After a year of introspection—panels and listening forums on music industry inequity, diversity-increasing membership drives spearheaded by the Recording Academy’s Task Force on Diversity & Inclusion—there is widespread hope that the winners’ circle at this year’s Grammy Awards will be more reflective of the rich tapestry of voices that make up contemporary popular music. The 2019 show’s shortlists appear to be the result of successful activism, as the Recording Academy has implemented broader cultural mandates for inclusion. The “Big Four” General Field categories—Album, Song, and Record of the Year and Best New Artist—are full of women and artists of color from a wide array of genres. All told, half of the Record of the Year and Song of the Year nominees are black, and five out of the eight nominees for the headliner Album of the Year category are black as well. Women-led acts account for five of the eight nominations in each category for Song, Record, and Album of the Year, and for six of the eight noms in Best New Artist.
But upon closer examination of the black musicians, it becomes clear that their odds of winning may still be very long. This group, historically, is among the most-nominated in any given year, though General Field wins are few and far between. And the handful of black artists who have taken home General Field trophies often fit into a specific mold: They are perceived as individual auteurs, creators whose work stands alone, outside of the broader black mainstream. For black musicians to hoist a golden gramophone in one of these four categories, the Academy’s voters essentially have to be convinced that the work of these artists is excellent because of its singularity.
This sets up a fascinating contrast among many of the artists nominated in this year’s General Field, where more popular, straight-ahead hip-hop faces off against a trio of black concept albums from artists whose candidacies would seem to rely on a perception of holistic artistry. A win in a category like Album of the Year for the former—Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy, Drake’s Scorpion, or (God help us) Post Malone’s Beerbongs & Bentleys—would be a major surprise, indicative of the Grammys’ growing acceptance of hip-hop. Meanwhile, the newcomer H.E.R.’s self-titled debut, Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist Dirty Computer, and the Kendrick Lamar–helmed soundtrack for Black Panther, all suggest broader narratives and themes. Monáe’s high-concept aesthetic (which includes an album cycle known as The Metropolis Saga) has been widely acclaimed, and Dirty Computer was accompanied by a nearly 50-minute “emotion picture” film. H.E.R’s identity was shrouded in secrecy upon the artist’s sparse, moody, album release, in part because the work is supposed to represent a metaphorical everywoman’s coming-of-age tale. And while Lamar is a household name, the Black Panther soundtrack is a more artistically- minded, conceptual project than his three previous releases (all of which have been nominated for Album of the Year, all of which have lost).
[Read: Why rap and R&B still might not win at the Grammys]
Not counting guest appearances, a black musician hasn’t won Album of the Year since Herbie Hancock in 2008. Alicia Keys, Luther Vandross, and Beyoncé won for Song of the Year, in 2002, 2004, and 2010 respectively, and these are the only wins for black artists in the category since 1996. Similarly, Ray Charles’s Record of the Year win in 2005 has been the only one for a black artist within the past 23 years. Contemporary hip-hop’s heavy hitters are almost always nominated across these Big Four categories, but again the wins are sparse. This phenomenon—one that I’ve called a “glass ceiling on black art”—suggests that high visibility on nomination lists has historically produced insufficient results for these musicians.
And when black artists do break through that ceiling, their auteurist bonafides are what carry them to the podium. Consider the list of black Album, Song, and Record of the Year winners since the turn of the century: Lauryn Hill (Album of the Year, 1999), Keys (Song of the Year, 2002), Vandross (Song of the Year, 2004), Charles (Record and Album of the Year, 2005), OutKast (Album of the Year, 2004), Hancock (Album of the Year, 2008), and Beyoncé (Song of the Year, 2010). (Yes, that’s really it). All of these artists (save Beyoncé) stand outside the mainstream hip-hop/R&B footprint. Keys was a child-prodigy whose classical piano training set her apart. Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was two individual creators making crossover statements, anchored by the omnipresence of “Hey Ya!” Hill’s Miseducation was a neo-soul concept album that drew its name from a book that advocated autodidacticism. Vandross, Charles, and Hancock all won in their twilight years far after their creative peaks; the latter won for, of all things, a record of jazz covers of Joni Mitchell songs. (And even still, a comprehensive aesthetic statement wasn’t enough for Beyoncé's Lemonade to beat out Adele’s 25 in 2017, a result that is even more annoying given this history.)
