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19 January 20
Michelle Alexander | Injustice on Repeat
Michelle Alexander, The New York Times
Alexander writes: "It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and nothing has changed."
en years have passed since my book, “The New Jim Crow,” was published. I wrote it to challenge our nation to reckon with the recurring cycles of racial reform, retrenchment and rebirth of caste-like systems that have defined our racial history since slavery. It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and nothing has changed.
The White House at night. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
Michelle Alexander, The New York Times
Alexander writes: "It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and nothing has changed."
From mass incarceration to mass deportation, our nation remains in deep denial.
en years have passed since my book, “The New Jim Crow,” was published. I wrote it to challenge our nation to reckon with the recurring cycles of racial reform, retrenchment and rebirth of caste-like systems that have defined our racial history since slavery. It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and nothing has changed.
When I was researching and writing the book, Barack Obama had not yet been elected president of the United States. I was in disbelief that our country would actually elect a black man to be the leader of the so-called free world. As the election approached, I felt an odd sense of hope and dread. I hoped against all reason that we would actually do it. But I also knew that, if we did, there would be a price to pay.
Everything I knew through experience and study told me that we as a nation did not fully understand the nature of the moment we were in. We had recently birthed another caste system — a system of mass incarceration — that locked millions of poor people and people of color in literal and virtual cages.
READ MOREThe White House at night. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
Erin Banco, Asawin Suebsaeng, Spencer Ackerman, Sam Brodey, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "The plan to kill Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was months in the making, but the justification appeared to be assembled and reassembled in real time."
The plan to kill Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was months in the making, but the justification appeared to be assembled and reassembled in real time.
n the hours after the killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on Jan. 3, U.S. officials in the White House, Pentagon, and State Department worked overtime on assembling a plan to handle the fallout, only to watch senior administration officials and the president himself scuttle their effort in real time on national television.
The ensuing days became a mad dash to reconcile the intense intra-administration tensions over what the intelligence actually said about Iranian plots, and how best to sell their case to the American public. At the very top was a president who stewed and complained to staff about how the killing he’d just ordered might negatively affect his re-election prospects and ensnare him in a quagmire in the Middle East of his own creation.
The plan to take out Soleimani had been approved months earlier by President Donald Trump after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-National Security Adviser John Bolton pushed for more to be done to manage Iran’s aggression in the Middle East. But the president for years tried to avoid a direct military confrontation with Tehran, and hitting Soleimani was a move that could edge the two countries closer to war.
When an American contractor was killed in Iraq in late December, President Trump’s national security team presented him with a slew of options on how to respond, and killing Soleimani was on the list. National security advisers reminded the president that he had publicly drawn a line in the sand, saying that if the regime killed Americans there would be severe consequences. Still, the strike was a departure from the regular Trump playbook and officials knew it would take a robust effort to explain not only the reasoning behind the attack but also the administration’s goal on Iran.
“There was this sudden nature about it all. Yeah, it had been in the works for some time. But it didn’t feel like we were all thinking the same on how to move forward,” said one U.S. official, referring to the strike on Soleimani. “It was like, ‘OK, now what?’”
For more than a week, Trump, Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence and officials from the national security community, including at the Pentagon, held twice-daily meetings and conference calls to make sure all government agencies were on the same page regarding messaging, according to two individuals familiar with those conversations.
Despite that effort, what resulted appeared to be an uncoordinated effort to justify an action by national security officials who were varied in their answers about the pre-strike intelligence and who struggled to define the administration’s strategy on Iran post strike.
That internal confusion on how to re-frame the administration’s approach to dealing with Iran led to weeks of what appeared to be frequent mixed messaging, critiques about the administration's apparent lack of strategy, calls from Congress for more robust intelligence briefings—and allegations that Trump and his lieutenants were actively misleading a nation into a sharp military escalation.
This article is based on interviews with 10 U.S. government officials and several former administration officials. The State Department and White House House did not comment on the record for this story.
Worry over the “counterpunch”
For several days following Soleimani’s assassination, Pentagon officials warned Trump and his national security advisers that Iran had a variety of responses it could carry out to make the Americans pay. Among them, sources said, were Iranian attacks on senior U.S. military officers overseas, or violence targeting American outposts in countries like Iraq. Their bottom line was that Iran would hit back, and hit back hard.
The president worried aloud to his team about how the strike could impact the way voters viewed him in the upcoming election. After all, avoiding costly foreign wars in the Middle East had been one of the key promises— and points of contrast—he made as a candidate in 2016.
One official told The Daily Beast that in meetings at the White House Trump was “preoccupied” with ensuring that his public statements on Iran—notably that he would not drag the U.S. into a war with the country—would hold following the assassination. Once Soleimani was gone, Trump was adamant that the administration “get things back to normal” with Iran, one official told The Daily Beast.
