse or neglect, siblings are often removed together.

As Scofield reported, 77 percent of the children in shelters are with siblings, while 79 percent of adoptive parents want to adopt only one child. In sum, the overwhelming majority of couples begin the process wanting only to adopt a purely healthy infant with no siblings, yet the reality of the eligible children is radically different. Adoption authorities have a strong preference to have siblings adopted together, and they apply a wide array of pressure tactics, from subtle to overt, to induce adopting couples to accept more than one child.

In the case of Alexandre and Francisco, such pressure was unnecessary. They rigorously scrutinized their income and budget and knew it would be extremely difficult to care for three children. But no matter: “From the start, it was unthinkable to leave one of the boys there,” Alexandre said. “We decided we would find a way to make it work. We felt we had no choice.”

Alexandre and Francisco with two of their three sons.

Photo: Thiago Dezan for The Intercept

The way the five of them have so quickly bonded into a loving and supportive family is a moving human story. It is also an illuminating and thought-provoking one, shedding light on a wide range of complex questions about human needs and relationships, psychology, race, class, gender, and behavioral influences — some of which are unique to Brazil, most of which are universal.

The couple decided to share their story because they want to enable better societal understanding of adoptive families, and to inspire others to adopt. They have begun speaking about their experience at the monthly meetings prospective adoptive parents are required to attend in Brazil in order to become certified to adopt, and they are active in several organizations devoted to support for adoptive families and public advocacy on their behalf.

There is serious need for such efforts in Brazil, where a growing and powerful faction composed of evangelicals and other ultra-conservatives want to ban same-sex couples from adopting, despite the large number of unwanted children in shelters. Such sentiments are also common in many other countries, including the United States.

After a three-week trial period — one designed to allow both the prospective parents and children to decide if the situation should be made permanent — the two fathers and three boys all unequivocally agreed they wanted to form a family. All three boys moved into the couple’s small, two-bedroom apartment in Tijuca, a working-class neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro’s Northern Zone. The two new fathers kept their bedroom, while the three boys moved together into the small spare room, with bunk beds and pull-out trundles maximizing the space.

“I grew up middle class, with English classes and trips to Disney World and other foreign countries,” Alexandre recalled. “And I did not want to adopt until we were ready and able to provide our own children with everything I had growing up.” Alexandre is a trained psychoanalyst but has been unemployed for the last year, creating uncertainty about whether they were ready.

But Francisco had a radically different upbringing: born into extreme poverty until the age of 7, and then raised by an aunt along with three cousins. “Because of how I grew up, I felt the most important thing wasn’t what we could give materially, but all that mattered was providing a loving and stable home, with the right values being taught,” he said.

Alexandre has now come around to that way of thinking — for the most part.

“I still wish I could give them more,” he said. “But reality is reality, and I feel very good about what we’ve all been able to do for each other’s lives.”

I first met the couple last July, when they spoke at a meeting I attended with my husband, David Miranda, for parents who were planning to adopt; it was the last of four meetings we had to attend to fulfill our own requirements to be certified by the family court. The session was held at night in a chapel inside a Catholic church in the Tijuca neighborhood where the family lives.

We sat with 20 or so prospective adoptive couples, all of whom seemed — like we were — filled with a roughly equal mix of apprehension and excitement. One of the four meetings entails listening to parents who have already adopted describe their experiences, and Alexandre and Francisco regularly volunteer to share their story.

Halfway into the couple’s presentation about their new lives as parents, all three boys entered the room, after playing together upstairs with their grandfather, Alexandre’s father. They walked through the crowd of prospective adoptive parents and made a beeline for their fathers, seating themselves at the front of the room next to them.

What was most striking about this 1-year-old family was its total normalcy. As most children would, all three boys manifestly felt uncomfortable as a roomful of adult strangers gazed at them. They sought immediate refuge and protection behind their fathers, literally hiding their faces.

But as their fathers’ presentation progressed, each of them — on their own time, slowly — began to be more comfortable. They gradually revealed their faces, while remaining anchored to the protective arms of their fathers. They began playfully interrupting their fathers’ presentation, mischievously grabbing their microphones, making fun of one another and their parents. The two fathers valiantly tried to divide their attention between the talk they were giving and their efforts to control three increasingly bold and restless boys as they began basking in the positive attention they were receiving from the roomful of attendees.