[Read: The great Grammy hypocrisy]
This issue traces its roots to the first black Album of the Year winner—Stevie Wonder—who took home the night’s biggest award in 1974 (and again in 1975 and 1977), 15 years after the first Grammy ceremony. What prompted Wonder’s win? The singer was framed by the media and industry as a unique figure, an artistic “genius” who was held back by a controlling label, one focused on the collective “Motown Machine” at the expense of his true singular artistry. Only after much-publicized contract negotiations in 1971 was Wonder released from the label’s strictures, free to pursue his artistic vision with full creative control. Coverage that followed affirmed him as a transcendent auteur, and with his 1974 win, the Grammys had made clear what a black General Field winner needed to be: standing alone and “above” typical black music.
There’s a very real chance that the next black General Field winner may represent, in effect, a referendum on what the Academy counts as “artistry” within the broader stylistic, sonic, and genre-based palates of black music. Drake and Cardi both stick to a more conventional sound while Lamar, H.E.R., and Monáe’s records follow the artist-as-creator narrative, where their broad concepts fuel their candidacies. If any of them win a major award on Sunday, it will say a lot about the Academy’s efforts and whether it’s truly committed to rethinking its position on black artistry.
For many TV shows, the perfunctory Valentine’s Day episode presents a unique tonal challenge. Lean too eagerly into the holiday’s conceit and you risk a frivolous deviation from the broader ethos of the series, if not also its plotline. Skewer dear Cupid too gleefully, and you might alienate viewers with a soft spot for romance (or for chocolate). Even the best examples of the genre can set up a show to later be bogged down by the same holiday-specific terror that haunts its audience: the tyranny of high expectations.
But Big Mouth, the animated Netflix series that follows a group of teens navigating the all-consuming chaos of pubescence, already combines good-natured levity and hormone-driven anguish. The show, which has run for two seasons, dramatizes the romantic and sexual anxieties of its teen characters with a signature mocktail of vulgar humor and earnest affirmations. It’s hardly any surprise, then, that the series’ entry into the Valentine’s Day pantheon is a sublime addition. “My Furry Valentine” is a hilarious romp, but it also functions as a confetti-gilded reminder of what Big Mouth does best. The double episode, which began streaming Friday, brings both genuine heart and nearly insurmountable horniness to the classic holiday special. For the show’s fans, it’s a delightful reunion; for unfamiliar viewers, it’s a raucous send-up of romantic comedies and Valentine’s Day tropes alike.
“My Furry Valentine” begins with a When Harry Met Sally–esque interview of Andrew (voiced by John Mulaney) and his anthropomorphic hormone monster (Nick Kroll) recounting the moment they knew they loved each other: Andrew’s first viewing of a pivotal Diane Lane scene in the 2003 romantic comedy Under the Tuscan Sun. The show quickly cuts to Andrew’s best friend, Nick (also Kroll), whose über-affectionate parents are spreading far too much Valentine’s cheer for the teen’s liking. When Nick begs them to tone it down, his amorous father (Fred Armisen) is aghast: “Valentine’s Day, it’s wonderful. It’s, it’s—.” Nick’s similarly sensuous mother (Maya Rudolph) then begins singing an ode to the holiday, which the show’s many characters take turns celebrating and lambasting:
It’s a day of hugs and snuggles,
A time to spread your loving seeds,
It’s a rolling, growing pink snowball of stress that no one needs.
It’s unhealthy expectations,
An opportunity to impress,
It’s a yearly grim reminder that your life’s a fucked-up mess.
It’s a dark and lurid history of deviant pagan kicks,
It’s outrageously expensive! Just stay home and watch the Knicks,
It’s a big fat middle finger to those who are all alone,
Whether sick or tired or uninspired, you still gotta bring the bone.