According to another U.S. official, senior administration officials, including President Trump, were framing the strike as a de-escalatory measure even before the attack was ordered. The idea was that if the U.S. didn’t hit Soleimani, more people would die because Iran would continue to carry out attacks in the region.
Trump’s insistence on returning to “normal” with Iran directly after he ordered the death of the Islamic republic’s top military leader underscores this president’s wild vacillations between diplomatic overtures and teasing violent retribution, where a call for peace one moment could be followed by a threat to destroy Iranian cultural sites—a tactic that is considered a war crime under international law.
The president inquired about this not long before greenlighting, then abruptly calling off, military strikes on Iran that he approved knowing the body count was estimated to be high.
And even as he publicly celebrated this massive escalation with Iran and aggressively campaigned on, and fundraised off of, his decision, Trump continued to lament privately to close allies that it would be “crazy” to plunge America into another invasion or full-blown war in the Middle East, according to two people who spoke to Trump in the days following the Soleimani hit.
He then pledged he would not “let it happen” on his “watch.”
Of course, none of the president’s stated reservations about starting a new war, or his stated desire to bring soldiers home, kept him and his administration from deploying thousands more American troops to the region as the U.S. and Iran walked up to the brink of all-out warfare early this month.
The Soleimani strike, though, forced the president to pause, even just briefly, to consider whether what he had ordered would have lasting, irreversible consequences—repercussions he’d never meant to bump up against.
“You know, he's sincerely grappling with this, which is good. I mean, war should be hard and we should grapple with it. I just don't want any one person to say, okay, I've grappled with it we should do it,” Sen. Tim Kaine told The Daily Beast in an interview about the escalating tension in Iran. Since the Soleimani strike, the Virginia Democrat has led a bipartisan push in the Senate to rein in Trump’s authority to wage war in Iran without congressional approval.
“If I were president I shouldn't have the ability to just on my own say, let’s do this,” Kaine added. “It should be deliberative, because that's what the troops and their families deserve.”
President Trump’s concerns were fed, in part, by comments from lawmakers and other analysts that the strike on Soleimani could lead quickly to a major, sustained conflict.
“We need to get ready for a major pushback. Our people in Iraq and the Middle East are going to be targeted. We need to be ready to defend our people in the Middle East,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in an interview with The Daily Beast the night of the strike. “I think we need to be ready for a big counterpunch.”
“Overselling the intel”
In the first week after the Jan. 3 strike, officials appeared on television and radio shows in an attempt to frame the Soleimani strike as an act of de-escalation. Just hours after the strike, Brian Hook, the special representative for Iran, went on BBC World Service radio saying that killing Soleimani was designed to “advance the cause of peace.”
Officials at the State Department, in coordination with the White House, drafted talking points advising those who would appear in the media to underscore Soleimani’s “malign activities” and his role in killing American troops over the years, according to two U.S. officials.
But the White House wanted to advance a different argument—one that wasn’t about what Iran had already done, but what U.S. officials claimed Iran was about to do. They said the U.S. killed Soleimani because he was planning “imminent” attacks that would harm American interests.
That talking point in particular was emailed out to officials across the Pentagon, White House, and State Department, and even to several GOP lawmakers’ offices repeatedly the week of the strike, according to several officials who spoke to The Daily Beast. It became, for a time, the central rationale the administration offered for the assassination.
On the night of the hit, the Pentagon said only that Soleimani was “actively developing plans” for an unspecified attack. By Sunday Jan. 5, Pompeo said on several morning talk shows that there were actually “constant threats” from Iran, rather than a specific one the strike preempted. And officials told a varying story about how many Americans could be killed.
That next week, in briefings to Congress, the administration struggled to explain what exactly the alleged “imminent” attack was.
Senators left a closed-door briefing Wednesday, Jan. 8, unconvinced, angry, and warning that the intelligence put forward did not match how senior officials described it. And when the dissatisfied lawmakers pressed for a clearer picture, Graham ended the briefing even though several members had yet to ask their questions.
“It was right when things were really starting to get heated and Graham just said something like, ‘Hey don’t you all have to get back to the White House?’,” the source said.
For Kaine, the problem wasn’t the intel, it was some of the messengers.
“I think the intel has been strong. But I think some of the political people have been overselling the intel,” said Kaine. “What I heard of the political folks doing seems to me to be significantly beyond what the intel says.”
Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), a member of the House intelligence committee who received a separate classified briefing on the Soleimani strike, said he “saw nothing related to imminence.”
“To exaggerate your view of what intelligence means is dangerous,” he told The Daily Beast. “This was either a misrepresentation or a degree of incompetence in analyzing the intelligence.”
