September, 04 2018, 12:00am EDT
WASHINGTON
Today, as the confirmation hearing for Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh began, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats spoke out for the American people and demanded that the hearing be delayed until Kavanaugh's full record has been released. Brett Kavanaugh spent over five years in the George W. Bush White House as White House Counsel and Staff Secretary. To date, only a fraction of Kavanaugh's more than 6 million White House documents have been made public.
Democratic Senators on the Judiciary Committee who spoke out today include ranking member Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar, Christopher Coons, Richard Blumenthal, Mazie Hirono, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris.
In response, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune released the following statement:
"Today, the American people witnessed Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee fulfilling their Constitutional duty and protecting the integrity of the Supreme Court. Sadly, their Republican counterparts were all too willing to disregard their obligations just to rush through Donald Trump's extremist nominee. Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court endangers so many things the American people hold dear, including clean air and water, the right to vote, access to healthcare, the right to make decisions about their own bodies, and a fair and open democracy. When it comes to Brett Kavanaugh, it is the epitome of hypocrisy for Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell, Senate Republicans, and Donald Trump to try to convince the American people that anything about this confirmation process is 'normal' or acceptable. The American people know exactly what is at stake, which is why they're overwhelmingly demanding Kavanaugh's nomination be rejected."
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Here is a timeline of Kavanaugh's documents released to date:
- July 27:Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley requests only the documents from Kavanaugh's time as White House Counsel and did not request any documents from Kavanaugh' three years as White House Staff Secretary. Kavanaugh himself described his time as Staff Secretary as "among the most instructive" experiences to his work as a federal court judge. We can see why.
- July 30:Previous Staff Secretaries during the Clinton and Obama Administrations affirmed that as Staff Secretary, Kavanaugh would have likely played a "substantive role" in key decisions.
- July 31: Senate Judiciary Democrats request all available documents from Brett Kavanaugh's time in the White House (2001-2006).
- August 1: The National Archives said that they have more than 1.2 million documents from Brett Kavanaugh's time in the White House, including an estimated 1 million documents from his time as Staff Secretary.
- August 2: The National Archives said it will take until the end of October 2018 to produce just the documents Sen. Grassley requested.
- August 2: Sen. Grassley and Senate Republicans said they are still planning to move forward with Kavanaugh's hearings , even without the vast majority of Kavanaugh's documents. A GOP source even said, "I can't envision a scenario where that vote is delayed."
- August 2:Former President George W. Bush revealed he is working with William A. Burck -- a right-wing political operative who served as a deputy to Kavanaugh in 2005 and is currently the attorney representing Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, and Donald McGahn in the Russia probe -- to vet which documents from Kavanaugh's record are released to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
- August 5: Trump's lawyer said that if Mueller subpoenas Trump, he'll file a "motion to quash" the subpoena that would likely go to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh -- who previously said that a sitting President should be above the law, should not be subject criminal indictment, no matter what evidence is uncovered, and can ignore the laws they think are unconstitutional -- would likely have the swing vote on this decision.
- August 8: Sen. Blumenthal and Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats file a Freedom of Information Act request seeking release all of Kavanaugh's White House documents.
- August 9: After attorney William A. Burck vetted the initial documents from the Bush Library, the documents were sent only to the Senate Judiciary Committee members. Of that small portion, only 5,800 non-substantive documents were released publicly. To date, these are the only documents of the more than 4 million in Kavanaugh's record. The Judiciary Committee said they only plan to release 125,000 documents total.
- August 10: Senator Grassley announces that Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings will be held Sept. 4-7, 2018.
- August 31: The Trump Administration announces that it is invoking executive privilege to conceal more than 101,000 documents in Kavanugh's record from his time in the George W. Bush White House.
- September 3:William Burck releases 42,000 pages of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee just hours before Kavanaugh's hearing is set to begin. As Senator Whitehouse noted, Senators would need to read 7,000 pages per hour to review all documents before the hearing begins.
- September 4: Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats repeatedly call for a hearing delay until Kavanaugh's full record is released. To date, only a small percentage of Kavanaugh's available records have been released.
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Israel's AI-Aided Targeting Creates Massacre 'Factory' in Gaza
"This is the first AI-facilitated genocide in history," said one observer.
Dec 01, 2023
As Israel on Friday resumed bombarding Gaza following a weeklong pause, a joint investigation by a pair of progressive Israeli media outlets sheds new light on the Israel Defense Forces' use of artificial intelligence to select targets, essentially creating what one former Israeli officer called a "mass assassination factory."
The Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call interviewed seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials including participants in the current war on Gaza, who spoke under condition of anonymity. Their testimonies—as well as official statements by Israeli officials, interviews with Palestinians, documentation from the besieged strip, and data—show how Israeli leaders know roughly how many Palestinian civilians are likely to be killed in each of its attacks, and how the use of AI-based systems is accelerating a noncombatant casualty rate that more resembles the indiscriminate bombing of World War II than the modern era of codified civilian protection under international humanitarian law.
