The grant was awarded September 21 to EcoHealth Alliance, helmed by Peter Daszak, and is titled “Analyzing the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.” The new grant comes despite an open congressional investigation into the organization, which has two other ongoing NIH grants and a third in negotiation.

In August, the NIH terminated a sub-award to the Wuhan Institute of Virology that had been part of an earlier grant to EcoHealth Alliance, telling the House Oversight Committee that the organization had refused to turn over laboratory notebooks and other records as required. “NIH has requested on two occasions that EHA provide NIH the laboratory notebooks and original electronic files from the research conducted at WIV. To date, WIV has not provided these records,” the NIH wrote to the committee. “Today, NIH has informed EHA that since WIV is unable to fulfill its duties for the subaward under grant R01AI110964, the WIV subaward is terminated for failure to meet award terms and conditions requiring provision of records to NIH upon request.”

On August 19, the NIH wrote to EcoHealth to let it know that the sub-award had been terminated for “material non-compliance with terms and conditions of award.” The agency added that EcoHealth could potentially renegotiate the grant without the involvement of the Wuhan lab.

Within weeks of terminating the Wuhan lab funding, the NIH awarded the new grant. The aim of the new research is to identify areas of potential concern for future pandemic emergence in order to help public health authorities suppress an outbreak before it breaks containment. But the process of performing the research introduces the risk of sparking an outbreak that would not otherwise have occurred, a concern highlighted by The Intercept last year: “Virtually every part of the work of outbreak prediction can result in an accidental infection. Even with the best of intentions, scientists can serve as vectors for the viruses they hunt — and as a result, their work may put everyone else’s lives on the line along with their own.”

The new grant proposes to collect samples of viruses from wildlife and then “rapidly supply viral sequences and isolates for use in vaccine and therapeutic development,” likely meaning that the researchers could ship live viruses around the world.

“It is disturbing that additional funding continues to be awarded for the same high-risk research that may have caused the current pandemic, before there has been a national investigation of the origin of the current pandemic,” said Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist with the Waksman Institute at Rutgers University, referring to EcoHealth’s multiple ongoing grants.

The Intercept first reported on one of the grants, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” last September; the work described involves research that many scientists characterized as “gain of function,” meaning that it can confer new attributes to make a virus more pathogenic or transmissible. The specific experiments described in detail in grant documents that have so far been made available used viruses that were not closely related enough to SARS-CoV-2 to have caused the pandemic. Critical records remain outstanding. (There is no evidence that the research supported by the new grant would qualify as gain of function, though the full proposal has not been made public, only a one-page summary.)

Another grant, “Study of Nipah virus dynamics and genetics in its bat reservoir and of human exposure to NiV across Bangladesh to understand patterns of human outbreaks,” also involves high-risk collection of viruses. The Southeast Asia hotspot grant was awarded in June 2020, at the height of controversy over the grant covering work in Wuhan.

Early on, Daszak himself was heavily involved in coordinating two global investigations into the origin, before his conflict of interest on the question emerged. Since then, EcoHealth and its partner at the Wuhan institute have impeded the investigation. (Daszak, who did not respond to a request for comment, has previously said that he is cooperating fully.)

Daszak’s NIH grant is also remarkable given that the NIH has repeatedly pressed Daszak for information he has declined to provide. On November 5, 2021, and again on January 6, 2022, the NIH demanded that EcoHealth Alliance provide original laboratory notebooks and electronic files related to the research under investigation as the cause of the pandemic. The records have yet to be provided. Ebright, a critic of Daszak, said it is “disturbing that additional funding continues to be awarded to a contractor that the NIH has reported to have repeatedly and seriously violated contractual terms and conditions of a grant.”

The lack of specific lab records pinpointing a specific accident or mutation that led to the emergence of the novel coronavirus has been used as evidence to discount the possibility of a lab origin, but without access to the records in question, such evidence is unattainable.

In early February 2020, many of the scientists who today are the most vocal advocates of a natural origin theory joined a conference call with Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-NIH head Francis Collins. Ahead of the call, and in notes afterward, they expressed varying degrees of concern that the virus may have originated in a lab. Fauci and Collins, who controlled a large portion of the global funding streams for scientific research, discouraged the pursuit of the theory.

Alina Chan, co-author of the book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,” said she has questions about what new safeguards have been put in place by Daszak.

“Can our scientific leaders, institutions, and journals stop doubling down on approaches that might’ve accidentally caused the current pandemic?” she asked. “Hunting and studying novel bat CoVs has not significantly contributed to the pandemic response.”

Those who’ve probed the question of the pandemic’s origin, from the Lancet Commission established for that that purpose to the world of intelligence, have left it open. “After examining all available intelligence reporting and other information … the IC” — intelligence community — “remains divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19. All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident,” offers the most comprehensive intel analysis declassified in 2021.

Ebright said we should pause funding of such research without answers to these questions and until “there has been a national discussion of whether research should continue to be performed that offers little or no benefit and poses high risk of causing a next pandemic.”

Democrats in Congress have paid little attention to the NIH funding controversy, but Republicans could soon be in charge of one or both chambers. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the top Republican on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, is in line to chair the panel in the event of a takeover. On Monday, she slammed the NIH for its continued funding of Daszak’s organization.

“EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak should not be getting a dime of taxpayer funds until they are completely transparent. Period. This is madness,” Rodgers said in a statement. “This further intensifies our extensive commitment on the Energy and Commerce Committee to ensure accountability from the National Institutes of Health for its role in supporting taxpayer-funded risky research without proper oversight of its grantees.”

The post NIH Awards New Grant to U.S. Organization at Center of Covid-19 Lab Leak Controversy appeared first on The Intercept.

Around the globe, the scientists who study the animal origins of infectious diseases are treated with similar reverence. In its documentary “Virus Hunters,” National Geographic tells the story of an American band of researchers who risk their lives in search of bats carrying Ebola in an abandoned Liberian mine shaft. “You are getting aerosolized urine, aerosolized feces, but also, if you’re killing the bats, you’re then exposed directly to their blood as well,” professor Christopher Golden says as the animals screech around him and eerie music plays in the background. The risk, it seems, is part of what makes these anti-outbreak efforts so thrilling — and the people who perform them so heroic.

As the world enters its third year ravaged by a novel coronavirus that may have originated in bats, the endeavor to learn more about SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens like it is particularly urgent. Much of the success we have had in responding to the Covid pandemic so far has its roots in studying coronaviruses. Recent research on MERS and human cold viruses enabled scientists to develop vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 in record time, and the genetic sequencing of viruses that have jumped from animals to people has helped scientists design Covid treatments. Yet it is not at all clear that tracking down virus-infected wildlife in remote locations, to which the U.S. devotes a substantial share of research dollars, has helped us prepare for our current crisis.

Still, over the past two decades, fears of bioterrorism have increased U.S. funding for a particularly aggressive subgenre of viral surveillance that entails hunting and studying previously unknown viruses in wildlife. “Outbreak prediction,” as it’s sometimes called, pushes beyond the tracking of diseases that affect people, which public health officials have relied on for decades to understand the scope and causes of epidemics. The new viral research aims to find the most dangerous pathogens before they jump to humans. Proponents of this approach — which involves hunting viruses in remote locations as well as transporting, storing, and sometimes experimenting on the most dangerous pathogens — say it’s necessary to prevent the next outbreak.

But others warn that the ongoing pursuit of deadly viruses that have yet to infect people is unlikely to prevent infectious diseases from emerging or help us cope with them when they do. Instead, they say, there are several ways this research could set off the next pandemic — and could have, in fact, led to this one.

Yet virus hunting and related activities have somehow escaped the level of scrutiny that some biosecurity experts feel they should have. “A lab leak in people’s minds means a building and something seeping out,” said Filippa Lentzos, a social scientist at King’s College London who studies the threat posed by biological agents. “But far too little of our pandemic origin discussion has been focused on that fieldwork point. There are really, really high risks involved in this kind of research.”

One Health

Most infectious diseases that have recently emerged in humans can be traced back to wild animals. There are about 1 billion of these “zoonotic infections” each year, as well as millions of deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Fruit bats are the natural hosts of the Nipah virus, which can cause brain swelling, seizures, comas, and ultimately death in humans. The Zika virus, which causes babies to be born with very small heads and other potentially deadly birth defects, was first isolated in a rhesus monkey. MERS, the coronavirus that causes the deadly Middle East respiratory syndrome, has been traced to camels from Saudi Arabia. And HIV infected chimpanzees before it jumped species and went on to kill some 36 million people worldwide.

The SARS coronavirus, which began infecting people in southern China in 2002, also originated in animals. The spread of SARS was brought under control in 2003, at which point it was already clear that humans had been exposed through contact with masked palm civets sold in wet markets. It was more than a decade before researchers found the SARS virus in horseshoe bats living in a remote cave in China’s Yunnan province. Peter Daszak, president of a New York-based research group called EcoHealth Alliance, and Shi Zhengli, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, were among the researchers who found the virus in bats. Daszak and Shi had worked together since at least 2014, and finding SARS in bats gave additional credence to the exhaustive sampling and cataloging of viruses they employed. By pinpointing the origin of the SARS virus, which spread from bats to civets to humans, they were able to underscore the dangers of the wildlife trade, which presents an ongoing viral threat.

But Daszak didn’t need the extra feather in his cap. By 2017, when he helped solve the SARS origin puzzle, he already had tens of millions of dollars in U.S. government grants under his belt, much of it from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense. He sat on the editorial boards of scientific journals and was advising science organizations around the world, including the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the Australian Biosecurity Cooperative Research Centre for Emerging Infectious Disease. He was also a member of the WHO’s Blueprint Pathogen Prioritization Committee.

A British parasitologist who had begun his career studying frogs, Daszak went to work for a conservation group called the Wildlife Trust in 2001. The organization then focused mostly on endangered species. But Daszak, who became its director in 2010 and helped rebrand the group as EcoHealth Alliance, shifted the organization’s emphasis toward an idea known as “one health.” The concept, which has gained ground in public health circles in recent years, recognizes that the health of humans, animals, and plants is inextricably linked.

EcoHealth’s rebranding allowed it to incorporate research on how the climate crisis and other emerging environmental factors were driving disease outbreaks. Through the interdisciplinary lens of “one health,” EcoHealth Alliance began studying the ecological and health effects of oil and gas extraction in Liberia, tracing the impacts of forcing wild animals from their habitats and into greater contact with humans, which in turn opened the possibility of animal-borne infections. The group also quantified the health costs of deforestation in Malaysia, showing that chopping down trees to make room for palm oil plantations has given rise to an increase in malaria infections.

The broader framing was helpful in the search for funding too. “We go to foundations and say, ‘Look, you’ve been trying to stop the wildlife trade in China for 20 years. You’ve put all this money into this. If you have a health angle to that, it really does work,’” Daszak said in a May 2020 interview with virologist Vincent Racaniello. “That’s the argument we use.”

EcoHealth Alliance’s funding from the U.S. government, which Daszak has said makes up some 80 percent of its budget, has also grown in recent years. Since 2002, according to an Intercept analysis of public records, the organization has received more than $118 million in grants and contracts from federal agencies, $42 million of which comes from the Department of Defense. Much of that money has been awarded through programs focused not on health or ecology, however, but on the prevention of biowarfare, bioterrorism, and other misuses of pathogens.

It might seem odd that an organization focused on naturally occurring organisms would receive such funding. But it also makes a certain amount of sense, as the Wildlife Trust pointed out in a 2008 grant proposal to the NIH, which The Intercept obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Even microbes found in wild animals could become weapons if they fell into the wrong hands, noted the proposal for the grant, titled “Risk of Viral Emergence from Bats.” The work entailed studying the Hendra and Nipah viruses. “HeV and NiV are not only novel discoveries, they are also BSL4 agents that possess several biological features that make them highly adaptable for use as bioterror agents,” the grant proposal explained, referring to biosafety level 4 laboratories that work with the most dangerous microorganisms.

A proposal for a grant that the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a division of the Defense Department, awarded EcoHealth Alliance in 2017 takes a slightly different angle. The bat coronavirus research the organization and its partners planned to conduct in Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, and Georgia would fill a dangerous data gap on viruses, EcoHealth argued in the proposal for “Understanding the Risk of Bat-Borne Zoonotic Disease Emergence in Western Asia,” which The Intercept obtained through a separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. “Viral emergence, both nefarious and natural, poses a significant threat to global security,” the proposal explains. “The current regional gap in capabilities to conduct research and facilitate early detection of bat borne diseases in Western Asia severely weakens our ability to counter the threats of biological weapons of mass destruction.”

In part, the justification for harnessing the “one health” concept to defend one nation-state from another seems to be that if U.S. scientists don’t learn about these viruses, someone else will. These projects were described as efforts to make the world safer: to alert people in the surrounding area to a new disease before it hits and to create treatments and potentially vaccines that could prevent it. But in the throes of the current pandemic, the risk calculus behind this decision is coming under new scrutiny.

With more than 5 million people dead from a disease that could have been unleashed as the result of research, this scientific attempt at staving off worldwide calamity is being reappraised as a double-edged sword.

Tooth and Claw

Virtually every part of the work of outbreak prediction can result in an accidental infection. Even with the best of intentions, scientists can serve as vectors for the viruses they hunt — and as a result, their work may put everyone else’s lives on the line along with their own. Seeking out animals and pathogens in areas where they might not have otherwise come into contact with people is especially risky, as is sending viruses from these locations to more densely populated urban areas such as Wuhan, where scientists sent samples of bat coronaviruses collected under a grant from the NIH. “There is immense danger when you go into remote areas in a highly intrusive fashion, directly seeking viral samples, and return those samples to laboratories where then they are tested for pandemic potential,” said Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University.

Ebright has been outspoken about the risks involved in “gain-of-function” research, in which researchers tweak viruses to make them more infectious or pathogenic. Ebright has called research that EcoHealth was conducting to enhance dangerous viruses — which The Intercept documented through materials obtained via an ongoing lawsuit with the NIH — “reckless.” But he is also concerned about the work that happens both before and after gain-of-function experiments. “Every aspect of that work plan, from beginning to end, entails risks,” he said.

The virus hunting itself is particularly perilous. The work of catching and taking biological samples from animals is inherently messy and dangerous. “Squirming, clawed and toothy animals bite and scratch during collection of body fluids. Teeth and talons easily penetrate the thin gloves required to maintain dexterity when handling fragile wildlife. And overhead, angry bats release a fine patina of virus-laden urine aerosols,” as infectious disease specialist Michael Callahan recently wrote in Politico of his virus-hunting expeditions. “The fact that researchers are not infected every time they do a field collection is a question that continues to stump us.”

“Every aspect of that work plan, from beginning to end, entails risks.”

In fact, some scientists have been infected in the course of virus hunting, including two researchers in Asia whom Callahan notes were recorded as having lab-acquired infections despite having contracted a disease when exposed to the pathogen during field collection. Because it took several days for their symptoms to appear, the researchers had already returned from their virus-hunting expedition to work in the lab by the time they realized that they were sick.

Scientists may become infected even when they’re not doing particularly dangerous experiments with pathogens, as an analysis of the spread of the Marburg virus in the Journal of Infectious Diseases made clear. The Marburg virus, which causes an often fatal hemorrhagic fever and infects bats and monkeys as well as humans, was spread through three different labs in the 1960s. Workers in the labs became infected with the virus after having direct contact with the blood, organs, and cell cultures from infected monkeys.

Even the seemingly straightforward reproduction of the virus in the lab, a step scientists often need to take before assessing its pathogenicity or analyzing its genetic makeup, entails danger, according to molecular biologist Alina Chan. “Just the act of trying to isolate and grow up the virus for studies involves making large volumes, far more than found in a bat,” said Chan, who emphasized that workers don’t need to be directly involved in producing the virus to be at risk. “The presence of a sample alone can result in accidental contamination.”

Lab workers can become infected through all sorts of routine encounters with lab animals. This was apparently the case when a researcher who worked on SARS-CoV-2 in Taiwan contracted Covid in early December 2021. The lab worker was infected in a biosafety level 3 lab that employs equipment and precautions meant to prevent such transmissions. But according to a report from Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Center, she had broken several rules by failing to wear proper protective gear, handling infected mice outside biosafety cabinets, and removing her mask before the rest of her protective gear.

And while Taiwan has advanced health security measures in place — and the facility where the lab worker was recently infected was part of Taiwan’s top research institution and used state-of-the-art equipment — many other facilities do not have the latest equipment, including negative pressure systems, HEPA filters, biosafety cabinets, and sewage incinerators. And those that do have biosafety level 4 labs, which offer the greatest containment of bio-agents, are often located in urban centers like Wuhan.

The 9/11 Funding Surge

Our vulnerability to bioterrorism was brought home by the anthrax-laced letters that were mailed just after 9/11, the first of which was sent less than a week after the Twin Towers fell. The handwritten phrase “Death to America” was part of what fueled suspicions that the letters, addressed to senators and members of the media, had been sent by a Muslim terrorist. Over the next few months, 22 people were infected by anthrax sent through the mail. Five of the recipients died from exposure to the bacteria. Although the letters stopped arriving within a month, their impact on the U.S. government’s approach to research on biological agents continues to this day.

In 2002, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a somewhat sleepy division of the NIH that had its roots in studying tick-borne diseases, announced that it would be receiving an extraordinary $1.5 billion funding increase. Much of the new funding would be spent defending the United States against bioterrorism, or the intentional release of dangerous viruses and other pathogens. The NIAID focused its new efforts on the most dangerous “Category A agents,” which include the bubonic plague, smallpox, viruses that cause hemorrhagic fevers, and anthrax. But the federal institute was also seeking a broader understanding of microbes and would try to genetically sequence “virtually any potential pathogens,” as NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, who began serving in that role in 1984, said at the time.

That year, some of the NIH’s new funding went to Daszak and the Wildlife Trust to study the Nipah and Hendra viruses the group had identified as “BLS4 agents.” In 2008, the NIAID provided the group with another grant to study the Nipah virus as well as bat viruses. Ultimately, the NIAID would award more than $15 million to the group.

After the anthrax attacks, additional funding to combat biological threats came from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, which expanded the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, a division of the Army that had conducted biological weapons research in Fort Detrick, Maryland, since 1969.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, whose mission is to counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and other emerging threats, funded EcoHealth Alliance’s bat research in western Asia and has awarded nine grants to the group to study a number of dangerous viruses and diseases, including henipaviruses in Malaysia, Rift Valley fever in South Africa, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever in Tanzania, avian influenza in Jordan, and high-risk pathogens in Liberia.

Other grants paid for the tracking of specific flu viruses that had already been transmitted through animals to cause human disease. Biodefense concerns had sparked disease surveillance in the past, including during the Korean War, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention created its Epidemic Intelligence Service to track the spread of infectious diseases. But after the anthrax letters, funding was increasingly directed toward the pursuit of pathogens that had not yet infected humans.

In 2008, after conducting thousands of interviews and creating a new Chemical Biological Sciences division, the FBI announced that it had solved what it had begun calling the “Amerithrax case.” The person who sent the letters, the FBI said, was not a Muslim terrorist after all, but Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist who had worked at the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Fort Detrick and had devoted much of his career to trying to thwart bioterrorism. Ivins, who had been experiencing mental health problems, killed himself after learning that the federal government was planning to file charges against him. But even after the evidence of the external bioweapons threat faded — and the internal threat posed by researchers working on bioterrorism was made frighteningly clear — large-scale U.S. funding for biodefense projects around the world has continued.

Predicting the Viral Future

By 2017, Daszak, Shi, and many of their colleagues had already pressed beyond studying past outbreaks into predicting future ones. The work involves mapping hotspots of potentially dangerous zoonotic diseases, trapping and sampling animals and analyzing the viruses that infect them, and then studying the viruses they find to determine which have the greatest potential to infect people. The ultimate goal is to create an open-source atlas of potential pandemic pathogens, complete with genetic sequencing information and a ranked list of the organisms that present the greatest threat.

In scope and ambition, the work is not unlike trying to predict the weather by studying individual raindrops. According to an article Daszak himself co-authored in Science, there are an estimated 631,000 to 827,000 undiscovered viruses capable of infecting humans circulating in birds and mammals — so many that it would take a global army of scientists decades to track them all down.

The U.S. Agency for International Development is another unlikely funder of viral research. Historically focused on providing economic aid to low-income countries, it began giving out grants for projects that could counter the threat of bioterrorism after 9/11, including Predict, a 10-year project launched in 2009 that would ultimately cost more than $210 million. Through the program, scientists in 35 countries collected samples from more than 160,000 bats, rodents, birds, and other animals. The work led to the identification of more than 1,100 previously unknown viruses and involved training scientists in more than 60 labs.

Predict had some clear benefits. Stephen Morse, who co-directed the first five years of the program, said that it left countries where the research took place better prepared to respond to outbreaks. “You don’t just fly in and take samples and test them using high-tech equipment,” said Morse, now a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University. “You try to work with local people to build the capacity in the countries where you’re working. And I think that’s the morally, ethically, as well as scientifically good thing to do.”

In an emailed response to questions from The Intercept, a spokesperson for USAID wrote that “USAID is building on previous efforts by expanding its global health security portfolio to help partner countries prepare for future health threats. This includes investing in risk reduction as well as discovering and understanding the risk of unknown viruses.”

While helping advance science in partner countries, such international aid is also sometimes seen as securing national security interests. As Callahan, the infectious disease physician, who has worked on global outbreaks for three federal agencies, has noted, an important part of the U.S. government’s international work on biological agents over the past decades has been securing and rooting out bioweapons in foreign labs through a program known as “cooperative threat reduction.”