Senators were also displeased with how the administration’s briefers, including Pompeo, answered questions about Iraq and its parliament vote to oust American troops from the country after the Soleimani assassination. According to two people in the room, the briefers dismissed questions about the Baghdad vote, telling lawmakers “don’t worry about it,” according to an individual who was in the room. “One of them said ‘that’s just how the Iraqis talk. We will take care of it.’”
“When you take strikes… in Iraq over their objections, there’s going to be consequences to that. And that’s the kind of thing where you got to be thinking down the board. If they object to us using Iraq as a field of battle… but we’re saying yeah, we’re doing it anyway. Well, what do you think is going to happen?” Kaine told The Daily Beast in reference to the briefing. “I certainly didn't get much sense that they had thought through, like, oh, they are probably going to kick us out of the country.”
Trump on Jan. 9 told reporters that the intelligence actually showed that Iran was “looking to blow up our embassy.” The next day, he went bigger in a Fox News interview, saying that there “probably would’ve been four embassies.”
But two days after that, on Jan. 12, Trump’s claim was put into question by his own defense secretary. In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Mark Esper conceded that he had not in fact seen a piece of intelligence “with regard to four embassies.” But, in an apparent attempt to cover for Trump, Esper said the president “believed that it probably and could have been attacks against additional embassies.”
According to two officials who spoke to The Daily Beast, Trump was outwardly frustrated by critiques of his embassy claim, telling his close confidants that he was furious with Esper’s performance on CNN.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill called on the Trump administration to explain the president’s remarks, demanding briefings with Pompeo and other administration officials—which were scheduled this week and then canceled without explanation. According to two senior U.S. officials, Trump and Pompeo spoke about the need to avoid answering more questions about the embassy threats.
“This whole episode has been one of mixed messages. Mixed messages is a function of no real strategy,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “When you don’t have a strategy, you get all sorts of confusing events on top of each other.”
“Aggressive opinions”
Officials who spoke to The Daily Beast said part of that confusion on messaging came as a result of abundant input by GOP lawmakers with “aggressive opinions on how to handle Iran,” as one official put it.
In the days after the assassination, Trump spoke with Republican leaders in the Senate and the House, picking their brains on how to redefine the administration’s years-long policy of maximum pressure—a campaign to wage economic warfare on Tehran.
Some of those same senators had publicly and behind closed doors denounced the administration’s maximum pressure campaign. They argued that the campaign wasn’t doing enough to change Iran’s behavior.
In the days leading up to the strike, Graham spoke with President Trump. “I won’t get into the details,” Graham told The Daily Beast. “But he told me Soleimani was a target and that they had caught him red-handed.” Graham said he had advocated for the president to take a tougher military stance against Iran following the attacks on the Saudi oil refineries in September.
“I didn’t have any specific targets in mind,” Graham said. “I just thought we needed to be doing more.”
Several national security officials who spoke to The Daily Beast said there was a push by GOP lawmakers, including Graham, in the days after the strike to fundamentally re-vamp the administration’s maximum pressure campaign by adding a military component.
“If there are any more threats against Americans or our interests then we should hit refineries and oil infrastructure inside Iran,” Graham said. “The military option should be on the table.”
The campaign was not initially designed to include military power as a form of maximum pressure, according to two former Obama administration officials. Instead, its architects envisioned it as a means of economic strangulation, whereby Iran would be put under such crippling sanctions that it would opt to transform its foreign policy and take an unspecified grand bargain that the administration began offering after abandoning the nuclear deal in 2018.
Graham told The Daily Beast that he is working on an alternative to the Obama administration's 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
“I'm not surprised the President has close relationships with these folks,” Kaine told The Daily Beast, referring to GOP lawmakers. “But it makes me nervous. Rather than senators pressuring the president, hey, go after Iran, let them make the case on the floor of the Senate.”
After two weeks of shifting talking points on Iran, re-defining the administration’s policy, Pompeo seemed to edge the closest to articulating a clear response on the administration’s policy when he appeared for a speech at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University on Jan. 13.
“President Trump and those of us on his national security team are re-establishing deterrence… against Iran. The goal is twofold. First we want to deprive the regime of resources. And second we just want Iran to act like a normal nation,” he said, sighing. “Just be like Norway.”
Militia members at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
David Toscano, Slate
Toscano writes: "Groups are warning of gun grabs and internet blackouts. In reality, the new gun measures are widely supported by Virginians."
Groups are warning of gun grabs and internet blackouts. In reality, the new gun measures are widely supported by Virginians.
fter months of threats, hoaxes, and fury at the prospect that Virginia’s new Democratic majority might restrict gun rights, the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a pro-gun group politically to the right of the NRA, is planning to descend on the state capital in a major rally on Monday.