It’s an inspired segment for a show that had, moments prior, featured the ghost of Duke Ellington (Jordan Peele) telling Nick his family “has no boundaries—they’re like Doctors Without Borders,” and then singing a wild punch line: If the doctors ate each other out. But that commingling of tawdry one-liners and empathetic storytelling is what makes Big Mouth so charming. Where other shows’ attempts to make decisive statements about Valentine’s Day might register as corny or tonally inappropriate, Big Mouth’s focus on the hysteria of adolescence helps inoculate the series from those common missteps.
Jay and Coach Steve in Big Mouth (Netflix)The show itself is already so outrageous that nothing in “My Furry Valentine” feels out of the ordinary—not even the repeated references to “bussy,” which is defined for audiences by a lascivious ladybug who insists that there’s a lot more where that description came from. There are new hijinks, conflicts, and simulations, like a skit that finds the preternaturally horny Jay (Jason Mantzoukas) competing in a sex-themed Ultimate Beastmaster obstacle course competition aptly titled Ultimate Fuck Machine. What other show would allow an animated rendering of Duke Ellington’s ghost to admit—and openly lament—the fact that he’s in love with the ghost of Whitney Houston, who’s in love with the ghost of Nina Simone, who’s in love with the ghost of Burt Reynolds?
While Big Mouth is full of brash humor and visual gags, the show manages to ground its episodes—including and especially the Valentine’s Day edition—with a rare appreciation for the multitudes of awkward and joyful moments that characterize all kinds of human connections. Crucially, Big Mouth pays special attention to the relationships its characters have with themselves. As ever, the teens experience a single event in vastly different ways. The When Harry Met Sally–inspired interview format, for example, finds Jessi (Jessi Glaser) sublimating her frustrations with life rather than reflecting on any burgeoning capacity for lust.
The divergences among the teens are often both funny and instructive. “My Furry Valentine” is most enjoyable when it explores these varying experiences—and smartly makes the case that difference isn’t inherently wrong. These moments are perhaps the clearest reminders that the series also serves as an educational program for its youngest viewers. (Among other lessons, “My Furry Valentine” nudges its teen characters toward the knowledge that gender isn’t defined by genitalia, and that queer men need not be restricted by the so-called old paradigms of top and bottom.)
“My Furry Valentine” doesn’t offer any unequivocal judgment on the holiday itself. Like most trials faced by the teens, Valentine’s Day presents an opportunity to reconsider the messages they’ve internalized about love, sex, and self. They don’t always succeed at establishing a new vision, but they all fail most epically when attempting to re-create the romantic scripts they’ve absorbed from the world around them. Who hasn’t?
On Ariana Grande’s new album, among the kinds of titles you’d expect from an ultra-successful pop star singing about the highs and lows of love—“needy.” or “ghostin.”— there’s the single, all-caps track: “NASA.”
Yes, one of Grande’s new songs is named for the U.S. government agency that runs the space program.
For Grande, the song is another catchy tune about self-empowerment in romantic relationships. For NASA, it’s free publicity; the agency tweeted a cheesy message at Grande on Friday, complete with a link to its own website. For music writers, such as my colleague Spencer Kornhaber, it’s a chance to celebrate a “top-tier bop.” For The Atlantic’s science desk, it is an opportunity to get nerdy about the astronomical facts alluded to in the lyrics.
The song opens with a reimagining of Neil Armstrong’s famous line: “This is one small step for woman / One giant leap for womankind.” The intro segues into an addictive jam sprinkled with outer-space buzzwords: Stars, orbit, gravity.
Read: “[It satisfies every childlike curiosity]”
“You know I’m a star / Space, I’ma need space,” the chorus goes. Grande insists to her paramour that she needs some time apart because she needs some “me” time. She imagines herself as a star, and also “the universe / and you’ll be N-A-S-A.” (We’ll leave the sleuthing about which ex-boyfriend NASA represents to someone else.)
As far as pop-song metaphors go, this is a pretty good one.
The universe is vast. The distances between stars are so tremendous that they measured not in measly units like miles or kilometers, but by how fast light can cross them. If Grande needs some space from a partner, she’ll find it here.