After the anthrax letters, cooperative threat reduction efforts were also increased. The U.S. sent infectious disease specialists and bioweapons experts to the former Soviet Union to help repurpose bioweapons labs and retrain the scientists who work in them. U.S. biosafety experts were also dispatched to countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

The Forecasting Fallacy

Predict may have also served the similar purpose of allowing U.S. scientists to keep an eye on viral research in other countries. Yet as a predictive tool, it was of little value. Even Morse described its ability to enable scientists to anticipate and prevent disease outbreaks based on the enormous amount of data they collected as “aspirational.”

“The problem,” said Morse, “is then, how do you decide which ones to pay attention to?”

Many other scientists have pointed to the same foundational problem. Alexander Kekulé, director of the Institute of Medical Microbiology at the University of Medicine in Halle, Germany, thinks that it is important to study viruses and has spent his career doing so. But he said that no amount of data on viruses will allow scientists to anticipate how they will behave in the future. “It’s almost impossible to predict which virus will spill over and when and how,” said Kekulé. “It’s science fiction to do this. To look to see if a virus might become dangerous is so arbitrary. Why should nature follow your path?”

“To look to see if a virus might become dangerous is so arbitrary. Why should nature follow your path?”

The sheer number of potentially dangerous viruses that have yet to infect humans also makes it unlikely that a catalog of the viral universe could help create countermeasures to treat and prevent the spread of the new diseases, according to Kevin Esvelt, a biotechnologist and assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. “There are so many viruses out there that we’d be lucky to prevent a single pandemic,” said Esvelt, who points to the difficulty of deciding which of the many viruses to target. “As for vaccines, forget about it. Are we really going to infect unvaccinated volunteers with a virus that hasn’t yet infected any human and might never do so and then do it again for dozens of different pathogens?”

Dennis Carroll, who designed and led Predict, defended the program. While Carroll, who has a doctorate in biomedical research, called the criticisms about its inability to predict the viral future “legitimate,” he also said that wasn’t the real point of the program. “It’s more about forecasting than predicting,” said Carroll. “It’s fool’s gold to think that you’re going to predict which is the next virus. But you can begin forecasting where that emergence is most likely to occur,” he said, and the hope is that such information can be used to change human behaviors that might lead to an outbreak. “I probably never should have named Predict ‘Predict,’” he added.

Other researchers have observed that rapid viral evolution would quickly render any collected data obsolete. “New variants of RNA viruses appear every day,” biologist Edward C. Holmes and his colleagues wrote in Nature in 2018. “This speedy evolution means that surveys would need to be done continuously to be informative.” Holmes, a professor at the University of Sydney, dubbed the idea that scientists could prevent the next pandemic by genetically characterizing all viruses the “forecasting fallacy” and urged his fellow researchers to focus on more cost-effective approaches to mitigate disease outbreaks.

Kekulé points to the recent failure of the scientific community to anticipate the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 to underscore the futility of outbreak prediction. “It was clear that there would be a variant which is a little bit more effective,” Kekulé said. “But how would the virus do this? What is the exact mechanism? No one knew.” Similarly, the close scrutiny of the Ebola virus that followed its jump to humans in West Africa in 2013 did not enable researchers to prevent or better respond to its reemergence in 2018. And many scientists who were carefully tracking flu viruses were nevertheless surprised by the emergence of the swine flu in 2009.

But perhaps the best indicator that viral surveillance won’t prevent future pandemics is that it didn’t prevent the current one, which, as many have noted, first arose in a city that is home to multiple labs engaged in studying dangerous coronaviruses, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “Despite the fact that they had been conducting intensive surveillance and characterization of SARS-like coronaviruses, they failed to identify the SARS-like coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that jumped into humans right where they were doing their studies,” said Jesse Bloom, who studies the evolution of viruses with a particular focus on the flu at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.

Bloom, who thinks that it’s valuable to understand the diversity of viruses in nature, also acknowledges the alternate possibility: that the Wuhan Institute of Virology did know about SARS-CoV-2 and it somehow escaped from its laboratory and went on to cause the pandemic. “In either case, that particular line of research wasn’t productive,” he noted, going on to point out the problematic premise underlying the pursuit of any previously unknown dangerous virus: “Either this virus is an animal virus and it can’t actually infect humans, in which case the entire rationale for the research is undermined because the rationale for this research is to predict the next pandemic virus,” said Bloom, “or, if it is actually the next pandemic virus and you’re collecting it and bringing it back to a lab and studying it, there’s some risk that if something goes wrong, it could cause a pandemic.”

No Need For Engineering

The $3.1 million grant that EcoHealth Alliance received from the NIAID in 2014 to study bat coronaviruses was also meant to anticipate and avert future outbreaks. The proposal described the project as a “predictive, proactive approach to combating the most high profile group of emerging pathogens.” Shi and five other Chinese scientists were co-investigators on the project, which involved catching bats in caves; taking samples of their blood, urine, and feces; transporting them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology; and subjecting them to various experiments to gauge the dangers they pose to humans.

The increasingly heated debate over the origins of SARS-CoV-2 has recently centered on those experiments. The Intercept has reported that under the NIH grant to study bat coronaviruses, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance created mutant versions of bat coronaviruses that were both more transmissible and more virulent than the original viruses. The majority of scientists we interviewed said that one experiment documented in records we obtained fit the NIH’s own definition of gain-of-function research, which had been a source of consternation within the scientific community for years before the pandemic.

But as a microbiologist named James LeDuc recognized early in 2020, all sorts of activities besides gain-of-function experiments could have led SARS-CoV-2 to leap from bats to humans. LeDuc was clearly worried about such activities when he emailed a colleague at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Yuan Zhiming, in early February of last year. As the first U.S. cases were being reported in Washington state and Wuhan was still under lockdown, LeDuc suggested that Yuan and others at the institute conduct their own investigation into whether the new coronavirus might have escaped from its main campus or the newly constructed biosafety labs, according to emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know.

Then serving as director of the biosafety level 4 Galveston National Laboratory in Texas, LeDuc had previously worked on infectious diseases for the WHO, the CDC, and the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick — and had trained scientists in biosafety procedures when the biosafety level 4 lab opened in Wuhan. And his list of questions for Yuan demonstrated his deep knowledge of the potential perils of viral research: Where were the coronavirus stocks stored? How many people had access to them? Were any of them disgruntled? Were exhaust air filtration systems working correctly? What about autoclaves and waste stream disinfection systems? Were biological safety cabinets used and appropriately certified? Was the waste stream properly managed?

LeDuc, who did not receive a response from his colleague, remained convinced that researchers could have caused the outbreak. “It is certainly possible that a lab accident was the source of the epidemic,” he wrote to another scientist named Philip Russell in April 2020. A physician and Army major who had also worked on biodefense, Russell agreed: “I have no doubt that Zheng Li Shi is a brilliant scientist and very charming. That does not rule out the possibility that one of the many bat coronaviruses isolated in the Wuhan lab infected a technician who walked out the door. No need for engineering the virus.”

The Laos Connection

Recently released communications between the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance hint at one plausible way that virus hunters might have aided the movement of SARS-CoV-2 from animals to people. A pre-print of a paper being considered for publication in Nature, released in September, described the discovery of three coronaviruses that were more than 95 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2 — the closest relatives yet discovered — in horseshoe bats found in the wild in northern Laos. The findings were presented by a team of researchers from the Pasteur Institute and the National University of Laos, and were received by many in the scientific community, as additional evidence that the pandemic began through a natural spillover from animal hosts.

But emails between EcoHealth Alliance and the NIH, which were released via a public records request and lawsuit by the White Coat Waste Project in November, raise questions about that conclusion. While the researchers had said that they planned to sample bats only in China in their grant proposal, the emails show that the group had actually written to the NIH about plans to conduct several “free-ranging bat surveys” during field trips to Laos — where the close viral relatives of SARS-CoV-2 were found — as well as in Vietnam, Myanmar, and Cambodia. All samples were to be tested at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a 2016 email Daszak sent to the NIH.

Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist and researcher who works with the group of Covid-19 researchers known as DRASTIC — Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19 — which has been conducting an online investigation into the possibility of a lab leak, said that the emails’ reference to sampling in Laos made him more inclined to think that the pandemic was caused by research-related work.

“There was a concerted effort to actually take some of these samples from Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and bring them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” said Demaneuf. “That’s a big change because now we have a direct link between Laos and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

The Intercept reached out to six of the scientists EcoHealth Alliance listed as viral sampling collaborators in its letter to the NIH, including Watthana Theppangna, who was listed as the group’s in-country contact in Laos, to get additional information about the sampling trips, like the number and dates of trips and the kind and number of animals sampled. Only one of the researchers, Dr. Veasna Duong of the Pasteur Institute in Cambodia, responded, saying that she did not have the requested information.

EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to The Intercept’s questions for this story. But Daszak did speak with Science’s Jon Cohen in November, telling him that he and his organization have broken no rules and “done nothing wrong.” On Twitter, EcoHealth Alliance insisted that it did not follow through with its plan to perform bat surveys in Laos, though it did seek and receive permission from the NIH to do so. “No work was ever conducted in Laos as a part of this collaborative research project,” the organization tweeted in November. The NIH did not answer questions for this article.

“Cowboy Country”

As outbreak prediction has grown from an idea into a well-funded research field, another danger has emerged. When the global hunt for potential pandemic pathogens began almost two decades ago, only a handful of people were able to create viruses from their genomic sequences. In the intervening years, technological advances have made it vastly easier to construct viruses, and now thousands of scientists can do so. The shift means that a ranked list of the most potentially destructive viruses would be available to an expanding group of people who, with little effort and expenditure, could use that information to create viruses capable of causing massive suffering and death.

Ironically, this also means that the NIAID’s funding for virus research, which ballooned because of bioterrorism fears, has inadvertently resulted in what could be a bioterror arsenal if it fell into the wrong hands.

“Creating a ranked-order list of every pandemic-capable pathogen we can find makes sense only if you assume that no one would ever dream of misuse.”

“A credible pandemic-capable virus on the level of SARS-CoV-2 is a weapon of mass destruction, one that can be assembled in a minimal lab for just a few thousand dollars in synthetic DNA and reagents,” said Esvelt, of the MIT Media Lab. While acknowledging the small possibility that the characterization and ranking of viruses that could infect humans might help address future pandemics, Esvelt believes that no benefit would be worth the possible costs.

“Creating a ranked-order list of every pandemic-capable pathogen we can find makes sense only if you assume that no one would ever dream of misuse,” he said.

Carroll, who directed Predict, acknowledged that a scientist could use the genetic sequence of a dangerous virus malevolently but said that risk already exists. “We don’t need to find some new virus in order to elevate that risk.” Even so, he recognized the more general concern. “If you go out and cavalierly begin collecting and characterizing these viruses, there’s inherent risk attached to that. And you have to be accountable for that risk.”

Given the numerous routes through which virus research can cause catastrophe, ensuring its safety requires keeping a close and constant eye on equipment, research practices, and anyone who has contact with biological samples in the field and the lab. Yet such oversight is all but impossible from afar.

Documents obtained in December by The Intercept as part of its litigation with the NIH reveal new details about EcoHealth Alliance’s monitoring of biosafety issues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In an April 23, 2021 letter to NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research Michael Lauer, Daszak stated that such monitoring consisted of “semi-annual meetings with the lead investigator and assessments of compliance against all conditions of the award.”

Presented with Daszak’s description of its biosafety oversight, Lentzos, the biological threat researcher, said, “I don’t think that’s appropriate at all — every half a year — when you’re talking about really fast-paced, high-risk work.” She said that there should be ongoing bio-risk management as scientists design, carry out, and review research. “Formal assessments need to be regular, but, in addition, whenever unexpected results arise or any biosafety lapses occur, these need to be relayed straight away without delay.”

Lentzos also expressed concern about the NIH’s apparent lack of oversight. “It’s not clear how NIH is doing risk assessment or whether they’re completely outsourcing it to the grantees,” she said. “It seems a little bit of a free-for-all, like cowboy country.”

Indeed, more than 7,000 miles from the lab it was funding, the NIH operated at an even greater remove than EcoHealth Alliance. In April 2020, the NIH suspended the bat coronavirus grant, offering only that the “NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities,” as Lauer wrote to Daszak. At the time, the decision was condemned as being unscientific, both because President Donald Trump had ordered it and because it recognized the possibility of a lab leak, then considered by many — including Daszak — to be an outlandish conspiracy theory. Yet more than a year later, the agency was still struggling to understand what biosafety protocols had been in place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology while the agency-funded research was underway, as the recently released correspondence between Daszak and Lauer makes clear.

For months, Lauer had been asking Daszak for a series of documents, including monitoring, safety, and audit reports. And while the organization supplied many of the requested documents, it appeared unable to find several that related directly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s inner workings. Throughout the spring of 2021, Daszak seemed hopeful that he might persuade the NIH to reinstate the bat coronavirus grant. Its cancellation had taken a toll on EcoHealth Alliance staff, particularly Daszak himself, as he explained to Lauer in an April 25 email. “During the last 12 months we have been the subject of a growing series of horrific attacks in the press, and via online conspiracy theorists, and physically (including a white powder letter delivered to my home address).”

Daszak said he hoped that the NIH would correct course by reinstating the bat coronavirus grant — which, he reminded Lauer, could both help prevent “future spillover events” and offer “a critical opportunity for the USA to have eyes and ears on the ground in a country that has seen two coronaviruses emerge and spread globally in the past 2 decades,” as he explained in his April 25 email, concluding that “we await your decision on this suspension with great interest and remain at-the-ready to continue this work, as do our collaborators in China.”

As part of his pitch, Daszak told Lauer that EcoHealth Alliance had begun to shore up its biosafety operations in China after the bat coronavirus grant was canceled. “We have contracted with a leading lab biosafety contractor based in Southeast Asia [redacted] who has extensive experience commissioning, accrediting and auditing BSL-2,-3, and -4 labs, and has worked for over a decade at the BSL-4,” Daszak wrote in an April 23 letter to Lauer. “We will be using their services where appropriate for foreign lab subcontractees to assess lab biosafety procedures and conduct audits, including following the full reinstatement of [the bat coronavirus grant].” EcoHealth Alliance also hired someone to ensure the safety of virus hunting and other activities that take place outside the lab, writing that “we have appointed a Senior Field Veterinarian who will oversee all EcoHealth Alliance fieldwork in the region and ensure continued compliance with biosafety when conducting animal capture, sampling and sample handling.”

While the improvements in the oversight of its lab and fieldwork in China were clearly offered up to assuage any concerns that the NIH might have about reinstating the grant, the decision to bolster its biosafety practices could also be interpreted as an admission of its previous inadequacy.

It is not clear how the NIH, which had apparently never asked EcoHealth Alliance to put any of these higher-level precautions in place before, saw Daszak’s pitch. But the agency did not restore the funding for the bat coronavirus grant. And on June 11, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services launched an audit “to determine whether: (1) the National Institutes of Health (NIH) monitored grants to EcoHealth Alliance in accordance with Federal regulations and (2) EcoHealth Alliance used and managed its NIH grant funds in accordance with Federal requirements.”

Yet on the very same day in June that the audit was launched, the NIAID awarded the second year’s funding of an even larger grant the agency had given EcoHealth in August 2020 — after the earlier grant had been terminated. A month later, Lauer sent a letter noting that he still had not received the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “records validating expenditures specific to [the bat coronavirus grant] as well as any and all monitoring, safety, and financial reports specific to [the grant] that WIV submitted to you.” Lauer reminded Daszak that the grant terms had specified that the NIH “must have the right of access to any documents” and that the right “applies not only to awardee records, but also to subawardee records.” If a grantee doesn’t comply with the terms of a grant, it can withhold funding for other projects, Lauer noted in his letter.

The NIH does not appear to have withheld any of EcoHealth Alliance’s new funding.

Doubling Down

The new NIAID grant, titled “Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in Emerging Infectious Disease Hotspots of Southeast Asia,” provides $7.5 million for researchers to track down, sample, store, and collect viruses obtained from animals throughout Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. The proposal, obtained by The Intercept through FOIA litigation, details much of the same work that was underway through the suspended bat virus grant. As with the previous grant, Daszak is the principal investigator.

The new grant, which is funded through 2025, seeks to identify and rank the spillover risk of the most dangerous viruses from wildlife, including bats, in remote locations. EcoHealth Alliance is also using this funding to build chimeric, or hybrid, viruses from SARS- and MERS-like bat coronaviruses, as it did under the grant that was suspended. This time, however, the scientists are using a pangolin virus rather than a bat virus to serve as the “backbone” of their chimeras.

The new grant attempts to tighten the oversight of anything that might be considered gain-of-function research. Both the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance said that work done under the canceled bat coronavirus did not qualify for review under HHS guidelines known as P3CO, which have been in place to guard against the risk posed by federally funded gain-of-function research since 2017. But under the new grant, “building chimeras based on SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2, and MERS-CoV may be subject to the DHHS P3CO Framework and must be submitted to NIAID for review and approval prior to the work commencing.” In other words, there may be a better chance that guidelines meant to safeguard against the dangers of the research will be effective — but there’s still no guarantee. The new grant also requires EcoHealth to give the NIAID detailed descriptions of its plans and the expected changes “prior to further altering the mutant viruses.”

But scientists who have been concerned about the possibility that the bat coronavirus grant may have led to the pandemic remain concerned that the research paid for through this next round of funding may involve some of the same risks. Instead of sending viral samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is not a partner on this project, the scientists will send the collected samples, including relatives of the Hendra virus and the Nipah virus, to the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories in Boston and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, both of which operate the highest-level biosafety labs.

“It’s good it’s not going to China now. But it doesn’t need to be brought here to my home,” said Chan, the molecular biologist, who lives in Boston. “Why don’t we just keep the virus characterization local?”

“It’s good it’s not going to China now. But it doesn’t need to be brought here to my home.”

Along with the new grant, the NIH also gave Daszak his own research center. The South East Asia Research Collaboration Hub is one of 10 Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases that the NIAID created in 2020 at a cost of $82 million over five years. Some of these new projects entail potentially dangerous research. In Malaysia and Thailand, scientists are now searching for novel viruses in bats, rodents, and primates, according to the website of the CREID network. In Ethiopia, similar work is being conducted on camels and bats. In Nigeria and Sierra Leone, scientists are isolating the Lassa mammarenavirus, which causes a deadly hemorrhagic fever, and plan to ship the virus samples to a biosafety level 4 lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Another project, taking place in “North America,” is simply described as “Engineering of reverse genetics for SARS-CoV-2 and testing of mutant viruses in cell culture and animal models.”

In April, the NIAID also launched another network of research sites. The Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Response will give out $24 million in contracts in its first year for the study of emerging viruses of pandemic potential and SARS-CoV-2 as well as flu viruses. The NIH did not answer questions about what measures have been implemented to ensure biosafety under these new efforts.

Additional federal funding for outbreak prediction is also on the way. In October, USAID, which closed out the Predict project in 2019, announced that it would be spending $125 million to scale up the agency’s previous efforts to identify and understand unknown viral threats through a new project called Discovery & Exploration of Emerging Pathogens – Viral Zoonoses, or Deep VZN. Like Predict, Deep VZN will conduct sampling in select countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; the project aims to strengthen the detection and characterization of previously unknown viruses and promises that the data and information it gathers will play a critical role in developing diagnostics, medicines, and vaccines. The project has already awarded a $10 million grant to Washington State University.

In an emailed statement in response to questions from The Intercept, a USAID spokesperson wrote that “USAID is working to detect and prevent future outbreaks by discovering and sequencing new viruses. These efforts help lead to better understanding of whether a new virus can infect humans, whether a human can fight off the virus, and how well the virus can replicate in humans. This information is critical to understanding whether new viruses have the potential to spillover and infect humans.” The USAID statement also said, “Our comprehensive global health security portfolio, including DEEP VZN, works to ensure systems are in place to prevent avoidable outbreaks; detect threats early; and respond rapidly and effectively when outbreaks occur” and that the agency ensures compliance with all safety protocols and procedures.

Protective suits hang in the lab at Boston University high security research lab in Boston on January 04, 2012.

The Global Virome

Meanwhile, Daszak and Carroll are leading an even more ambitious outbreak prediction effort. The Global Virome Project plans to find and map the genomes of more than 500,000 viruses around the world at a cost of roughly $1.2 billion. Carroll, who previously directed the NIAID’s emerging pandemic threats program, refers to the 10-year, $200 million Predict project that he oversaw as a mere “pilot project” for the new endeavor.

As with Predict, the rationale for the Global Virome Project is to track down potential pathogens so that we can prepare treatments and vaccines before the diseases emerge and “kick your door in,” as Carroll explained to Kaiser Health News in a 2020 interview. But Carroll bristles at criticism that the project is overly broad. “The work that I’m advocating isn’t about identifying and characterizing every virus on the planet,” he told The Intercept, emphasizing that the research focuses on global hotspots where viruses found in wildlife would be most likely to infect people. “It’s trying to be a lot smarter about risk and future risk.”

A 2017 State Department cable from the American Embassy in Beijing offers another reason why the U.S. government might want to invest in the project: to maintain U.S. dominance over China in the field of viral research. “Absent U.S. government leadership in GVP agenda-setting, governance, and funding the Chinese government could likely take a leading position in this potentially path breaking endeavor undermining years of USG leadership and considerable investment in this critical field of public health,” the cable states. “The Chinese government has shown strong interest in the Global Virome Project and is not shy about expressing interest in funding projects where Chinese scientists will take a lead.” Indeed, China and Thailand both launched partner virome projects before the pandemic, and the State Department cable, obtained via a public records request by U.S. Right to Know, notes that the Chinese Academy of Sciences had already allocated funding for the project. In an interview, Carroll said that both the Thai and Chinese virome projects are now “on hold.”