Since the fall election, the rhetoric around guns in Virginia has dramatically intensified. Memes appeared on the internet claiming that Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam was going to shut down the internet, cut off utilities, and seize guns. Since November 2019, more than 100 counties, cities, and towns in Virginia have declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries” and have vowed to oppose any new restrictions on guns which they deem to be unconstitutional. Some proponents have even resurrected words like nullification and interposition, terms first used extensively by Southern secessionists prior to the Civil War and more recently during the “massive resistance” to federal laws requiring desegregation in the 1960s. Gun groups became further incensed in December when Democratic Congressman Donald McEachin suggested that if people did not follow the law, Northam should use the state’s National Guard to make them do so.
Despite the rhetoric about gun confiscation and governmental overreach, most of the measures proposed by Democrats are widely supported by Virginians. A December poll indicated that universal background checks, one of the first measures that will be enacted, are supported by 86 percent of Virginia voters. A bill that would allow courts to temporarily prevent the dangerously mentally ill from having access to firearms, the so-called “red flag” law, enjoys the support of 73 percent of Virginians, and similar measures have been passed in seventeen states and D.C., including Florida, Nevada, New York, and Colorado.
Concerned about rising tensions and false statements online, Northam, in an unprecedented move, used his annual State of the Commonwealth Address to the joint assembly last week to assure Virginians that “no one is calling out the National Guard. No one is cutting off your electricity, or turning off the internet. No one is going door-to-door to confiscate guns.” That effort has not, however, stemmed the tide of controversy. Even Liberty University President, Jerry Falwell, Jr., has gotten into the act, stating that the Second Amendment is “sacred” and that the state is “going to be faced with civil disobedience, not just by citizens but by police officers. And I think it’s what they deserve.”
Monday’s protests are expected to be so volatile that even the National Rifle Association has distanced itself, directing supporters to attend a separate “lobby day” last week, when hundreds of Virginians peacefully and respectfully argued against the legislation.
Still, Monday’s action is expected to draw a larger crowd than the NRA’s lobby day, and the governor says he has received intelligence that some groups that came to Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally in 2017 will reappear in Richmond. Militia groups across the country have promised to protest in Richmond, dressed in military camouflage and outfitted with sophisticated assault weaponry. White supremacists have been using their internet sites to issue threats and mobilize; similar activity preceded Charlottesville. The Justice Department said Thursday that three men taken into custody by the FBI amid an investigation into the white nationalist group called The Base had weapons and were considering attending the rally in Richmond. Some Antifa groups, who frequently organize in an effort to repel, with violence if needed, those on the right with whom they disagree, were purportedly ready to engage as well.
The potential for mayhem is so acute that the governor has declared a state of emergency and banned “weapons of any kind” from Capitol grounds through the evening of January 21. Before the ban, Philip Van Cleave, the head of the VCDL, urged supporters not to bring assault-style rifles to the rally, but had not discouraged them from bringing handguns; he continues to complain that protestors will be defenseless without having the right to carry weapons to the demonstration. Legal challenges by the VCDL to the ban in the courts have now stalled; the Virginia Supreme Court ruled on Friday evening that it will not overturn the governor’s action. It is not clear whether the group will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. And it is not clear how protestors will respond to the ban.
Legislators are worried, but continue their work. The Virginia Senate passed gun safety measures on Thursday: one to restore the state’s previous one-handgun-a-month rule, another empowering local governments to ban guns in public buildings, parks and at permitted events like political protests, and the third requiring background checks for all gun sales. The House, after years of attempts, was finally able to engineer a prohibition to ban firearms in the Capitol and in the House gallery, joining many other southern legislatures that have adopted such measures. The other House Democratic initiatives will be heard in subcommittee late next week and, given the energy around gun safety measures evidenced in the last election, many will likely pass.
January 20 is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day at the Capitol, and it is typically the time when many school children come to see how government operates. Not so this year. Instead, Capitol Square will likely be filled with loud and angry gun advocates claiming that their rights are about ready to be severely compromised by the Virginia General Assembly. State officials are determined to prevent a replay of Charlottesville; whether protesters will cooperate remains to be determined.
Jani Cauthen holds a photo of her family during a demonstration in New York on Jan. 5, 2010, to protest the incarceration and possible deportation of her ex-husband, Jean Montrevil. (photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
Trump Banished Immigration Rights Activist for Speaking Out. He's Suing ICE to Come Back.
Nick Pinto, The Intercept
Pinto writes: "They say his adult life was characterized by the industry, community building, and love that this country valorizes in its immigrants."
