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An Appeals Court panel upheld banning TikTok in the name of “protect[ing] free speech in the United States…from a foreign adversary nation” (AP, 12/6/24).

Donald Trump is just weeks away from returning to the White House, and when he gets there, it is all but assured that he will attack press freedom (FAIR.org, 11/14/24; NBC, 12/4/24).

But the will and desire to clamp down on free speech and expression isn’t just a Trumpian phenomenon. A US District Court of Appeals panel, with two Republican-appointed judges and one picked by a Democrat, has upheld a law forcing the sale of TikTok because of its alleged Chinese government control (AP, 12/6/24).

All corners of government, joined by members of both major parties, concur that national security concerns should allow the government to scrap First Amendment principles. This means that Trump’s aggressiveness against free speech isn’t an anomaly of his Make America Great Again movement, but a general feature of American state power. The enormity of this decision, if upheld by the notoriously conservative Supreme Court, is a dire sign of what is to come.

Censorship for freedom

Judge Douglas Ginsburg: “People in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire.”

Writing for the court, Ronald Reagan appointee Douglas Ginsburg said that despite the importance of the First Amendment, the government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States” (Reuters, 12/6/24).

In a concurring opinion, the court’s chief judge, Sri Srinivasan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said that “concerns about the prospect of foreign control over mass communications channels in the United States are of age-old vintage,” and thus the “decision to condition TikTok’s continued operation in the United States on severing Chinese control is not a historical outlier.”

Srinivasan cited the Communications Act of 1934 and other Federal Communications Commission regulations:

The FCC’s revocation of China Telecom’s authorization was “grounded [in] its conclusion that China Telecom poses an unacceptable security risk” because “the Chinese government is able to exert significant influence over [it].”… In rejecting China Telecom’s claim that the asserted national-security risk was unduly speculative, we noted that Chinese law obligates Chinese companies “to cooperate with state-directed cybersecurity supervision and inspection,” and we cited “compelling evidence that the Chinese government may use Chinese information technology firms as vectors of espionage and sabotage.”

He went on to say that “China Telecom is a present-day application of the kinds of restrictions on foreign control that have existed in the communications arena since the dawn of radio.”

Two-fifths of the nation

But there’s a key difference. For many reading this, this might be the first time you have ever heard of the FCC’s case against China Telecom (Reuters, 10/26/21). When I last wrote about the potential ban on TikTok (FAIR.org, 9/27/24), I debunked many of the national security concerns about data mining and espionage, and I also noted that the ban is incredibly unpopular, in part because “TikTok (3/21/23) claims 150 million users in the United States; its users are disproportionately young, female, Black and Latine (Pew, 1/31/24).”

An act of Congress signed by the president—in this instance, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden—that could ban a media product used by two-fifths of the nation seems inconceivable. And yet here we are.

Al Jazeera (11/12/24): “Advocates warned the legislation could empower the incoming administration with an incredibly dangerous tool to crack down on dissent with few checks and balances.”

This year, the House of Representatives “passed legislation that would allow the government to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups it accuses of supporting terrorist entities” (New York Times, 11/21/24). While most Democrats voted against the bill in the end, it enjoyed the support of “blue dog” Democratic congressmembers like Henry Cuellar of Texas and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state (Intercept, 11/21/24).

With Trump coming back into the presidency and the Senate falling into GOP control, that bill has a good chance of becoming law. Just think of what an unfettered Trump—who has vowed to make “the Fake News Media…pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country” (AP, 12/5/23)—could do with a law giving virtually free rein to pull the plug on any nonprofit.

For example, the New York Times (8/5/23) last year raised alarms about a left-wing tech mogul named Neville Roy Singham, who the paper painted as a Chinese government puppeteer (FAIR.org, 8/17/23). “He and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a ‘smokeless war,’” the Times wrote.

In order to advance Beijing’s “goal…to disguise propaganda as independent content,” the account continued, his groups “have produced YouTube videos that, together, racked up millions of views.” This depiction of journalistic advocacy as a kind of foreign invasion could be used to justify fodder to go after groups the government could connect to Singham, like the antiwar group Code Pink.

But any nonprofit would be under existential threat under the bill, if the Trump administration decides to label it a ““terrorist-supporting organization.” This includes major nongovernmental organizations like the ACLU and Amnesty International, as well as major news outlets organized as nonprofits, including NPR, ProPublica and the Intercept.

Flimsy security concerns

President Donald Trump tried to unilaterally ban TikTok in 2020 (NPR, 8/6/20).

Some see a ray of hope in Trump’s mercurial behavior, hoping he turns course on TikTok despite the fact that he started the whole campaign (NPR, 8/6/20; Vox, 12/6/24)—there’s some self-interest for the president-elect at play as “Trump joined TikTok during the 2024 election and used it to reach younger audiences” and he “boasts more than 14 million followers on the app” (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/24). But, given how far this case has gone, it would be a mistake to think Trump might simply give up the China-bashing as the core of his economic nationalism.

And Washington is already heading in a repressive direction. The Biden administration’s sanctions have forced Russian radio broadcaster Sputnik off US airwaves (FAIR.org, 10/22/24), and privately owned Chinese newspapers like Sing Tao have had to register as foreign agents (South China Morning Post, 8/26/21); FAIR.org, 2/28/22).

It is also important to note how flimsy the “national security” concerns are in the TikTok case. As many journalists, including myself, have pointed out, the accusation that TikTok, a social media product, might engage in data collection is like saying water is wet—this is the nature of social media platforms.

The AP report (12/6/24) on the appeals court decision said that during the case, TikTok

accurately pointed out that the US hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the US.

To “assuage concerns about the company’s owners,” AP noted, “TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to bolster protections around US user data.”

But the court ruling shows that the mere invocation of “national security” can pull government branches together to support measures that smother media freedom. A federal law eliminating a product enjoyed by nearly 150 million Americans might seem anathema to the free market rhetoric of the GOP, but this is completely in line with the authoritarian mindset that has been growing in the United States and many European countries for years.

 

Brazil’s Federal Police released an 884-page report on November 26, laying out the evidence used for its November 21 indictments of former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 of his cronies. Among the revelations are evidence showing that Bolsonaro knew about a plot carried out by army special forces officers to assassinate President Lula da Silva, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, and proof that Bolsonaro oversaw a complex plan with six working groups to enact a military coup after losing the election in 2022.

This news was covered in media outlets around the world, from the Washington Post, Reuters and AP to the Guardian and Le Monde. Curiously enough, the New York Times, which has given ample coverage to Brazilian politics and the ongoing investigations against Bolsonaro, remained silent.

When former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was accused of trying to overthrow the government, the New York Times (11/21/24) reported that “the police did not provide any specifics about Mr. Bolsonaro’s actions”—but when the Federal Police released 884 pages of specifics days later, the Times was silent.

Five days earlier, in an article about the indictments, Times reporter Ana Ionova (11/21/24) misleadingly wrote, “The police did not provide any specifics about Mr. Bolsonaro’s actions that led to their recommendations.” So why, five days later, when a mountain of material evidence and plea bargain testimony transcripts were released, demonstrating exactly why the police recommended that the attorney general file three criminal charges against Bolsonaro, would the Times not join in with the other media outlets to add clarification?

As I’ve written before (FAIR.org, 7/7/23), the Times has aligned itself with a toxic narrative pushed by Bolsonaro, along with international allies like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, to discredit Brazil’s court system. Most of their efforts have focused on Moraes, the former Electoral Court president and current Supreme Court minister. As the police report shows, delegitimizing Moraes was one of the strategies used to build public support for the 2023 coup attempt.

Furthermore, since the failure of that attempt, the attacks on Moraes have been used by conservatives to build public sympathy for amnesty for Bolsonaro, in a move to pressure Congress to restore his political rights so that he can run for election in 2026.