"Nothing happens by accident," another source stressed. "When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it's because someone in the army decided it wasn't a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target."
"We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets," the source added. "Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home."
In one case, sources said Israeli officials approved an attack they knew would kill up to hundreds of civilians in a bid to assassinate a single Hamas military commander. More than 120 civilians were killed in the October 31 bombing of the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp with at least two 2,000-pound bombs.
"The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage," one source said.
One reason for the staggering Palestinian civilian death toll—over 15,000 people as of December 1, most of them women and children—is Israel's use of a platform called Habsora, or "Gospel," which is largely built on AI and can generate targets at what the report states is "almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible."
A source interviewed in the report said that "in the past there were times in Gaza when we would create 50 targets per year," but with AI-driven systems, it is possible to produce 100 targets in a single day.
"It really is like a factory," the source said. "We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate."
According to the report :
The increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.
One source said that a senior intelligence officer told his subordinates after October 7 that the goal was to "kill as many Hamas operatives as possible," leading to "cases in which we shell based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where the target is, killing civilians."
"This is often done to save time, instead of doing a little more work to get a more accurate pinpointing," the source added.
Another source said that the "emphasis is on quantity and not on quality." A human "will go over the targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them."
The result of the new Israeli policy is the killing and maiming of civilians at a rate with few if any parallels in modern history. Since October 7, when Hamas-led attacks killed 1,200 Israelis and others in southern Israel, nearly 50,000 Palestinians have been killed, wounded, or left missing by IDF attacks. Over 300 families have lost at least 10 members, which the report notes is 15 times higher than during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, when the IDF killed more than 2,300 Palestinian civilians in what was at the time its deadliest attack on Gaza.
In the wake of the horrific October 7 attacks—plans for which were known to Israeli leaders but dismissed as too audacious, according to new reporting by The New York Times—Israeli officials publicly stated how they would retaliate, sometimes using language rife with genocidal intent.
"The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy," IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari explained on October 9.
Israeli forces answered the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust with the worst mass murder of Palestinians since the 1947-48 Nakba, or "catastrophe," when Jews—many of them Holocaust survivors—killed 15,000 Arabs and ethnically cleansed more than 750,000 others from Palestine while establishing the modern state of Israel.
IDF bombs and bullets have killed nearly as many civilians in 56 days as the U.S.-led coalition did in Afghanistan in 20 years. During the first two weeks of the Israeli onslaught, nearly all the bombs dropped by the IDF were either 1,000- or 2,000-pound bombs made by the United States—which, although it has killed more foreign civilians this century than any other armed force in the world, eschews using such massive ordnance in civilian areas.
Israeli military officials said the IDF dropped 6,000 bombs weighing a total of 4,000 tons on Gaza during the first five days of the war alone, destroying entire neighborhoods.
In addition to bombing tactical and undergound targets—which often lie beneath homes and other civilian structures—the IDF is destroying so-called "power targets," which include high-rise and residential towers in the center of densely populated cities, and other civilian structures likes universities, banks, and government offices. The idea, intelligence sources said in the report, is to foment "civil pressure" against Hamas, whose political wing governs Gaza.
The IDF also targets the homes of Hamas and Islamic Jihad personnel, but Palestinians interviewed in the report said some of the families killed by Israeli bombing had no members who were in militant groups.
"We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas," said one source. "Sometimes it is a militant group's spokesperson's office, or a point where operatives meet. I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is what they told us."
"If they would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it," the source added.
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US Pledge to Loss and Damage Fund Calling 'Insulting... Paltry... Shameful'
"The United States refuses to acknowledge historic responsibility for the decades of damage that has been done to communities bearing the brunt of climate change and the fossil fuel industry," said one advocate.
Dec 01, 2023
Climate justice advocates, outraged over the inadequate funding that was pledged to the "loss and damage" fund as the United Nations Climate Change Conference opened this week, reserved particular disdain on Friday for the United States delegation and its refusal to contribute a meaningful amount to the fund.
The Climate Justice Alliance said the U.S. contribution of just $17.5 million for the loss and damage fund—a tiny fraction of the nearly $900 billion President Joe Biden requested for his military budget earlier this year and the annual fossil fuel subsidies distributed by the U.S. government—sent a clear message to the Global South: that "the U.S. is completely uninterested in prioritizing or being accountable to the climate impacts frontline communities are facing."
"The amount pledged by the United States is insulting," said Bineshi Albert, co-executive director of the organization. "It is a paltry, shameful amount of money... By comparison, island nations have requested at least $100 billion over the first four years."
