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For Immediate Release
August, 23 2019, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Jennifer K. Falcon, Communications Coordinator, jennifer@ienearth.org
Monica Mohapatra, U.S. Communications Specialist, monica.mohapatra@350.org
Coalition Outraged Over Nebraska Supreme Court Decision and Committed to Fight KXL
Tribes, Landowners and Climate Groups
WASHINGTON
Early Friday morning, the Nebraska Supreme Court issued a decision denying the landowners' appeal and upholding the Nebraska Public Service Commissions decision on the in-state route of Keystone XL pipeline in Nebraska. The appeal was struck down after a year of work by grassroots advocates to highlight the many ways in which the pipeline would damage their communities and resources.
Faith Spotted Eagle, member of the Yankton Sioux, Chair of the Ihanktonwan Treaty Committee and Brave Heart Society Grandmother said: "The NE decision to approve the KXL route is not a surprise but we had hoped they would be courageous to protect the earth, water and wishes of the Indigenous people and our allies. These courts represent the incongruity between Indigenous values and capitalism which is of a predatory nature. No one wins, least of all the people of the heartland and our grandchildren. The fight is not over, the prayers are still traveling and we never will give up on protecting sacred lands and water. I am hoping that the investors will regain their humanity and realize that they are threatening the lives of our frontline communities, where they do not live and that they will move towards divestment. And we out here on the Northern Plains will fight harder as we have all of our lives."
John Harter, landowner along the route in South Dakota and member of Dakota Rural Action said:
"I want to thank the Nebraska Landowners who've stood up to this pipeline and the powerful forces supporting it. We're disappointed that people don't value water above money. Our land and water has more value to many people than this pipeline has for greed of a few people. I and the members of Dakota Rural Action are proud to stand with you as we all continue to fight."
Judith LeBlanc, Director, Native Organizers Alliance:
"This week, every presidential candidate who attended the Native Presidential Forum pledged to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline. The issue was settled under the Obama Administration, yet TC Energy continues to drive forward hoping to build the pipeline while President Trump is in the White House. No matter where they build the Keystone XL Pipeline, the impact on Mother Earth will be the same. There is no alternative to clean water."
Dallas Goldtooth, Keep It In the Ground Organizer, Indigenous Environmental Network said:
"Today's ruling by the Nebraska Supreme Court although frustrating is not the nail in the coffin for us. Our resistance has shown over the years that we will not give up, we will protect the sacred. From the tar sands region to the gulf coast, Indigenous communities and non-native landowners will continue to fight this dirty tar sands pipeline."
Lewis Grassrope, Wiconi Un Tipi Resistance Camp said:
"We are disheartened by the decision from the Nebraska Supreme Court to move forward with this black snake. We have a collective responsibility and commitment to stop Keystone XL from being built and we will not stop. We will continue with our perseverance and fortitude to ensure our safety and livelihood continues within our ancestral lands."
350.org's Associate Director of US Campaigns, Sara Shor said:
"The Amazon is burning. The Arctic is burning. This decision by the Nebraska Supreme Court to green light Keystone XL is outrageous. By ruling in favor of the Public Service Commission, the state Supreme Court has ruled against the community. The climate impacts of this route have not been thoroughly studied, nor were Tribes or landowners properly consulted. What we already know that this pipeline will have long lasting and devastating huge impacts on the climate, water and land, none of which have properly been assessed by a body with the capacity to understand the environmental impact. At such a critical juncture for the fight to keep fossil in the ground, where big oil corporations are doing their best to stifle pipeline protest, this decision is heartbreaking. We will continue to fight with communities Keystone XL with every available means."
Established in 1990 within the United States, IEN was formed by grassroots Indigenous peoples and individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues (EJ). IEN's activities include building the capacity of Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities.
LATEST NEWS
US Forces Board Tanker in Indian Ocean as Trump Targets Venezuelan Oil
"The Donroe Doctrine is not simply a vision for the hemisphere. It is a doctrine of global domination," said one critic.
Feb 09, 2026
President Donald Trump's blockade of Venezuelan oil—condemned as "piracy" by critics around the world—continued on Monday, with the US Department of Defense announcing that overnight, "military forces conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding on the Aquila II without incident" in the Indian Ocean.
"When the Department of War says quarantine, we mean it. Nothing will stop DOW from defending our homeland—even in oceans halfway around the world," the Pentagon declared on social media, using Trump's preferred department name. "The Aquila II was operating in defiance of President Trump's established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean. It ran, and we followed."
"The Department of War tracked and hunted this vessel from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean," the department continued. "No other nation on planet Earth has the capability to enforce its will through any domain. By land, air, or sea, our armed forces will find you and deliver justice."
"You will run out of fuel long before you will outrun us," the Pentagon added. "The Department of War will deny illicit actors and their proxies the ability to defy American power in the global maritime domain."