Moraes’ central position as a target in the strategy is demonstrated in intercepted WhatsApp conversations between members of the group who were indicted in the coup investigation. A review of Times articles covering Moraes over the last two years shows that, at the least, the newspaper has acted as an unwilling accomplice, or “useful idiot” by perpetuating the coup plotters’ judicial overreach narrative.

‘Knowingly false allegations’

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro spreading doubts about his country’s electoral system (New York Times, 7/19/22).

On July 19, 2022, Bolsonaro held an event in the Presidential Palace for dozens of foreign diplomats. There he spent over an hour railing against Brazil’s renowned electronic voting system. Without providing any evidence to back up his statements, he announced that if he lost the October 2 presidential election, it would be a sign of voter fraud.

The entire event was broadcast live on TV Brazil, Brazil’s national public television station, in violation of Brazil’s election laws against abuse of power for electoral purposes. It was this event which, months later, caused the Superior Electoral Court to bar Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years.

Thirteen days earlier, according to the Federal Police report (p. 7), the president held a meeting with high-ranking military officers and cabinet ministers. There, he

presented a narrative which had been built to spread knowingly false allegations, without any concrete evidence, suggesting that there would be fraud and manipulation of votes in the Brazilian elections. [He] used the meeting to spread attacks and make insinuations of crimes he said would be committed by current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and, primarily, Supreme and Superior Electoral Court ministers Luis Roberto Barroso, Edson Faschin and Alexandre de Moraes.

Intercepted communications between the people indicted show that, in the ensuing months, Moraes would become the primary target or, as they proclaimed in military jargon, the “center of gravity” of the coup (p. 14).

‘Going too far?’

The New York Times (9/26/22) attacked the Brazilian Supreme Court’s efforts to rein in the country’s authoritarian far right: “According to experts in law and government, the court has taken its own repressive turn.”

Weeks after Bolsonaro’s event, and six days before the first round of Brazil’s presidential election, the New York Times published a hit piece (9/26/22) on Brazil’s judiciary, called “To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?”

As I later wrote for FAIR (5/14/24), the primary target of the article, written by the Times‘ Jack Nicas and André Spigariol, was Moraes. One of Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court ministers, Moraes at the time was also serving a four-year term as Superior Electoral Court president. Clearly basing its analysis on US law, the Times described in alarming terms activities that were completely legal in Brazil:

The power grab by the nation’s highest court, legal experts say, has undermined a key democratic institution in Latin America’s biggest country as voters prepare to pick a president on October 2.

This wasn’t original analysis by the Times. As the Federal Police report (p. 11) stated:

The dissemination of false narratives through digital influencers and some members of the traditional media, with strong penetration among a segment of the population aligned with the right-wing of the political spectrum, maintained the discourse of an illicit action by the Judiciary, especially the Supreme and Superior Electoral Courts, claiming that they overstepped their constitutional limits in order to prevent the re-election of then-President Jair Bolsonaro.

The narrative of Supreme Court overreach continues to be the key pillar of the amnesty movement. As this campaign picked up momentum, the Times spread doubt regarding the judiciary as it oversaw investigations into anti-democratic behavior by the far right. In an article explaining why Bolsonaro had been barred from running for office, the Times‘ Nicas (7/1/23) wrote that the judiciary’s “hands on” approach to investigating election fraud “has also put what some analysts say is too much power in the hands of the electoral court’s seven judges, instead of voters.”

‘Crisis of democracy?’

As time passed, an investigation into illegal use of social media during the 2022 election season, an inquiry ordered by the Supreme Court due to death threats made against its justices and their families, began to draw the attention of the international far right. This was thanks in part to the efforts of Glenn Greenwald, who ridiculously claimed, to his Rumble audience of millions, that Moraes was the de facto ruler of Brazil.

In May 2024, a group of GOP lawmakers held a congressional subcommittee hearing called “Brazil: A Crisis of Democracy, Freedom and the Rule of Law?” As I documented for FAIR (5/14/24), the most-cited source in the GOP’s supporting document for the hearing was the Times‘ 2022 election-season article (9/26/22) about judicial overreach.

For an expert on “free expression,” the New York Times (9/21/24) turned to a far-right influencer under investigation for electoral disinformation.

One of the panelists at the hearing was Paulo Figueiredo. Introduced as an “investigative journalist,” Figueiredo—grandson of Brazil’s last military dictator, Gen. João Figueiredo—is a far-right influencer who relocated to Florida to flee a fraud investigation into the fleecing of Brazilian investors in a failed real estate deal with Donald Trump in 2019. On November 21, Figueiredo was indicted as one of the coup plotters in the Federal Police report (p. 15), which describes how military leaders who refused to join the operation were targeted with disinformation campaigns. The coup plotters

made use of the modus operandi developed by the digital militia, selecting targets to insert into a machine for amplifying personal attacks, using multiple channels and influencers in positions of authority over their “audience.” Economist and digital influencer Paulo Renato de Oliveira Figueiredo Filho was integrated into the core group responsible for inciting military personnel to join the coup, due to his ability to penetrate the military sphere because he is the grandson of former president of the republic, Gen. João Baptista Figueiredo.

In February, 2024, the Federal Police announced that Figueiredo was under investigation for spreading electoral disinformation during the lead-up to the January 8, 2023, coup attempt. Many journalists at the time remembered the fact that, before becoming military dictator, his grandfather served as National Intelligence Service chief during the most repressive phase of the government’s death squad and torture operations.

In an article by Jack Nicas and Ana Ionova on Musk’s losing battle with the Brazilian Supreme Court, the Times (9/21/24) turned to Figueiredo for analysis:

Mr. Musk “has bowed down,” Paulo Figueiredo, a right-wing pundit who had his X account blocked in Brazil, wrote in a post on Thursday, when X first hired new lawyers in Brazil, signaling a shift in stance. “It’s a very sad day for freedom of expression.”

The Times failed to mention why Figueiredo was blocked, or his family ties—a connection it had made before, in the 2019 article “Investors in Former Trump-Branded Hotel in Brazil Charged With Corruption” (1/31/19):

Mr. Figueiredo, the grandson of the last military dictator in the authoritarian government that ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985, displayed a picture of himself with Mr. Trump at the Trump Tower in New York, both men flashing a thumbs-up sign.

The different framing illustrates the Times‘ double standard: When it’s useful to attack Trump, Figueiredo is identified as the grandson of an authoritarian. When used to criticize a left-wing Brazilian government as authoritarian, he’s introduced merely as a “right-wing pundit.”

‘I’ll say what I want’

The New York Times (10/16/24) declared that Brazil’s Supreme Court may be “a threat to democracy itself” because it prosecutes violent threats against judges.

The Times‘ Nicas (10/16/24) continued to platform far-right figures with suspect backgrounds while using the story of X‘s ban and reinstatement in Brazil to undermine Brazil’s judiciary in “Is Elon Musk’s Brazilian Nemesis Saving Democracy or Hurting it?” The article opened with:

Daniel Silveira, a policeman turned far-right Brazilian congressman, was furious. He believed Brazil’s Supreme Court was persecuting conservatives and silencing them on social media, and he wanted to do something about it.

So he sat on his couch and began recording. “How many times have I imagined you getting beat up on the street,” he said in a 19-minute diatribe against the court’s justices, muscles bulging through his tight T-shirt. He posted the video on YouTube in February 2021, adding, “I’ll say what I want on here.”

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice immediately ordered his arrest. A year later, 10 of the court’s 11 justices convicted and sentenced him to nearly nine years in prison for threatening them.

While the Times notes Silveira’s YouTube rant against the Supreme Court, it failed to explain the context of his arrest. Silveira, who was kicked out of Rio de Janeiro’s Military Police after 60 disciplinary procedures, had been publicly inciting violence against the Supreme Court and its ministers for months, even after receiving warnings.

In one YouTube video, quoted in the Supreme Court case, he says: “When a soldier or a corporal knocks on your door, locking it won’t help. It will be ripped down. Yes, the armed forces will intervene and this is what we want.”