Five people who did not know each other the year before — who came from such radically different backgrounds and experiences — had so obviously and quickly formed a standard family with all of its familiar patterns. The power and beauty of this bond instantly dispelled whatever lingering doubts my husband and I had about the exciting but scary prospect of adopting.

The family agreed to share their story with The Intercept. Our team — myself, reporter Juliana Gonçalves, and videographer Thiago Dezan — spent many hours with them over the course of several days, in various settings, in order to get them comfortable with being interviewed and filmed and to be exposed to a full range of their experiences. Their individual story is fascinating on its own, but also for the window it provides into a wide array of societal issues.

Photo: Thiago Dezan for The Intercept

Adoptive parents in Brazil confront a number of ethical quagmires which many did not anticipate. The first is the issue of race preference.

Is there any explanation, other than racism, for why some white parents would specify that they only want a white child, thus ensuring a far longer wait for themselves, particularly when most of the children in Brazil eligible for adoption are black?

Psychologists who oversee the orientation sessions insist that there is a non-racist motive. Adoptive parents, fearing that their children will already face significant hurdles, don’t want to add another: the constant stigma of having everyone — even strangers in public — know they are adopted by virtue of being of a different race than their parents. Having a child who looks enough like their parents to be perceived as their biological child, so the explanation goes, reduces the stigma for the child.

One of Alexandre and Francisco’s first conflicts with their youngest son, Gabriel — which took place within weeks after the adoption process was finalized — highlights this concern. When the five of them were walking on the street, Gabriel, when told he could not have something he wanted, threw a tantrum of the type common among 6-year-olds.

As his rage escalated, he ran away from his fathers, and Francisco had to chase and then grab him, all while Gabriel screamed for help. The sight of a 30-something man chasing and grabbing a screaming black child attracted the attention and concern of pedestrians and even security guards. “It was embarrassing,” Francisco recalled, “because it was the first time it happened. But I explained Gabriel was my son and that was the end of it.”

Both Alexandre and Francisco are dismissive of the significance of this stigma. “People do look at us in public, especially when I’m alone with them,” said Alexandre. “But it’s a look of curiosity, not malice, and it’s not hard to deal with. The boys know they are adopted and do not regard it as a stigma or source of shame: quite the opposite, as they have learned that adoption is something to be proud of and we are as much a family as anyone else.”

Whatever else is true, the issue of race looms over the adoption process from the start. The question prospective parents in orientation sessions most frequently ask is about time frame: How long will it take before you have your child? The answer is delivered by social workers in a matter-of-fact tone that masks its stunning meaning. The message is along these lines: “Well, it all depends on your preferences; if you want a fully healthy, white infant, then of course you will wait a very long time, even years. But if you are more flexible with your preferences, if you’re open to a nonwhite or an older child, one with conditions requiring treatment, then it will go much quicker.”

That nonwhite children are implicitly regarded as less desirable and thus more available is casually stated — as though it’s the most natural, or obvious, fact in the world. The grim reality that white children are more in demand hovers over an otherwise inspiring process. For that reason, preferences about race, along with age of the child, are among the most significant factors determining how long the process takes.

The issue of health is also complex. Children with disabilities requiring significant levels of care are sometimes given up for adoption by parents incapable of caring for them, meaning that many of those eligible suffer from blindness, paralysis, Down syndrome, or severe heart disease certain to produce a short life. Other children have treatable, chronic conditions such as fetal alcohol syndrome, HIV, or diabetes.

An adoptive parent’s decision on the limits of illness or condition they feel themselves able and willing to confront can be a tormenting one. “You have dreams for what you want your children to be,” explained Francisco, “but you don’t want to feel as though you’re demanding a physically perfect specimen. We all have frailties and imperfections; it’s part of what makes us human.”

Beyond that, added Alexandre, “part of our motive was to have children because of the happiness it would bring us, but a big part was to give an unwanted child a home. So we didn’t want to restrict ourselves to children who would easily find one.” Ultimately, they opted to accept a child with treatable, chronic conditions but not grave, untreatable ones.

Photo: Thiago Dezan for The Intercept

Questions of gender, and, for same-sex couples, sexual orientation, can be even more difficult to navigate. The couple’s youngest child, Gabriel, spent years in a poorly funded and badly managed shelter that was just one small step removed from living on the street: Homeless children often entered without impediment, and the children in the shelter easily left to commingle with groups of homeless people. At a young age, they were all immersed in a highly patriarchal and macho culture as a means of survival. And no family members or relatives ever visited the boys to provide a countervailing influence.