The scientists behind the Global Virome Project emphasize its potential to help the world prepare for future pandemics. In an email to The Intercept, Edward Rubin, a physician and geneticist who serves on the project’s board, wrote that the collection of viruses on a massive scale has already put scientists on a path to developing a universal flu vaccine and could potentially help with the development of a similar vaccine for coronaviruses: “This theoretically might be vaccine specific not only for a single coronavirus family but effective against different families of coronaviruses: SARS, MERS, COVID-19 and its variants.”

While Carroll told The Intercept that he and others are “still negotiating” possible federal support for the Global Virome Project, the 2017 State Department cable suggests that the U.S. had already begun funding the project. “Significant USG support for GVP-related research already exists, including the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases Program, which is jointly supported by NIH, USDA and [National Science Foundation].”

Asked about the cable, Carroll said, “Further development of GVP has been disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Issues of sample ownership remain to be resolved.”

Even as it was getting underway, U.S. officials saw a possible hitch in the plan. “General view is that we do not want China to take a leadership role in isolation in fear of their reluctance to share data,” Rubin wrote to his colleagues in 2017 about a gathering of international officials to discuss the Global Virome Project. Similarly, the State Department cable described the project as having several “significant challenges” and unresolved questions. “Who will own the samples that are collected from many countries? Where will they be analyzed? Will all the GVP data be freely available to the public?” the cable asked in a section titled, “Like all risky endeavors, failure is a possibility.”

While acknowledging the possibility of failure, the State Department document did not explore what that failure might look like. At the time, it might have seemed unlikely that a lack of oversight of this well-intentioned endeavor could lead to grave global consequences. And it would have been hard to accurately weigh — or even imagine — the scale of worldwide misery, death, and economic disruption that hung in the balance.

The world has shifted in other ways around this massive global undertaking. While the pandemic can make the exhaustive search for dangerous viruses seem all the more necessary, unanswered questions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 underscore the profound implications of the biosecurity concerns voiced in the State Department cable. The Global Virome Project got its start at a time when scientists from China and the U.S. could work together in a way that felt constructive. But now, as tensions over the origins of the pandemic escalate, it’s hard to imagine such cooperation — and hard to imagine that the U.S. will ever have full access to all the viral research funded through NIH grants at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“We’re missing the entire period of 2016 to 2019. What viruses and sequences did they find?”

Chief among the missing data are the genetic sequences of viruses the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance collected between 2016 and 2019. A 2020 paper that Shi, Daszak, and others published in Nature, which cited the bat coronavirus grant as one of its funding sources, includes only viral samples collected through 2015. The sequences of viruses collected under the grant since then have yet to become public.

“We’re missing the entire period of 2016 to 2019. What viruses and sequences did they find?” asked Chan, who had similar questions about the projects underway through the new Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases. Is there any way to ensure transparency and accountability around the viruses and information they collect?

Meanwhile, the fate of the China Virome Project, which was begun in the hopes of working in conjunction with the Global Virome Project, is unclear. Rather than collaborating on health security, the U.S. and China are now positioned to operate as competing superpowers in a biological arms race, engaged in separate efforts to hunt down the world’s most dangerous viruses.

Skirting Safeguards

Even the experts who see the global pursuit of the most dangerous potential pandemic pathogens as dangerous folly agree that basic research on viruses must continue. The challenge is how to do that safely — and ensure that safety measures cover all areas of research that pose risk.

The shortfalls of recent efforts to shore up the safety of viral research are now becoming clear. The U.S. instituted a carefully thought-out moratorium on gain-of-function research — but the policy specifically carved out an exemption for hunting coronaviruses. “The research funding pause would not apply to characterization or testing of naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses,” as the 2014 HHS document made clear. Similarly, the P3CO guidelines that HHS issued in 2017 apply only to “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens” — and not viruses that have not been altered, even though they may also be dangerous.

And as happened in the case of EcoHealth Alliance, even the best-laid policies can be evaded by powerful scientists. Daszak and Fauci, two powerful leaders in their field, were able to work together to skirt safeguards the U.S. government imposed on gain-of-function research, which might have otherwise prevented experiments that were conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as The Intercept has previously reported.

Related

NIH Officials Worked With EcoHealth Alliance to Evade Restrictions on Coronavirus Experiments

The U.S. government does have some strict safety protocols in place for working with dangerous pathogens. Virus hunters are required to report any bites or scratches that happen during sampling and train workers in emergency response. But such rules are only as strong as whoever is enforcing them — and they may be increasingly difficult to enforce.

While countries across the globe are taking part in this research, there are no international standards for bio-risk management. Several of the scientists interviewed for the piece, including Carroll of the Global Virome Project, emphasized the urgent need for such oversight. Without it, the level of attention to the possible dangers of the work varies widely throughout the world. Some partners may not agree with the U.S. government about when such facilities should be used, as was the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had a biosafety level 4 lab but did much of its work on coronaviruses through the NIAID grant in a much less protective biosafety level 2 lab.

“You can say, ‘You have to have this and this equipment in place,’ but it’s harder to ask for certain ways of operating,” said Lentzos, who added that in many countries it is difficult for scientists working on viruses to honestly discuss risk. “Some of this work is taking place in cultures where openness, transparency, and admitting mistakes is not encouraged at all. In fact, the opposite is encouraged.”

An even more vexing challenge to keeping this work safe is the persistent impulse to push past the bounds of acceptability, which can drive researchers around the world to conduct risky gain-of-function experiments or press into the world’s most remote bat caves. According to Lentzos, the pressure to transgress those norms is built into the profession of science. “You have to push the envelope,” she said. “That’s what gets recognition, not just peer recognition, but that’s what gets funding. That’s what gets publication.”

In other words, it’s simply all too human to gravitate toward the most dangerous science — just as it’s only human to have all sorts of accidents once you do.

Documents published with this article:

Risk of Viral Emergence from Bats

Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in Emerging Infectious Disease Hotspots of Southeast Asia

The Ecology, Emergence and Pandemic Potential of Nipah Virus in Bangladesh

Understanding the Risk of Bat-Borne Zoonotic Disease Emergence in Western Asia

Communications related to “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence”

HHS Inspector General Notice of Audit

Year 2 Award Notice Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in EID Hotspots of Southeast Asia

Documents previously published by The Intercept:

Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence

Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Virus Emergence in Emerging Infectious Disease Hotspots in Southeast Asia

The post How the Pursuit of Unknown Viruses Risks Triggering the Next Pandemic appeared first on The Intercept.

Truong, 26, managed to link up with the congressional campaign of Sri Preston Kulkarni in Texas’s 22nd District. Truong didn’t recognize the radical nature of what he was about to engage in; he just considered it common sense. “If a block walker looks like the constituent, they’re more willing to listen,” Truong said.

Truong, who is Vietnamese-American, is now part of a sophisticated new experiment to target and turn out historically non-voting Asian-Americans by reaching them precisely where they are.

Kulkarni, a 40-year-old Democrat, is facing incumbent Rep. Pete Olson in November, armed with a multilingual, multigenerational, multicultural battery of dedicated volunteers, in a rapidly changing district that national Democrats had long ignored, but suddenly believe is flippable. On Wednesday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee broke a long silence and put Kulkarni on their coveted “Red to Blue” list. “Sri has put together a strong, people-powered campaign that makes this race competitive,” said DCCC chair Ben Ray Luján in a statement.

That may be something of an understatement. The campaign has held phone banks in 13 languages, including six major dialects spoken in India and a Nigerian language called Igbo. Organizers have dispatched volunteers to micro-target tiny communities. It has taken a street-by-street approach to outreach that has already paid dividends. When Kulkarni defeated four challengers for the Democratic nomination, his campaign’s internal figures show that they increased the Asian-American percentage of the primary electorate from 6 percent in 2014, the last midterm election, to 28 percent in 2018.

If Kulkarni succeeds, his tactics will become a model for how to target communities that historically don’t vote, primarily because nobody has ever tried to engage them in politics.

Along the way, volunteers have broken out of their clusters and gained a cultural education of their own. “All the people I’ve met I never knew before January,” said Renée Mathew, an empty-nest mother and precinct chair in Sugar Land. “Whatever happens on November 6, we’re going to still be here. We’re all connected in an amazing way.”

Along the way, Kulkarni’s campaign is challenging the popular mythology of Texas. Olson has derided Kulkarni as an “Indo-American who’s a carpetbagger,” but it is Olson who’s the relative newcomer. Kulkarni’s family can trace its lineage back to migrants from the 1600s — and he is descended directly from the founding father of Texas, Sam Houston. Texas: It’s complicated.

The breadth of this organizing is necessitated by the astonishing growth in Fort Bend County, a suburban ring outside Houston that’s home to 80 percent of the district, as sugar cane farms and open fields have given way to master-planned subdivisions. Good schools and several major arteries to downtown Houston have attracted young families. In 1990, the population of Fort Bend County was a little over 225,000. By 2017, it stood at nearly 765,000, a gain of 239 percent in 27 years. Estimates say it will be 2.1 million by 2050.

Texas’s 22nd Congressional District, eight years after reapportionment in 2010, now has 897,000 residents, making it the largest congressional district in America by population, outside of the state of Delaware. The demographic makeup — 90 percent suburban, well-educated, and above average in median household wealth — mirrors the kinds of districts that national Democrats have been contesting in 2018. And the shifting political tastes here are apparent. In 2016, Trump won TX-22 by 8 points, a 17.5 point swing from Mitt Romney’s victory over Barack Obama in 2012. That’s one of the largest congressional district swings in the country, and now two more years’ worth of new residents have moved in.

The difference — and perhaps the reason why national Democrats have been slow to recognize the opportunity — is that this district is incredibly diverse. Paradoxically, Democrats in Washington have long believed that their emerging coalition relies heavily on minority voters, but when they gaze toward the suburbs, they see white people, and that’s not the complexion of this Houston suburb. Fort Bend County is 65 percent minority, with almost equal amounts of African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans. Within those large banners are dozens of subgroups; Kulkarni’s campaign estimates that 100 languages are spoken within the district. Churches mix with temples and mosques, fast-food joints with biryani restaurants along the main boulevards. “We don’t look like Texas now, but this is what it will look like in 20 or 30 years,” Kulkarni said.

Though Asian-Americans have trended sharply left in the last decade, these communities have largely been ignored in politics. Those who do vote in the affluent district vote Republican. Consultants and strategists don’t see enough return on investment to put in the effort to raise historically low turnout. “When I ask people why they haven’t voted before, I get variations of them saying, ‘No one ever talked to me about it,’” said volunteer Nathan Truong.

Doing the outreach properly would require a small army of campaign workers. Who could inspire so many people to engage so deeply? The answer is Sri Preston Kulkarni, who is almost preternaturally situated to organize a place like this. “Sri is an Asian Barack Obama. When you hear him speak, that’s it,” said Ali Hasanali, a second-generation Indian-American who joined the campaign early.

Kulkarni spent 14 years in the foreign service, with tours in Iraq, Israel, Russia, Taiwan, and Jamaica. He speaks six languages fluently (English, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Hebrew, and Russian). Hasanali told me about Kulkarni visiting the Texas Democratic Party convention, discussing working in Iraq at the Muslim caucus, and cracking jokes in Hebrew at the Jewish caucus. Kulkarni has also practiced his diplomatic skills in conflict zones. “In Iraq, I sat across the table from a person funding roadside bombs,” he said. “I was literally sitting next to the man trying to kill me! If I can talk to him, I can talk to anyone.”

Few other candidates have this life experience, and it could prove useful in Washington. But Kulkarni, whose political experience consists of a brief fellowship working for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., on the Senate Armed Services Committee, had to get past a five-person field in the Democratic primary. He charted a path to victory by activating dormant, cloistered communities across the district who hadn’t traditionally turned out, especially for midterm elections.

“There was a study that spent several years figuring out how to get people who don’t vote to vote,” Kulkarni said. “They found that you needed to talk to them. Big surprise!”

Kulkarni, along with a core campaign team of second-generation immigrants and millennials, had a fundamental insight: Nobody views themselves as solely Asian-American. East Asians from the Philippines, China, and Taiwan had to be approached differently from South Asians from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Even within that, there are sub-groups from the Indian subcontinent, like Gujaratis, Punjabis, and Bengalis. And all of these cultures are represented in the 22nd District.

The campaign took a list of 85,000 registered Asian-American voters and manually broke it down into as many categories as possible, whether by religion or ethnicity or homeland or personal knowledge from volunteers. “We were figuring it out from last names,” said Kulkarni. “This person is Patel, they come from this region. This one is Subramanian. The Ismaili Muslims, they’re a sect of the Shia and you can tell from the names.”

After the categorizing, they split the voter lists into notebooks and designated volunteers to speak to people within their communities. Gujaratis would call Gujaratis. Urdu speakers would call Urdu speakers.

Meera Kapur, a Punjabi-American Kulkarni volunteer, related the micro-targeting to a campaign she worked on two decades ago for Martha Wong, the first Asian-American on the Houston City Council. “In those days we were a smaller community; we would go door to door and talk to our friends,” Kapur said. “It’s just going to the places where a lot of people are who don’t pay attention. On their grounds, where they feel comfortable.”

Kapur said she would not always start phone bank conversations in Punjabi, but downshift into it along the way. Others, like Nathan Truong, open with “xin chào” as a general hello greeting for Vietnamese speakers, or “Ni hao” for Chinese. He saw it as a sign of respect, making people comfortable with the messenger and subsequently, the message. Just pronouncing someone’s name properly or throwing in a common phrase can earn that trust. “From my time in the classroom, effort goes a long way,” Truong said.

The campaign believes that they’ve increased phone bank response rates between twofold and fivefold. The outreach led Kulkarni to the top 30 percent in the five-way primary, and over 60 percent in the runoff to take the nomination. “We were told that the easiest way to lose is go after voters who don’t vote,” Kulkarni said. “We did this on our own with a strategy that they said can’t win. It’s like, tell me one more of your conventional wisdom rules.”

For the general election, Kulkarni has expanded the scale. “Instead of just phone banking, we take a group, like the Gujarati list or 18-year-olds in a certain high school,” he explained. “I give [a volunteer] this list of voters, and I say, identify the people you know on that list. If you can identify 300, I’m not going to have you randomly phone bank, you’re going to call the people you know. If they don’t show up on the first day of voting, you’re going to call them as someone who knows them directly.”

The campaign has filtered by social network: Chinese-Americans tend to use WeChat, while South Asians use WhatsApp. They’ve deputized high school volunteers to cover their circles of friends. They’ve organized within temples and mosques, and professional organizations for people of color. In master-planned communities, they’ve found individuals in homeowner associations who know all the families. It’s hyperlocal targeting to friends, and friends of friends, as an offline complement to social networking. It’s all designed to get someone with a direct connection in front of voters.

“We find actual community leaders to be the organizing force for specific communities,” said Hasanali, who has honed this technique at a smaller scale on campaigns in Fort Bend County since 2010. “You can’t have token representation. That never gets you community-based knowledge that someone in the community does.”

That Kulkarni can even attempt this strategy is a testament to his success as an organizer. “Building a volunteer corps that can reach out in this many languages proves there’s a connection,” said Maria Urbina, political director for Indivisible, which has backed Kulkarni. “That’s why we’re excited about him, he’s not just chasing the same people.”

Kulkarni likes to emphasize different aspects of his platform depending on his audience. For Indian-Americans, he finds that everyone knows someone with an H1-B or H-4 work permit visa issue, so he highlights that. With Chinese-American groups, he discusses family reunification (what Trump calls “chain migration”). For Latino groups, it’s family separation at the border.

Other issues cut across groups. “We all care about health care, we all care about keeping kids safe,” said Renée Mathew. Kulkarni can draw on local and personal experience here. Santa Fe High School, where 10 were killed in a mass shooting, is just outside the district. And when Kulkarni was 18, his father contracted leukemia, and being the oldest son, he dropped out of college to care for him. His father died the next year, and the family needed donations to stay out of bankruptcy. “Medicare for All” is the top issue on his website.

But Kulkarni also points to pride as a way to rally voters around someone who would be the first Asian-American member of Congress from Texas in history. “In Hinduism we have the concept of dharma, obligation or duty, all cultures have that,” he said. “If you appeal to that feeling of communal responsibility, people will be more motivated to show up.”

He continued. “We have people who speak Tamil; in the primary they were saying that all Tamils will show up. We showed them that only 30 percent turned out in the primary. Now they’re all extra-motivated, they want to show us that they’ll turn out!”

Kulkarni’s campaign doesn’t merely run on intense volunteer organizing. He has raised over $1 million without taking corporate PAC money, well outpacing Pete Olson, his Republican opponent, in the most recent fundraising quarter (half of Olson’s cash comes from corporate PACs). He earned an endorsement from the Houston Chronicle editorial board, with the board raving that Kulkarni “represents our politics at its best.”

Olson, on the other hand, didn’t show up to the editorial board and is seen by many in the district as a non-entity. Elected in 2008, Olson has named his two greatest accomplishments as a bill he wrote to reverse ozone standards that has yet to pass, and the renaming of a post office. “A countywide Republican official told me, ‘You know what they call people like Olson in Congress?’” asked Hasanali. “Office furniture.”

In a video of a meet-and-greet with local supporters in Sugar Land, supplied by the Kulkarni campaign, Olson calls his opponent a “liberal, liberal, liberal Indo-American who’s a carpetbagger.” Kulkarni was abroad in the foreign service and then in Washington and at Harvard’s Kennedy School until 2017, but he was born and raised in the district and literally has familial ties to a founding son of the state. Says Kulkarni, “When Olson said I was an Indo-American carpetbagger, my mom said, ‘Why not ask him if he’s related to Sam Houston?’”

Olson continues in the video to question Kulkarni’s raising of money from “a group called Act Blue.” Apparently unaware of the fundraising tool for Democratic candidates, Olson marvels that “somehow the other side has arranged for people to send money to this group in Massachusetts, to send it all across the country.” And he further intimates that the money must be “coming from overseas” or through some other illegal means.

Olson speaks to supporters at Big Ben Tavern on August 1, 2018, referring to Kulkarni as an Indo-American “carpetbagger” getting donations from “a group called Act Blue.” Video: Kulkarni Campaign

“You don’t assume when you get a donation from someone with the name Murphy that it’s coming from Ireland,” said David Manners-Weber, Kulkarni’s campaign manager. “We have a lot of diverse supporters who are Americans.”

It was not the first time Republicans in the area have used ethnicity as a club in the Kulkarni race. Earlier in the campaign, Olson blamed Pakistanis for 9/11, later calling it “accidental.” Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Kulkarni saw it as a way to pit traditionally adversarial communities, like Pakistanis and Indians, against one another. More recently, the Fort Bend Republican Party had to apologize for a campaign ad likening the Hindu deity Ganesh to the GOP elephant.

Olson wrapped up his talk this way: “We’re going to make sure they don’t turn this county blue because that’s their dream. … Mrs. Clinton won this county by 10,000 votes in 2016. Democrats saw that. And they know if they can put a blue tinge, a little purple, on Fort Bend County, they may be able to take Texas. If they take Texas, guess what happens? We never, ever have a person like Donald Trump in the White House.”

Said Kulkarni: “Sounds good to me!”

The volunteers, all unpaid, span generations, occupations, and electoral experience. Most have never worked on campaigns before. Kulkarni has attracted mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, and numerous members of his extended family. There are Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipinos, Indians of all ethnicities, African-Americans, Latinos, and yes, some whites.

Renée Mathew reflects the campaign’s spirit. She’s white; her ex-husband is from south India; her son, like Kulkarni, is a polyglot, working on his sixth language and studying abroad in China. She has held campaign meetings in her house and provided a couch for field organizers. She praises Kulkarni for his “compassion, reason, and decency,” and ability to disagree with respect. “It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.

Even if Kulkarni doesn’t succeed, the campaign will leave an infrastructure in place for the future: from waves of new Democratic voters locally, to interns and organizers schooled in community engagement who can replicate it anywhere in America. When you activate communities, that switch rarely turns off.

I asked Ali Hasanali, who has been banging away at this strategy for a decade, what it would mean to win. “I think for me personally it would be a lifelong dream,” he said. “I have had people yell at me, call me a terrorist in public school. This would be a sign that change is possible. If you trust your instincts and do community building, you can see dividends being paid.”

The post Texas Candidate’s Radical Approach to Turning Out Asian-American Non-Voters: Talking to Them (in 13 Different Languages) appeared first on The Intercept.

There is a largely hidden, poorly regulated, and highly profitable industry in the United States that has a gruesome function: breeding dogs for the sole purpose of often torturous experimentation, after which the dogs are killed because they are no longer of use.

Americans frequently express horror at festivals in countries such as China and South Korea where dogs are killed, cooked, and eaten. Mainstream media outlets in the U.S. routinely report, with a tone of disgust, on the use of dogs in those countries for food consumption.

But in the U.S. itself, corporations and academic institutions exploit dogs (as well as cats and rabbits) for excruciating experiments that are completely trivial, even useless, and are just as abusive as the practices in Asia that have produced so much moral indignation in the West. These dogs are frequently bred into life for the sole purpose of being laboratory objects, and spend their entire, often short, existence locked in a small cage, subjected to procedures that impose extreme pain and suffering.