In the US, federal judges can investigate threats against them through the judiciary’s own police forces, such as the US Marshals and US Supreme Court Police. Yet the Times described the Brazilian Supreme Court’s investigation as a “highly unusual move,” while citing Moraes, central target in Brazil’s failed coup attempt, 22 times.

A target omitted

Another target was Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, whom the New York Times has frequently criticized—but the Times (11/19/24) couldn’t bring itself to report his name.

A series of events that unfolded in November have put a halt to the amnesty movement and attempts to prepare Bolsonaro for a Trump-like return in the 2026 elections.

On November 13, a member of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) detonated bombs in Brasilia’s Three Powers Plaza. Security footage shows him setting off a car bomb, attacking the Supreme Court with fireworks, and accidentally blowing himself up when his backpack bomb ricocheted off a statue. Several PL officials immediately called him a lone suicide bomber, a narrative echoed by the Times in a piece by Ionova (11/13/24). However, due in part to his links to the PL party, whose president was indicted along with Bolsonaro on November 21, the police are investigating the case as a terrorist act.

On November 19, Federal Police arrested a police agent and four army officers from the “Kids Pretos,” an army special forces division, for plotting to assassinate President-elect Lula, Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin and Moraes in December 2022. Planning reportedly occurred at the home of Bolsonaro’s former defense minister and VP candidate, General Walter Braga Netto. Police said a hit man had been stationed near Moraes’ home on the planned assassination night, but the attempt was aborted due to a scheduling change at the Supreme Court.

Despite outlets like AP (11/19/24) and CNN (11/19/24) naming Moraes as a target, the Times‘ Ionova (11/19/24) omitted his name, stating only that “authorities did not divulge the name of the justice.” Brazil’s largest news outlet, Globo (11/19/24), broke the story hours earlier, listing Lula, Alckmin and Moraes as targets.

Although the Times ignored it, the news that Justice Moraes was an assassination target has undermined the far right’s narrative portraying him as overreaching in his oversight of federal police investigations into threats against Supreme Court justices and their families.

Just three days after the indictments, a November 24 Times article by Nicas and Ionova, headlined “A Corruption Case That Spilled Across Latin America Is Coming Undone,” targeted another Supreme Court minister, Dias Toffoli. It dusted off the discredited Car Wash investigation, an ostensible anti-corruption probe that ended in February 2021 (FAIR.org, 11/14/19, 12/20/23), to further undermine Brazil’s judiciary. The article blamed Toffoli, who discarded tampered evidence and reversed convictions based on new proof from leaked Telegram chats showing collusion between Car Wash Judge Sergio Moro and the prosecution team, for causing an investigation that ended four years ago to “unravel.”

On the same day, the article was published verbatim in Portuguese in Brazil’s third-largest newspaper, the conservative Estado de S. Paulo (11/24/24).

Historic window

The November 21 indictments have opened a historic window of opportunity in Brazil. For the first time since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985, the judiciary is poised to hold high-ranking military officials—including those, like Bolsonaro security advisor Gen. Augusto Heleno, who were actors in Brazil’s bloody military dictatorship—accountable for breaking the law. Furthermore, there is a real possibility that Brazil will avoid suffering from the same system failure that led to Trump’s return to the White House, by jailing former President Bolsonaro for crimes that are more serious than anything Trump was indicted for.

Why, at a moment like this, would the Times continue to bolster Brazil’s Trump-aligned far right by delegitimizing one of Brazil’s three branches of government? Could it simply be another, regrettable chapter in the Times’ long history of smear campaigns against leftist governments in Latin America?

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated Glenn Greenwald’s platform; it is Rumble.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241206.mp3

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

 

Progressive International (11/25/22)

This week on CounterSpin:  Few corporations have changed the US business and consumer model more than Amazon. So when that corporate behemoth buys one of the country’s national newspapers—it’s a conflict writ large as can or should be. But things as they are, reporting on Amazon has in general looked more like representing that conflict than confronting it.

Good Jobs First monitors megacompanies like Amazon and their impact on our lives. Their database, Violation Tracker Global, notes more than $2.4 billion in misconduct penalties for Amazon since 2010. The most expensive of those fines have been connected to the company’s anti-competitive practices; the most frequent offenses are related to cheating workers out of wages and jeopardizing workers’ health and safety. Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First. We’ll talk to her about the effort to #MakeAmazonPay.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241206Martinez.mp3

 

Amazon Seattle HQ (cc photo: kiewic)

Also: A few years back, Amazon, like it does, dangled the prospect of locating a headquarters in New York City. And the city, like it does, eagerly offered some $3 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to entice the wildly profitable company to bring its anti-union, environmentally exploitative self to town. The deal fell through for reasons, one of which was informed community pushback. We talked about it with journalist Neil deMause, co-author of the book Field of Schemes. We’ll hear just a little of that conversation today.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241206DeMause.mp3

 

 

Next year, Donald Trump will have the chance to reshape the American public health system with his nomination of anti-vaccine crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary for health and human services. While corporate media haven’t necessarily endorsed this choice, many commentators have worked hard to downplay the danger Kennedy poses to the US public.

Dr. Rachael Bedard (New York Times, 11/15/24) says of Robert Kennedy Jr., “We can’t spend four years simply fighting his agenda.”

On one of the most influential platforms, the New York Times op-ed page (11/15/24), geriatric physician Rachael Bedard wrote that Kennedy has “seeds of truth” in his agenda: “There’s a health care agenda that finds common ground between people like myself—medical researchers and clinicians—and Mr. Kennedy.”

We shouldn’t fret too much about RFK Jr.’s vaccine positions, Bedard assured us, because “Mr. Kennedy’s skepticism on this topic may counterintuitively be an advantage.” His “statements on vaccinations are more complex than they’re often caricatured to be,” she insisted. “He’s said he was not categorically opposed to them or, as an official in the new Trump administration, planning to pull them from the market.”

Similarly, physician and media personality Drew Pinsky, aka Dr. Drew, downplayed Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stance in The Hill (11/25/24):

I know Bobby Kennedy—I’ve had him on my show—and I have talked at length with him about these issues. Kennedy isn’t a vaccine-denier or a vaccine conspiracy theorist…. Kennedy isn’t attempting to deny access to vaccines to anyone.

In Newsweek (11/27/24), Brandon Novick of the Center for Economic and Policy Research acknowledged “legitimate concern about his vaccine skepticism” but went on to argue that those concerns are “overblown”: “He promises not to prevent Americans from accessing any vaccine,” Novick wrote. “Kennedy mainly wants to require more and higher quality studies of vaccine safety and increase transparency.”

‘Better not get them vaccinated’

Seth Mnookin (Scientific American, 1/11/17): “For more than a decade, Kennedy has promoted anti-vaccine propaganda completely unconnected to reality.”

A review of RFK Jr.’s record by the AP (7/31/23) clearly documents that he opposes vaccines generally, especially when talking to right-wing audiences: “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” he told a podcast in 2021. (He also said, in 2023, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” but claims the podcaster cut him off before he could say something…more complex.) He has also peddled the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism (Scientific American, 1/11/17).

Of course, his dangerous anti-science views go far beyond vaccines. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network (11/22/24) laid out the extent of Kennedy’s maddening ideas:

His opposition to life-saving vaccines, his belief that HIV may not cause AIDS, his desire to increase the use of quack autism “treatments,” and his comments about putting people taking psychiatric medication in labor camps should all be immediately disqualifying. Autistic people, the disability community and the nation’s public health will all suffer if he is confirmed.

Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (11/18/24), sees a direct threat public health under Kennedy:

Unfortunately, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has demonstrated a consistent lack of willingness to listen, learn and act in the best interest of the health of the American people. He was identified in 2021 as a member of the “Disinformation Dozen” that produced 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms that contributed to the public’s mistrust in science, and likely led to morbidity and mortality.