READ MORE
Nick Pinto, The Intercept
Pinto writes: "They say his adult life was characterized by the industry, community building, and love that this country valorizes in its immigrants."
READ MORE
Delbert Orr Africa with his daughter after his release from prison. Only one of the nine, Chuck Africa, remains behind bars. (photo: Brad Thomson)
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK
Pilkington writes: "One of the great open wounds of the 1970s black liberation struggle came closer to being healed on Saturday with the release of Delbert Orr Africa."
Members of black liberation group given long sentences after 1978 police siege on Philadelphia commune, during which officer died
Del Africa walked free from Pennsylvania’s state correctional institution, Dallas, on Saturday morning after a long struggle to convince parole authorities to release him. He is the eighth of the nine Move members – five men and four women – to be released or to have died while in prison.
Only one of the nine, Chuck Africa, remains behind bars.
The nine were arrested and sentenced to 30 years to life following a dramatic police siege of their communal home in Philadelphia which culminated with a shootout on 8 August 1978. In the maelstrom a police officer, James Ramp, was killed with a single bullet. Move has always denied that any of its members were responsible.
Brad Thomson, a member of Del Africa’s legal team, said the decision to release him on parole “affirms what the movement to free the Move 9 has been arguing for decades: that their continued incarceration is unjust”.
Thomson added: “With the release of Delbert, that leaves Charles ‘Chuck’ Africa as the last member of the Move 9 to still be in prison. Chuck went before the parole board last month and we are optimistic that he will be released in the very near future.”
The Guardian told the story of Del Africa and his fellow Move 9 member Janine Phillips Africa in a series of articles on black radicals who have been incarcerated for decades as a result of their activities in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Move was formed in Philadelphia as a group of black radicals committed not only to the liberation from racial oppression, in tune with the Black Panther party of the time, but also to environmentalist and back-to-nature ideals. They lived, as they still do today, as a family, taking “Africa” as their shared last name.
Over two years, from prison, Del Africa related his story to the Guardian in emails and a three-hour interview. He recounted how he became engaged in the black struggle when a girlfriend introduced him to the Black Panther Party in Chicago in the late 1960s.
Later, he moved to Philadelphia and drifted into Move. He was inside the Move house in Powelton Village in the summer of 1978 when it came under police siege.
The city, under a notoriously brutal mayor, Frank Rizzo, wanted to evict the group on the grounds that they were a nuisance and an affront to public decency.
When the shootout broke out, police went in with guns and water cannon. Del Africa provided one of the astonishing images of the black liberation struggle when he emerged from the house with his arms outstretched, as if on the cross, while a police officer jabbed a rifle in his neck.
Video footage shows two officers throwing him to the ground and kicking him on the head, which bounces between them like a ball.
Africa described the event: “A cop hit me with his helmet. Smashed my eye. Another cop swung his shotgun and broke my jaw. I went down, and after that I don’t remember anything till I came to and a dude was dragging me by my hair and cops started kicking me in the head.”
For six years of his incarceration, Delbert Africa was put in an infamous solitary confinement wing known by prisoners as the “dungeon”. His isolation was imposed because he refused to have his dreadlocks cut – part of the Move philosophy.
He recalled in Guardian interviews how he survived in solitary confinement by developing a black history quiz with other prisoners, which they would play by tapping out messages. Other prisoners joined the game, which asked questions like: when was the Brown v Board of Education ruling in the US supreme court? What year was the Black Panther party founded? Who was Dred Scott? For what is John Brown remembered?
In 1985, when Del Africa had been in prison for almost seven years, tragedy struck again. He learned that Philadelphia police had conducted a second siege on the Move communal home, which was now located in Osage Avenue.
On this occasion, the police dropped an incendiary bomb from a helicopter. The bomb ignited a fire that spread through the overwhelmingly African American neighborhood.
City leaders allowed the fire to rage. Sixty-one houses were razed and 11 people in the Move house were killed, including five children. One of the survivors, Ramona Africa, was badly burned. She was duly put on trial and sentenced to seven years in prison.
One of the children who died was Delisha, Del Africa’s 13-year-old daughter. He told the Guardian how he responded to the news that she had been killed in an inferno: “I just cried. I wanted to strike out. I wanted to wreak as much havoc as I could until they put me down. That anger, it brought such a feeling of helplessness. Like, dang! What to do now? Dark times.”
With the 35th anniversary of the bombing approaching in May, Del Africa is free. At the end of the Guardian’s interview with him, he described how he had managed to endure four decades behind bars.
“I keep staying on the move. Stagnation is the worst thing. I’m on the move, and I hope you are too,” he said.
“We’ve suffered the worst that this system can throw at us – decades of imprisonment, loss of loved ones. So we know we are strong. For all of that, we are still here and I look on that with pride.”