The sum also made clear that the Biden administration is following through on Special Presidential Climate Envoy John Kerry's remarks at a hearing in July, in which he said that "under no circumstances" would the U.S. provide funding to countries in the Global South that are increasingly facing prolonged droughts, rising sea levels, and severe storms, among other climate impacts as a result of planetary heating.
"The United States refuses to acknowledge historic responsibility for the decades of damage that has been done to communities bearing the brunt of climate change and the fossil fuel industry," said Albert.
The U.S. is by far the largest historic emitter of planet-heating emissions, while many countries that are already facing the worst impacts of the climate emergency, such as small Pacific island nations, shoulder the least blame for the crisis.
Albert called the $17.5 million pledged by the U.S. "a drop in the bucket compared to the annual $20.5 billion in fossil fuel subsidies handed out by the US government, which recently surged to $7 trillion in 2022."
To help governments in the Global South rebuild damaged communities, prevent further destruction, and relocate displaced people, developing countries have said they will ultimately need about $400 billion annually.
$17.5 million "is not only ineffective to address these harms and injustices but it is minuscule compared to the hundreds of billions in loan, grants, and tax breaks available from the Inflation Reduction Act to corporations to further build out or prolong the life of fossil fuel infrastructure and energy intensive fuels like hydrogen," said Albert.
She added that it is not lost on advocates that the U.S. government pushed for contributions to the loss and damage fund to be voluntary: "another clear sign that the United States does not take responsibility for its harmful past actions nor does it consider the needs of the most impacted and marginalized communities seriously."
With contributions from other wealthy governments ranging from just $10 million (Japan) to $245 million (the European Union), Amnesty International climate adviser Ann Harrison said wealthy countries committed "barely enough to get the fund running, and little more."
"Billions of dollars are needed to make a substantive difference to communities in desperate need of help to rebuild homes after storms, or to support farmers when their crops are destroyed, or those permanently displaced by the climate crisis," said Harrison. "Considering the vast and excess profits accrued by fossil fuel companies last year while they continue to trash the climate, and that some the donor states today were responsible for a large proportion of historical greenhouse gas emissions, this is a disappointingly small initial sum."
High-income countries that continue to produce fossil fuels despite clear warnings from energy and climate experts, said Harrison, must "make new and additional commitments to the fund on a scale which reflects the global nature of climate crisis, and the threat it presents to billions of people."
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UAW Becomes Largest US Union to Back Gaza Cease-Fire
"From opposing fascism in WWII to mobilizing against apartheid South Africa and the Contra war, the UAW has consistently stood for justice across the globe," said United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain.
Dec 01, 2023
Fresh off historic contract victories, the United Auto Workers on Friday became the largest U.S. union to endorse a cease-fire in Gaza as Israel resumed its bombardment of the Palestinian territory following a weeklong pause.
"I am proud that the UAW International Union is calling for a cease-fire in Israel and Palestine," UAW president Shawn Fain wrote in a social media post on Friday. "From opposing fascism in WWII to mobilizing against apartheid South Africa and the Contra war, the UAW has consistently stood for justice across the globe."
The union's cease-fire endorsement was made public by Brandon Mancilla, director of UAW Region 9A, in remarks outside the White House, labor activist Mindy Isser reported for In These Times.
"Mancilla was at a news conference where labor leaders and union members from across the country had journeyed to Washington, D.C. to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a broad, multiracial coalition of politicians, organizers, and activists who have been on a five-day hunger strike outside of the White House to demand a permanent cease-fire," Isser noted.
On social media, Mancilla announced that the UAW's International Executive Board "will also be forming a Divestment and Just Transition Working Group to study the history of Israel and Palestine, our union's economic ties to the conflict, and explore how we can have a just transition for U.S. workers from war to peace."
The UAW's cease-fire call makes the 400,000-member union part of a growing segment of the American labor movement that is pushing for a negotiated end to the bloodshed in the Gaza Strip, where U.S.-backed Israeli bombing has killed more than 15,000 people in less than two months.
Dozens of unions have signed onto a petition launched by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, which demands the release of all hostages, an end to Israel's siege of Gaza, and a cease-fire that sets the stage for "negotiations for an enduring peace."
Despite growing labor support, the AFL-CIO—the largest federation of unions in the U.S.—has yet to back a cease-fire and has actively pushed back against its affiliates' efforts to build support for one.
During a meeting of the AFL-CIO's executive council in late October, just one union leader—Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU)—spoke up in support of a cease-fire, The New York Timesreported at the time. Last month, the APWU called for "an immediate cease-fire, the release of hostages, and urgently needed humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza."
"The cries of humanity demand nothing less," the union said.
Dimondstein echoed that message at Friday's press conference outside the White House.
"As working people we stand with the oppressed and the innocent, thousands of whom have lost their lives over the last two months," he said. "We unite with unions and people of goodwill around the world in calls for justice and peace."
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