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Despite covering questions regarding
what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) knew about the Bush administration's
interrogation policies, none of five major newspapers -- The New
York Times, The Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times,
The Wall Street Journal, and
USA Today -- has reported on a May 13 Daily Beast article reporting that Vice President Dick Cheney's
office "suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence
official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al
Qaeda connection." On the May 17 edition of ABC's This Week, Cheney's daughter Liz, a former State
Department official, was
specifically asked
twice about the report and dodged both questions.
Moreover, those same newspapers have
yet to report on a May 15 McClatchy Newspapers article by Jonathan S. Landay highlighting comments made
by Dick Cheney in 2004 that detainees at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, provided
information confirming Iraq's involvement in giving chemical
and biological weapons
training to Al
Qaeda.
In the Daily Beast article, former
NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem reported: "Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm
that Vice President Cheney's office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner
... who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection." As
Media Matters for Americanoted, MSNBC hosts covered Windrem's
report at least twice on May 14, and at one point hosted Windrem to discuss it.
From Windrem's report:
At the end of April 2003, not long
after the fall of Baghdad,
U.S. forces
captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide
information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime.
Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one
of Saddam's secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical
weapons and contacts with terrorist groups."To those who wanted or suspected a
relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House
officials] had particular interest," Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey
Group and the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, told me. So
much so that the officials, according to Duelfer, inquired how the interrogation
was proceeding.In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for
Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily
Beast, Duelfer says he heard from "some in Washington at very senior levels (not
in the CIA)," who thought Khudayr's interrogation had been "too gentle" and
suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere.
"They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,"
Duelfer writes. "The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear
that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our
debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just
debriefings, even for this creature."Duelfer will not disclose who in
Washington had
proposed the use of waterboarding, saying only: "The language I can use is what
has been cleared." In fact, two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the
time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office
of Vice President Cheney. Cheney, of course, has vehemently defended
waterboarding and other harsh techniques, insisting they elicited valuable
intelligence and saved lives. He has also asked that several memoranda be
declassified to prove his case. (The Daily Beast placed a call to Cheney's
office and will post a response if we get one.)Without admitting where the
suggestion came from, Duelfer revealed that he considered it reprehensible and
understood the rationale as political -- and ultimately counterproductive to the
overall mission of the Iraq Survey Group, which was assigned the mission of
finding Saddam Hussein's WMD after the invasion.
In the McClatchy article, Landay wrote that "Cheney,
defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees
interrogated at the Guantanamo
Bay prison camp had revealed that
Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives
in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn't true." According to
Landay, Cheney asserted in an interview with The Rocky Mountain News, "We know for example from
interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad
to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology, chemical and biological weapons
technology." Cheney biographer Stephen Hayes reported on the interview,
including those comments, in a January 13, 2004, Weekly Standard article (retrieved from the Nexis
database). Landay reported: "No evidence of such training or of any
operational links between Iraq and al Qaida has ever been
found, according to several official inquiries." From Landay's article:
The Rocky Mountain News asked Cheney
in a Jan. 9, 2004, interview if he stood by his claims that Saddam's regime had
maintained a "relationship" with al Qaida, raising the danger that
Iraq might give the group
chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to attack the U.S."Absolutely. Absolutely," Cheney
replied.A Cheney spokeswoman said a response
to an e-mail requesting clarification of the former vice president's remarks
would be forthcoming next week."The (al Qaida-Iraq) links go back,"
he said. "We know for example from interrogating detainees in Guantanamo that al
Qaida sent individuals to Baghdad to be trained in C.W. and B.W. technology,
chemical and biological weapons technology. These are all matters that are there
for anybody who wants to look at it."No evidence of such training or of
any operational links between Iraq and al Qaida has ever been
found, according to several official inquiries.It's not apparent which Guantanamo detainees
Cheney was referring to in the interview.One al Qaida detainee, Ibn al Sheikh
al Libi, claimed that terrorist operatives were sent to Iraq for chemical and biological weapons
training, but he was in CIA custody, not at Guantanamo.Moreover, he recanted his
assertions, some of them allegedly made under torture while he was being
interrogated in Egypt."No postwar information has been
found that indicates CBW training occurred, and the detainee who provided the
key prewar reporting about this training recanted his claims after the war," a
September 2006 Senate Intelligence Committee report said.