The statements of the Minister of Defense took place during the presentation of a military and police device to strengthen security for the next day 22nd, when Bolivia celebrates Plurinational State Day. (photo: La Prensa Latina)
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The anti-imperialist school that Evo Morales created in the Armed Forces of Bolivia in 2016 has been renamed Friday to Heroes of Ñancahuazu, after the Bolivian military unit that killed the revolutionary figure Ernesto 'Che' Guevara in 1967."
"Bolivians are not anti-anything," Bolivia’s Interim Defense Minister Luis Fernando Lopez declared to media in La Paz, while explaining that the anti-imperialist orientation with which Morales launched this academy in 2016 "did not fit with military doctrine."
"Under that anti-imperialist concept, foreign doctrines are generated," he added, something that "has nothing to do with the spirit of Bolivians."
The General Juan Jose Torres Anti-Imperialist Command School installed in the Bolivian city of Warnes did not provide "any type of function that will contribute to the Armed Forces," the official added.
The training center was integrated into the Military School of Engineering with the new name. Yet this is just another attempt form the de-facto government to erase the legacy of Evo Morales and the social and cultural progress made during his mandate; as in the case of the burning and dismissal of the Indigenous Wiphala flag.
The de-facto President Jeanine Añez, after coming to power last November in a violent coup, said the government would replace "ideological educational instances" that in her opinion "did not pay any education" to the Bolivian military.
The statements of the Minister of Defense were made during the presentation of a military and police device to strengthen security for Jan. 22 when Bolivia celebrates Plurinational State Day.
Flames and smoke rise after a series of explosions at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refining Complex on June 21, 2019. (photo: Matt Rourk/AP)
Massive Oil Refinery Leaks Toxic Chemical in the Middle of Philadelphia
Corbin Hiar and Lisa Riordan Seville, E&E News and NBC News
Excerpt: "Philadelphia Energy Solutions is just one of a dozen refineries across the U.S. that have consistently exceeded the EPA's 'action level' for benzene."
Corbin Hiar and Lisa Riordan Seville, E&E News and NBC News
Excerpt: "Philadelphia Energy Solutions is just one of a dozen refineries across the U.S. that have consistently exceeded the EPA's 'action level' for benzene."
ast May, an air monitor on the border of the East Coast's largest oil refinery recorded a level of benzene, a cancer-causing gas, more than 21 times the federal limit.
In June, an explosive early morning fire rocked the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery, terrifying nearby residents. Weeks after the disaster, as PES filed for bankruptcy and wound down operations, another air monitor in the network that rings the facility quietly registered the same sky-high reading for benzene. Long-term exposure to the sweet-smelling chemical has been linked to leukemia, lymphoma and a host of blood and immune system disorders.
That monitor, on the edge of this 1,300-acre complex of steel and pipe, is across an expressway from schools, parks, a strip mall and hundreds of homes.
Charles Reeves lives less than a mile and a half north of both air monitors in the largely African American neighborhood of Grays Ferry. A community organizer in this area of low-slung row houses, Reeves keeps tabs on the news in the neighborhood. He said no one informed him or his neighbors that they may have been exposed to benzene until he was contacted by NBC News, E&E News and the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit newsroom based at American University.
"Poor people don't get information," said Reeves, 61, a grandfather and prostate cancer survivor. "Whichever way that blows, we're going to be affected."
The refinery disaster in June unleashed over 5,200 pounds of deadly hydrofluoric acid. A 4 a.m. leak inside a unit that produced high-octane gasoline caused a series of explosions that sent a ball of fire into the night sky. One blast hurtled a slab of metal bigger than a school bus across the river. Quick action by workers meant no one was killed or seriously injured. The refinery ceased production in August.
The catastrophic blaze provided a stark illustration of the hazards the refinery has long posed for Philadelphians. But even in its wake, officials gave no formal notice to residents that the same facility had registered among the highest benzene levels of any refinery in the country, according to data submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Philadelphia Energy Solutions, or PES, is just one of a dozen refineries of the more than 130 refineries operating across the country that have consistently exceeded the EPA's "action level" of 9 micrograms per cubic meter of air, according to data compiled and analyzed by the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group that advocated for the fenceline monitoring program now required at all refineries.
High benzene readings registered by the network of monitors around a refinery don’t necessarily translate to dangerous levels in the community, according to the city and EPA. But former EPA officials who examined the hard-to-access data compared ongoing high benzene concentrations around the Philadelphia refinery and near other top benzene emitters to levels more often seen in China and India. And they criticized local and federal officials for failing to address the problem or adequately warn the public.