The horrors of the dog experimentation industry are on vivid display at Ridglan Farms Inc., a company that provides beagles to research facilities.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s aptly named the Animal Usage report, 60,979 dogs were used in the U.S. for experimentation in 2016 alone. The reported number of all animals used for experimentation, whose reporting was required, was 820,812. Often, the experimentation has nothing to do with medical research, but rather trivial commercial interests, and in almost all cases, dogs provide little to no unique scientific value. This chart, compiled by Speaking of Research using USDA data, reflects the total numbers of animals used for experimentation in 2016 — an increase of 6.9 percent as compared to the prior year:

Dogs bred into life for use or sale as experimentation objects have all the same emotional complexities, sensations of suffering and deprivation, and inbred need for human companionship as household dogs which are loved as pets and members of the family. Yet the legalized cruelty and torture to which man’s best friend is subjected for profit in the U.S. is virtually limitless.

In fact, the majority of dogs bred and sold for experimentation are beagles, which are considered ideal because of their docile, human-trusting personality. In other words, the very traits that have made them such loving and loyal companions to humans are the ones that humans exploit to best manipulate them in labs.

Even when legal standards are adhered to — and they often are not — the permitted abuse to which these dogs are subjected is horrifying. They are often purposely starved or put into a state of severe thirst to induce behavior they would otherwise not engage in. They are frequently bred deliberately to have crippling, excruciating diseases, or sometimes are brought into life just to have have their organs, eyes, and other body parts removed and studied as puppies, and then quickly killed.

They are force-fed laundry detergents, pesticides, and industrial chemicals to the point of continuous vomiting and death. They are injected with lethal pathogens such as salmonella or rabies. They have artificial sweetener injected into their veins that causes the dogs’ testicles to shrink before they are killed and exsanguinated. Holes are drilled into their skulls so that viruses can be injected into their brains. And all of that is perfectly legal.

The horrors of the dog experimentation industry are on vivid display at Ridglan Farms Inc., one of the three largest firms in the U.S. that provides beagles to research facilities. Located in Dane County, Wisconsin — on a hill west of Madison — the corporation, according to Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, investigators, provides dogs to research facilities that include the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota, and various colleges within the University of California system.

Last spring, activists with DxE entered a door that was ajar at the Ridglan facility in order to investigate conditions inside, document what they saw, and rescue a sampling of dogs in particular distress. What they found horrified even these hardened activists, who have seen years worth of severe animal abuse. DxE activists spent a year investigating the facility and the industry its serves, and are releasing their footage and accompanying report for the first time today.

One of the DxE investigators, Wayne Hsiung, told The Intercept, “As you approach the facility, the smell is overwhelming — exactly the same smell from a dog meat slaughterhouse in China.” The first thing the investigators saw upon entering — as demonstrated by the photo at the top of this article — was that “the dogs are housed in huge industrial sheds with massive ventilation fans, very similar to the sheds used in factory farms.” Hsiung, a former lawyer, added in an email:

Thousands of dogs are held in cages, usually 1-2 to a cage and stacked on top of one another, that are about twice the length of the dog’s body. We found no facilities for the dogs to step outside or exercise. The dogs sit on their own feces and urine, unable to escape their own waste. Dogs are routinely so desperate to escape that they slam themselves against the cage walls, desperately stretch their paws through the bars, and sometimes chew on the cages. The screams of the dogs in the facility are so loud that we were forced to yell at one another to communicate, even when we were only a foot away from one another.

In response to multiple requests from The Intercept that included detailed questions about what this story would include, a Ridglan spokesperson said the company would decline to comment.

Cages of “research dogs” stacked on top of each other at Ridglan Farms Inc.

Dog experimentation is pervasive

The number of dogs used for experimentation in the U.S. has generally declined some over the past several decades — though it rose again last year — but still remains remarkably high. The most common animals used for testing — mice, fish, and birds — are not covered by any federal regulations or reporting requirements, and thus no precise numbers are known, but estimates vary from 20 million to as many as 100 million.

The primary law governing treatment of animal experimentation is the Animal Welfare Act, or AWA, which was first enacted in 1966 under the name Laboratory Animal Welfare Act. Under all federal law, all forms of experimentation on animals — including on dogs — is legally permissible, even though superior research alternatives (such as stem cell research) are increasingly available. A small handful of states have banned product testing on animals if alternatives are available.

While the AWA permits all animal experimentation, it requires minimal standards of humane treatment for dogs that are bred and sold for experimentation. But even when these rules are complied with, the conditions in which “research dogs” are routinely kept are nothing short of barbaric.

For instance, regulations merely require that the dogs’ cage be six inches taller than their height and six inches longer than their body length. Doubling that size eliminates the requirement to allow the dogs out of their cage at all for exercise.

The cruelty even of treatment that complies with legal standards is illustrated by a handbook from one of the field’s most authoritative researchers. The Laboratory Animal Medicine and Science training program series, developed by the American College of Laboratory Animal Medicine, the handbook is designed to create industry norms. Its author is Jerald Silverman, a leading authority figure in the animal research industry.

The handbook describes the proper methods for putting “ear tattoos” on the dogs for identification and tracking purposes. The first picture below is of a “research dog” kept in a cage that is twice the size required by federal regulations, which means, as Silverman notes, that the exercise requirements for the dog are eliminated. The two images below describe the “humane” way for treating research dogs, and the third relates to tattoos:

That means that tens of thousands of dogs are barely able to move. They are fully isolated, with their metal cages stacked on top of one another. Many “research dogs” never see the sunlight, go outside, or exercise, spending their entire lives locked in a cage.

Most dogs used in research are purchased from so-called Class A breeders, which are licensed specifically to breed and raise “research dogs.” (“Class B” dealers are ones who collect or buy animals, rather than breed them themselves.) Among the services they offer is “devocalization,” which the advocacy group NAVS describes as “a surgical procedure which makes it physically impossible for the dog to bark.” The procedure costs $20 to $47 per dog, according to NAVS, and is “performed so that barking dogs do not disturb lab technicians.” The Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association details the significant pain and risks from such procedures.

A new group devoted to stopping taxpayer-funded animal research, White Coat Waste Project, created some national news when they exposed horrific practices inside Veterans Affairs facilities earlier this year. “We’re talking about tests like taking six-month-old puppies – putting them on treadmills – forcing them to run. Exhausted dogs, inducing heart attacks, sloppy and botched surgeries, restraint devices, drilling holes in their skulls, destroying their brains and charging taxpayers for it,” one of the group’s founders reported.

Worst of all is that dogs and other mammals provide almost no medical value in experiments because of their physiology. Lawrence Hansen, a professor of neuroscience and pathology at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine, once engaged in experimentation on dogs and wrote how ashamed he was of this work in a 2016 op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

From a scientific perspective, the problem is that dogs, monkeys and mice are not simplified versions of humans. This is why the NIH reports that 95 percent of drugs that pass animal tests — often including beagles — fail in humans because they don’t work or are dangerous. … In my specialty, Alzheimer’s disease, the drug failure rate is actually 99.6 percent, and the use of animals has recently been referred to as “a cliff over which people push bales of money.”

One of the most common experimental techniques used on dogs is known as “oral gavage,” used to force animals to ingest substances they otherwise would refuse. The scientific literature, such as this 2015 study from the Journal of Pharmacological and Toxicological Methods, defines it as “a technique for delivering a substance directly into the stomach and is frequently used to administer test compounds in research and toxicity testing.”

This is the same hideous technique that is used to make foie gras, by force-feeding a bird, duck, or goose to the point that its liver enlarges to such massive proportions that the animal suffers excruciating pain before death. So cruel is the procedure that many cities around the world — from San Francisco to São Paulo — have banned the sale of foie gras altogether. But the technique continues to be permitted, and widely used, on dogs in laboratories across the U.S.

As loose and permissive as this legal framework is, these standards are often flagrantly ignored by many dog breeding and experimentation corporations — with little consequence. Dogs are often mangled, tortured, and killed through sadistic abuse, reckless experimentation, or just sheer negligence. 

Beagles Preferred for Experiments

The dog breed which corporate breeders and research labs prefer is the beagle. In a dark and twisted irony, what makes them such beloved and kind animals, and particularly well suited for households with small children, is precisely what dooms them to an existence of suffering as objects of experimentations. The National Institutes of Health’s poorly named Office of Research Integrity states the blunt truth: “Most of the dogs used in research are beagles due to their convenient size and docile nature.”

The neuroscience professor who once experimented on dogs and now regrets it, Hansen, wrote in his op-ed, “Of all the animals used in research, subjecting dogs to invasive experiments is especially condemnable because humans have selectively bred dogs to unconditionally love the very people who sometimes visit abuses upon them.” That is especially true of beagles, because of how kind, loving, and thus malleable they are.

About such experimentation, Hansen wrote, “After three decades, I’m still ashamed to say I was once convinced to participate in this betrayal.” And he describes how his training in experimenting on and then killing dogs went back to medical school:

Back in medical school, I was instructed to cut apart and kill dogs — a Golden Retriever and a black Lab — for physiology demonstrations and surgical practice. In the latter case, we were made to perform weekly surgeries on the same dogs until the end of the lesson and until, frankly, the dogs couldn’t take any more of the mutilations and we put them out of their misery. I did it, qualms of conscience notwithstanding, because I was told it was “necessary.”

Increasingly, shelter mutts are also often used, as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals found as part of an investigation it conducted: “PETA’s undercover investigation inside the laboratories of the University of Utah revealed that the school was purchasing homeless dogs and cats from local shelters for use in invasive, painful, and often deadly experiments.” But in the world of corporate breeders, beagles remain the object of choice. Scientific literature, for decades, has bluntly discussed the attributes of beagles that make them ideal for experimentation:

Jeremy Beckham, a research associate with PETA’s Laboratory Investigations Department, wrote a definitive history of how beagles became, during the Cold War, the breed of choice to treat as objects for experimentation, with virtually no limits on the suffering and torture to which they were subjected.

In 1952, he wrote, “Experimenters at the University of Utah Radiobiology Laboratory injected a beagle known only as ‘T0P5’ with a radioactive and highly toxic isotope of plutonium. The dose that was given to T0P5 – more than 3 microcuries per kilogram – was 1,620 times the recommended maximum amount for human exposure.” Twenty-four hours later, ToP5, only 33 months old, was killed.

That began a huge spate of experimentation with and killing of beagles. Over the next several decades, the U.S. government spent $200 million — a large sum for those years — on injecting dogs with radiation. As Beckham noted, “Between the years of 1952 and 1983, federally funded radiation research killed more than 7,000 beagles in laboratories located in six locations throughout the United States: University of Utah, University of California-Davis, Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Washington state, the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in New Mexico, and Colorado State University.”

These gruesome experiments, like most dog experimentation today, produced almost no scientific value. As Beckham documents, “Epidemiological and clinical studies during this same timeframe provided us with much more meaningful data about the dangers of ionizing radiation.” But it started the trend of breeding beagles into life in order to use them for all forms of experimentation, and then dispense with them when done.

April 1956 article in Mechanix Illustrated on the University of Utah’s beagle experimentation program

A 1962 academic paper entitled “Adult Beagles. Radiation Research”

Even as dogs have become beloved pets in the U.S., treated as members of the family, with harsh punishments for those who abuse them, the behavior of corporate and academic entities that subject dogs to gruesome experimentations has barely changed. It’s a strange hypocrisy: Individuals may not abuse these animals, but corporations can.

One stirring video excerpt, provided to The Intercept by Beckham from a PETA investigation into Liberty Research Inc., shows how dogs, and cats, are treated as inanimate laboratory objects who, once their usefulness runs arounds, have their lives extinguished with the casualness of how one tosses a used paper towel into a trash can:

That gratuitous and indescribably cruel experimentation on beagles is as barbaric as ever is illustrated by this opening paragraph from Craig Masilow’s 2015 exposé in the Houston Press:

The purpose-bred laboratory beagle is a remarkably versatile animal. It can be used to ingest a toxic compound until it dies and to ascertain human safety guidelines for pesticides. Its heart, brain and prostate are easily accessible for cancer studies. It is bred to be docile and obedient, and, if necessary, it can be purchased sans working vocal cords. For around $700, you get a 33-pound specimen that needs no more than 8 square feet of kennel space, per federal law.

The group Rescue Freedom Project is devoted to rescuing beagles and other dogs from research labs. This video excerpt shows the first dog they ever rescued — a beagle who had been “devocalized” — as she steps on grass for the first time in her life, in 2010, after having spent her life being experimented on. The trauma is palpable, as one would expect:

Lax regulatory enforcement

The federal legal standards in the U.S. for ensuring humane treatment during experimentation are incredibly permissive, yet they are still frequently violated by corporations and academic facilities. And when these laws are violated, virtually nothing happens to the offenders, even when the violations are egregious and result in severe suffering, or even death, for the dogs.

Federal oversight of breeders and research facilities has been notoriously lax for years, to the point where penalties for even the most egregious abuses are systematically reduced to such a low level that they barely register. This laxity has worsened in the Trump era, with the new Republican administration placing more agricultural industry executives at the helm of oversight agencies than ever before.

The inspector general found that the Animal Care Unit “did not follow its own criteria in closing at least 59 cases that involved grave (e.g., animal deaths) or repeat welfare violations.” Even when violators were punished, the agency ensured that the punishments were so trivial that they would inflict no real consequences.

At times, the inspector general report documented, “some violators that committed grave violations only received official warning letters,” and even where violations “were mostly either serious (e.g., compromise the health and well-being of animals) or grave (e.g., result in animal deaths), violators were offered penalties reduced to between 57 and 97 percent of AWA’s authorized maximum penalty per violation, or 86 percent on average.”

The USDA has been notoriously permissive, for decades, when it comes to corporate abusers of dogs for research purposes. In 1995, the inspector general found that “dealers and other facilities had little incentive to comply with AWA because monetary penalties were, in some cases, arbitrarily reduced and often so low that violators regarded them as a cost of doing business.”

A decade later, nothing changed: Matters were just as grim, as the 2005 inspector general report found that “in addition to reducing the penalty by 75 percent, APHIS offered other concessions — making penalties basically meaningless. Violators continued to consider the monetary stipulation as a normal cost of business, rather than a deterrent for violating the law.” In 2010, still nothing had changed: “an OIG audit of problematic dealers found that APHIS’ enforcement process was ineffective, and the agency was misusing its own guidelines to lower penalties for AWA violators.”

As The Intercept has previously reported, much of this lax regulation in the context of industrial abuse of animals is the result of the revolving door form of legalized corruption that dominates so much of Washington. As our reporting noted, “The USDA is typically dominated by executives from the very factory farm industries that are most in need of vibrant regulation.”

President Donald Trump’s appointee to head the USDA, former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, has extensive ties to the agribusiness sector he’s now supposed to oversee and regulate, a history of lax enforcement of industry rules, and substantial contributions from corporations over which his department exercises regulatory supervision. It is thus unsurprising that the USDA, early in 2017, “abruptly removed inspection reports and other information from its website about the treatment of animals at thousands of research laboratories, zoos, dog breeding operations and other facilities,” according to the Washington Post.

The USDA’s own data shows that enforcement of animal welfare laws is plummeting during the Trump era. The amount of civil penalties assessed, for instance, went from $3.8 million in fiscal year 2016, to only $467,150 in fiscal year 2017. The numbers for 2018 are on par to be far worse still:

To the extent that there are bills pending in Congress on this enforcement scheme, many of them would actually weaken, rather than strengthen, the already permissive regime. Just last week, according to the Animal Welfare Institute, “Representative David Rouzer (R-NC) introduced an amendment to absolve experimental laboratories of the very minimal requirement for an annual inspection by the USDA to ensure compliance with the basic animal care standards of the Animal Welfare Act. If approved, research facilities would only have to submit to USDA oversight of their use of animals once every three years.”

It is thus virtually impossible to imagine this enforcement scheme improving under the Trump administration. Indeed, it appears highly likely, if not inevitable, that it will get even worse.

Rescue operation at Ridglan

According to its 2017 report filed with the USDA, Ridglan Farms is currently holding almost 4,000 dogs that are being “bred, conditioned, or held for use in teaching, testing, experiments, research, or surgery, but not yet used for such purposes.”

Using the narrow definitions of federal law, the company reported that the “number of animals upon which experiments, teaching, research, surgery, or tests were conducted involving accompanying pain or distress to the animals and for which appropriate anesthetic, analgesic, or tranquilizing drugs” is 79 (the definition of “accompanying pain or distress” includes only physical, not psychological, torment).

When DxE investigators arrived there last spring and looked at the cages, the first thing they noticed was how many dogs were exhibiting extreme psychological torment, including endless spinning. Many of the dogs, they say, had skin and foot conditions from walking on wire their entire lives. They decided to rescue three dogs. The video published by The Intercept details the investigation, rescue, and subsequent care for these dogs.

“Research beagles” in their Ridglan cages.

The rescue of these dogs saved them from a short but hideously painful life as lab objects. In the report published today, provided in advance to The Intercept, DxE explains, “Ridglan says on their website, ‘We do not conduct toxicology studies or studies which require euthanasia at the conclusion of the study.’” But the company does not deny, and to The Intercept refused to provide comment, that it sells dogs to universities and other researchers who do use them for toxicology studies and kill them when the study is concluded.

As DxE detailed, some of the most horrifying experiments imaginable, along with post-experimentation killing, are common in research laboratories, meaning that there is at least a strong possibility that Ridglan has sent thousands of dogs to brutal ends. Common industry-wide experiments, as DxE describes them, include:

• Poisoned with artificial sweeteners. In a 2015 study by food giant Cargill, dogs were given large doses of a new artificial sweetener, which caused the male dogs’ testicles to shrink. All dogs were killed at the end of the study.

• Infected with heartworm. In a 2016 study at Auburn University, dogs were infected with heartworm larvae to the test the relative efficacy of commercial heartworm treatments. Five months after the infection, the dogs were killed.

• Convulsions from synthetic cannabis. In a 1987 study at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, dogs were forced to ingest nabilone, a synthetic cannabinoid, until some experienced convulsions and died.

• Force-fed commercial laundry detergent. In a 1974 study by the Lovelace Foundations, dogs were forced to ingest large amounts of commercial laundry detergent. Some vomited blood and died.

One of the dogs rescued from Ridglan was blind, though an ophthalmologist was unable to determine what caused it. Another had “mangled internal organs” that, according to DxE, were the apparent result of some sort of surgical procedure. The veterinarian who operated on her told DxE activists she was shocked and had never seen something like that.

All dogs have since recovered, but they also exhibit symptoms of trauma, including fearfulness and extreme separation anxiety. The blind dog in particular continues to spin around reflexively. While the physical pain and torment from experimentation is obviously severe, the psychological trauma for dogs kept in isolation after having been bred to need human companionship can be even worse.

Legislative and other solutions

As grim as all of this is, there are rational grounds for believing that reform is possible. As a 2015 Pew Research Center poll found, “The general public is closely divided when it comes to the use of animals in research: 47% favor the practice, while a nearly equal share (50%) oppose it.” That was for all animals, including rats and fish. Given the widespread sympathies for dogs in the U.S., the percentage opposing their use in experimentation is almost certainly far higher.

More interestingly still, animal rights have become a far less ideological cause than they once were perceived as being. The group White Coat Waste has tried to bridge that ideological gap by emphasizing a ban on taxpayer-funded animal experimentation, a posture that would enable liberals and conservatives to unite. Given that publicly funded animal experimentation composes a large bulk of such experiments in the U.S., that could go a long way to eliminating this cruelty. One poll commissioned by White Coat Waste found that a majority of Americans (60 percent) favor such a ban.

The promise of this approach is reflected in the increasingly bipartisan, trans-ideological nature of animal rights activism. Late last week, a right-wing GOP House member, Mike Bishop of Michigan, joined with Democrat Jimmy Panetta of California, introduced a law to ban the use of cats in all taxpayer-funded animal research. As CNN put it, the bill would “stop the Department of Agriculture from using cats and kittens in painful experiments.”

https://twitter.com/RepMikeBishop/status/995075508462391299

While the Pew poll found some greater support among conservatives and Republicans for animal experimentation, the differences are modest, far less than what one finds on many highly divisive political questions in the U.S.:

Some states have begun to enact laws severely restricting how animal experimentation can be used. Several, for instance, now ban animal testing for “testing cosmetics and personal care items” when an alternative is available.

DxE has drafted, and is currently promoting, what it calls Julie’s Law, named after the blind beagle it rescued from Ridglan. As Hsiung told The Intercept, “The Julie’s Law campaign is important for its own sake. Dogs are being brutalized right here at home in a way that’s just as evil as the dog meat festival in Yulin. But it’s also important because, if we succeed, it will be a legal breakthrough: giving a species of animal legal standing for the first time in history.”

Ultimately, a direct collision is coming between the rapidly evolving scientific understanding of the capacity of animals to suffer, emote, and possess self-consciousness (as Stephen Hawking and other leading neuroscientists recognized), and the legalized tolerance for mass animal abuse. This inevitable incompatibility was vividly highlighted by a remarkable written judicial opinion earlier this month, from a judge on New York’s highest court, which ultimately ruled that two chimpanzees do not possess legal standing as “persons” to petition for release. Nonetheless, in the case brought by the group Nonhuman Rights Project Inc., Judge Eugene Fahey explained that society’s treatment of animals is becoming increasingly untenable as a matter of ethics, morality, science, and law:

The inadequacy of the law as a vehicle to address some of our most difficult ethical dilemmas is on display in this matter. … The question will have to be addressed eventually. Can a non-human animal be entitled to release from confinement through the writ of habeas corpus? Should such a being be treated as a person or as property, in essence a thing? …

I agree with the principle that all human beings possess intrinsic dignity and value, and have, in the United States (and territory completely controlled thereby), the constitutional privilege of habeas corpus, regardless of whether they are United States citizens (see Boumediene v Bush, 553 US 723 [2008]), but, in elevating our species, we should not lower the status of other highly intelligent species. …

The record before us in the motion for leave to appeal contains unrebutted evidence, in the form of affidavits from eminent primatologists, that chimpanzees have advanced cognitive abilities, including being able to remember the past and plan for the future, the capacities of self-awareness and self-control, and the ability to communicate through sign language.