Indeed, according to the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence's September 2006 report on postwar findings about
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, al-Libi, who was "the source of
reports on al-Qa'ida's efforts to obtain CBW [chemical and biological weapons] training, recanted the information he
provided." The report found that al-Libi recanted in January 2004, claiming he
had "fabricated information since his capture. ... Al-Libi claimed that to the best of his
knowledge al-Qa'ida never sent any individuals into Iraq for any
kind of support in chemical or biological weapons, as he had claimed
previously." The report concluded: "The other reports of
possible al-Qa'ida CBW training from Iraq were never considered credible
by the Intelligence Community. No other information has been uncovered in
Iraq or from detainees that confirms
this reporting." According to the
report, as early as 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency had expressed
skepticism about al-Libi's claims, at one point stating
that while his story was "possible," "it is more likely this individual is
intentionally misleading the debriefers."
Media
Matters searched the Nexis database for
The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today since May 12 for the following
terms:
Media
Matters searched the Factiva database for
The Wall Street Journal since May
12 for the following terms:
Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.
"President Biden and the Democratic Party should know the passage of this negotiation is the type of harmful decision that makes our generation feel disillusioned and defeated," said the Sunrise Movement's leader.
As the U.S. House of Representatives prepared to vote on President Joe Biden's debt limit deal with GOP negotiators Wednesday evening, the youth-led Sunrise Movement warned Democrats that the so-called Fiscal Responsibility Act could have a major impact on the 2024 elections.
"When we're knocking on doors and on college campuses, we constantly hear young people in our generation feel like the government doesn't work for them," said Sunrise Movement executive director Varshini Prakash in a statement. "This debt ceiling deal tells these young people that the U.S. will keep polluting our air and water by approving the Mountain Valley Pipeline, that our government will make life harder for working people, and that our system values billionaires over students."
"Democrats must stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline and achieve their climate goals if they want to energize Gen Z to get out and vote in 2024."
While the proposal would suspend the debt ceiling until 2025, in addition to greenlighting the contested gas pipeline, it would freeze nonmilitary spending, impose new work requirements for federal aid like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), resume student loan repayments, controversially reform permitting for energy projects, and repeal some funding intended to help the Internal Revenue Service crack down on rich tax cheats.
"President Biden and the Democratic Party should know the passage of this negotiation is the type of harmful decision that makes our generation feel disillusioned and defeated about the state of our politics," Prakash warned Wednesday.
"Building new fossil fuel infrastructure right after the approval of the Willow project is politically and morally dangerous, but it's not too late to fix this," the climate activist continued, referring to ConocoPhillips' oil development in Alaska. "Democrats must stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline and achieve their climate goals if they want to energize Gen Z to get out and vote in 2024."
\u201cThe GOP doesn\u2019t have the votes they need to pass this deal. If Democrats hold the line, we can stop it.\n\nTell Dems to vote for a clean debt ceiling deal \u27a1\ufe0f https://t.co/PmR7HGH6F1\u201d— Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05 (@Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05) 1685464612
Last year, as Common Dreamsreported at the time, young voters played a key role in preventing a "red wave" that political pollsters and pundits anticipated based on previous midterm elections, helping Democrats secure major congressional and gubernatorial victories as well as advancing a variety of progressive ballot measures.
Biden is seeking reelection next year and former President Donald Trump is leading polls for the GOP primary, followed at a distance by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. There will also be fierce battles for both chambers of Congress—currently, the fractured Republican Party holds a slim House majority, and Democrats control the Senate but lack enough votes to defeat filibusters.
Since Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) finalized their deal over the weekend—after Republicans refused to vote on a clean debt ceiling hike, despite U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's warnings of an economically catastrophic default by June 5—a growing number of progressive lawmakers have come out against the White House's compromise.
As Common Dreams reported earlier Wednesday, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) decried the GOP's "reckless hostage-taking" and highlighted that "House Republicans raised the debt ceiling with no preconditions three times under the Trump administration."
Other House progressives who have made their opposition to the Fiscal Responsibility Act clear include Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC).
"Tonight I'll be voting NO on Republicans' hostage bill that maliciously weaponized the debt limit. I came to Congress to stand up for our NY-16 community, kids, and families, but this austerity bill will only end up hurting the people I came here to fight for," Bowman said. "This bill will make the poor poorer, hungrier, and sicker, while further enriching the rich through the prison, fossil fuel, and military-industrial complex."