That information could also come into play for investors eyeing the South Philadelphia site. Its creditors are looking to unload the refinery at a closely watched bankruptcy auction on Friday, as both residents and former workers watch from the sidelines.
The pollution threat from the bankrupt refinery didn't begin last spring or end in July 2019 for Reeves and his neighbors.
Opened in the late 1800s and long operated by Sunoco, the refinery was temporarily saved from insolvency in 2012 by a group of investors led by the Washington, D.C.-based private-equity giant Carlyle Group.
For more than a year and a half prior to the fire, air monitors near the blast site and along the perimeter of the refinery registered troubling levels of benzene, according to "fenceline" data submitted by refineries to the EPA.
The data, which EPA began posting early last year, shows the refinery exceeded the benzene emissions limit for all but 12 weeks from the end of January 2018 to late September 2019 — an 86-week span.
That may have exposed thousands of Philadelphians to troubling levels of benzene, including children like those who often play in the streets of Grays Ferry.
More than 297,000 people live within three miles of the refinery. About 60 percent of those residents are minority, and nearly 45 percent live below the poverty line, according to census data.
"The residents of South Philadelphia bear the environmental cost of the refinery and get almost none of the benefit," said Peter DeCarlo, an atmospheric scientist who spent the last eight years at Philadelphia's Drexel University. "It's a classic environmental justice issue."
In June, PES sent local and federal regulators a plan for how it aimed to cut benzene emissions, which the company mainly blamed on leaks and a neighboring facility.
Since then, city officials have not spoken publicly about the high benzene readings or the plan for addressing those emissions.
Bankruptcy battle looms
Now Reeves and other clean air advocates are fighting to keep the 335,000 barrel-per-day refinery closed.
They would like to see the site, which has been home to oil storage facilities since shortly after the Civil War, converted to a less polluting commercial use. At least one advocacy group, Philly Thrive, is planning to bus opponents of reopening the refinery to New York City, where the PES auction will be held in the offices of the refinery's bankruptcy lawyers.
Advocates have also pressured Mayor Jim Kenney to oppose bids that include fossil fuel components. The Delaware bankruptcy court that's overseeing the refinery sale has granted his administration a consulting role during the auction.
Labor unions, on the other hand, want to see the refinery back up and running. Most of the hulking refinery was unaffected by the blast. More than 1,000 oil workers lost their jobs last year when PES abruptly closed, citing financial fallout from the fire.
They argue the refinery benefited the Philadelphia region.
"There's an idea out there that we weren't good neighbors. But that's false," said Ryan O'Callaghan, a laid-off worker and former president of United Steelworkers Local 10-1.
"We all live around the refinery," said O'Callaghan, who grew up in Grays Ferry and now lives seven miles away. "I belong to a social club in South Philly. Most of my time is spent there."
PES first filed for bankruptcy in 2018 to shed debt it blamed on EPA's ethanol mandate for gasoline.
PES is currently owned largely by its former creditors, according to bankruptcy filings. Credit Suisse Asset Management and Bardin Hill Investment Partners, which each control more than a quarter of the company, are now the primary owners. Carlyle maintains a 15 percent stake and Energy Transfer Operating LP, Sunoco's parent company, owns just over 7 percent.
Soon after the refinery shut down, Mayor Kenney created an expert panel to help the city evaluate its options. But Kenney didn't inform the Refinery Advisory Group of the benzene issue, said Mark Alan Hughes, the chairman of the advisory group's environment and science committee.
Potential buyers of the PES refinery or investors in the land should know about the benzene problems and potential legal liability for the emissions, Hughes said.
"If it becomes clear that there is a very strong lawsuit here, then it's going to affect your bidding," said Hughes, who is also the faculty director of the University of Pennsylvania's Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.
Carlyle and Credit Suisse Asset Management didn't respond to requests for comment on the refinery's benzene emissions or how they could affect the sale. Bardin Hill declined to comment and Energy Transfer Operating LP directed questions to PES, which also didn't respond to inquiries.
James Garrow, a spokesman for Philadelphia's Department of Public Health, said in a statement that "it is a well-known fact that refineries emit benzene during operation." He said that a city-run air monitor a half mile from where the refinery's highest benzene emissions were recorded didn't record excessive benzene emissions after the disaster and that any "responsible bidder" would seek out such information.
Reeves, the community organizer, was critical of the city's outreach efforts around the refinery sale.
"The same people, the same companies that allowed the stuff to happen are trying to decide what happens in the future," he said.
"Where are the people who still live here, who can't afford to leave?" he asked. "We're still getting kicked to the back."
Americans at risk
PES and most other U.S. refineries began monitoring benzene emissions on Jan. 30, 2018, to comply with a 2015 EPA rule that tightened emission standards for refineries.