Chimpanzees make tools to catch insects; they recognize themselves in mirrors, photographs, and television images; they imitate others; they exhibit compassion and depression when a community member dies; they even display a sense of humor. Moreover, the amici philosophers with expertise in animal ethics and related areas draw our attention to recent evidence that chimpanzees demonstrate autonomy by selfinitiating intentional, adequately informed actions, free of controlling influences (see Tom L. Beauchamp, Victoria Wobber, Autonomy in chimpanzees, 35 Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 117 [2014]; see generally Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior 15-42 [1986]). …

The reliance on a paradigm that determines entitlement to a court decision based on whether the party is considered a “person” or relegated to the category of a “thing” amounts to a refusal to confront a manifest injustice. Whether a being has the right to seek freedom from confinement through the writ of habeas corpus should not be treated as a simple either/or proposition. The evolving nature of life makes clear that chimpanzees and humans exist on a continuum of living beings. Chimpanzees share at least 96% of their DNA with humans. They are autonomous, intelligent creatures. To solve this dilemma, we have to recognize its complexity and confront it. …

The issue whether a nonhuman animal has a fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus is profound and far-reaching. It speaks to our relationship with all the life around us. Ultimately, we will not be able to ignore it. While it may be arguable that a chimpanzee is not a “person,” there is no doubt that it is not merely a thing.

The work of animal rights activists is forcing us to confront what we would rather avert our gaze away from — systematic abuse, torture, and unspeakable cruelty. It is increasingly difficult to ignore the ethical questions all of this presents. As Fahey put it, “Ultimately, we will not be able to ignore it.”

Top photo: A “research dog” in its cage at Ridglan Farms Inc.

Correction: May 18, 2018, 11 a.m.
An earlier version of this story misidentified Rep. Jimmy Panetta of California as a Republican; he’s a Democrat. It has been updated.

The post Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation appeared first on The Intercept.

A mercenary, a torturer, and a conspiracy theorist walk into the White House. In the Trump administration, that’s called “Tuesday.” This week on Intercepted: Exxon Mobil is out at the State Department. A radical Christian ideologue is in. And a veteran CIA officer who tortured detainees and set up the CIA black sites after 9/11 is slated to take the helm at Langley. And all of this happened in one fell swoop on Tuesday morning. The Intercept’s Matthew Cole and Jeremy analyze the major re-shuffle in Trumpland and what it means for the future of the planet. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who led the investigation of Erik Prince and Blackwater for years in Congress, analyzes the ongoing scandal over his alleged role in the Trump era and explains why she had her house swept for surveillance when she was investigating Prince. Musical artists Ana Tijoux and Lila Downs talk about the politics of colonialism, neoliberalism, and revolution and their new collaboration on the song, “Tinta Roja.” And, fresh off her stellar debut on 60 Minutes, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos stars in “Kindergarten Cop.”

Lesley Stahl: Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is the most hated member of the Trump Cabinet. Now, after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, president Trump is expected to appoint her to prevent school violence.

LS: Do you think that teachers should have guns in the classroom?

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos: That should be an option. I hesitate to think of like, my first grade teacher, Mrs. Zorhoff, I couldn’t ever imagine her having a gun and being trained in that way.

Narrator: Now, more than ever, to be a teacher requires patience. Fortunately, Astoria Elementary has just hired such an individual: (Gun cocks.) Kindergarten Cop.

Penelope Ann Miller (as Joyce): Kindergarten is like the ocean. You don’t want to turn your back on it.

Arnold Schwarzenegger (as John Kimble in “Kindergarten Cop”: Don’t worry. Everything is under control.

Narrator: He’s been trained to shoot.

PAM: What made you become a kindergarten teacher?

Narrator: He’s been trained to fight, before a killer does.

AS: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Stop whining. You kids are soft. You lack discipline. But I’ve got news for you: You are mine now! You belong to me.

Narrator: Kindergarten Cop.

President Donald J. Trump: A gun-free zone to a killer? That’s like going in for the ice cream.

[Musical interlude.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is intercepted.

JS: I’m Jeremy Scahill, coming to you from the offices of The Intercept in New York City, and this is episode 48 of Intercepted.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: My commission as Secretary of State will terminate at midnight, March 31.

Between now and then, I will address a few administrative matters related to my departure, and work toward a smooth and orderly transition for Secretary of State designate Mike Pompeo.

DJT: I’ve worked with Mike Pompeo now for quite some time. Tremendous energy, tremendous intellect. We’re always on the same intellect. The relationship has been very good and that’s what I need as Secretary of State. I wish Rex Tillerson well.

JS: Exxon Mobil is out at the State Department; a radical Christian ideologue is in, and a veteran CIA officer who directly participated in the torture of detainees and was key to setting up the CIA black sites during the Bush-Cheney administration, is now slated to take the helm at Langley. And all of this happened in one fell swoop on Tuesday morning.

DJT: And, I’m really at a point where we’re getting very close to having the cabinet and other things that I want. But I think Mike Pompeo will be a truly great Secretary of State. I have total confidence in him.

JS: We’re going to get to Secretary of State designate and current CIA director Mike Pompeo in a moment, but first Donald Trump has now named Gina Haspel as CIA director and Trump is already boasting that she’s going to be breaking the glass ceiling as the first woman to head the CIA.

But Haspel has an atrocious, some would say criminal history, at the CIA. She oversaw the torture of at least two prisoners that were taken after 9/11. They were subjected to waterboarding and other acts of torture and abuse. This happened at a CIA black site in Thailand that Gina Haspel helped to set up and run.

She was also deeply involved with the CIA global kidnapping program — it’s officially referred to as “extraordinary rendition” but it was a kidnapping program.

Oh, and Gina Haspel? She was one of the key people at the CIA who directed the destruction of evidence in the form of tapes of CIA interrogations. This is the person that Donald Trump has just named as the next CIA director.

Of course, over on Fox News, they were just ecstatic about this. Here is the legendary Islamophobe and pro-torture retired General Jerry Boykin.

General William “Jerry” Boykin: Mike Pompeo is a perfect choice. Mike is in sync with the president but Mike is also a very experienced not only intelligence officer but also he’s been a member of Congress, been on the Intel Committees, and I think that he has a much better understanding of the situation in the world today in general, but certainly among our allies, as well as our enemies.

JS: So that was on Fox News, but over at MSNBC, the official television network of the #resistance, the coverage must have been harsh? I mean they were going to town on Gina Haspel, right? Wrong. They had on a string of former intelligence officers to tell us how we shouldn’t judge Haspel on her involvement with torture or black sites, that that’s in the past. And if that wasn’t gross enough, MSNBC had on John Brennan to discuss his longtime colleague.

John Brennan, of course, was President Barack Obama’s CIA director, and here is how John Brennan fawned over and defended this torturer who Trump wants to be CIA director:

John Brennan: She has you know more than three decades experience both abroad as well as at headquarters. She has a tremendous respect within the ranks. She was involved in a very, very controversial program and I know that the Senate confirmation process will look at that very closely. But Gina Haspel has a lot of integrity. She has tried to carry out her duties at CIA to the best of her ability, even when the CIA was asked to do some very difficult things in very challenging times.

JS: Whoa, hold up here a second! Brennan is praising Gina Haspel for her wealth of experience. He’s saying that she had integrity as she carried out the CIA’s torture to the best of her abilities. Is that we’re supposed to think about someone involved with kidnapping? Someone who destroyed evidence of torture? Gina Haspel is a person that we’re supposed to be cheering for as CIA director?

Oh, and this gushing? It was all done not on Fox News, but on MSNBC. But seriously, we shouldn’t be surprised that John Brennan is defending and promoting Gina Haspel. Brennan also defended the torture program. And when Barack Obama tried to make John Brennan CIA director in his first term, there was a lot of pushback from the left and from liberals on the grounds that he had supported torture.

Steve Inskeep: Liberal bloggers recently mounted a campaign against Brennan, charging that he was too closely associated with harsh interrogation practices. NPR intelligence correspondent Tom Gjelten has been following this story, he’s on the line. Tom, good morning.

Tom Gjelten: Yes, it’s this campaign that was being waged against him, apparently — at least that’s what he said in a letter he wrote to President-elect Obama. He said he feared that the hubbub that these liberal groups were raising about him would prove to be, “a distraction to the work of the intelligence community at this time.”

JS: But that was all in the distant past. That was just Obama’s first term. A few short years later, John Brennan sailed through with the support of Democratic lawmakers. In fact, Republican Rand Paul led a filibuster and got only one Democrat to support him. He tried to stop John Brennan’s nomination. He not only raised torture, but he raised the issue of John Brennan’s tenure as head of all U.S. global drone strikes.

Oh, and by the way? When Brennan was the director of the CIA, the CIA spied on the Senate investigators who were investigating the very torture that Gina Haspel was helping to run and which Brennan had defended.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein: CIA personnel had conducted a search that was John Brennan’s word, of the committee computers at the off-site facility. This search involved not only a search of documents provided by the committee, by the CIA, but also a search of the standalone and walled off committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications.

JS: You know, there’s a saying in intelligence circles that there is no such thing as former CIA. And that’s part of what we’re seeing here with John Brennan defending a CIA torturer, even if she’s going to be Donald Trump’s CIA director.

And also, by the way, during its coverage of Gina Haspel on Tuesday morning when this news broke, MSNBC had an on screen graphic that referred to torture as “rough interrogation.” What are they going to call it next week? Gentle prodding?

This major reshuffle within the Trump administration comes as so many questions are swirling about Trump’s possible summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, with hawks beating the drums for escalation against Iran and, of course, the Mueller investigation.

Later in the show we’re going to be joined by Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and we’re going to talk about the role that Blackwater’s founder Erik Prince has played in this whole Trump-Russia ordeal.

But first, I’m joined by my colleague Matthew Cole. He’s an investigative reporter for The Intercept, and a few months ago if you recall, on this very show, he predicted that Mike Pompeo would be leaving the CIA.

The Intercept’s Matthew Cole and Jeremy Analyze Changes at the State Department and Discuss Gina Haspel and Erik Prince

Matthew, welcome back to Intercepted.

Matthew Cole: Thanks, Jeremy.

JS: What’s going on here with Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo to the State Department?

MC: Well I think that we are moving further to the right. The Trump administration in year two, at least on foreign policy, is going to start looking a lot more like Trump the campaigner. I think that we’re not done yet, if the rumors and what I’ve heard is accurate, in addition to Pompeo taking over at State, you have John Bolton replacing H.R. McMaster and there’s I don’t think any way to describe him as anything other than pro-war.

JS: That hasn’t happened yet.

MC: That has not happened yet, and it may not happen, but it looks increasingly like it is going to happen. Bolton was in the White House the day before the Trump administration announced that they would be meeting with Kim Jong-un in North Korea. So we’re looking at a real shift to the right. I would say that this may or may not signal something about how the administration is going to respond or deal with the nuclear agreement with Iran. It certainly does not bode well for the idea that the United States is going to remain in the agreement.

I would say, actually, it’s pretty alarming. Pompeo is an ideologue. He’s not dumb, but he is very ideological. He has entertained conspiracy theories for years while he was in Congress.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo: $30 billion dollars plus of taxpayer dollars that have been provided by this administration to the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. And we know, we know that this money will end up in the hands of terrorists all around the world and put our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines at risk. We know it was done in cash, a way that makes it just as easy as pie to put that in places where the financial system can’t see it.

MC: By our own reporting here The Intercept, he’s entertained conspiracy theories as director of the CIA. And now we’re moving him over to a position where he is the United States’ top diplomat, and he will speak out about policy, which is something that as director of the CIA he certainly wasn’t supposed to do, although he did do it. So I think we are on a path that is potentially much more aggressive and hostile to the rest of the world.

JS: What is your sense of why Trump put Gina Haspel there? She’s been the deputy to Pompeo, and what message is that sending?

MC: I would say that with all things with Trump what we see at the beginning or on the surface may not be everything that there is. There may be much more than meets the eye. On the surface this is a very confounding decision.

On the one hand, you have someone who is at ground zero for the CIA’s long and disastrous counterterrorism efforts after 9/11 that revolved around torture and very brutal interrogation tactics. And Gina Haspel was in charge of, you know, the first black site in Thailand codenamed Cat’s Eye, and oversaw the interrogation of the first two high-value detainees, the first two al Qaeda detainees that were waterboarded quite viciously.

On the other hand, she would also represent the first female director of the CIA, and there’s a glass ceiling there that no doubt this administration, and there might be some in the national security world, will herald as a triumph.

JS: Well in fact in fact on MSNBC on Tuesday morning you had Malcolm Nance.

Malcolm Nance: You have to understand her position. She’s a career intelligence officer, but she was also a deputy throughout most of that time, which means when she was given orders, she had to carry them out.

JS: Who was formerly one of the instructors for the SERE program: the survive, evade, resist, escape program that prepares U.S. personnel for being tortured themselves in other countries.

MN: I think she’ll have to answer for some of the things that she did during her time, but, for the most part, I think the agency is out of that business.

JS: And Ned Price —

Ned Price: I completely agree with Malcolm on this.

JS: Who is the former PR flack for the CIA, who also is now nonstop on MSNBC.

NP: So we can’t look at this is something that Gina Haspel herself cooked up.

JS: They were defending Gina Haspel, and saying well, you know, let’s not look at her past, and let’s move forward, sort of echoing the line of Barack Obama.

NP: And so I think in these brave men and women were answering the call that the White House gave them.

JS: But you have a different theory about what may happen with Gina Haspel.

MC: Yeah, my first thought was that this is all just a ploy. That Haspel will be floated, that she can’t pass confirmation at the Senate and it’s a way to get Senator Tom Cotton in as director. He had been rumored to be the replacement for Pompeo when the Times first broke the story that Pompeo would replace Tillerson late last year, and I still have real questions about how the Senate would vote to confirm her in Given what will be I expect a pretty brutal confirmation process in which she’ll have to disclose all of the parts of the rendition and interrogation program in which she had direct involvement. Her career rise goes up with the chief architects of the torture program.

So she is controversial, I think is the softest way. I mean, I think the question really is in a Trump administration, now that we’ve had the Obama administration, have we normalized torture on some level? I mean it’s important to remember that when Haspel, for a time in 2013, was the acting head of the clandestine service for the CIA and she was passed over as the permanent head of the operations center, the DO, or the NCS at the time, because of her past and her affiliation with the torture program and regime at the CIA.

So in five years, have we gotten to the point now politically where it’s now acceptable that someone who had been so heavily involved in the torture of terrorist suspects, that it’s normal and it’s OK? And my first thought was: It’s not and there’s no way she’d pass and that there are few Republicans that would not be supportive of her background. And so that this may be a really sort of a fairly cynical effort to say: We nominated a female to break the glass ceiling but it wasn’t good enough for you, so we’re going to give you Cotton.

JS: Right, and Trump can then turn around and say: Aha! See, the Democrats are trying to, you know, spike this female who can become head of the Central Intelligence Agency. But we now have a situation where Mike Pompeo, a radical ideologue, someone that I think is clearly a Christian supremacist who embraces kind of neo-crusader ideology, he’s going to be the top diplomat. And someone who has directly participated in systematic torture and the destruction of evidence of torture may well be, or at least for the time being, is going to be the acting CIA director and may actually be confirmed.

What does this mean for the State Department that you have Pompeo jumping from CIA to State at this moment when this big focus is on Trump potentially meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea?

MC: I don’t have a crystal ball. You know, to the extent that I have spoken to people inside the State Department, there is no question that at the professional level, Tillerson was a disaster from their perspective and that the mismanagement or the view of the mismanagement at State Department was so bad in such a short time that they may view Pompeo, frankly, as a savior just from a management standpoint.

From the ideologue —

JS: But Pompeo knows Washington, he was in Congress, he —

MC: Right. He is still a creature of Washington and the U.S. government. And at the CIA, frankly, there was a lot of support for Pompeo when he came in because he was very aggressive about bringing back the CIA from its, you know, what he viewed as the need to bring it to its glory days and there was a lot of aggressive hostile talk, there was a lot of tough talk and in that way Pompeo really parrots and mirrors the president.

And so I expect more of the same at the State Department, which is to say as the top diplomat I think instead of having Tillerson who is clearly at several points but especially at North Korea, totally at odds with what was coming out of the White House, you can expect to see that Pompeo will be on message, because I think they largely agree with each other. My view is that Pompeo is not particularly serious, certainly not as a thinker, certainly not as the leader of an executive agency in the United States government, which isn’t to say he doesn’t wield power or influence. But Pompeo is not considered, for instance, part of the axis of adults that existed inside the administration with Tillerson, Mattis and McMaster. I am a little surprised that he took over. My understanding is that Trump does not particularly care for Pompeo, which isn’t to say that he doesn’t think he’s a nice guy, but he’s not particularly moved by his arguments inside the White House.

But nonetheless, if he tows the line on North Korea, I think what you can expect is an administration more on the same message, so that we don’t have multiple parts of the administration at odds with each other with public statements.

JS: Now you mentioned earlier the possibility that H.R. McMaster will, in the near future, be out as national security adviser. And it’s important to note, the national security adviser is not a Senate-confirmed position. What does that mean? It means that whoever Trump puts in that position just becomes the national security adviser. And so when you talk about someone like John Bolton, who also may not be able to clear a Senate confirmation process, the idea that you could kind of sneak him in the back door of this administration and have him serve as the national security adviser, for those of us that have followed John Bolton’s career, this is a pretty frightening prospect that you replace someone like McMaster with John Bolton.

Bolton, of course, wants war with Iran. He thinks the United States already should have joined with Israel and militarily wiped out Iran. He also wants an offensive attack on North Korea. I’ve predicted that I could see Donald Trump going the way of Dennis Rodman. You know, if anyone saw the documentary “Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang,” where he goes, he gets drunk, I mean Trump says he doesn’t drink, but he’s partying with, you know, all of these apparatchiks for the North Korean regime. He then sings Happy Birthday to Kim Jong-un at a basketball game. I mean it’s a surreal scene. I honestly could see Trump going that way — John Bolton’s not going to be down with that. I mean John Bolton doesn’t want talks with Kim Jong-un, as far as I understand. He wants war with Kim Jong-un.

MC: Bolton has wanted war in multiple countries around the world basically since he turned 18.

JS: (Laughs.) But he wants other people to fight those wars.

MC: Well, John Bolton was a huge supporter of the war in Iraq, wanted the United States to go into Tehran shortly after the war in Iraq, believes that the war in Iraq was an astounding success, has called for strikes on North Korea multiple times and believes — every year John Bolton has advocated for war in Iran.

Tucker Carlson: And so why should we see Iran as our primary threat?

John Bolton: Because Iran, for many decades, has been the world’s central banker of international terrorism, funding Shia, Sunni terrorists on an equal opportunity basis, providing arms to them as they do to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, so it’s their support for terrorism generally the should concern us. It’s not necessarily specific attacks in the United States.

MC: For people who don’t remember: during the George W. Bush administration, Bolton was the U.S. ambassador to the UN.

JS: He was appointed during recess so he didn’t have to go up for any confirmation.

MC: Right. He’s basically viewed as un-confirmable in front of the Senate because his ideas — he’s not dumb, but he is extremely right wing. And some people have questioned his sanity in that regard. I mean he’s very, very zealous towards U.S. military action abroad and it’s important to remember the national security adviser position is essentially the most powerful position in the U.S. government that doesn’t require Senate confirmation. And the fact that it’s the only way that they could get him into the U.S. government, potentially, is an indication of how far to the right his ideas really are.

I think again with Pompeo moving over, we are seeing more of what Trump talked about. And if Gina Haspel were to be confirmed as CIA director, you would have someone who had been involved directly and heavily with some of the darkest period of CIA’s history and especially U.S. foreign policy, you know, in recent years, but matching what the president campaigned on. I mean this was a man who went out and said “torture was good,” and that we needed to torture. And if you remember, there was a lot of back and forth when he first won the presidency with Mattis about whether Mattis agreed with the fact that the United States should be engaged with torture.

So, we are I think actually somehow, I don’t know how this was possible, but in the second year getting closer towards a more pure, Trumpian vision, at least as defined by his campaign and his rhetoric in terms of who he chooses. So, it is very alarming, potentially very disturbing and I think on these questions of North Korea, Iran, which remains to be seen how the Trump administration is going to play some of these diplomatic issues out, how it’s going to play out, but we’ve moved to the right, I think.

JS: And also I think it is important to note that someone like Gina Haspel, who has been around for a long time, whose role in torture and destruction of evidence of torture has been known for many years, even before her name finally was reported in the news media, this was known in D.C., it was known in political circles who she was. And I have to say: When Obama came into office and he made his deal with the CIA, they told him. “Mr. President, if you start prosecuting people who are involved with torture at the CIA, you’re going to lose the entire agency, you’re going to destroy morale there.”

And, you know, I’m just sort of spit-balling here but I would imagine that for an incoming president that was a pretty intimidating message, and Obama very quickly changed his tune on the CIA and torture and just said: “Well, we need to look forward not backward. This should never happen again.”

But the main way that you prevent future acts of torture or other kinds of misconduct, abuses, crimes is by holding people accountable. That’s what all of the effective Truth and Reconciliation Commissions around the world have enacted.