The two fathers were, at first, concerned about what attitudes Gabriel and his brothers would have to same-sex couples and to women. They therefore prioritized education about social attitudes. Alexandre bought books designed to teach kids that both genders are equal and that sexual orientation discrimination is wrong. “I immediately corrected any expression of bigotry that they had picked up,” Alexandre said, “and now they see these issues completely differently.”

During their first week together, one of the boys, when told that Alexandre and Francisco were married, asked whether that was allowed. After being told that it was, the boys pointed to a well-known Brazilian prime-time soap opera that had depicted a same-sex couple, provoking controversy in Brazil. “That normalized it for them,” said Francisco, “made them understand that this was common. After that, it’s just natural for them that they have two fathers.”

The question of age also presents an endless array of difficult questions. Child psychologists vehemently debate the age at which a child’s emotional and psychological formation is largely complete and thus immune from meaningful influence, with some believing that can take place as early as 2 or 3 years old. Others, however, believe the process never ends.

Alexandre and Francisco had no such doubts about their ability to parent their pre-adolescent boys, and time appears to have proven them correct. “These are completely different children than they were a year ago when we met them,” Alexandre says. “Even as an adult, I continue to learn and change from interactions I have with others and my life experiences. Of course kids are susceptible to parental influences throughout their childhood.”

Perhaps an even more excruciating ethical quandary comes from how one conducts the “search” for the child. The question a prospective adoptive parent must face is an almost impossible one to resolve: Do you keep meeting multiple children until you find “the right one” — thus rejecting hopeful children you meet on the path to the one you ultimately adopt — or do you commit in advance to adopting the first one that falls within your demographic preferences?

Children in shelters who are older than 3 or 4 know that they are waiting to be adopted and are hopeful it will happen. When a prospective parent visits, many try to be charming in the hope that they will be chosen. A parent who rejects a child under those circumstances knows they are bestowing the child with the knowledge that they have been rejected, and are also consigning them to a future where there is a real possibility that they will never be adopted. That’s a heavy burden for both to bear.

But the other option — committing in advance to adopting the first child one meets regardless of compatibility — can present its own serious difficulties. Not every parent is equipped to provide every adopted child with the emotional and psychological support they need. Compatibility can be critical in determining whether the relationship works.

“In our case,” recalls Alexandre, “this turned out not to be a problem because we knew as soon as we met Gabriel that he was our son. And we felt the same way when we met his two brothers.” Francisco added: “That’s not to say it’s always been easy. But somehow we found them and they found us and it was meant to be.”

Gabriel with his parents and two of his friends at a birthday party.

Photo: Courtesy Alexandre Louzada and Francisco David

There is no question that adoption presents some unique challenges. Ultimately, though, parenting adopted children is far more similar than different to the process of raising biological children. Those who have children biologically also face an endless array of unknowns and factors far beyond their control. On one level, adoptive parents have more advanced information about their children than biological parents do. But in each case, the beauty and power of the parent-child relationship lies in the unknown. As is always true, that is where human possibility resides: in the realms we cannot control and thus limit with expectations.

In his 2016 book “Love That Boy,” the political journalist Ron Fournier describes the dreams and plans he had for his son before he was born, only to find that his son’s autism rendered the boy much different than the blueprint envisioned. Fournier’s account of how he came to love his son on his own terms, for what he is and for his unique attributes and abilities, highlighted the vital lesson: Once one frees oneself from expectations and attachments, all new and more powerful possibilities are discovered.

What is ultimately most powerful and inspiring about the family formed by Alexandre, Francisco, and their three boys is the sheer improbability of it. The seemingly insurmountable obstacles one would expect them to face are, in reality, no match for the human bonds they formed. The barriers and differences — socioeconomic, racial, cultural, psychological — seem trivial when set next to the love-and-support-based structure these five human beings have chosen to form. Observing and understanding it provides critical, and universal, clues for how empathetic humans are truly capable of interacting with one another.

For a school assignment, the middle son, Pablo, now 11, wrote a story of the wish he once made when throwing a coin into a fountain. He wrote: “My dream came true: I asked for a family which would never leave me.” His father Francisco put it simply: “If anyone thinks that we, two men, cannot care for these children, and that they’re not living well at our house: come here and meet us.”

The post A Same-Sex Couple Set Out to Adopt a Child. They Ended Up With Three. appeared first on The Intercept.