Nowhere do Bedard, Pinksy or Novick take any of this into account when categorizing Kennedy’s views on vaccines as “more complex” or “overblown.” Unmentioned in all three pieces, for example, is that Kennedy and his anti-vax nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, helped spread misinformation in American Samoa, where vaccination rates plummeted and a measles outbreak subsequently killed dozens of children (Mother Jones, 7/2/24). Derek Lowe of Science (8/28/24) wrote: “As far as I’m concerned, he and Children’s Health Defense have blood on their hands.”

And Novick’s blithe dismissal of health experts’ concerns misrepresents Kennedy’s promise: He did not promise “not to prevent Americans from accessing any vaccine”; he promised not to “take away anybody’s vaccines.” It’s a crucial distinction. Banning vaccines would actually be fairly difficult for a health secretary to do by fiat, so it’s an easy promise to make. But many rightly fear he would work to make vaccines less accessible—not by “pulling them from the market,” as Bedard assures readers he won’t do, but by, for instance, making decisions that would mean vaccines would in many cases no longer be covered by insurance.

And by changing vaccination recommendations, Kennedy could strongly influence vaccination rates, which would increase the possibility of deadly disease outbreaks impacting far more people than only those able to choose whether they want to be vaccinated—again, whether or not he “takes away anybody’s vaccines.”

‘Best chance of reining in corruption’

Brandon Novick (Newsweek, 11/27/24): “Kennedy represents a unique shift away from the corporate capture that has pervaded the public health agencies.”

Many of these corporate media pieces try to frame Kennedy’s position as populist outrage against the status quo, portraying Kennedy as some anti-corporate crusader  looking out for regular folks against parasitic healthcare profiteers.

Novick wrote:

Within the context of a Trump administration, Americans should strongly support Kennedy’s nomination as he is the best chance of reining in corruption and corporate power while prioritizing public health over profits.

“Kennedy has railed against price gouging, and he supports the ability for Medicare to negotiate drug prices like other nations who pay far less,” he argued. Novick added that Kennedy “seeks to stop the pervasive poisoning of Americans by large drug and food companies,” and points “to European nations which have stronger regulations.”

It’s hard to imagine the Trump White House, dedicated to destroying the administrative state, creating more federal regulations on commerce. As Greg Sargent (New Republic, 11/15/24) noted, Trump

didn’t disguise his promises to govern in the direct interests of some of the wealthiest executives and investors in the country…. Trump is basically declaring that his administration will be open for business to those who boost and assist him politically.

The notion that you can pick through an agenda like Kennedy’s and join with him on just the sensible parts is a fundamental misunderstanding of how right-wing “populism” works. Its very purpose is to deflect legitimate concerns and grievances onto imaginary conspiracies and scapegoats, in order to neutralize struggles for real change.

When the far right talks about genuine problems, your response should not be, we can work together because we share the same issues. Those issues are just the bait that’s necessary for the switch.

‘Casualty of the culture wars’

Laurie Ochoa (LA Times, 11/23/24): “Many in the food community would love to see someone break the status quo.”

But this is a mistake that commentators, eager for compromise and common ground, make again and again. Asking if there’s a “silver lining” to RFK Jr.’s appointment, Laurie Ochoa at the LA Times (11/23/24) said that while scrutiny has

rightly been on [Kennedy’s] anti-vaccine and anti-fluoride positions, some have taken note of his strong language against food additives in the processed foods so many of us consume and that are making so many Americans sick.

Houston Chronicle (11/22/24) editorial writer Regina Lankenau used her column space to ask Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard University, “So is there any chance that RFK Jr. under a Trump administration will be the one to disrupt Big Food?” He answered, “Yes, and I’m hopeful,” saying that Kennedy’s potential oversight of “federal nutrition programs, including school meal programs” could help him tackle processed food intake.

At the Boston Globe (11/20/24), Jennifer Block argued that “When It Comes to Food, RFK and the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Crew Have a Point.” Block touted the right-wing pseudo-science “wellness” panel that launched the MAHA movement, writing that while it’s true that Biden-Harris have done much more for public health than Trump did in terms of nutrition and regulation of the food industry, “Yet the community voicing concerns about food and contaminants—like the people who showed up at Vani Hari’s rally in Michigan — feel as if they’ve gotten a warmer reception on the political right.”

Her evidence is that Democrats and the left have been critical of the pseudo-science wellness crowd. “But it would be a grave mistake if necessary conversations about chronic illness and our medical and food systems became another casualty of the culture wars,” she wrote.

The medical world just isn’t being open-minded enough, she wrote, arguing that the “debunkers’ credo is that anyone who’s critical of medicine or offers alternatives to pharmaceuticals will send you on a slippery slope to anti-vaccine, anti-science woo.” The problem, of course, is not that Kennedy is at the top of that slope, but that he’s already at the bottom of the hill.

‘A national disgrace’

Neil Barsky (Guardian, 11/21/24): “Should RFK Jr. be able to abandon his numerous conspiracy theories about vaccines, he can be the most transformative health secretary in our country’s history.”

Neil Barsky, founder of the Marshall Project, admitted in the Guardian (11/21/24) that Kennedy’s “anti-vaccine views are beyond the pale,” but said he understood that “our healthcare system is a national disgrace hiding in plain sight.” Barsky added, “He recognizes the inordinate control the pharmaceutical and food industries [have] over healthcare policy.”

But Kennedy does not actually propose to replace that “national disgrace”; asked whether he supported a Medicare for All system, which would be a real step toward curbing the power of the pharmaceutical industry, his response was incoherent (Jacobin, 6/9/23):

My highest ambition would be to have a single-payer program . . . where people who want to have private programs can go ahead and do that, but to have a single program that is available to everybody.

In other words, he thinks “single payer” should be one of the payers!

So it is questionable how much Kennedy really wants to address these issues. But even if one were to give him the benefit of the doubt, the pro-business, anti-regulation nature of the rest of the incoming administration suggests there is scant hope any of Kennedy’s health food talk would ever become meaningful policy.

For example, Mande’s answer that Trump would allow Kennedy to make school lunches more nutritious appears naive in view of Trump’s first term, in which he rolled “back healthier standards for school lunches in America championed by [former First Lady] Michelle Obama,” moving to “allow more pizza, meat and potatoes over fresh vegetables, fruits and whole grains” (Guardian, 1/17/22).

In fact, Kennedy already seems at odds with Trump’s pick for agriculture secretary (Politico, 11/29/24), who will be his main influence over US food policy. Big Pharma already has Trump’s ear (Reuters, 11/27/24). And Kennedy has already felt the pressure of his new boss’s love of fast food when he threw out his ideals and posed with a Big Mac and a Coke (New York Post, 11/7/24).

As SEIU President April Verrett (11/15/24) explained, none of Kennedy’s pseudo-populist sloganeering can really outweigh the danger he poses if he becomes a part of state power:

SEIU members know that healthcare must be grounded in science and evidence-based medicine. Our healthcare workers put their lives on the line to protect patients during the darkest days of the pandemic, and we would have lost many more members and loved ones if it weren’t for lifesaving vaccines. We will not stand silent as an outspoken anti-vaxxer who spread misinformation about autism and widespread public health interventions is poised to take control of one of our most consequential government agencies.

‘Legitimating his extremist positions’

Beatrice Adler-Bolton: “Media have allowed this anti-science and ableist rhetoric to be normalized at a mass scale.”

Pundits in the New York Times and elsewhere taking Kennedy at his word are part of a broader problem in the media, according to Beatrice Adler-Bolton, co-host of the podcast Death Panel. Media frame his MAHA movement to sound “like a health-focused initiative,” she told FAIR in an email, but it’s actually a “platform for dangerous rhetoric and fake science that directly undermines public health research”:

By framing RFK Jr. as a semi-legitimate voice on health issues at all, not only does it bolster the credibility of the MAHA agenda, the media have allowed this anti-science and ableist rhetoric to be normalized at a mass scale, effectively legitimating his extremist positions on vaccines, climate change and chronic disease without sufficient scrutiny, right before his appointment will be up for debate in the Senate. Truly scary stuff.