The closest stars to our own orbit are in a trio known as Alpha Centauri, located about four light-years away. It is considered “close” only on cosmic scales. How long would it take us to reach Alpha Centauri? Kurtis Williams, an astronomy and astrophysics professor at Texas A&M University, worked out the math. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. Let’s say a spaceship travels at 20,000 miles per hour, a little faster than the U.S. Space Shuttle, which flew at 17,500 miles per hour. At that speed, it would take people 137,000 years to reach the stars. Plenty of time for some self-care away from the boyfriend.
Read: Ariana Grande[ tells the cold truth on Thank U, Next]
Even across astronomical distances, though, it’s possible to see stars with some clarity. Celebrity journalists have to use tiny clues to try to understand the lives of their subjects, and so do astronomers. Telescopes, on the ground and in space, gaze out and absorb stars’ light. Astronomers split that light into different wavelengths, in the same way a prism spreads light into a rainbow of colors. The wavelengths can reveal certain properties of stars, like composition and temperature. Astronomers have used this technique to explore a variety of stars in the cosmos.
If Grande wanted to get a little specific about the kind of star she is, she has several options.
All stars form in the same way, from within clouds of cosmic dust. Dust twists into knots that grow until they collapse under their own weight, leaving behind clumps that become super-hot and radiant. But stars, as eternal and unyielding as they may seem to us, transform through the course of their lifetimes.
Most stars in the universe are main-sequence stars, including the sun and our neighbors in Alpha Centauri. These stars are in the prime of their lives, fusing hydrogen to create helium to produce their blinding radiance for billions of years. (At 25, Grande arguably is in the prime of her career, with years of blinding radiance to come.) The smallest stars, known as red dwarfs, emit a tiny fraction of the energy of our sun. The most massive, known as hypergiants, exude hundreds of thousands of times more energy.
A big star like Ariana might see the fate of space-bound stars as a warning, too: A star’s fuel is finite, and the more massive it is, the faster it will burn out. Longevity favors the smallest.
Read: [How exploding stars may have shaped Earth's history]
When stars runs out of their supply of hydrogen, they metamorphose into something else. Their new appearance depends on their mass. The biggest stars explode in dazzling explosions called supernovae and leave behind dense remnants known as neutron stars. (I’m not a music producer, but “Supernova” sounds like Grande’s next hit.) Our own star will expand and cool into what’s known as a red giant. Eventually, it will shed its outer layers to space and expose an extremely dense core. After that, it’ll be known as a white dwarf.
Sun-like stars, red dwarfs, white dwarfs, red giants, hypergiants—any star in the universe, though, has plenty of the space Grande craves. Last year, astronomers working on the Hubble Space Telescope announced the discovery of the most-distant star to date, a hypergiant nicknamed Icarus, about 9 billion light-years away. The light traversed the cosmos for 9 billion years before reaching the telescope.
The most distant stars are some of the most interesting to astronomers. The farthest stars are also the earliest stars in the universe. Astronomers study them because they want to know what the cosmos was like at the very beginning. This is a mysterious period in astronomy. This may be where Ariana Grande and astronomers diverge. Grande sings that maintaining some mystery will only strengthen her bond with her suitor. For astronomers, the mysteries that distance creates only cause pain.
Purdue University. The University of North Dakota. Auburn University. The University of Oregon. Brigham Young University. Xavier University. Oklahoma State University. These are just a handful of the schools in America that have had blackface scandals—not, as one might presume, in the long-distant past, but in the past two decades.
This blackface resurgence dates to late 2001, when Alabama’s Auburn University found itself in the throes of a crisis that made national news. One fraternity, Delta Sigma Phi, had cast out two of its members who had been photographed in front of a Confederate flag. One student was wearing a makeshift Ku Klux Klan robe; the other was wearing blackface and had a noose around his neck. Within the same week, another fraternity on campus, Beta Theta Pi, suspended 13 of its members who had been photographed at a party wearing blackface and wigs.
[Read: America can’t seem to kick its racist costume habit]
Greek organizations across the country raced to condemn the incident at Auburn. The North American Interfraternity Conference ran an ad campaign imploring students to show their true faces next Halloween. There was a diversity rally on campus. There were calls for reforms of the Greek system. Then, several months later, in May of 2002, there was another incident, this one at Syracuse University: A student and member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity dressed in blackface, covering his arms and hands in the black paint as well. He went around to several college bars. He was, he explained, dressed as Tiger Woods.