The department also shared a video and photos from the operation, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth acknowledged during a visit to the Bath Iron Works shipyard in Bath, Maine, a stop on his national Arsenal of Freedom tour.
According to the Associated Press:
Following the US raid to apprehend then-President Nicolás Maduro in early January, several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight.
Hegseth vowed to eventually capture all those ships, telling a group of shipyard workers in Maine on Monday that "the only guidance I gave to my military commanders is none of those are getting away."
"I don't care if we got to go around the globe to get them; we’re going to get them," he added.
Citing an unnamed dense official, the AP also reported that "the Aquila II has not been formally seized and placed under US control," unlike seven other Venezuela-linked tankers previously taken by the Trump administration. Instead, the news agency explained, the Panamanian-flagged ship "is being held while its ultimate fate is decided by the US."
Reuters noted that Aquila II "was carrying about 700,000 barrels of Venezuelan heavy crude bound for China," based on schedules from the Venezuelan state oil and gas company, PDVSA.
In addition to Trump's efforts to hand Venezuela's nationalized oil industry over to fossil fuel companies that helped him secure another term, the president is ramping up US pressure on the Cuban economy by depriving the island nation of Venezuelan oil.
As Common Dreams reported earlier Monday, David Adler, co-general coordinator of Progressive International, accused Trump of "laying siege to the island of Cuba: asphyxiating its people, shuttering its hospitals, starving them of food."
After news of US forces boarding the Aquila II broke, Adler added: "Jesus christ. The United States is now intercepting oil tankers in the INDIAN OCEAN that dare to carry oil to starving Cuba. The Donroe Doctrine is not simply a vision for the hemisphere. It is a doctrine of global domination."
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Use of Ireland Airport for Trump Deportation Flights Denounced as 'Absolutely Reprehensible'
"The US Trump administration's cruel and inhumane mass deportation campaign must be denied any form of facilitation... to the degree that is legally possible," said the head of Amnesty International Ireland.
Feb 09, 2026
Amnesty International Ireland on Monday joined Irish politicians and other critics in condemning the use of Shannon Airport as a refueling stopover for some of US President Donald Trump's deportation flights.
Outrage over the use of the Irish airport has mounted since an investigation published Thursday by the Guardian and +972 Magazine detailed how a private jet owned by Trump donor and business partner Gil Dezer was recently chartered by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through the company Journey Aviation to deport Palestinians to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
"It is absolutely reprehensible that any ICE deportation flights would be allowed stop and refuel in Shannon," said Duncan Smith, a Labour Party foreign affairs spokesperson.
Smith called on the prime minister, or taoiseach, Micheál Martin, and Minister for Transport Darragh O'Brien, both members of the party Fianna Fáil, to "intervene and ensure this ends."
"Ireland cannot in any way be complicit in these ICE flights," he added, according to the Irish Times.
The newspaper published a collection of other reactions from representatives for the country's political parties:
Green Party leader Roderic O'Gorman said, "It is deeply disturbing to learn that Shannon is being used to facilitate the cruel actions of Donald Trump's ICE." He called for the government to clarify the matter.
Social Democrats foreign affairs spokeswoman Senator Patricia Stephenson also said it was deeply disturbing: "The coalition must make a statement on whether it knowingly facilitated these flights," which she claimed were a violation of the human rights of the deportees.
Sinn Féin foreign affairs spokesman Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire said the matter "requires immediate clarification" as he questioned if the flights were compliant with international law.
People Before Profit-Solidarity TD Paul Murphy said, "The fact that these were flights deporting Palestinians just adds insult to injury."
Weighing in with a Monday statement, Stephen Bowen, executive director, Amnesty International Ireland, similarly said that "we are deeply troubled at these reports of ICE deportation flights refueling at Shannon, including to states of which deportees are not even citizens."
"The US Trump administration’s cruel and inhumane mass deportation campaign must be denied any form of facilitation by Ireland to the degree that is legally possible," he argued. "Our government must do everything it can to refuse to allow such stopovers without first assessing if any individuals on board face a real risk of serious harm if transferred."
Ireland's Department of Transport has noted that "stops at Irish airports by private aircraft and commercial charters which are technical stops for non-traffic purposes (ie, not picking up or setting down passengers), do not require prior authorization from the Department of Transport."
Bowen said that "whilst we understand the intricacies of aviation law, it is wholly unbecoming for states to hide behind these when such cruelty and rage is being deployed to weaponize immigration control. Ireland still has legal obligations under the international human rights treaties it has ratified. There can be no doubt that serious human rights violations are taking place during ICE deportations, with many detainees denied legal due process before being deported."
"We are currently looking into this very worrying matter and will be writing to government soon," he added. "However, the government should already be looking at all possible ways to stop Ireland being a link in a chain of suffering, fear, and systemic abuse."