Rather than critically examining his stances, mainstream outlets often frame his views as “alternative” or “controversial,” which not only normalizes them but implicitly elevates them to the level of mainstream discourse, or further bolsters his reputation among the wellness community as a class warrior/truth teller.

This is particularly problematic in the context of his potential role at HHS, where his views could directly influence policy, research and local health department budgets, drug approvals, healthcare safety guidelines, disability determinations, disease surveillance, health statistics, public health disaster and epidemic preparedness, and so much more, making the media’s soft treatment of him even more dangerous.

‘Failures of the pandemic response’

“Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy claimed (New York Post, 7/23/23), citing this as evidence that the virus “is ethnically targeted.”

These efforts to find a silver lining in the Kennedy appointment, strenuously searching for common ground on which progressives and medical professionals can work with him, necessarily involved distorting the record in order to create a potential good-faith ally who doesn’t exist. Bedard’s piece in the Times, for example, twisted the facts in writing about the context for Kennedy’s rise:

There’s been no meaningful, public reckoning from the federal government on the successes and failures of the nation’s pandemic response. Americans dealt with a patchwork of measures—school closings, mask requirements, limits on gatherings, travel bans—with variable successes and trade-offs. Many felt pressured into accepting recently developed, rapidly tested vaccines that were often required to attend school, keep one’s job or spend time in public spaces.

The Biden administration did, in fact, reflect on the Covid pandemic to better plan for upcoming pandemics (NPR, 4/16/24; STAT, 4/16/24; PBS, 4/16/24), as scientific journals and government agencies have looked at the last pandemic to come up with planning for the future. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (11/14/24) recently held a hearing on the subject, and the Government Accountability Office (7/11/23) offered nearly 400 recommendations on improving pandemic planning. It might be fair to evaluate how well this effort is going, but that’s not what Bedard wrote.

And the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates were popular when they were being rolled out (Gallup, 9/24/21)—as one might expect when an effective preventive measure is introduced to combat a contagious virus killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Meanwhile, the fresh face that Bedard hopes will give us a meaningful reckoning, the one that the Biden administration supposedly failed to give us, endorsed a xenophobic, antisemitic conspiracy theory to explain the coronavirus (New York Post, 7/23/23): “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

Bedard sanewashed this lunacy, saying that RFK Jr. “is right that vaccine mandates are a place where community safety and individual liberties collide.” “Official communication about vaccine safety can be more alienating to skeptics than reassuring,” she declared.

If someone wrote that traffic lights are a place where road safety and drivers’ liberties collide, and that traffic enforcement was alienating to red light skeptics, the Times would laugh it off. Yet the Times let a doctor give oxygen to such nonsense, even as she admitted that vaccines are only effective when an overwhelming majority of the population gets them.

Places like the Times have also published criticism of Kennedy (New York Times, 11/18/24), including a thorough look at his role in the American Samoa crisis (New York Times, 11/25/24). But corporate media have no obligation to bend the truth to offer the “other side” of an anti-vaccine extremist who is only taken seriously because his last name happens to be Kennedy.

 

Beyond Gas (11/24): “We found indoor NO2 pollution levels from moderate gas stove use far above the health
standard set by the EPA for outdoor exposure.”

It was the sort of feel-good, David-vs.-Goliath story that’s perfect ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.

A coalition of DC-area faith, tenant and environmental groups spent two years studying the health impacts of gas stoves. Just ahead of the holiday, when countless families would be spending hours in their kitchens cooking turkey and fixings, the coalition released their report, and it was a shocker.

After running the gas oven and two burners for 30 minutes, nearly two-thirds of homes studied registered higher levels of nitrogen dioxide than the EPA health-protective standard.

Nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, is a gas linked to wide-ranging health problems, from asthma to heart issues, and possibly “tied to increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, as well as cognitive development and behavioral issues in children,” the report noted.

For the grassroots group, called the Beyond Gas Coalition, the most pressing message to get to families was how to lessen their exposure to NO2 by keeping windows open during and even after cooking with gas stoves.

Longer term, the group encourages localities to ban gas appliances in new construction—a step already taken by DC and Montgomery County, Maryland, the two jurisdictions Beyond Gas studied. (Those bans will take effect in 2027.)

Despite the timeliness of Beyond Gas’s findings, only two news outlets covered the release: the Washington Informer (11/22/24), a venerable Black newspaper, and WUSA9, the local CBS affiliate owned by the media conglomerate Tegna (formerly part of Gannett).

WUSA, in fact, produced no less than three stories on the day of the report’s release (Heated, 11/27/24). Unfortunately, WUSA’s stories were quickly followed by an about-face.

Yanked without explanation

WUSA‘s report (11/27/24) on the dangers of gas stoves disappeared from its website—then came back in a more industry-friendly form.

WUSA’s trio of pieces began running on the morning of November 21, but by that evening, two of the three links to its stories were broken. “I thought it was just a glitch or something,” Barbara Briggs, co-author of Beyond Gas’s report, told the climate newsletter Heated (11/27/24).

Washington City Paper (11/27/24) reported:

When [Beyond Gas] called up WUSA to inquire, they say the message they received from the producer who worked on the story was that the station made the decision at the behest of the utility company, choosing to pull the story down and hide the video from its YouTube channel until it could include a statement from Washington Gas.

Of course, Washington Gas was under no obligation to ever give a statement.

“[WUSA] essentially told Washington Gas, ‘We’ll kill the story, and let you decide when and whether we republish it,’” Mark Rodeffer, a member of Sierra Club’s DC chapter, told Heated‘s Emily Atkin. “It’s shocking to me that they’re letting one of their advertisers dictate stories.”

“Washington Gas has sponsored many WUSA environmental stories,” Heated reported, “most of which are designed to bolster the utility’s environmental reputation.”

While Washington Gas wasn’t initially named in WUSA’s main report, Scott Broom, the environmental reporter who produced the story, noted in his report the gas industry’s objection to findings linking NO2 exposure to negative health outcomes, as well as the industry’s lawsuits against DC and Montgomery County over banning gas appliances.

But Washington Gas apparently wasn’t happy with Broom’s story, and it was quietly yanked without explanation.

New and improved

Heated (11/27/24): “The incident raises questions about how much fossil fuel sponsorship is influencing environmental and public health journalism—both in the DC region and beyond.”

Then, just as suddenly, the story reappeared six days later (11/27/24), now with Washington Gas’s fingerprints all over it. An editor’s note affixed to the top read: “This story…has been updated to include additional research and sources regarding the safety of gas stoves.”

A more honest editor’s note might have read: “We changed this story to keep a sponsor happy.”

WUSA’s apparent accommodations to Washington Gas—a greedy local monopoly utility owned by the Canadian multinational AltaGas—started right at the top of the new story. Here’s the opening to Broom’s original story (which can still be accessed via the Wayback Machine):

As families prepare for Thanksgiving feasts, a new report highlights what studies show is a serious health hazard in the kitchen: gas stoves and ovens.

In the updated version, WUSA downgraded the health hazard from “serious” to merely “potential.”

Broom’s second paragraph initially stated that “a study” had “revealed” that nearly two-thirds of the gas-stove-kitchens tested exceeded standard NO2 levels. The updated version now says “a report” only “claims” this.

Further down, things got stranger. The new version contains a long tangent conveying a gas industry talking point that has nothing to do with the story.

“Gas appliances can play an important role in reducing health hazards in poor countries where people rely on dirtier fuels such as wood and kerosene,” WUSA reported, citing a study likely handed to it by Washington Gas.

Better than nothing?