In the days that have followed revelations that Virginia Governor Ralph Northam dressed either in blackface or in a KKK robe—or neither, but it somehow ended up on his medical-school yearbook page—a national reckoning of sorts has taken place. People have combed through other college yearbooks and found more racist images. Blackface and nooses ad infinitum. But these yearbooks are from the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, leading to the impression that blackface on campus is a thing of the past. And that’s just not the case.
“We haven’t been talking about it, but this hasn’t gone away. This has been happening,” Walter Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University and an expert on fraternity and sorority life, told me. “And there’s an incident practically every year.”
Just weeks ago, in January, two students at the University of Oklahoma were filmed in a video laughing as one of the students wore blackface, painted down to the palms of her hands, and said the N-word. At least one of those students was expelled from her sorority, Delta Delta Delta.
The incident at the University of Oklahoma came only four years after another video, showing members of the university’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon chanting, “There will never be a nigger at SAE,” roiled campus and forced a reappraisal. “This video signals to me that we have much more to do to create an environment of equity and respect,” said Jim Gallogly, the university’s president, who was facing calls for resignation after mere months on the job. “We must be purposeful to create authentic measures to address and abolish racist experiences for our students, faculty, and staff.”
[Read: Who wants to be a college president?]
What it meant to be purposeful to create authentic measures wasn’t exactly clear, but universities have been trying for years to grapple, in particular, with racism, both contemporary and historical. Across the country, institutions—Brown, Harvard, UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, Georgetown—have formed commissions to understand their links to slavery. The University of Virginia, for example, recently released a report detailing how its beginnings are intrinsically, fundamentally tied to slavery. “Even in Jefferson’s own imagining of what the University of Virginia could be, he understood it to be an institution with slavery at its core,” the report reads. And yet these issues are not merely in the past. The university today says it’s committed to the ideals of “creating opportunities for global citizens” and fostering collective learning, but the avowed white nationalists Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler, two of the organizers of the 2017 rallies in Charlottesville, are alums of the institution.
When blackface or racist incidents keep happening, Kimbrough says, “it’s a feature, not a defect.” Colleges are reflections of the nation; as the nation’s problems go, so too do universities. “There are a lot of campuses that need to truly have that conversation to say: ‘What’s going on?’” he told me. “It’s not, ‘Let’s have a diversity program or a Martin Luther King program’; it has to be much deeper than that.”
“They scapegoat and say, ‘Oh, that was just back then, and people didn’t know better,’” Kimbrough says. “No. It’s happening right now.” On Thursday, Auburn City Schools in Alabama announced that they would be investigating a photo of a student at Auburn High School who wore blackface. The photo is overlaid with the caption, “is this what being a nigger feels like.”
It took about five minutes of questioning for the acting attorney general to provoke gasps and jeers in the congressional hearing room. “Your five minutes is up,” Matthew Whitaker, an ex–U.S. attorney turned toilet salesman, told the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic chairman, Jerry Nadler. Nadler cracked a smile, but from that point on, the rules of engagement seemed clear: Whitaker, with just days remaining in his legally dubious role as the interim head of the Justice Department, appeared to be playing to an audience of one.
President Donald Trump appointed Whitaker late last year to replace Jeff Sessions, whose recusal from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation in early 2017 was viewed by the president as an unforgivable betrayal. But Whitaker was not the obvious replacement—he served for a few years as a U.S. attorney in Iowa, but spent far longer in private practice and partisan politics. He also served as a paid advisory-board member of a fraudulent invention-promotion firm. Later, he was the executive director of a conservative nonprofit funded by dark money. And then came his stint as a CNN commentator in 2017, during which he blasted Mueller and opined that his probe had “gone too far.” All of this received heavy scrutiny as the constitutional basis of his appointment was challenged in the courts.
[John Yoo: Whitaker’s appointment is unconstitutional]
But Friday marked his first oversight hearing on Capitol Hill.