But here it’s sort of like: Well we’re not going to do it. Gina Haspel would have been one of those people. So, we can cry until the cows come home about Gina Haspel, she was a torturer and now she’s going to be the head of the CIA, “oh my God we should all be so outraged at this.” Yeah! But there was a chance to hold her accountable. And it’s like, I feel like this is something that we keep repeating over and over again in our society, where we say: Oh, well our guy is in power, he must know what he’s doing. Look, we have Gina Haspel because we had John Brennan; because the Democrats kind of sold this idea that we’re moving on now from torture. And I think they shouldn’t be let off the hook in this stuff.

MC: Well I think that’s what I meant about the normalization, right? I think the body of the CIA is going to applaud this decision from the standpoint of the fact that she’s very capable, that, you know —

JS: She’s a very capable torturer; she knew how to destroy those videotapes so well.

MC: From the standpoint of operations, people who have worked with her, above her, under her, describe her as being incredibly competent, and from the tribal standpoint of the CIA that is very important.

I mean, and one of the other things that we didn’t mention in terms of why her nomination would be significant is that it has been a long time, in fact, off the top of my head, I cannot remember when the last time the CIA had a director who had been in operations, whose career started — she was not a case officer, she was a reports officer, but she’s not an analyst. She wasn’t an administrator. What we’re seeing is the practical side of government service saying: “Look, she’s competent, she’s capable, don’t knock her because she was involved in this dark past that we’ve agreed we’ve all moved on to” — in part because we haven’t necessarily agreed that we’ve all moved on. You have a president who is, who campaigned on it and who frankly could bring it back by executive order at any time. Now is actually the time, frankly, to bring the issue back up very much so. You know? Go back into the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the history of the program to remind ourselves of where Haspel played key roles in a very — it’s not just that, you know, people forget: It’s not just that torture is immoral. The fact is that it was highly ineffective. It has never been effective. It is highly ineffective.

And so that she was central to the CIA’s narrative that what they were doing was not only just and legal, but effective and worked. And that was bullshit.

JS: I agree. We should be digging back into that. I just want to clarify though: When you talk about the Senate Torture Report, this is the report that John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, passionately tried to stop from being released. And, in fact, the CIA under Brennan spied on the Senate investigators and it was one of the only times where you’ll see Dianne Feinstein of California, who normally just is in love with the CIA, actually getting angry. That’s the report you’re talking about.

MC: Yes, and what was released to the public was 500, roughly 500-page executive summary of what was 7,000 maybe?

JS: Thousands and thousands of pages.

MC: Thousand and thousands of pages that documented the history of the program, every detainee that went in that they had paper for.

The thing that was the most disturbing at the end, I thought, was that there was a full display of how the emperor had no clothes for years the agency argued that this was necessary for national security, it saved lives, hundreds, thousands, it was embellished over and over. And in fact, it didn’t. And even by their own documentation, what the Senate investigators found was that it was largely a figment of their imagination and their zealousness. And I think coming from the right place which was the CIA missed 9/11 and wanted to prevent another one and felt bad about what happened. But it was incredibly misguided and if Haspel is to be named director of the CIA, the United States will have essentially said that, you know, we’ll have truly moved on from torture by not holding anyone accountable.

JS: Matthew, you and I both have been on the Erik Prince/Blackwater story for a very long time, and on Monday evening I had a chance to interview Representative Jan Schakowsky who definitely has been the most passionate member of Congress in trying to hold Erik Prince and Blackwater accountable and we’re going to hear that full interview in a moment, but I just want to get your reaction, Matthew, to one part of what Representative Schakowsky said about Erik Prince.

Representative Jan Schakowsky: You know, he was working closely with the Bush administration and there were operations, intelligence operations that were coming out of the vice president’s office, and he was a valuable player in carrying out what they may have defined as the mission. And Erik is, I think, one frightening guy.

JS: So Matthew, here we had someone who was on the Intelligence Committee when this assassination program involving Erik Prince and Blackwater was briefed to that committee. Leon Panetta, who was the CIA director at the time, said that he had shut the program down. But what I find interesting, and I have never heard another member of Congress who had that level of access to classified intelligence say, is that Vice President Dick Cheney was running intelligence operations out of his office that directly involved Erik Prince.

MC: Yeah. To be honest with you, it was pretty stunning, because we’re in 2018 and that is information that confirms reporting that I know you and I have both done over the last 10 years. Other sources have placed Erik Prince and Dick Cheney in the same room and certainly on some of the same projects, and essentially Erik Prince reporting to Dick Cheney, sometimes through his daughter Liz Cheney, who’s now a member of Congress. I’ve had sources for years who told me, “Look, Erik worked for the vice president.” And that was something that was never revealed.

And I think you know we know from much of both Seymour Hersh’s reporting during the Bush administration, but also Barton Gellman’s reporting, how clandestine and covert that Cheney — Cheney really did run the dark side for eight years in the United States government, and the fact that he was using Erik Prince and Blackwater in ways that are still not fully understood, I think one thing that people need to keep in mind is in this administration we hear a lot of the whole issue of the “deep state?” Erik Prince is the “deep state.” Or Erik Prince certainly was the “deep state.” If ever there was someone who was never officially part of the CIA or a government employee outside of his time as a Navy SEAL, that is someone who knows where the bodies are buried and may have been involved directly in burying them.

It’s a pretty stunning thing that Representative Schakowsky revealed, and I think there’s still so much more of the Erik Prince story that is yet to come because there — he’s been involved for so long. And people don’t remember, people don’t realize, I think, that the relationship between Prince and Cheney comes through his father. Edgar Prince was the biggest GOP donor in Michigan for years and was a huge supporter of Gerald Ford. And that’s where Dick Cheney first met Erik Prince’s father, was when he was the chief of staff for Gerald Ford. So, they go back a long way.

So, when Cheney comes in as vice president in 2000, there was already a relationship or a familiarity with the Prince family. There’s still much more, and we have parts that — it’s sort of unfortunate that it takes so long to report these out — but they are deep secrets.

JS: Well and you and I will continue to talk about this in future episodes of this program. One thing to add, just by way of context for people is Erik Prince starts Blackwater in the late 1990s and his focus actually at the beginning was on protecting U.S. ships and vessels against terrorist attacks, like the U.S.S. Cole that was bombed on the Port of Aden, off of the coast of Yemen, but also militarizing our schools in this country.

Erik Prince built a mock high school called “R. U. Ready High” and he was taking advantage of the Columbine shootings that happened in 1999, and he starts inviting law enforcement from around the country and around the world to come and train in how to face down, in an armed way, against school shooters. And 9/11 happens and Erik Prince is on Bill O’Reilly’s program right after 9/11, and he says that now his phone is ringing off the hook. And a lot of those calls were coming from the CIA, and I know both of us have heard they were also coming from Dick Cheney. And, you know, the rest is sort of history as they say, and we’re going to get into some of that.

But this is a guy who has been deeply involved with some of the most high-profile, damaging operations that have been conducted by the United States post-9/11, and still is able to maintain these relationships, these businesses. And now, and I’ll give you the final word on this Matthew Cole, now he is in bed with the Chinese government and they just injected even more capital into his security company based out of Hong Kong.

MC: Right, so, you know, as we’ve discussed on the show before, Erik Prince is the CEO of Frontier Services Group, which originally was a logistics company, is now a logistics and security company, based out of Hong Kong and own and primarily by CITIC Corporation, which is the private investment arm of the Chinese government. And they recently, according to our sources put another $107 million into the company that allowed them to dilute actually some of Erik Prince’s shares, but it gives them effectively full control of the company and it makes the company that Erik Prince is the CEO of an actual arm of the Chinese government for security logistics around the world.

And it’s a endlessly confounding issue as to how an American businessman who is associated with the current administration and was considered for private intelligence operations around the world, as well as privatizing the war in Afghanistan, while maintaining his position and having, one time, been under investigation by the FBI for his relationship and contacts with Chinese intelligence. He is a man who has nine lives, so to speak, and he is also somehow, I think for many journalists, a lifelong jobs program. He has an incredible ability to find himself in rooms with very powerful people who make decisions, even if he is ultimately not particularly successful.

JS: Matthew Cole, investigative reporter at The Intercept. Thank you so much for joining us again.

MC: Thank you so much, Jeremy.

[Musical interlude.]

Rep. Jan Schakowsky on Erik Prince’s Alleged Role in the Trump Era and Explains Why She Had Her House Swept for Surveillance When She Was Investigating Him

JS: Now, the Republicans in charge of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into allegations of collusion between Donald Trump and members of his inner circle and Russia, those Republicans have announced that they are done interviewing witnesses and that they found no evidence of collusion. Big surprise there. But questions do remain about the truthfulness of the testimony of several of the witnesses that were called to appear before this House committee. And one of those is Erik Prince of Blackwater infamy.

Early last year, The Intercept broke the story that Erik Prince was advising the Trump transition team from the shadows. Now, of course, it’s important to remember Erik Prince’s sister is Betsy DeVos, the, as of now education secretary.

A short time after we broke that story on Erik Prince advising Trump, the Washington Post reported that Erik Prince had traveled to the Seychelles to take a meeting arranged by powerful royals from the United Arab Emirates. According to the Post, the Emiratis arranged this secret meeting on January 11, just nine days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the meeting was between Erik Prince and a Russian oligarch named Kirill Dmitriev. That guy controls a $10 billion sovereign wealth fund that was created by the Russian government. The purpose of that meeting, according to The Washington Post, was to “explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would be likely to require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions.” The Washington Post also said that Erik Prince presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump. This meeting has also been characterized as Erik Prince helping to set up a back-channel communication between Trump and Russia.

Well, after this story came out, Erik Prince went public and he blasted it. And he said it’s bullshit, and that he had never heard of Kirill Dmitriev before he met him at a bar and that this was just an innocent chance encounter, suggested impromptu by someone from the Emirati delegation. Erik Prince said that he just had a beer with Kirill Dmitriev, and that the Russian probably was drinking vodka and that there wasn’t much more to it.

Erik Prince: So if they asked me to go meet with some Russian, which no one actually did, I was — I happened to be there and I met a Russian.

CNN’s Erin Burnett: Who’d you meet?

EP: It’s pretty thin. Uh, some fund manager, I can’t even remember his name.

CNN’s EB: A fund manager. But you don’t remember his name.

EP: I don’t remember his name. We didn’t exchange cards.

CNN’s EB: How long was it? The meeting, do you remember?

EP: Uh, it probably lasted about as long as one beer.

CNN’s EB: So it was, it was a casual setting, over beers.

EP: Absolutely.

CNN’s EB: OK.

JS: The Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee didn’t buy Erik Prince’s explanation and they asked Erik Prince to appear before the committee, which he did, with the agreement that the transcript of his appearance would be made public, which it was. And according to that transcript, Erik Prince maintained that he had never heard of Dmitriev and that he’d only talked to him as long as it takes to drink a beer. Erik Prince did tell Congress that he told the Dmitriev that, “If Franklin Roosevelt could work with Joseph Stalin to defeat Nazi fascism, and then certainly Donald Trump could work with Vladimir Putin to defeat Islamic fascism.”

During his testimony, Prince seemed much more interested in accusing Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national security advisor, of unmasking his identity and inappropriately spying on him.

Prince said that he had sources from the U.S. intelligence community who would back that up. That part of the discussion, by the way, was not released in the transcript and we don’t know what Prince was basing those allegations on. He said he would tell the members of the committee in a private hearing that would not be subjected to a transcript.

We now understand that an old associate of Erik Princes, a guy named George Nader has been cooperating in the Mueller probe. Nader is a Lebanese American and a very enigmatic character. He worked as a secret envoy on Syria for the Bill Clinton administration. He then was working with Erik Prince during Bush-Cheney, trying to help Blackwater get contracts in Iraq. And last year, George Nader was a frequent guest at the Trump White House. George Nader is now working as an adviser to some very powerful people in the United Arab Emirates, and Nader is reportedly cooperating in Robert Mueller’s probe. If press reports are correct, George Nader says that the whole point of Erik Prince’s trip was, in fact, to set up a back channel between Russia and Trump. If that’s true, then it could mean that Erik Prince lied to Congress.

Remember too, that Matthew Cole and I broke a story some weeks back that Erik Prince was pitching a private intelligence service to the Trump administration that was in part aimed at circumventing the deep state. Oh, and one other thing: Erik Prince seemed convinced that the U.S. government was spying on him. That actually may be true, but not because of some deep Obama conspiracy. But rather because he was under federal investigation, as we reported, for money laundering and for his business dealings with China.

JS: I’m joined now by the member of Congress who has been most dedicated in investigating Erik Prince. She is Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and she served on the Intelligence Committee during the height of Blackwater’s operations on behalf of the U.S. government. Representative Schakowsky, welcome back to Intercepted.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Thank you. Thanks, Jeremy.

JS: Let’s just start with a historical question here. You were, more than anyone else in the Congress, there were other people that were paying attention but you were really dogged in your pursuit of Erik Prince, particularly when you were on the Intelligence Committee. Share with people, in your view, why has he never been held accountable for everything that preceded this meeting in the Seychelles?

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Well even the violence that was at the hand of Blackwater, really at the end of the day, the murders in Nisour Square where 17 innocent people were killed essentially — well, exactly — because of Blackwater. There’s been little or no accountability. But in many ways, that’s true of the whole Iraq story and in many ways, Erik Prince was perfect for that mission, because he has no respect for rules. He is sort of like the uber-mercenary, doing what he thinks he wants to do, he thinks he’s smarter than everybody as a military guy that knows how to do everything, and that he is above the law. I mean he has this self-confidence, or his ego is so big that he will do anything. And not really feel especially responsible or guilty for any of the bad things that may happen.

JS: Now, I remember when president Obama was elected and Leon Panetta was serving as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Panetta went to Capitol Hill early on the first year of the Obama administration and he emerged from his meetings with you guys on the Intelligence Committee and said that there had been an assassination program involving Erik Prince and Blackwater, but that it had been shut down. What can you tell us about that chapter in all of this? Erik Prince, Blackwater being involved with the CIA assassination program.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Yeah, I can’t, I really can’t, I don’t think even at this point we did a study on the committee. I had insisted on it. And we actually — and it’s on the shelf, and I’ve encouraged current members of the Intelligence Committee to take a look especially as they’re investigating Erik Prince right now. But when I say anything goes, when it comes to Erik Prince and of course, he was working closely with the Bush administration and there were operations, intelligence operations that were coming out of the vice president’s office and he was a valuable player in carrying out what they may have defined as the mission. And Erik is, I think, one frightening guy, one of the current members of the Intelligence Committee said even after the testimony they had, that he’s the scariest person he ever met.

I have to tell you, Jeremy, you know at one point, because on the floor of the House members can say whatever they want without liability, and he threatened to sue me. I got a letter from their lawyers and even though he couldn’t sue me, I have to tell you, I had my apartment in Washington swept. He makes me very nervous. But this time, I think that Mueller may actually be catching up with Erik Prince, and the kind of lies that just roll off his lips, the kind of description of what he’s done, what he did in the past, which is clearly not true. Lying to Congress is against the law and you know, what a coincidence that he met with all these people in the Seychelles. Isn’t that amazing?

JS: I want to get into that, but to just close the loop on this, I realize that you are very respectful of the fact that when you’re on the Intelligence Committee, you effectively take a double oath and that there are, you’re very limited in what you can say. But in general terms: are there incidents and events that you investigated or heard testimony on when you were on the Intelligence Committee that you think should be raised in the current context of exploring the entirety of what Erik Prince has done around the world, including on the U.S. dime?

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Let me just say an unequivocal yes about that, and I think that they’ve got enough, the members, the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee got enough taste of this person and what he’s like, even though he was so non-communicative about what he did and when he did talk about it, it wasn’t true at all. I think they get a sense of the kind of person who might be responsible for things that they need to know about in order, as you say, to get this comprehensive view of Erik Prince.

This is a dangerous person. Even before this incident in the Seychelles, or maybe it was afterward, he basically has gone to the White House and says: You know what? I will buy Afghanistan from you. Just turn it over to me, you know, give us the money and we’ll just take care of it. Why should you send American soldiers over there when we can do it? And probably do it at a decent price?

Erik Prince: So this plan, as I lay it out, puts contracted people, attaching them to the Afghan army for the long-term, at the battalion level, living with, training with.

Charlie Rose: But are these contract people going to be boots on the ground? They’re engaged in the battle?

EP: Yes.

CR: And are they, by definition, mercenaries hired by the U.S. government?

EP: Actually, the way the United Nations defines mercenaries by being attached to the Afghan army, they would not be mercenaries. So, they would be contracted people, professionals, former Special Operations veterans that have experience in that theater to go do that work.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: It’s just incredible. This is who he is.

JS: We also reported that he and another former CIA official were pitching the Trump administration together and one of the things they were talking about was the idea of offering the Trump administration a privatized intelligence gathering operation that they could use to “circumvent the ‘deep state.’” This guy is still very much in the center of pitching the CIA and Director Pompeo, as well as the White House directly.

Jan Schakowsky: Yes, he is. But, you know, let’s be clear: He’ll go anywhere in the world and he’ll be on the side of anybody in the world. You know, this attitude of being such a patriot and he will really help, I think is also very false and there’s, you know, the examples of what he did in Hong Kong and China for China and all of the things that he did in the Middle East. He’ll be on pretty much anybody’s side, as long as they’ll pay the price.

JS: Regarding China, just in the last two weeks we learned through the financial press that the largest investment bank in China, which is controlled by the Chinese government, the CITIC bank, has poured another $100-plus million into Erik Prince’s China-based security company and Erik is open about his mission, which is to help China to extract natural resources from Africa.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, to hell with the people in those countries and the rights to the minerals that are valuable, you know? If he can make a whole bunch of money going in there, protecting, I’m sure the people who are doing the extraction against any indigenous people that happen to live there, he will do it. So, this is a guy that is ultimately for sale I think to pretty much anybody.

JS: Right, and talking specifically about this Seychelles story, the story is that Erik Prince goes to the Seychelles and he is going there to meet with Mohammed bin Zayed, who is the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. They have these meetings, and of course, Erik has a long relationship with the UAE, but what is at issue to Congress right now, or what’s what the course of his testimony was about, is that he had this other meeting that he claims is only a half-hour or as long as it takes to, you know, get a beer, with a very well-known Russian oligarch named Kirill Dmitriev, who runs this Russia direct investment fund, and Eric told Congress that basically, they were just sort of introduced to each other. This is an interesting guy. You both are kind of in this similar thing, you should just chat. He has a beer with him, thinks nothing else of it, doesn’t make a deal and comes back to the United States.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Right. That’s his story. That’s his story.

JS: That’s his story. What is your sense of the focus of the investigation now regarding what Erik Prince told Adam Schiff and others on the House Intelligence Committee?

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Well, my understanding is what, you know, I’ve seen publicly. It’s in the media. The special counsel Robert Mueller has a man cooperating with him in this Russia investigation, testifying that what really happened is that a meeting was set up purposefully for Erik Prince to go to the Seychelles as an unofficial — well, it’s unclear — either official or unofficial emissary of the president of the United States and meet with this Russian who is in charge of a sovereign fund, but apparently very close to Vladimir Putin, in order to open up this backchannel with Russia. A very different scenario than this: Oh, my goodness! What a coincidence that you happen to be here, I happen to be here, why don’t we have a beer together kind of story. And that there is someone who was in the meeting, who is apparently testifying and spoke to a grand jury and is part of this Mueller investigation, and apparently there’s even some other source about this meeting, George Nader, the man who apparently helped set, and organized this meeting. And that is clearly problematic, especially if he was representing himself as an emissary of the Trump administration.

JS: Now, Erik Prince has had an established relationship with this guy George Nader, he’s been involved with him in the past, so it’s not like this name just came out of nowhere and the committee is certainly aware of this.

The pushback that I’m reading now in the in the right-wing or conservative press defending Erik Prince, is to say: “OK, well even if he did take this meeting and even if they were discussing setting up a backchannel, why does that matter?” Setting aside the fact that he may have lied to Congress or that’s the allegation right now, what would be the problem in your view, Representative Schakowsky, if everything that is sort of alleged is true?

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Well, first of all, why would he lie about it if there was nothing wrong with such a meeting? And it is not nothing. Often the cover-up is a bigger problem than the actual.

But I do think it is problematic. If this administration, let’s remember that his son-in-law was also supposedly working on setting up this backchannel, that the goal here was to work closely with the Russians, the Russians, who, in the meantime had been interfering with our elections, that is known. That is just sure. And so the whole thing is very corrupt, very slimy, and very inappropriate and he had obviously felt a reason to just lie about it to the Congress. He was not willing to discuss it and to this very day is denying that there was anything involved more than this casual, unarranged meeting.

JS: For those of us that have never served in Congress and are not sort of aware of how things work — you know, I’m one of those people, I have never served in Congress, I try to follow things, but explain this part of it to me: When I read the transcript of Erik Prince testifying in front of the Intelligence Committee, and there were some redactions but largely everything got put on the record, I wonder why the Democrats on the committee didn’t pursue any line of questioning about the fact that you have this American citizen, Erik Prince, who was a former Navy SEAL, a longtime CIA contractor, who was a green badger, he could walk around the CIA and pitch them projects, as he did all the time under Bush, and for the very beginning of Obama he was doing it, but then eventually the Obama administration said, “We’re done with this guy.” And I know you worked very hard on that. But this is a guy who is in bed right now with the Chinese government, helping them build a security company. He’s got one of his top business associates in China is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. You have an American working with China, who then is meeting with a Russian oligarch in the Seychelles. Why wouldn’t Democrats on that committee? I know the Russians — the Republicans would never ask it, why wouldn’t a Democrat say: Wait a minute, what’s the nature of your business with China and was it related at all to what you were doing in the Seychelles?