You might think the advocates who spent two years working on their study would be outraged at WUSA. But the DC area’s local media scene is in such disrepair that any coverage, no matter how problematic, may be better than the all-too-common nothing.

“It’s not like public radio has done anything,” a resigned Briggs told Heated. “It’s not like any of the other stations have carried it.”

 

 

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Katherine Gallagher about the Abu Ghraib verdict for the November 29, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241129Gallagher.mp3

 

Intercept (11/12/24)

Janine Jackson: For a press corps that described the grievous abuse of Iraqi detainees at the prison in Abu Ghraib as “seared into the American consciousness,” there’s been relatively little interest in the fact that a federal jury has just found defense contractor CACI guilty of conspiring in that abuse.

Al Shimari v. CACI International was filed in 2008 and, CounterSpin listeners will know, has been fought and fought and fought. And now, while its unclear what justice would look like for victims of torture, there is some acknowledgement of harm, and the fact that it was people, and not nameless forces in the “fog of war,” who were to blame.

How meaningful this verdict becomes could shape things going forward, given the US military’s increased reliance on private contractors, who’ve evidently been led to understand that they are above the law.

We’re joined now by Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who have held onto this case all the way. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Katherine Gallagher.

Katherine Gallagher: Thanks so much for having me back.

JJ: First of all, congratulations. I’m not sure people understand that, just because the paper says, “Oh, this was horrible abuse. Our conscience is shocked,” doesn’t mean that anything happens. So the law isn’t justice, but if you use the law, it’s something. So first of all, I want to say thank you.

KG: Thank you, thank you for that acknowledgement, and, really, the thanks and the effort was first and foremost to our clients, who filed this case 16-and-a-half years ago, and stuck with it and stuck with us and stuck with US courts through a rollercoaster ride of moments where they thought that justice might be coming, and then others where the case was dismissed and deep disappointment. So I agree, the law is not always an answer, but it can certainly be a tool, as it was in this case, to get some measure of justice for Suhail, Asa’ad and Salah.

JJ: I’ll ask you to say their names, actually, because they’re not often named. So the plaintiffs in this case, that made it this far, say their names.

Middle East Eye (3/22/23)

KG: Salah al-Ejaili came and testified in person in Virginia in this case. He is a journalist, and he was working as a journalist for Al Jazeera at the time he was detained and tortured at Abu Ghraib. The second plaintiff is Asa’ad al-Zuba’e. He is a fruit vendor in Iraq, and he testified, via video link, live in the courtroom in Alexandria. And then the third plaintiff is Suhail al-Shimari, whose name is the lead name in this long-running case of Al Shimari v. CACI. And he is an educator.

JJ: It seems important to recognize and acknowledge that there are human beings here. I want to ask you to ground us, because some of our listeners weren’t even born. Ground us on the substance of the charges here, and maybe why is this the only lawsuit to make it this far?

KG: So this case stems out of what for many of us, or those of us of a certain generation, really is a historic event, in the negative sense. And that is the torture of Iraqi detainees at a US-run detention center in Baghdad, in Iraq, during the US invasion of Iraq.

At Abu Ghraib, especially during the time from fall 2003 until early 2004, there was a conspiracy to torture and otherwise subject Iraqi detainees to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. And that abuse, that horrific abuse, was documented in photos.

And those photos came out, the world saw them in 2004, and really “shocked the conscience,” which is a term that we often use in the law, but here it was true, for the entire nation and the world, when we saw naked, hooded, Iraqi detainees in human pyramids, being threatened with dogs, being subjected to sexual assault and degradation and humiliation, being held in contorted, painful positions, shackled to bed frames and walls.

And all of this, military generals investigated, they found that this was done, in large part, to “soften up” detainees, to make them pliable and ready to speak when they went into interrogation.

Now, at the time of the US invasion of Iraq, the US went in far too quickly, and with not enough resources, and with really no plan for the counterinsurgency that followed. So in the summer of 2003, the US started detaining Iraqis en masse. And so there were thousands and thousands of Iraqi detainees.

CounterSpin (8/18/23)

And in order to understand who they were even picking up, the US set up a number of detention centers, and they didn’t have enough trained interrogators, and they also didn’t have enough trained translators within the US military. So they outsourced those functions to private companies, and one of them was CACI, or C.A.C.I., a private government contractor from Virginia.

And CACI was hired, and paid tens of millions of dollars, to augment and support the US interrogation services. So CACI was hired to find so-called resident experts—qualified, trained interrogators to work in Iraq, and to supervise those interrogators who were working with the US military.

But what we found out, as the torture scandal broke and the military investigations happened and more information came out, is that CACI sent over unqualified interrogators, in many cases, and did not provide the kind of oversight or supervision that was required, and that was particularly required at Abu Ghraib, where there was a breakdown in the command structure within the military that allowed the kind of torture and abuse in those notorious photos to occur.

So that’s the big picture of what happened. And the abuse in that time was also inflicted upon the plaintiffs, Suhail, Asa’ad and Salah, who were detained in that end-of-2003, early-2004 time.

JJ: It seems worth just lifting up, as a point of information, these were not people who were charged or convicted of any crime, the detainees that we’re talking about, many of them, at Abu Ghraib, right?

KG: Correct. The individuals in this case, and I’ve represented individuals in two other cases, one that settled back in 2012 and one that was dismissed back in 2009. And of those 338 plaintiffs I’ve represented across those three cases, zero were ever charged with a crime. But I also want to be very clear that, even if one were charged with a crime, torture is always unlawful.

JJ: Right. Well, the case is landmark, in part just because of the way that it names contractors as responsible parties. It’s always been their argument, right, that they’re just private actors following orders from the US, and the US has immunity, so we do too, right? That’s part of what’s important about this.

KG: That’s precisely right. Over the 16 years of litigation, CACI has filed at least 15 motions to dismiss. And whether they’ve invoked Derivative Sovereign Immunity or the Political Question Doctrine or the Government Contractor Defense or the Law of War Immunity, or most recently and throughout trial, the so-called Borrowed Servant Defense—all of these boiled down to essentially one argument, which is, we were working with the US military, and anything we did was because they were overseeing it. And if they were overseeing it, they should have any responsibility, not us. We were just, essentially, following orders.

Democracy Now! (4/7/16)

Now, the conduct at issue in this case—and we have clear decisions from the Fourth Circuit saying as much in our long litigation—the conduct at issue is unlawful. We’re talking about torture. We had plead war crimes, we’re talking about cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment. These are violations of US domestic criminal law, and they are also violations of US-signed treaties, including the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions.

And so, this is not conduct that the military could order anyone, whether it’s soldiers or contractors, to do. This is unlawful, illegal. So CACI’s defense fails, insofar as this is not a lawful order that they could have ever received from the military.

But, additionally, CACI was hired to supervise its own employees. This is a for-profit corporation that hired employees at will. So, unlike an enlisted person at Abu Ghraib, the CACI employees could quit at any time, and notably, some did, and one even did, more than one, because of what they saw happening at Abu Ghraib. So this corporation should be held accountable for its own employees’ conduct.

And that’s precisely, after 16-and-a-half years, what a jury in Alexandria, Virginia, found to be the case two weeks ago when they gave down a verdict against CACI and for our plaintiffs.

JJ: I will say I’m disheartened by the relative quietness of media around the verdict. There has been some coverage, but I feel like I can say pretty confidently that had this case died in court, we would’ve never heard about it again.

But I’m also saddened by the accounts that I have seen: Virtually all of them use the phrase “over two decades ago.” And that, to me, is not a neutral tag. It’s a linguistic wink that says, “Why are we still talking about this?” But as you’ve noted, the case has taken this long because CACI has resisted it for this long, right?

KG: That is absolutely the case. The plaintiffs filed back in 2008, and our plaintiffs, to this day, the 20-year time period doesn’t erase or make this historic. They are living every day with being an Abu Ghraib torture survivor. They still suffer from nightmares, from flashbacks, and talking about Abu Ghraib is not something that’s easy for them to do.