Separately on Monday, Seamus Culleton, an Irishman who is married to a US citizen and has been in an ICE detention facility in Texas since September despite having no criminal record, called on the taoiseach to raise his case with Trump during a White House visit planned for St. Patrick's Day.
Culleton told the Irish Times that his message to politicians in his homeland is: "Just try to get me out of here and do all you can please. It's an absolute torture, psychological and physical torture. I just want to get back to my wife. We're so desperate to start a family."
"I'd be so grateful if we could just end this," he added. I've been detained now for five months. It's just a torture, I don't know how much more I can take."
A spokesperson for Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs—led by Minister Helen McEntee of the Fine Gael party—confirmed that it was providing "consular assistance" through the consulate in Austin and "our embassy in Washington, DC is also engaging directly with the Department of Homeland Security at a senior level in relation to this case."
Responding to Culleton's description of his experience Smith of the Labour Party noted that "just last week I raised the concerning fact that data showed an increase in Irish citizens interacting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and deportation procedures."
MMr. Culleton's testimony is absolutely harrowing, and marries with what immigration lawyers on the ground tell us about the very real and disturbing conditions that Irish citizens are facing inside ICE detention facilities," Smith said, urging McEntee to "seek any and all information" about everyone from Ireland now in US custody.
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Seth Harp Speaks on New York Times Spiking US Foreign Policy Interview With Ross Douthat
"I think the US is only the latest in a very long history of military empires," he told Common Dreams. "This is a perspective to which New York Times readers are rarely exposed."
Feb 09, 2026
Investigative journalist Seth Harp has accused the New York Times of burying his interview with a prominent opinion columnist. He told Common Dreams that the paper is trying to silence his forceful critiques of US foreign policy.
In a post on social media Thursday, Harp blasted Ross Douthat, a conservative opinion columnist for the paper, after learning that a conversation the two had recorded last month had been cut.
“Ross Douthat challenged me to a debate on foreign policy,” Harp wrote. “We recorded a 90-minute segment for his show, Interesting Times, on January 15, 2026. But I defeated him so decisively that he refuses to air the footage. What an absolute coward.”
According to Douthat, the conversation between the two was “pegged to the Delta Force raid in Venezuela,” referring to President Donald Trump’s operation last month, which overthrew the South American nation’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
Though Trump himself has plainly stated that his goal was to forcibly open the nation’s vast oil reserves to be taken over by US corporations, the administration has papered over this nakedly imperialist justification with dubious claims that Maduro was at the helm of a multinational narcotics trafficking ring. Maduro has pleaded not guilty to related charges in US court.
This was where, Douthat said, Harp’s perspective was relevant. His recent Times bestselling book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, examines the long history of the US Army Special Forces’ own history of international drug trafficking, which culminated in a series of unsolved murders at the titular Army installation in North Carolina.
The day after US forces bombed Caracas in the January operation, which is estimated to have killed as many as 83 people—including dozens of civilians—Harp posted a photo of one of the Delta Force commanders who played a key role in the attack. For this, he was subpoenaed by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee, which accused him of “leaking classified intel” and “doxing” the official, even though the information was already publicly available.
According to Harp, the conversation was cordial at first but became prickly when the two began to discuss the recent attack on Venezuela.
"Again and again he tried to box me in with some kind of gotcha," Harp said. "For example, he sprung on me that I'd called Nicolás Maduro the 'rightful' president of Venezuela, and tried to make the discussion about the last election in Venezuela and abuses by the government security forces there."
"I replied that Maduro was the rightful president of Venezuela simply because he became president through Venezuela's own internal political processes, and that the US has no right to dictate to other countries who their leaders should be," he said. "Douthat had no response to that and appeared visibly thrown off balance. It was as if he had never encountered a real anti-imperialist critique of US foreign policy and was only prepared to deal with some weak sauce humanitarian liberal critique, which I'm not about."
Harp said the discussion also encompassed many other foreign policy topics, including “Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the post-9/11 wars, and American military interventions since 1945 more broadly.”
He added that the pair “also discussed the methods by which these interventions were accomplished, specifically the use of large conventional armies versus special forces and proxies,” and that they “talked a lot about China and Russia, too.”
“I served in the military and have spent my entire adult life thinking and writing about these issues,” said Harp, an Army veteran. “My basic argument was that the United States has been so violent and aggressive since World War II that it has not only destabilized the entire world but also destroyed our own country from the inside, materially and politically.”
“Ross’ basic point of view was that while the US has done terrible things and killed millions of people in recent years, the world is a better place as a result of American hegemony,” Harp continued. “But his grasp on historical facts was so weak that he was unable to make a strong argument.”
“He frequently became confused and contradicted or reversed himself,” Harp explained. “Frustrated at his own befuddlement, he blew up and said: ‘We get it. You think the United States is uniquely evil.’”