\u201c"...I cannot, in good conscience, vote for a bill that makes it easier for fossil fuel companies to pollute and destroy the planet by fast-tracking the disastrous Mountain Valley Pipeline."\n\nThank you for standing up for our generation, @SenSanders.\u201d— Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05 (@Sunrise Movement \ud83c\udf05) 1685562682
After U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) came out against the bill on Wednesday, other progressives in the upper chamber joined him—including Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who tweeted that "I will not support a deal to fast-track dirty fossil fuel projects at the expense of environmental justice. I will not give polluters a Get Out of Jail Free card. I will vote NO on the default deal."
"Republicans racked up trillions in debt under Trump and would now rather deprive struggling families of food and financial security than ask the wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes," Markey added, as Republican lawmakers plan to unveil a tax proposal that would further serve rich individuals and corporations.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) also came out against the bill. Along with detailing his critiques of several provisions in a lengthy statement, he warned that "yielding to this blackmail only guarantees that Republicans will use the debt limit to hold America hostage time and time again."
"Today looks like it might be the start of a new chapter in Amazon's history," one organizer of the nationwide protest remarked optimistically.
More than 1,000 Amazon corporate workers and allies rallied outside the e-commerce giant's Seattle headquarters on Wednesday to protest the company's return-to-work policy and what they called its failure to fulfill its climate pledge.
Sign and chant slogans during the Seattle lunchtime rally—which was organized by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and Amazon's Remote Advocacy group—included "Amazon: Strive Harder," "Stop Greenwashing," and "Hell No, RTO,"—a rebuke of a mandate from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to return to the office at least three days per week.
"Morale is the lowest I've seen since I've been working here," one Seattle-based employee who did not want to be named and has worked for the company since 2020 told Wired.
This year, Amazon terminated 27,000 workers, layoffs that mirrored cost-cutting sackings at other tech companies that overhired during the Covid-19 pandemic.
\u201cHundreds of corporate employees at the #Amazon walkout underway at the Spheres in South Lake Union. Workers calling out leadership for the return-to-office mandate and failure to reduce carbon footprint\u201d— Jackie Kent (@Jackie Kent) 1685560576
At least hundreds of other Amazon corporate employees and their supporters took part in similar demonstrations outside company offices around the nation on Wednesday, according to reports.
"Today looks like it might be the start of a new chapter in Amazon's history, when tech workers coming out of the pandemic stood up and said, 'We still want a say in this company and the direction of this company,'" Eliza Pan, a former Amazon corporate employee and a co-founder of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, toldThe Associated Press.
\u201cThanks to everyone who showed up to make #AmazonWalkout a success!\u201d— Amazon Employees For Climate Justice (@Amazon Employees For Climate Justice) 1685559893
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told Wired that "we're always listening and will continue to do so, but we're happy with how the first month of having more people back in the office has been."
"There's more energy, collaboration, and connections happening, and we've heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices," he added.
However, Church Hindley, an Amazon quality assurance engineer, told the AP that working from home has improved his health and quality of life.
"I'm not suited for in-office work," Hindley said. "I deal with depression and anxiety, and I was able to get off my anxiety medication and start living my life."
\u201cMessages in the crowd at the Amazon walkout in Seattle.\u201d— Kurt Schlosser (@Kurt Schlosser) 1685563537
Pamela Hayter, an Amazon project manager, started the "Remote Advocacy" internal Slack channel, which now has 33,000 members.
During the Seattle rally, Hayter slammed the return-to-office mandate, saying, "I cannot believe that a company in this day and age, a company that claims to be an innovative leader in its space, would do that to one of its most precious resources—its employees."
"Total employment in the nationwide U.S. energy sector could double or even triple by 2050 to meet the demand for wind turbines, solar panels, and transmission lines," according to a new study.
Achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by mid-century would lead to a net increase in energy-related employment nationwide, and Republican-voting states whose leaders have done the most to disparage climate action would see the largest growth in green jobs.
That's according to research published in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed journal Energy Policy. The new study, summarized Tuesday by Carbon Brief, undercuts the old right-wing canard that environmentally friendly policies are inherently bad for workers.
Four academics led by Dartmouth College engineering professor Erin Mayfield found that shifting to a net-zero economy could create millions of jobs in low-carbon sectors—enough to "offset" losses in the declining fossil fuel industry, not only in the aggregate but also in most dirty energy-producing states, which tend to be GOP strongholds.
"Total employment in the nationwide U.S. energy sector could double or even triple by 2050 to meet the demand for wind turbines, solar panels, and transmission lines," Carbon Brief reported. Such growth in clean power generation and dissemination "would outweigh losses in most of the country's fossil fuel-rich regions, as oil, coal, and gas operations close down."