The fact that this case went to trial not once but twice, and that the plaintiffs had to tell their account, tell about their suffering, their humiliation, more than once, it wasn’t easy. And to remember the kinds of details, some of it is seared in their memory, and others, of course, over 20 years is less clear than it used to be. But the nightmares and the mental harm has continued to this day, and it should not be something that is relegated to the history books at all.

And one of the things I’d note: There weren’t many photos shown during trial, but there were a few photos shown during trial, and there were a couple of jurors who appeared to be on the younger side. And when those photos came up, particularly for one of the younger jurors, who may not have seen this on the cover of the paper each day, as those of us did back in 2004, there was absolute shock. There was absolute shock. I mean, these photos were shocking for everyone, but the accounts seemed to be unknown. And that is not something that should be permitted to happen.

And that’s part of why, despite the difficulty, our plaintiffs have brought this case forward, and stayed with it throughout all of this time, so that it is not forgotten. And it is so that what was done in our name, for me as a US citizen, is also not forgotten. And they want to be sure that this never happens to anyone else again. So to the extent that corrections haven’t been made, whether by the US military or by CACI, to ensure that their employees or soldiers do not ever, ever treat detainees, or humans, in the way that the Iraqi men, women and children who were held at Abu Ghraib were treated, that’s what this case is also about.

JJ: Well, what do you make of the “few bad apples” line, which literally has appeared in some of the journalistic accounts that I’ve seen, that these were some rogue CACI employees, and it’s wrong to hold the organization liable for that?

KG: CACI, again, by its contract, had an obligation to oversee its employees, and it had staff on site precisely to do that. Also, the staff in Iraq was in daily contact with the staff back in Virginia, and some of the staff in Virginia traveled to Abu Ghraib over this period of time.

And so, whether we’re talking about a contractor at Abu Ghraib and allegations of torture, or frankly, other kinds of corporations, you have an obligation to look down your supply chain. And that, here, that supply chain is your employees, and you have an obligation to ensure that they are abiding by the terms of their contract, and the obligations that you as a corporation are putting forward that you will comply with. And that included following federal and international law. And that means no torture, no cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment.

JJ: I sort of resent the fact, though I understand it, that it’s being reported solely as a lawsuit, and not a human rights crisis. And the coverage as a lawsuit means, first of all, we see a note of monetary outcomes: These folks are getting millions!

And then, also, I see the Washington Post quoting CACI, saying CACI employees say, “None of them laid a hand on detainees.” Well, “laid a hand on,” like, I don’t know, that sounds like language you got from somewhere else.

But, also, plaintiffs are described as “saying” they were restrained, “claiming” they were tortured. There’s always this degree of difference. And I wonder, I wish, in some ways, we could move it outside of just the lawsuit framework, and talk about the human rights crisis that Abu Ghraib actually presents and presented for the United States.

Katherine Gallagher: “The jury found not that our clients ‘claimed’ that they were tortured, but that our clients were subjected to torture.”

KG: I appreciate that comment and that perspective. And just a few reactions to the language that you cited: What’s important here is, our clients testified in court, under oath, and there were findings made by a jury, factual findings against clear law. And Judge Brinkema gave the jury their legal instructions against which to apply facts.

So the jury found not that our clients “claimed” that they were tortured, but that our clients were subjected to torture, or cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment. The jury found them credible, as did General Taguba when he investigated Abu Ghraib back in 2004.

And, in fact, one of our clients in this case was someone who provided an account of abuse already, back in late 2003. And at that time, General Taguba also found the report by him and other Iraqi detainees credible.

So these are not mere allegations at this point. We have a jury verdict, and the jury awarded each plaintiff $3 million in compensatory damages, and $11 million each in punitive damages against CACI.

And that punitive damages award is saying that it wasn’t a few rogue employees, but it was a corporation that had responsibilities that it didn’t fulfill. The fact that that punitive damages award was meeting the amount that CACI was paid through their contract at Abu Ghraib, I really think sends a very clear message.

JJ: Finally, and perhaps you’ve answered it, but what are your hopes for the impact of this verdict, and what would you maybe say to other attorneys, frankly, who are working on years-old cases that might never lead to such an outcome?

KG: First, on the outcome, we certainly had a big victory, and it was a real validation of our clients, of what was done to them, and of their quest for justice. So that, again, I am very grateful for.

We will be facing an appeal; CACI has made that clear. So the litigation is not yet over, and our clients have not been given the monetary compensation. But, indeed, there already has been a real recognition for them by the jury, which mattered a lot, I have to say. It mattered a great deal to them, to know that they were heard and that they were believed.

In terms of the bigger picture of what this means, I do think that these cases are important. They may be difficult and, frankly, they also may be lost, but raising the challenges, and bringing the facts to the forefront, and putting harm with proper labels, so that those pictures Abu Ghraib are understood as torture, which means causing severe physical or mental harm, intentionally. And that is what happened to our plaintiffs.

CACI was part of a conspiracy to do that to our plaintiffs. And, indeed, they may not have been the ones to literally shackle our plaintiffs, but they gave instructions and encouragement to have our plaintiffs so mistreated and so harmed.

And I think that that message of challenging injustice, and for our clients to try and regain some of their agency, some of their dignity, it’s important. And I’m gratified that in this case it ended in a victory, but I still think it’s worth bringing cases, even if that’s not the outcome.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. They’re online at CCRJustice.org.

Thank you so much, Katherine Gallagher, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KG: Thank you so much.

 

 

In the aftermath of the Trump victory, the opinion pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both published post-election eulogies for conventional economics. Remarkably, these columns shared almost the exact same headline.

Peter Coy’s column in the Times (11/8/24) read “The Election’s Other Biggest Losers? Economists.” In the Journal (11/7/24), Joseph C. Sternberg’s piece was headed “The 2024 Election’s Other Loser: Economists.”

While the headlines were nearly identical, the ideological differences between the Times and the Journal mean that Coy and Sternberg arrived at very different conclusions for the future of the field of study.

Coy’s piece is a lament for mainstream economists, who in his view perfectly analyzed the economic situation of the election, only to have their expertise rejected by the voters. Sternberg strikes a smugger tone, arguing that economists deserve scorn for not understanding what the economy meant to voters, as evidenced by the election results.

Despite their divergent tones, both columns suffered from similar problems, including a fundamental misunderstanding of how voters interface with “the economy” as a political concern.

‘Moment of reckoning’

Peter Coy (New York Times, 11/8/24): “Maybe I’ve spent too much time around economists.”

Peter Coy is the resident economics and business columnist at the New York Times. A longtime writer for BusinessWeek, he is an unabashed apologist for mainstream economics, so when “voters utterly ignored” the wisdom of 23 Nobel Prize–winning economists, Coy seemed to take it personally.

Coy ticked off Trump’s economic sins, including tariffs and immigration restrictions, before conceding that “voters ate it up. Economists were perceived as spokespeople for the power structure—if not outright harmful, then at least ignorable.”

One doesn’t have to be a Trump supporter to recognize that economists (or at least, the ones quoted in corporate media) are generally spokespeople for the power structure. That aside, Coy went on to pose the election loss as a “moment of reckoning” for Democrats:

Should Democrats stick to the economic platform of 2024, which on the whole is based on standard economic principles, with a few concessions to electoral politics, such as promises of mortgage down-payment assistance and fulminations against “nefarious price-gouging”? Or should they go full-on populist to compete with Trump?

Coy was vague on what he meant by “standard economic principles,” elaborating only to say “trade should be free, within reason,” and that “monetary policy should be insulated from politics.” (“Insulated from politics” is what media say when they mean bankers should be allowed to set interest rates without regard for their impact on people.)