Within days of the interview, Harp expressed fears that the Times might decide not to release it. On January 20, five days after his sit-down with Douthat, he wrote to one of his editors.
“I was somewhat surprised that Ross wasn’t better prepared to defend his point of view,” he said, according to a message he made available on social media. “They may decide to spike it; we’ll see.”
About three weeks after the conversation and after weeks of silence from the Times, Harp received a text message from one of the show’s producers, who told him, “We aren’t going to be able to make it work.”
“We were kind of pummeled by the news cycle in the last six weeks and are going to pivot away from this story,” the producer explained in the text message exchange.
“I had canceled a vacation to do the show in studio,” Harp told Common Dreams. “Twice they changed the date on me, so I was kept waiting for two weeks. Then, after they spiked the episode, they didn’t even bother to inform me. I didn’t learn about it until three weeks later, when I reached out to the producer. At that point, I asked for Ross’ email address so that I could speak to him about it directly and in private. The producer refused to put me in touch.”
Harp responded to the message, calling it “unbelievable cowardice on Ross’ part and a giant waste of my time.” He said he was going to “make it known what actually happened: Ross challenged me to a debate on foreign policy, got crushed, and doesn’t have the intellectual or journalistic integrity to air the footage.”
He later posted the text exchange to social media. He told Common Dreams he chose to go public because he “felt deeply offended by [The Times'] complete disrespect for my time and lack of professional courtesy.”
hey @DouthatNYT, release the debate ya coward https://t.co/2eMysOn4nn
— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) February 6, 2026
ross douthat has no time for a foreign policy discussion with seth harp but loads of time for this misogynistic culture war slop… https://t.co/ZIZDqTy8Kc pic.twitter.com/SaCkE3OMkV
— Erin Overbey (@erinoverbey) February 7, 2026
Harp's publication of the messages on social media resulted in a wave of backlash from others in the media, who accused Douthat of cowardice and the Times of burying the interview to protect him from embarrassment.
On Thursday, Douthat issued a response on social media.
Though the debate was recorded less than two weeks after Trump’s raid, he said the interview “had missed the ideal spot in the news cycle” for a conversation about Venezuela. He also said the interview, which he wanted to keep narrowly focused on Harp’s reporting about drug-dealing in the Special Forces, “became unmoored from Mr. Harp’s specific reporting in a way that undermined the first half of our conversation.”
“Interesting Times is a show where I try to give a lot of space to the guest’s perspective while posing challenging questions, creating episodes where the audience gets the best version of an idea or worldview that they might not have understood before,” Douthat continued.
Harp called this justification “hogwash,” pointing out that three of the most recent episodes of his show address such timely issues as the end of Roe v. Wade, questions about public trust after the Covid-19 pandemic, and church attendance statistics among young men.
“Anyone can look at your recent episodes and see that a debate between us on the US military and foreign policy would have been far more timely and relevant to the news cycle than any of them,” Harp wrote.
Douthat, one of the many Times columnists who enthusiastically supported the Bush administration’s War in Iraq more than two decades ago, has often given his platform to unapologetic supporters of US foreign military interventions.
The first interview he published after Trump’s Venezuela operation was a conversation titled “A Defense of US Intervention in Venezuela,” in which he hosted the notorious war hawk Elliott Abrams, who served as special envoy to Venezuela during Trump’s first term.
The neoconservative policy adviser, who’d previously worked for Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. During that time, he championed US support for anti-communist death squads and dictators across Latin America and was later convicted for his participation in the Iran-Contra affair.
Douthat largely agreed with Abrams on the moral justifications for regime change in Venezuela, though he questioned the operation’s effectiveness in bringing about democracy.
Harp said that during their conversation weeks later, he disputed Douthat’s “sarcastic outburst,” accusing him of portraying America as a unique evil.
“I don’t think the US is unique or evil,” he told Common Dreams. “I don’t think in those sorts of religious terms. Rather, I think the US is only the latest in a very long history of military empires, but that its marriage to extractive capitalism makes it exceptionally violent, unstable, and short-lived.”
“This is a perspective to which New York Times readers are rarely exposed,” he went on. “It was an interesting and entertaining discussion all around, and no doubt would have garnered far more views than anything else that Ross has published recently. Sadly, Ross’ ego was a little battered.”
“I had tried to go easy on him as an interlocutor, not pointing out, for example, that I personally fought in the Iraq War while he merely promoted it in the pages of the National Review, even though both of us were of military age in the early 2000s,” he said. “I had kept it all above the belt and never attacked him personally. But I had laid bare the shallowness and inconsistency of his views on foreign policy.”
“Another pundit or host would have had the intellectual and journalistic integrity to publish the interview anyway,” he said. “Not Ross.”
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