Because to me, I think about what Steve Bannon said in that “Fire and Fury” book: all roads lead to money laundering. I’m not so sure the bigger scandal here, Jan, is not: What was he doing brokering something involving Russia, China, and the Trump administration?

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: That could very well be. I really can’t speak for the members of the Intelligence Committee. I have to tell you, though, I’ve been very impressed with Adam Schiff and all of those people who have been speaking for the Intelligence Committee. My understanding is that he was willing to share very, very little I actually, when he was before the Oversight Committee years ago, he’s a pretty clever guy. Now, you’re saying that the transcript itself did not indicate that the Democrats were doing enough probing to get information from him, but my guess is that even if those questions were on the record that the answers would not have been sufficient.

JS: Well, that’s what I’m getting at here. Basic, just sort of, you know, “Schoolhouse Rock.” When you’re in the Intelligence Committee, as you’ve been, and you’re in a closed-door hearing like that, if Representative Schiff or another Democrat, obviously they’re not in control of the committee right now, if they started down the line of questioning that the Republican chair of that committee, Devin Nunes, doesn’t like, what power does Nunes have?

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Well let me give you an example. One of the most recent people involved in the White House that have been interviewed by the Intelligence Committee wouldn’t answer questions, so what they can do is subpoena the person. And so the Democrats made a motion to subpoena and the Republicans just sat on their hands. Short of that, there’s really not a lot that the Democrats can do. And so most of the witnesses that have come before that committee have either, you know, claimed some sort of, you know, some right not to do it or just said, “I’m not going to. I’m just not going to answer that.”

And, you know, if the Republicans who are in fact in charge, even though Nunes is supposedly, he isn’t there, it’s Conaway, Mike Conaway I think, who chairs those meetings, if they don’t do anything, then nothing really can happen.

JS: Are the transcripts edited and can be the sort of ruling party say, “We’re not going include this in the publicly available or released transcript?”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: It’s actually pretty unusual to have the transcripts, from my experience, released at all, but I’m sure that if there is any significant information it’s certainly the right of the committee, meaning the majority, to be able to redact.

JS: And they certainly did. I mean I will say, having read that, that I understood the line of questioning that your colleagues from the Democratic Party were engaged in and the Republicans spent the overwhelming majority of their time trying to say: There’s nothing to see here, we’re wasting Mr. Prince’s time. You get a sense, they weren’t even interested in hearing the answer to the question.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: It’s so infuriating. This whole issue is so central to our democracy, and as you point out, it’s not just about Russian interference with the election, it’s about money laundering, it’s about how real conducting foreign policy, is it all about Trump businesses? Is it about money laundering? Is it about these sinister people who certainly have a, not the interest of the United States in their, in their mind it’s all about money, and that they would not be interested, even within the confines of the Intelligence Committee. This is the most partisan moment, I think, for the Intelligence Committee than there really ever has been. When Mike Rogers from Michigan was the chairman of the committee, and most of the time that I was there, there at least was ability for the Democrats to ask their questions to get the answers, and there was a different ethic, too, even among the people who came before the committee. They understood that, you know, this was a closed hearing but they were obligated to answer questions.

And that is not the case anymore. They think, and they, I mean the Trump administration and the people who are affiliated with them, think they can do anything.

JS: Part of the reason why I think some of the pursuit of Erik Prince has only gone so far is because he did so much work for the Bush White House, for the CIA, some of which was off-the-books or still hasn’t fully come to light. I wonder if because of the knowledge that Erik Prince has of where certain bodies are buried, maybe some of the things that were being run by Dick Cheney and company that wasn’t exactly on the level or wasn’t briefed to the Congress, if part of it is that he just, he holds some cards against some pretty powerful people within the intelligence community and consort of graymail, for lack of a better term, the federal government of the United States from ever actually touching him.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Well, I would certainly agree that Erik Prince knows where bodies are buried, that he knows where a lot of things that would reflect very poorly on the role that he played, and certainly on the Bush administration. So, I’m sure there are some people that are still there. That is a real possibility.

But Erik Prince has proceeded ever since, I like very much that he’s associated with the name “Blackwater” still — he’s never been able, no matter how many times the company has changed its name, to extricate himself from that and the bad reputation that Blackwater gained. So —

JS: Oh, wait, Jan! I can’t not share this with you: Just last week, we learned that Erik Prince has licensed, because he still owns it, the Blackwater brand to create their own line of ammunition and silencers that are, right now, being targeted at law enforcement and the military, but luckily will eventually be coming to civilians for their use and perhaps will show up at a school near us, soon.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Well, so now he feels that the name has been rehabilitated and maybe that’s true. In the Trump world, a person like that, who’s real tough, who has the same kind of attitude as the dictators that Trump admires so much around the world, maybe there is now new space for Blackwater in new markets. Yes. That’s incredible to me.

JS: Question: not just, not on Erik Prince but on his sister Betsy DeVos, who had her widely sort of mocked appearances this weekend, most prominently on “60 Minutes”, how on earth is that person still education secretary and what on earth can be done about it?

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: It’s just so embarrassing. I mean, in the first place, this is a woman who spent her whole adult life fighting against public education, has no respect for public education, admitted that she’s never gone to low-performing schools in this country. It was a humiliating, I would think, for most normal people, interview that she did on “60 Minutes.”

Betsy DeVos: Michigan schools need to do better. There is no doubt about it.

Lesley Stahl: Have you seen the really bad schools? Maybe try to figure out what they’re doing?

BD: I have not, I have not, I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.

LS: Maybe you should.

BD: Maybe I should. Yes.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: And none of this seems to matter and I think she may be the most hated cabinet member, but when you’ve got Pruitt at the EPA, and all of his anti-environmental policies, and you know someone at HUD like Ben Carson who doesn’t know a damn thing about, and doesn’t seem to care, except he’s still doing damage at HUD, it is so bad for our country and I think more and more people are coming to that realization, more and more people, I’ve never seen a mobilization like I have seen. I am having a lot of faith right now in the young people who are saying: This is about me. And I’m sorry, but I’m not going to wait for the adults to take over here. We’re going to take things into our own hands. I just met with a group like that. I think they’re going to persist. I think it’s going to be, it’s a real sign of change in this country and a passing of the generations.

So, these people, the Erik Princes, the Donald Trumps, the Betsy DeVos’, can do a lot of damage that we’re going to have to spend a lot of time undoing when power gets back in the hands of people who care about our democracy.

JS: Representative Jan Schakowsky, thank you so much for joining us.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: Been a pleasure, Jeremy, thank you.

JS: Representative Jan Schakowsky is a Democrat from Illinois. And you are listening to Intercepted. When we come back, we’re going to talk to two badass singer-songwriters from the global south — Ana Tijoux and Lila Downs. But first, check out this teaser for a new podcast coming soon from The Intercept.

Mehdi Hasan: My name is Mehdi Hasan. Throughout my career as a journalist, I’ve clashed with some of the biggest political figures in the U.S. and across the world. And now I’ve joined forces with The Intercept to launch a new podcast. It’s called: Deconstructed. Whether it’s challenging the racism and misogyny coming out of the White House or resisting the push for yet another war in the Middle East, my goal each week will be to cut through all the political drivel and media misinformation. So, join me, Mehdi Hasan, on Deconstructed, coming soon from The Intercept.

JS: On a personal note, I have to say I am really excited for this new podcast from my colleague Mehdi Hasan. He is such a great interrogator of powerful people and one of the sharpest minds that I know. That show kicks off on Friday, March 23, and we are going to be putting the first episode of Deconstructed down our feed. So, our subscribers, those of you who subscribe to Intercepted, are going to be among the first to hear it. Make sure you check that out.

[Musical interlude.]

Musical Artists Ana Tijoux and Lila Downs Talk About the Politics of Colonialism, Neoliberalism, Revolution, and Their New Song, “Tinta Roja”

JS: Now we just talked to Representative Jan Schakowsky, and back in 2007 when she questioned Erik Prince about the role of Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan, she raised the fact that Erik Prince was hiring mercenaries from all around the world.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky: In 2004, Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater U.S.A., admitted that your company had hired former commandos from Chile to work in Iraq, many of which served under General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile. As you must know, his forces penetrate, perpetrated widespread human rights abuses, including torture and murder of over 3000 people. Did Blackwater or any of its affiliated companies at that time use any, at any time, use Chilean contractors with ties to Pinochet?

JS: Erik Prince hemmed and hawed in response to Jan Schakowsky’s question about the Pinochet connection, but Schakowsky is right: Blackwater did hire Chilean commandos who had ties going back to the Pinochet era for its operations in Iraq. And General Augusto Pinochet was absolutely a brutal dictator that the CIA and the U.S. government-backed as he rose to power and that the U.S. supported as he unleashed his brutality on the Chilean people.

To close today’s show, I’m joined now by a musician whose life has been directly impacted by the U.S. support for the Pinochet regime in Chile. I’m talking about singer-songwriter-rapper Anna Tijoux. She has an upcoming EP called “Roja y Negro” and she recently released a new song called “Tinta Roja,” featuring powerhouse Mexican American singer Lila Downs. This is their first collaboration, which is a long time coming for these two revolutionary women. Ana is known for her fast-paced raps in Spanish about injustice, colonialism, and American interventionism. In one well-known song, “Somos Sur,” she covers topics such as freedom for Palestine and how Latin American and African countries have been impacted by U.S. interventions.

[“Somos Sur” by Ana Tijoux plays.]

JS: She frequently takes on colonialism and calls for revolutionary action. Her song “Shock,” she says, was inspired by the book “The Shock Doctrine,” written by my colleague Naomi Klein.

And Lila Downs is a Grammy-winning Mexican-American singer-songwriter who grew up between Oaxaca and Minnesota. Lila’s anthropological music draws on traditional languages, like her mother’s native Mixtec, indigenous beats, and other earthy sounds, while confronting global injustices, issues around immigration and now the Trump presidency. In fact, Lila dedicated a song off her latest album to Donald Trump and that song is “The Demagogue.” It’s off the album “Salón Lágrimas y Deseo.”

Lila Downs, Ana Tijoux, welcome to Intercepted.

Lila Downs: Thank you.

Ana Tijoux: Thank you.

JS: So, let’s begin with you, Ana. How did you and Ana start collaborating or come up with the idea to work together?

AT: The first time I saw Lila in life, we was in Las Vegas. I’ve been listening to the music of Lila since a couple of years ago, and I saw Lila and I say, “Wow, she’s there,” and I always look Lila like, it’s not because she’s here, but this super powerful musician-woman and super-beautiful, and was like, “I want to be like her.”

[“The Demagogue” by Lila Downs plays.]

AT: I naturally like, we begin to talk, and then she came to Chile and she invited me to make a song with her, and then connection just like that.

JS: What was it like when you first made the bond and you first started connecting? You were familiar, of course, with Ana’s work. Yeah?

LD: Yeah! Love to hear her rhythmic appreciation of the Indian-ness of the Chilean way of speaking.

[“Antipatriarca” by Ana Tijoux plays.]

LD: Each of our countries in Latin America, we have a way of dealing with the clash of cultures, of course, and then the denial of being accepted. And rhythm has to do with that and the expression of beauty has to do with the way that we accept ourselves, and also where we want to go in the future. And so it’s wonderful to connect to people who have a intuitive feeling for that beauty.

JS: And both of you, your music is obviously appreciated by wide swaths of people, big audiences, but it’s very much rooted in revolutionary thinking and the politics of struggle and resistance. And Ana, I’m wondering, how your personal story informs your music and your passion.

AT: I think in all kind of way, because of course it’s got to do with a personal history, but I think it’s the history of the world. I don’t want to make it personal, porque [because], I think we live in un momento historico [an historical moment], very violent, and I think we are naturally politically involved, we don’t need to be academic, we don’t need to have a history.

So, I think it’s just a way of looking in the world, and how the mechanic of the world and the humanity has tried to struggle against the system. So, every relationship is a political relationship, like between couples, between mother and kids, it’s a natural relationship where you build a way of life, a way of building your vision with the world.

I was not born in Latin America, I was born in France. But, all the time Latin America, was resonando [resonating] in my house and in my ears and in my brain, and de forma natural [the natural way], for me it has been amazing to profundisar también esa raíz y que tiene que ver con una vision crítica, pero con un tremendo amor por un cambio [To deepen my roots and it has to do with a critical vision, but also with a desire for a bigger change]. It’s not because we are revolutionaries, because we want love, like, and we think that we — hay otra manera de vivir en el mundo there is another way to live in a more balanced way between the hurts and the economic way of the world.

JS: Lila, you sort of straddle two worlds because of your upbringing, but the rooting and the connection to Oaxaca I’m very interested in, because that is a city that in recent times has seen very serious struggle and uprising and repression, and you are viewed as sort of a revolutionary voice who is able to communicate with people of all education levels. And the accessibility of your music and your lyrics, I think, is really inspiring.

But how has your connection to Oaxaca informed your struggle and your music?

LD: Well, Oaxaca is a very particular place in terms of conscious identity, and by chance, I grew up in Minnesota as well.

JS: I hear the Midwest there. I’m from Wisconsin, so I can hear a little bit of that.

LD: OK. OK!

JS: She has a Midwest accent, you know?

LD: And so, Minneapolis also there were a lot of collectives and community efforts, and I related to that. When I went to college, I remember thinking: This is kind of like Oaxaca, you know? It’s about volunteer participation and learning the value of that. I think it’s huge. It’s an amazing concept. And if we stopped thinking that it’s Marxist, it would be even greater. (Laughs.) Because I think it’s a human nature. It’s, you know, I come from a place where there are sixteen different First Nations, meaning Native American groups, and who speak their languages. My mother is from one of them, the Mixtec, and we learn about the traditions since we’re children, and we learn about coming together for certain efforts, like making a road, getting drinking water for the community. We also have trouble, just like the rest of Latin America and we have leaders who are very corrupt, not so different from some leaders who are here in the U.S. (Laughs).

It’s interesting because all of this volunteer work and conscious community efforts I think is going to pay off in the end, but it’s about the younger generations. I can see it coming, I can see a wave coming.

JS: Ana, I wanted to ask you, you mentioned that you grew up in France and the events that happened in Chile, of course played a big role in your family, where your family physically was, but also like many Chileans, how you see the world.

What impact did the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile and the rise of Pinochet have on your family?

AT: I think in every since, because we’ve got to understand that the dictatorship in Chile is not an isolation. It is not one case. It was like a mathematic repression that was built by, by the CIA, basically.

President Richard Nixon: If Allende should win the election in Chile, and then you have Castro in Cuba, what you will in effect have in Latin America is a red sandwich, and eventually, it will all be red.

AT: So, it was not only Chile, it was Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Operation Condor — I mean, there is like a systematic dictatorship that was in Chile.

RN: Allende lost eventually. Allende was overthrown eventually. Not because of anything that was done from the outside, it was because his system didn’t work in Chile, and Chile decided to throw it out.

AT: And the repercussion is until today. This kind of repression is not only about that people, and people that was in jail. It is also a system that was in place, and even in we, the television, like the amnesiac of the TV, and how the role of the TV, and how this culture of the garbage is also very important in the way of the dictatorship work until today. I’ve got this vision that the leadership never leave. We say that is a democracy, but in the end, people can be in the street, protest for free education, but at the end, nothing change very much.

That’s terrible. Because how much have we got to protest to ask for our dignity, basically? No? So, we live the same problem now with the south of Chile which is a very complicated problem with Ngulumapu, which is a territory of Mapuches that is between Argentina and Chile, and that also is part of that plan that was built. So we say that we got a new Operation Condor between Argentina and Chile right now.

JS: Ana, I wanted to ask you about the influence of Víctor Jara, the Chilean singer who was abducted and murdered in the early days of the coup against Salvador Allende, and there’s the sort of story about it is that they snatched Víctor Jara and then they forced him to sing in the stadium and then they killed him as he was singing.

[Víctor Jara sings.]

JS: I don’t know what was true and what wasn’t about it, but clearly they viewed Víctor Jara, who was a revolutionary singer as such a threat that they needed to kill him and to do it while sort of forcing him to sing his songs, and some of the people who witnessed it said that he continued to sing even as they were attacking him. But his influence on your life.

AT: What you say is this very symbolic, his death was very — un acto de demonstración de poder [an act of a demonstration of strength]. But it’s not about Víctor. Víctor is one person, just because his voice was so powerful, Víctor symbolized so many Víctor Jaras, that’s the point, and the powerless about Víctor, but I think it represents so many of our people, is those kind of artists that cross over everybody, is like these kind of scares of Chile, he represented that, como, something that is not resolved yet, because the persons that was involved with his death are all free, there is no justice with Víctor. And that is the point why Víctor is so — he represents the pain of Chile and the frustration of Chile. You know? That is the power of his legacy.

[Víctor Jara sings.]

JS: Lila, the Zapatista uprising that happened in the 1990s represented the face of kind of the global south mobilizing and unifying and confronting neoliberal economics, and also the iron fist of militarism that backs that up. And it seemed like that movement had so much momentum and then, bam! 9/11 happens, and it was like all of the air was sucked out of the room. And you saw this very quick transformation of people who used to be denounced as communists and they were a threat because they were communists, but now they’re terrorists.

Talk about the words that are used by both the resistance, but also the oppressors and those who are, who have the cannons, the guns, the weapons, the modern.

LD: Yeah that’s true. I think, though, that it was more of a cultural movement, as well, that really permeated our consciousness at different levels. You know? There were children who are now more conscious of our native Indian roots because of this movement. Recently there has been a woman who is a healer and she is the present candidate of the movement. Her speeches are very much like the spoken word of the elders of the healers seen in Mexico, which is amazing to see that.

Certainly I can venture to say that I am a successful artist.

JS: I think that’s objectively true.

LD: I live from our music. (Laughs.) And this is also one of the results of being more conscious of our roots I believe I try to be more of an optimist, even though there are a lot of dark things going on constantly, and of course I take from the darkness to compose and to write and to talk about the world and women in our lives. But I do believe in humanity. And I think there have been a lot of positive things that have changed in the recent past in Latin America.

JS: How do you see the ascent of Donald Trump to power and the people he has around him and the way that he talks and his policies and his ideas? If you can even give him credit for ideas. That’s maybe too strong of a word — the things that come out of his mouth? I don’t know.

LD: I think there are people who don’t appreciate life and the gift of life. They haven’t had a moment to be with themselves and recognize themselves, I think, and it’s sad.

Someone like this leader that we have in the U.S. now I think is someone that is similar in his approach, doesn’t think of the consequences of his actions and I think those actions will be seen later on. You know? They’re like seeds that you plant and then you will see the fruits of these seeds. But yeah, mainly I’m disenchanted, I’m broke-hearted, because I am half-Anglo. It’s disappointing.

JS: Ana, talk about “Tinta Roja,” and the project that you guys are working on together.

AT: “Roja y Negro” is a project that was born with some friend guitarists, because we were super bored in airports. So, the project was born like that, like, “Oh, we are bored. Take the guitar and let’s play and make a song.” Like, whatever.

So that’s the way that we built this project and, and in my case, like, como I begin to make music with rap like hip hop, and I love hip hop as part of my life and as my DNA, and I think a voice with a guitar is always something so powerful, like, and good lyrics get una fuerza que no se puede ni ver, no [a force that you cannot see, no]?

So, we try, in our way, to say, you know what? We say in Chile, tierarse la piscina [throw yourself in the pool] let’s make this mistake, and let’s make a song, and try it another way to work and build lyric, and we built this song thinking about, it could be a man or woman that was, that fell down with wine and alcohol. That is very common in Latin America and in the world, basically. We always got some person that we know in that —

LD: Situation.

AT: Situation. Yes, is very common. And musically, we put un toque de “Salla” un poco Andina, [a touch of “Salla,” a little Andean] it was very mixture, like, we play like, whatever we were feeling, basically.

[“Roja y Negro” by Tinta Roja (featuring Lila Downs) plays.]

It’s about release and truth and coming to terms with loss and melancholy about the self, I think. But there’s something about connecting to ancient time. I come from a place where you go to the ruins and you can stand there and you feel like you are connecting to some — something that’s, to the grandmothers, to the grandfathers of course, but something that’s bigger than us. A lot of times these pre-Hispanic places are placed in very particular mountains that are connected to the stars, because of course our ancestors, both Inca and Mixtec or Zapotec or Aztec peoples knew about these connections. You know? With the stars. It’s about bridging things that we were not allowed to say for hundreds of years, and now are coming through the art. And it’s enriching and it’s certainly empowering to be able to connect.

JS: Well, Lila, Ana, thank you so much for being with us.

AT: Thank you so much.

LD: Thank you for having us.

JS: I appreciate it, and I appreciate all of the work that both of you do.

AT: Gracias.

LD: Thank you.

[“Roja y Negro” by Tinta Roja (featuring Lila Downs) plays].

JS: Ana Tijoux is a world-famous musician and rapper whose family is originally from Chile. And Lila Downs is a Grammy-winning Mexican-American musical artist. Both of them are amazing. Check out their work.

[Musical interlude.]

JS: And that does it for this week’s show. If you’re not yet a sustaining member of Intercepted, log onto theintercept.com/join.

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. Laura Flynn is associate producer. Elise Swain is our assistant producer and graphic designer. Emily Kennedy does our transcripts. Rick Kwan mixed the show. Our music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

Until next week, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

The post Intercepted Podcast: The Lyin’, the Rich, and the Warmongers appeared first on The Intercept.

The Xiaoqing flows 134 miles through the major cities of Zibo, Binzhou, and Dongying in Shandong province. Tens of millions of people depend on it. In Jinan, which is close to the river’s origin, human and livestock waste and runoff from fertilizers and pesticides have caused the water to stink in recent years. But downstream from Jinan, waste from factories has compounded the river’s problems.