The study adds to mounting evidence that so-called "red" states now dominated by Republicans and fossil fuel interests—including particularly sunny and windy ones like Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming—stand to reap the biggest rewards from the green industrial policy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Joe Biden last year.
At the same time, the authors acknowledge that some GOP-controlled dirty energy-producing states, such as North Dakota, are likely to see net decreases in energy sector employment, and they stress that "many communities will still require help to ensure a 'just transition' away from fossil fuels," as Carbon Brief noted.
In their paper, Mayfield and her three co-authors—Jesse Jenkins, Eric Larson, and Chris Greig, all of whom work at Princeton University—estimate how energy-related employment in the U.S. would change depending on different emission reduction contexts.
To simulate "labor market pathways of large-scale, low-carbon energy-supply infrastructure development," the team developed the Decarbonization Employment and Energy Systems (DEERS) model, which combines myriad economic and energy data, and then applied it to four alternative scenarios from the 2021 Net-Zero America report they were all involved in writing.
The transition scenarios, which assume varying levels of electrification and renewable energy supply, are as follows:
The authors expect overall energy sector employment to climb in all four scenarios, although net job gains are limited under E+ RE- conditions in which the deployment of renewables is constrained.
"We find that a net-zero transition supports an annual average of approximately 3 million direct energy jobs or $200 billion in wages during the first decade, and approximately 4-8 million direct energy jobs or $200-500 billion during the 2040s," they wrote. "The modeled supply-side energy workforce represents 1.5% of the total U.S. labor force in 2020, increasing to 2.5-5% by mid-century."
As Carbon Brief reported: "The number of energy-related jobs roughly doubles in both the 'high electrification' (E+) and 'less-high electrification' (E-) scenarios, which focus on the extent to which transport and buildings are electrified by 2050. The largest growth is seen in the E + RE+ scenario, which features high electrification and a 100% renewable power system by 2050."
"Notably, the research finds that many fossil fuel jobs would have been lost even in the absence of new climate policy," the outlet noted. "It suggests there would be a drop of one-third by 2050, as coal and gas are driven out of the market by cheaper wind and solar."
According to Mayfield and her colleagues, "In most states, job losses in declining fossil fuel sectors are offset by an increasing number of energy jobs in low-carbon sectors."
Carbon Brief observed that "this is particularly evident in Republican-voting states, which have larger energy workforces. In the E+ scenario, these states would lose around 700,000 fossil fuel jobs but gain 1.7 million low-carbon energy jobs between 2025 and 2050."
The outlet created a chart to visualize the paper's projection of rising energy-related employment under the E+ scenario in "red" states that voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 and "blue" states that backed Biden.
In their paper, Mayfield and her colleagues cite the example of Texas, a GOP stronghold that is simultaneously the nation's top fossil fuel-producing state and its top generator of electricity from wind and solar.
As Carbon Brief pointed out:
By 2025 in the E+ scenario, around 480,000 of the state's 660,000-strong energy workforce are employed in the fossil fuel sector, more than 72% of the total. Within 25 years, many of these jobs would be lost as the number of fossil fuel employees falls to 123,000.
Yet the state would still see a big uptick in energy sector employment by 2050. The modeling suggests Texas would have around 778,000 energy jobs in 2050, with around 84% employed in low-carbon industries.
Despite this, Inside Climate News reported last month that Texas Republicans recently introduced legislation "intended to punish renewable energy and boost fossil fuels, including a measure that would increase the amount of gas-fired electricity generated by the state by upwards of 10 gigawatts and one that would limit the development of renewable energy in the state based on how much natural gas generation is also being built."
For decades, Republicans have couched their opposition to climate policies in the language of protecting the jobs of fossil fuel workers. In many cases, GOP candidates perceived to be defending the interests of dirty energy-producing communities have been rewarded by voters in those localities.
While Trump's stated support for coal workers benefited him politically in 2016, employment in the sector still fell by a quarter during his reign. Biden, by contrast, has made clear that "creating jobs and tackling climate change go hand in hand."
Evidence is growing that the clean energy transition is poised to be a major job-creator rather than a job-killer as suggested by right-wing lawmakers.
It remains to be seen whether the political allegiances of fossil fuel workers—who have previously expressed interest in moving into the green sector—will change to reflect the fact that Democrats, not Republicans, are most aggressively fighting to boost energy sector employment.
Of course, there are other important factors to consider in addition to the quantity of low-carbon jobs created, as the authors of the paper acknowledge. The quality of green sector work—whether it is unionized and high-paying, for instance, or precarious and poorly remunerated—will play a large role in determining public support for the shift to renewables.