In proposing the regulation, EPA argued that benzene — a naturally occurring component of crude oil and still a key ingredient in gasoline — is mainly released by leaking equipment. It's a good "indicator of other air toxics emitted from fugitive sources," the agency said.
When the rule took effect, PES was planning to go public and warned potential investors that the "fenceline monitoring requirement may lead to corrective action measures, including the installation of additional pollution controls, even if the refinery is otherwise in compliance with its air emissions permits."
The benzene monitoring requirement forced PES and other refinery operators to place air monitoring tubes around the borders of their refineries and then measure and analyze the amount of the carcinogenic gas that those monitors detected every two weeks. For refineries whose average annual emission topped the action level of 9 micrograms of benzene per cubic meter of air, the regulation required operators to determine the cause of the refinery's excess emissions and create a plan to reduce them.
"We project that no refinery should exceed that fenceline benzene concentration action level if in full compliance" with the stricter emissions standards, the rule said.
In weeks before and after the 2019 fire, some of the monitors along the fenceline repeatedly hit 190 micrograms per cubic meter. The emissions levels, however, could have been even higher since PES noted that the reading "exceeds instrument calibration range."
"Oh my god," said Bob Sonawane, a toxicologist who worked in EPA's Office of Research and Development for more than three decades. "The numbers that you're saying are very, very high, like some things happening in China, India and many other places."
In a corrective action plan required by the refinery rule, PES blamed many of its high benzene readings on a different company's petroleum terminal across the Schuylkill River as well as its own "benzene tanks and benzene unloading operations" that it argued are "nonrefinery operations and therefore not sources to be controlled." The refinery operator also promised to conduct additional sampling and inspections and work with the neighboring facility.
Garrow, the health department spokesman, said the city didn't receive the PES document until three days after the June 21 refinery disaster. But even then, city officials did not tell the public. At a press conference on June 25 about the refinery fire, Mayor Kenney told reporters "there are no findings that would suggest a threat to public health."
Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project and former head of EPA's enforcement office, cast doubt on the refinery’s attempt to explain away its high benzene readings.
"The monitoring they report is supposed to screen out background levels, including what comes from upwind sources," he said.
The plan also doesn't appear to be working. As of Sept. 25, 2019 — the last biweekly period EPA has posted online and more than two months after PES stopped producing fuel — the refinery's average annual emission level was 49 micrograms per cubic meter. That's higher than any other refinery that reported data to EPA and over five times the benzene action level.
Yet Sonawane, the toxicologist, said even the federal action level is "not protective of public health."
A hazard summary he worked on while at EPA warned that anyone exposed to air with more than 0.45 micrograms per cubic meter of benzene over their lifetime would have a greater than one in 1 million chance of developing cancer "as a direct result of continuously breathing air containing this chemical." That risk increases to more than 10 in 1 million at the level set by the federal refinery rule.
In Grays Ferry, that means residents, over a lifetime of exposure, may have been breathing air of a quality that the EPA estimates could be linked to an incidence of cancer of more than 100 adults out of a population of 1 million.
Children in the neighborhood could be at even greater risk of developing certain cancers, Sonawane estimated, citing research published after 2003, when EPA last reviewed the health dangers posed by benzene.
For example, a 2015 analysis in the American Journal of Epidemiology found "children might be affected at lower benzene levels than adults."
Silent regulators
Public health advocates are critical of Philadelphia and EPA for staying mostly silent about the benzene levels in South Philadelphia and around the country.
"That makes no sense," said Schaeffer, with the Environmental Integrity Project. "It's bad government and bad corporate management."
Schaeffer criticized Mayor Kenney for failing to tell residents about the benzene problem and for not talking about the company's response, as the powerful investors who own the refinery try to sell it off.
Schaeffer was also critical of his former agency. While city officials may have incentives to keep quiet because of the impending sale, Schaeffer said that the "EPA shouldn't have quite the same constraints."
"That's why you have feds overseeing all these state and local programs," he said. "So they should be on the hook, too."
Public health and the environment are a top concern for EPA, the agency said in an email, and it has worked to reduce emissions from all types of facilities, including refineries. When it comes to informing the public, EPA said it often lets local partners take the lead.
Asked about the agency’s response to the PES plan to reduce benzene emissions, the agency said that it "does not comment on ongoing potential enforcement activities unless and until we take a public action."
For his part, Reeves expects little to change for the residents of Grays Ferry and other fenceline neighborhoods.
"The [bankruptcy] judge right now is making decisions without the input of the community," Reeves said while his grandchildren and a group of boys he mentors played on the street outside his home. He added that refinery workers had "told us to move."
But moving, he said, is not an option for many people in his neighborhood.
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