Directly translated from Chinese, the word “Xiaoqing” means “clean and clear.” But here in Cuijia, the water is neither. From the bridge, you can see debris and garbage swirling atop the forceful rush of brown. Occasionally, bits of plastic and something that looks like Styrofoam float by. But what may be most dangerous in the Xiaoqing River isn’t visible: perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, long used by DuPont in the production of Teflon, among other products, and linked to cancer and other diseases. Because Cuijia lies downstream from a factory that emits more PFOA than any other industrial facility in the world, levels of the chemical at various points near here are among the highest ever reported, reaching more than 500 times the safety level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently set for drinking water. The plant, operated by a company called Dongyue Group, is the world’s biggest producer of Teflon and emits 350 pounds of PFOA every day, an amount that totals 63 tons in a single year, according to a recent estimate.

DuPont and seven other companies agreed to phase out the use and production of PFOA in the United States by 2015, after lawsuits and protracted negotiations with the EPA. Keeping toxic chemicals at bay in countries that have relatively strong environmental regulations is a Herculean task that, in the case of PFOA and perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, is still underway. Though this effort can consume the energies of Western environmentalists, the story doesn’t end when they push a toxic chemical beyond their borders. In China, that’s often when a chemical’s life begins in earnest.

As we stood next to the river, Wu looked out across the landscape. He wore blue plastic sandals and baggy gray pants. A shovel, from which two empty plastic buckets hung, lay across his shoulders, and as he listened to translations of my questions he nodded slightly. He had never heard of PFOA, he said, and didn’t know the exact causes of his village’s problems. There may be many. The Dongyue plant isn’t the only factory that disposes of its waste in the water. Wu said a paper mill upstream also puts waste into the river. And Dongyue itself makes many chemicals in addition to PFOA.

But Wu understands well that something has profoundly changed the river he has relied on his whole life. For more than a decade, the people of Cuijia have watched as their crops have stopped thriving. The corn does better than the wheat, he said, but both have become harder to cultivate. Recently, his wheat crop failed altogether, imperiling his family’s meager income.

Then there’s the sickness. More and more people in Cuijia have been falling ill and dying, he said, often with cancer and at a young age. When I asked whether any of them got medical help or reimbursement for their doctors’ bills when they became sick, Wu guffawed theatrically, putting one hand over his belly and turning his face to the side, as if some invisible presence would appreciate the absurdity of my idea. After his laughter subsided, he explained that some of the villagers had recently reported the increase in pollution and cancer to the local government, but had received no response.

Around the world — from Hoosick Falls, New York, to Buck’s County, Pennsylvania, Holland, Sweden, and several parts of Australia — communities have begun to understand not only that the chemicals have been in their water for years but also that the contamination continued after industry scientists knew PFOA and PFOS persisted indefinitely in the environment, accumulated in human bodies, and affected health.

Yet by the time that information made its way to the public, the contamination was too great to be completely cleaned up, and PFCs were already in the vast majority of human bodies. A 2007 study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control found that 99.7 percent of Americans over 12 had trace amounts of PFOA in their blood, while 99.9 percent had PFOS. The contamination begins even before birth, according to a 2006 study, which detected PFOA in 99.3 percent of umbilical cord blood.

This mounting knowledge has translated into action in many places — if slowly and, some argue, inadequately. The European Union officially deemed PFOA a “substance of very high concern” in 2013, a designation reserved for chemicals that have “serious and often irreversible effects on human health and the environment.” Production and use of both chemicals has subsequently ceased throughout most of Europe, Japan, and Canada. And in response to outrage over contamination, one Australian state recently banned firefighting foam that contains PFOS.

In the U.S., an agreement between the chemical industry and the EPA brought all production and use of PFOA and PFOS to an end last year. And in May, in part because of concern in communities that had discovered PFOA and PFOS in their water supplies, the EPA came up with voluntary standards limiting the amount of both chemicals in drinking water to .07 parts per billion (ppb). This week, New Jersey’s Drinking Water Quality Institute recommended a much lower standard, .014 ppb, one-fifth that of the federal EPA. The U.S. Air Force just announced that it would replace its PFOS-containing firefighting foam with a safer substitute, and people exposed to the chemicals in their water have sued both the U.S. Navy and private companies.

Yet while most of the world was phasing out PFOA and PFOS and beginning to address the problems they had caused, the chemicals emerged in countries with fewer restrictions. There is some evidence that India and Russia have recently used PFOA to make Teflon and that Russia may also be manufacturing the chemical. But it’s in China that the business has truly boomed, keeping global output of PFOA and PFOS steady even as the industry ground to a virtual halt everywhere else.

So while Teflon began as a quintessentially American brand, China now manufactures most of the world’s supply of the slippery substance, which is used in dental floss, textile fibers, wire and cable insulation, and hundreds of other products, including nonstick cookware. The Dongyue plant in Shandong used PFOA to make more than 49,000 tons of Teflon in 2013 as well as four other products, including PVDF, a compound used in the semiconductor, medical, and defense industries.

Though they’re toxic, persistent, and accumulate in human bodies, PFOA and PFOS are by no means the only contaminants China has to worry about — or the most dangerous. Heavy metals such as lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium, which cause cancer, lung problems, and brain damage, have made one-fifth of the country’s farmland too polluted for growing food. Air pollution, which has reached hazardous levels in at least 83 cities — and in some places, as much as 20 times recommended levels — is perhaps the country’s most visible problem and is contributing to soaring lung cancer rates.

The nation’s water crisis is just as dire. More than 80 percent of China’s underground water supply is unfit for human consumption and almost two-thirds is unfit for any human contact, according to a government report released earlier this year. Some 300 million people —almost equivalent to the entire U.S. population — lack access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 190 million have become sick from drinking water polluted with everything from pesticides to heavy metals, toxic waste, and oil spills.

PFOA and PFOS are just the latest in a steady stream of chemicals to make the journey to China after being cast off by countries that have deemed them unacceptably hazardous. Production of short-chain chlorinated paraffins, which are used as lubricants and coolants in metal cutting, shot up 30-fold in China as these chemicals were coming under EPA scrutiny. Similarly, China is now the world’s biggest producer of HBCD, a flame retardant the EPA recently targeted for action. And the aniline dye industry migrated from the U.S. to China after it was well established that the chemicals involved are carcinogenic.

“I call it the leftovers problem,” said Joe DiGangi, who works for IPEN, a network of organizations in 116 countries devoted to protecting health and the environment from toxic chemicals. “Often a chemical comes under public or regulatory pressure in the EU or the U.S. and then shortly thereafter, Chinese companies begin producing it,” said DiGangi. China and the other developing countries that inherit it, he said, “often don’t have the adequate infrastructure to regulate, monitor, and deal with it safely.”

DuPont, which made Teflon a household name, also built a plant here in 2008 at a cost of $80 million. In July 2015, it passed the facility on to a new company called Chemours, when it spun off its performance chemical division. In July 2016, Chemours announced it would invest $15 million to expand its Changshu Works plant to augment the company’s “already considerable presence in China” and increase Teflon output. (Chemours did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

With its own fire station and heat, water, power, sewage, and postal systems, the Changshu industrial center is like a small self-contained city. A giant modern sculpture and the flags of more than a dozen nations adorn its entrance, and manicured shrubbery lines its freshly paved roads. Changshu’s website lays out grand plans for the park, predicting that it “will become a paradise for technological development, a powerful treasure land and an ecologically harmonious auspicious land.”

But after more than a decade of operations, residents of a nearby village called Haiyu have planted corn between and around the neatly spaced buildings. Although the crop appears to be fed at least in part with wastewater, one of the villagers told me that people in Haiyu eat the corn as they always have, cooking it on the cob and grinding up whatever’s left to make dough for noodles.

A ship worker descends into a storage container to clean up chloroform after a shipment.

A short drive from DuPont Bridge, a man wearing a Paddington T-shirt bearing a picture of the bear eating a sandwich was fishing in another canal. He sat under a thatch of trees across from a factory, dangling a wooden rod into the water below as brown waves lapped at the mouth of a pipe that opened onto the stone-lined canal. The man told me he worked at one of the factories. This was a Sunday, and though he didn’t have to work, he had ridden 40 minutes on his motorbike to try his luck fishing. He’s spent most of his days off this way over the past four years. And in that short time he had noticed the number and quality of the fish in the canals worsen. That morning, it had taken several hours just to catch the six small fish in the plastic bucket beside him.

Scientists might have predicted the size and yield of his catch, since PFOA has been shown to harm fish exposed to it. The chemical causes male fish to develop female reproductive cells and the ovaries of female fish to degrade. Contaminated food may account for as much as 90 percent of human exposure to PFOA and PFOS.

There are plenty of both chemicals in this water. In fact, in 2013 the scientists measured some of the highest concentrations of PFCs ever reported in China right here in this industrial park. But the man in the Paddington shirt said he wasn’t terribly concerned. He’s careful to switch fishing spots if the water begins to smell bad or turns an odd color. He had just recently stopped fishing at a nearby canal when its water turned an electric blue. He said the fish he caught at other spots sometimes tasted bad, but these were delicious, especially when stewed with soy sauce and spices over a small fire.

Ni Jiahui, director of the Changshu park, wrote in an email that wastewater in the park was pre-treated at factories and then sent to the park’s wastewater treatment plant and that factories’ exhaust systems have to pass an environmental assessment. Ni also acknowledged in his email that boats are present in the park and that people farm and fish amid the factories. “I think having people fishing and farming in the industrial park are indications that our chemicals production has not caused any problem to the environment,” he wrote. “Otherwise no one would fish here.”

You can also find the molecules in dust and air, as one study recently did, documenting a 12-mile plume of PFOA-contaminated air that surrounds the Dongyue plant in Shandong. The level of PFOA in the nearby Zhulong River was recently measured at 10,379 ppb, more than 148,000 times what the U.S. had deemed safe.

Yet other than guards who discouraged passing cars from slowing, nothing seemed particularly menacing about the Dongyue plant. The factory entrance was plastered with colorful billboards with reassuring English messages, such as “Safety and environmental protection are the first value of the Dongyue group,” and “Taking good care of yourself is the best love to your mother.”

Just over 5 miles away, in a small farming village called Bozhadian, the residents seemed well aware of the river’s problems. An elderly man who was ushering his herd of goats across a bridge over the Zhulong said that no one fishes in the river anymore. And the proprietor of the local corner store said simply, “The water’s not good there.”

Low labor costs and a lack of environmental regulation helped draw American and European chemical companies to China. Since the late 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping opened the country’s economy to the world, the chemical industry has been at the heart of its dazzling growth. In the past four decades, the Chinese chemical sector has grown faster than that of almost any other country. From 2000 to 2010, production of chemicals nearly tripled. By 2010, industry sales totaled more than $754 billion a year.

Yet knowledge of the environmental hazards of industrial chemicals — and how to address them — has not always made the trip.

Since 2006, when it first negotiated the phaseout of both PFOA and PFOS in the U.S., the EPA has also required companies to drastically reduce their emissions of the chemicals. And each of the eight companies that participated readily began recycling and incinerating PFOA after using it. Companies in Japan and Western Europe also instituted recycling.

Yet in China, these straightforward techniques of disposing of PFOA appear to be the rare exception. Scientists I contacted agreed that releasing the chemical waste directly into waterways and the air seemed to be the norm. “The best available treatment technique is not used in China despite that this would be a very cost-efficient and easy way to drastically reduce emissions of PFOA,” Robin Vestegren, an environmental researcher at Stockholm University, wrote in an email.

The Dongyue Group declined a request to be interviewed for this story, but a spokesperson wrote in an email that the company denies researchers’ claims that its emissions contribute to water pollution in the Xiaoqing River. The email also said that the Chinese government has installed a 24-hour monitoring system in its factory, and that its emissions comply with government regulations. “Dongyue values environmental protection above all things,” the company spokesperson added.

But Vestegren and his colleagues in China recently calculated how much PFOA the plant would emit based on its Teflon production, and found that the number was very close to the actual amount they measured in the Xiaoqing River. (A small amount of the chemical is also emitted through the air.) Vestegren wrote that he was confident the plant “has not installed any treatment technology.”

You can even see the differences in practice between plants belonging to the same company. In the U.S., DuPont greatly reduced its emissions of PFOA after coming under scrutiny. Workers’ blood levels dropped, too. The amount of PFOA in workers at its New Jersey plant was down to an average of 1,644 ppb by 2007 and had dropped to 1,110 by 2009. But in China, the levels of PFOA in workers’ blood reached an average of 2,250 ppb within the first year of operation of the Changshu plant.

DuPont’s international messaging team was quick to fill in the blanks. Shortly after the news broke, two senior staff members from DuPont’s Beijing office took part in a talk show on sina.com, one of the largest Chinese-language websites, offering assurances that there was no link between PFOA and health hazards and noting that “administrative reporting requirements in the U.S.” had led to a “misunderstanding about the quality of the products.” On its Chinese website, DuPont proclaimed that the company had used the chemical “safely” for 50 years and, according to the story, that “there is no PFOA in Teflon product.”

Neither statement was true — there were trace amounts of PFOA in Teflon, and DuPont had known for years about the health effects of PFOA on its workers and lab animals. But the effort seems to have quelled any nascent controversy in China over the chemical.

In an emailed statement, a DuPont spokesperson wrote that the company “always acted responsibly based on the health and environmental information that was available to the industry and regulators about PFOA at the time of its usage.”

Small organizations like Guo’s, which has only four full-time staff members, often rely on volunteers. More than 100 have come forward to help Green Qilu. For now, most pitch in by participating in the “black and smelly river project,” which involves visiting local waterways and reporting on whether they reek or have an odd color. The project, which is sponsored by the central government’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, has already yielded an alarming picture of the extent of water contamination nationwide. But going further — figuring out which particular contaminants are causing the changes or taking steps to remove them — is a trickier business.

Part of the problem is financial. It’s expensive to train volunteers and test water for individual chemicals. The Chinese government made a huge step in 2013 by requiring factories not only to perform certain tests on their wastewater but also to make the water itself available for independent testing. Environmentalists around the country, including Guo, have begun to collect samples. But, while more than 40,000 types of chemical products are made in China, Guo can usually only afford to test for one or two and sometimes opts for tests that simply characterize the water as good, fair, or poor.

An even bigger challenge is a fear of reprisal that hovers over environmental work in China. Businesses often don’t take kindly to citizen oversight. And if protestors are perceived as undermining the government, the consequences can be dire. Guo said Green Qilu’s volunteers wouldn’t be comfortable investigating industrial water contamination because “they’re hesitant that the factories will do something to them or their families.” And even though he is careful to file all the appropriate papers and follow all government regulations, he sometimes worries that the work will somehow cause problems for his own family.

Simply documenting levels of various substances in air, soil, and water can be a risky pursuit. Several of the Chinese researchers I spoke with who track the presence of PFOA said they didn’t want to be mentioned by name. And one environmentalist, Mao Da, told me of his difficulties finding epidemiologists to work on a survey of people living near waste incinerators. “The university professors didn’t want to do it because they didn’t want to have trouble,” Da said, adding that “data collection can be very hard because the local government may try to stop you.”

The country’s new environmental protection law, which went into effect last year, may be the best evidence of the seriousness with which the Chinese government is now approaching the crisis. The law lifted what had been a low ceiling on fines that government officials could impose on polluters and for the first time authorized environmental organizations to sue over pollution. The first successful verdict came in June.

The youth of the environmental movement and the severity of the mess it has sprung up to address make this an odd — and, in some ways, hopeful — moment for China. “It’s like the late ’60s in America,” said Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based organization the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. “The issue is so bad and so obvious,” it’s become virtually impossible to ignore. “We feel quite lucky. It’s one of the few areas where we have so much social consensus.”

Ma has been thinking about China’s pollution problem for a long time, first as a journalist, and for the past 10 years, as head of the venture that came up with perhaps the cleverest way to fix it. To Ma, the most vexing aspect of China’s situation was the lack of transparency. Large companies throughout the world had outsourced their dirty chemical work to China, but few were keeping track of what these companies were doing with their waste. The big foreign companies sometimes didn’t even know which companies were supplying their chemicals, let alone what their environmental practices were. “The supply chain was a black box,” said Ma.

IPE has managed to shine light into that box by harnessing both the Chinese government’s amped up commitment to tracking pollution and the internet’s power for public shaming. The organization created a database that allows multinational and local brands to see whether their Chinese suppliers comply with the law, using data that factories are now obligated to report about their waste. It also synthesized information on companies such as Adidas, H&M, Zara, and Dell — whether they screen their suppliers or even attempt to identify pollution problems, for instance — into handy online charts available in English.

Unfortunately, IPE’s online tool has very little information on PFOA or PFOS, since reporting on the use of these chemicals is still voluntary. But you can get a sense of some of the companies that still use these chemicals from the EPA’s website.

In some cases, the rationale for requesting an exemption seemed to be based on the unique qualities of PFCs. (PFOA gives ski racers an inimitable glide, for instance.) But for many manufacturers, the challenge appeared to be logistical. A letter from the Association of Global Automakers described the average car as “a complex web of systems and networks, containing more than 30,000 unique components sourced from thousands of suppliers around the world.” Thus, it concluded, removing the chemicals would pose “significant challenges to the automotive sector.”

But even with the backing of 179 countries, including China, the Stockholm Convention has made slow progress. The convention added PFOS to the list of substances to be restricted in 2009. Implementation of the order didn’t begin until 2014. Even then, industries petitioned for exemptions, and loopholes were carved out for the use of PFOS in firefighting foam, liquid crystal displays, color printers, and decorative plating. A precursor of PFOS can still be used to control red fire ants, and China ships between 30 and 50 tons of it each year to Brazil, which has used and then dumped much of the stuff.

When I visited the office responsible for implementing the Stockholm Convention in China, on the outskirts of Beijing, the staff had recently finished hosting a delegation from North Korea. To put the enormity of their burden in some perspective, they had been coaching the North Koreans on how to eliminate PCBs, chemicals the rest of the world stopped making decades ago. In addition to overseeing the Stockholm Convention project throughout the Pacific region, which includes many countries that are much further behind in terms of eliminating the chemicals than China, the office is also responsible for administering the Basel Convention, a separate treaty governing the transnational movement of hazardous waste.

All of which helps explain why their efforts to reduce PFOS in China through the convention are just getting underway. “We’re just in the beginning to investigate how much of the chemical occurs,” one staff member told me. “China is a very big country. We have a lot of industry. We need some time.”

In the coming weeks, a committee is expected to take the first steps toward adding PFOA to the convention’s list. Though participating governments probably won’t make a final decision until at least 2019, it seems likely that at some point not too far in the future, that chemical, too, will start inching closer to elimination.

“The country may get a few years out of it,” IPEN’s DiGangi said of PFOS, which itself was a substitution for another chemical, Halon, that was produced in China and phased out in the 1980s because it was depleting the ozone layer. For the PFCs, foreign companies have already taken the next step, replacing PFOA and PFOS with similar molecules that are based on shorter-carbon chains. DuPont, for instance, swapped out PFOA for a chemical it calls GenX.

Indeed, Ni Jiahui, the director of the Changshu industrial park, said that because of safety concerns, both PFOS and PFOA have now been replaced with shorter-chain PFCs. The most recent testing, done in 2012, showed both these replacement molecules and PFOA were present in the water around the park.

While new testing could help clarify that the park has since exclusively switched to shorter-chain replacements such as GenX, it’s difficult to confirm whether companies have phased out chemicals. For instance, one group of German scientists led by Franziska Heydebreck recently measured extremely high levels of 8- and 10-carbon chain compounds inside a Chinese textile manufacturing plant that supposedly had switched to shorter-chain replacement PFCs.

Because many of the shorter-chain PFCs do not appear to be much safer than PFOA and PFOS, even if companies do switch to these molecules, they will likely wind up having to swap out these replacements as they are targeted for global elimination.

The justification for adopting these cast-off chemicals is financial, of course. Yet, many of the leftovers that were big moneymakers in their earlier years aren’t as lucrative in the last stage of their lives. As China has become the main producer of Teflon in recent years, its price has dropped.

Whether because of this or the broader economic forces that have squeezed the Chinese chemical industry, business was slow for the family living on the boat under DuPont Bridge. In the past month, the woman said, she had ferried only a single load of chemicals over the canals of the Changshu industrial park and was worried about how her family would survive.

A few miles away, in a hotpot restaurant in the small city of Fushan, two men also pondered the business of making a living at the chemical park. The name “Fushan” translates to “Fortune Mountain.” But given its proximity to the factories that make PFCs, some locals have darkly joked that the town ought to be called “Fluorochemical Mountain,” which sounds very similar in Chinese.

The argument briefly grew heated, as the two men raised their voices and put down their chopsticks. But the factory worker put an end to it with an analogy: “It’s like walking down the road,” he said, as they returned to their meal. “There’s always a chance you might get hit by a bus, but still you walk.”

The analogy doesn’t hold up. China faces far more than the possibility that these toxic chemicals will spread throughout the country. They already have, exposing Chinese people to PFCs without their knowledge or consent. It’s much the same predicament Americans were in 15 years ago, except that this time scientists have a far greater understanding of the dangers posed by the molecules being released into water and soil. And even as international experts prepare to hammer out which chemicals to tackle next and the Chinese government slowly brings its immense power to bear on the pollution problem, they continue to accumulate.

Back in Cuijia, the situation is already urgent. According to Wu, young people in the village decided their best shot — the only one in their power, really — was to leave. Most have. Not long ago, Wu’s own son set off to become an itinerant worker, a life he hopes will be safer than relying on the polluted Xiaoqing River.

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and ChinaFile. 

Research: Coco Liu

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