In other words, Coy stumped for the status quo, in the most general sense. He believes that Biden bet big and lost on “deliverism,” the idea that voters will reward politicians at the ballot box for material gains delivered. Coy failed to mention the Covid-era relief, like the expanded child tax credit, that was delivered then taken back from US workers. Deliverism is far from full-fledged economic populism, but Coy uses Harris’s election loss to argue that interventions in the economy on behalf of working people are a fool’s errand.

‘Unfortunate’ populism

Franklin Roosevelt

Coy invoked the example of President Franklin Roosevelt, a president who turned to economic populism to “fight off threats” from political populists, as a “reference point” for Democrats.

But instead of investigating why Roosevelt’s populism was successful, both electorally and economically, in an effort to imagine what modern left economic populism could look like, Coy decried a hypothetical progressive populism as “unfortunate”:

Higher tariffs would slow economic growth and raise prices, no matter how many times Trump denies it. As for immigration, effective border controls make sense, but sharp restrictions on new arrivals and expulsion of people who are already in the country would leave millions of jobs unfilled and possibly unfillable.

Most progressives who wish a return to economic populism would agree with this analysis. The problem is that Coy presented tariffs and mass deportations as the only forms Democrats’ economic populism could take. Unmentioned were universal healthcare, a wealth tax and guaranteed basic income, to name just a few examples—odd omissions, given that he acknowledged that FDR called for “higher taxes on the rich, a federal minimum wage and Social Security.”

Advice from the right

A scholar from the highly ideological Hoover Institution advised Democrats to “offer nonideological solutions.” (Creative Commons photo: Jim Naureckas)

Instead, Coy sought advice from Larry Diamond of the right-wing Hoover Institution, and experts from the arms maker–funded Center for a New American Security, on what Democrats can do to “fend off populism.” Their prescriptions included “offer non-ideological solutions…create unifying and aspirational narratives, use blame attributions sparingly,” and other safely capital-friendly methods.

Unsurprisingly, these experts agreed wholeheartedly with Coy’s assertion that left-wing populism in any form is the wrong path for Democrats. The fact that Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election after she renounced the progressive policies she once supported, then offered many “nonideological solutions” of her own, didn’t seem to concern Coy.

Instead, Coy concluded, Democrats would be better served by sticking to their (Hoover Institution–vetted) principles, and waiting for Trump to mess up. “Maybe I’ve spent too much time around economists,” Coy conceded, “but I do think the prescriptions of mainstream economics still make sense.”

It is clear why Coy and his fellow fans of mainstream economics were so disappointed by this election. In his eyes, the Harris campaign did everything right. She ran on an incumbent record that posted strong growth and low unemployment, and lowered inflation rates. She ran on a business-friendly platform (despite Coy’s disapproval of her anti-price-gouging “concession” to voters).

And after all that, Harris lost, decisively. Nonetheless, Coy was optimistic for the future of a Democratic Party committed to centrism: “In the long run, Democrats will be better off sticking to their economic principles while Trump and the party he controls founder.”

‘Those parts that matter most’

Aside from pointing to phony wage growth statistics, the Wall Street Journal‘s Joseph Sternberg (11/7/24) argued that numbers like the “business-investment component of …quarterly GDP releases” mattered most to voters.

Sternberg spent the first half of his Wall Street Journal column (11/7/24) arguing that “prominent economics commentators missed (or chose to overlook) those parts of the economy that matter most to most voters.” As someone who studies Marxian political economy, I am highly sympathetic to the view that the conventional economists have it dead wrong. However, instead of calling for a true reevaluation of the economics field, Sternberg limited his critique to Monday morning–quarterbacking his ideological opponents.

Sternberg claims that real weekly earnings fell 0.5% over Biden’s term in office, as opposed to 7% growth during Trump’s term. Sternberg appears to be looking at Current Population Survey earnings data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which show a phantom spike in income just before the end of Trump’s first term. This clearly reflects lower-paid workers disproportionately losing their jobs during the lockdown rather than actual gains for workers’ pocketbooks (FAIR.org, 11/20/24).

More dependable statistics show real incomes increased at all income levels during the Biden administration, and increased the most at lower income levels. Per the Center for American Progress, workers poorer than 90% of all earners saw a 16% increase in real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) between February 2020 and September 2024; workers poorer than 80% of earners saw a 9% increase.

Other analyses similarly found across-the-board income increases from the Biden economic recovery (especially among lower income levels) in terms of both real wages and real weekly earnings. In other words, if you look at data without known aberrations, workers have indeed come out ahead.

Those datasets, however, don’t post-confirm Sternberg’s notion that economists sleepwalked into an election loss. Whether it’s earnings data or anything else, there will always be statistics that can support one’s post-hoc reasoning. Confidently proclaiming which economic indicators decide an election after the election takes place is low-hanging fruit.

Sternberg declared that “only an economist could be surprised by Donald Trump’s presidential victory.” But economists who favorably compared Kamala Harris’ platform to Trump’s weren’t predicting that she would therefore win; they were saying they thought her policies would result in better economic outcomes. That voters most concerned about economic issues picked the candidate most economists thought would hurt the economy is more an indictment of journalism than of economics.

Workers the actual losers

FAIR.org (7/13/23): “Any discussion of Biden’s poor approval ratings on economic policy has to include consideration of the media’s role in manufacturing those ratings.”

The job of communicating economic activity to the masses is not that of economists, after all, but rather journalists and the punditocracy (of which Sternberg is a part). Throughout his column, Sternberg referred to the “economics pundit class,” “economics commentators,” “economists,” “academics,” “punditry” and “economic analysts,” all in more or less the same role. The problem is, these words describe people in a wide variety of jobs, who were by no means united in their electoral prognostication.

FAIR (1/25/23, 7/13/23, 1/5/24) has documented the media obsession with Biden-era inflation, and indeed, continuous news reports that decry the effects inflation will have on people’s quality of life go a long way to shaping perceptions of the economy. When media bleat for years about inflation, and workers recognize that prices have indeed increased, then workers’ justified dissatisfaction with the economy will be identified as “inflation.”

The pundit class has displayed an inability to differentiate between short-run grievances and long-term disaffection. It may be true that inflation is down, thanks to Biden’s remarkable recovery. It may also be true that workers are fed up with the status quo, as represented by Harris’s bid to change “not a thing” about the current administration. Of course, Donald Trump has few real offerings for improvements for the working class, but that is another issue altogether.

To Coy, a dramatic Democratic underperformance, especially among workers, is a sign that economists should stick to the same great policies that have generated historic wealth inequality. To Sternberg, economists are fools because they weren’t looking at the figures that exactly predicted the election, notwithstanding the fact that 1) that’s not the job of economists, 2) he only chose his magic figures after the election took place, and 3) Sternberg’s chief data point, how much voters were paid, is known to misrepresent reality.

As long as writers like Coy and Sternberg fail to understand the motivations of voters, then the losers won’t be the economists, but the workers who are forced to vote for one faction of capital against another.

 

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241129.mp3

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Intercept (11/12/24)

This week on CounterSpin: It wasn’t the horrific abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, but the pictures of it, that forced public and official acknowledgement. The Defense Department vehemently resisted the pictures’ release, with good reason. Yet when, after the initial round, Australian TV put out new images, Washington Post executive editor Len Downie said they were “so shocking and in such bad taste, especially the extensive nudity, that they are not publishable in our newspaper.” The notion that acts of torture by the US military and its privately contracted cat’s paws are, above all, distasteful may help explain corporate media’s inattentiveness to the efforts of victims of Abu Ghraib to find some measure of justice.

But a federal jury has just found defense contractor CACI responsible for its part in that abuse, in a ruling being called “exceptional in every sense of the term.” The Center for Constitutional Rights has been behind the case, Al Shimari v. CACI, through its long rollercoaster ride through the courts—which isn’t over yet. We hear about it from CCR senior staff attorney Katherine Gallagher.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241129Gallagher.mp3

 

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the ICC’s Israel warrants.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241129Banter.mp3