“I’m confused, I really am,” Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries told Whitaker at one point. “We’re all trying figure out: Who are you, where did you come from, and how the heck did you become the head of the Department of Justice?”
[Read: How Mueller could defend the Russia investigation from interference]
Despite the lingering questions about his resume and suspicions about why he was appointed over Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who would have been Sessions’s natural replacement, Whitaker presented himself to Nadler, a 13-term congressman, with the same aloofness and disdain for tradition that often seems typical of the Trump White House. And that may have been on purpose. Whitaker, whose tenure ends when Bill Barr is confirmed as attorney general next week, will need a new job. He has reportedly been considered for the role of Trump’s chief of staff. And though he testified under oath that he had “not interfered in any way with the special counsel’s investigation,” he repeatedly declined to contradict Trump’s claims that Mueller is on a “witch hunt.”
Chuck Rosenberg, a former senior Justice Department official who resigned in 2017, said it would have been “easy” for Whitaker to say that Mueller’s investigation is legitimate, as Barr did during his recent confirmation hearings. “I don’t know how somebody could be that cowardly,” he added. But doing so would have undermined what is arguably his boss’s most important talking point—and that would not have been a good move for Whitaker if he was, in fact, auditioning for his next position.
Instead, Whitaker had a boilerplate response prepared for the myriad questions posed by Democrats about the Mueller probe: “It would be inappropriate for me to talk about an ongoing investigation,” he said. Democrats, though, found that disingenuous—Whitaker had discussed the probe publicly earlier this month, going as far as to speculate that it would be wrapping up soon. During Friday’s highly contentious oversight hearing, he entertained a Republican’s inquiry about the way Trump’s longtime confidant Roger Stone had been arrested last month in Florida by the FBI—and why a reporter was staked out there in advance of the raid. “I share your concern with the possibility that a media outlet was tipped off to Mr. Stone’s either indictments or arrest before it was made,” Whitaker told Representative Doug Collins, acknowledging later that he had no inside information to suggest that the media outlet, CNN, had advance word of Stone’s arrest.
[Benjamin Wittes: It’s probably too late to stop Mueller]
Trump has yet to comment on Whitaker’s performance. But there seemed to be little for him to complain about. Whitaker told lawmakers that despite a CNN report to the contrary, Trump had not “lashed out” about the investigation into his longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen. And in contrast to his testimony that he had not discussed the Mueller investigation with Trump, Whitaker dodged questions about whether he had discussed the Cohen probe with the president. “As I’ve mentioned several times today, I’m not going to discuss my private conversations with the president,” he told Democratic Representative Val Demings.
The acting attorney general’s obfuscation when asked simple yes-or-no questions seemed reminiscent of Trump’s own tendency to filibuster his way out of uncomfortable confrontations. “You have not yet appeared for an oversight hearing: Yes or no?” Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee asked Whitaker. “I am the acting attorney general of the United States,” Whitaker responded evasively. Pressed repeatedly by Lee to answer the question, Whitaker said that he wasn’t sure how much time she had left. “Mr. Attorney General, we’re not joking here,” she said. “And your humor is not acceptable. Now, you’re here because we have a constitutional duty to ask questions, and the Congress has a right to establish government rules. The rules are that you are here.”
Frank Figliuzzi, the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, seemed shocked by Whitaker’s demeanor: “I am not kidding when I say I have interviewed terrorists who were more cooperative and respectful than Matt Whitaker was today,” Figliuzzi told MSNBC. “The attorney general’s role is America’s lawyer; we are his client.”
Unfortunately, at Friday’s hearing, Figliuzzi said, “he treated us with utter disdain.”
Private-sector unions may be best known for large, high-stakes labor fights—the 2014 UAW–Volkswagen battle in Tennessee, for example, or the more recent effort by thousands of workers at a Nissan factory in Canton, Mississippi. Indeed, unions themselves have focused their organizing efforts at these large workplaces for decades, assuming it’s the easiest way to gain new dues-paying members.
But this conventional wisdom—that unions get the most bang for their organizing buck at large workplaces—is wrong. New research shows that most workers are unionized in smaller workplaces. Of the nearly 700,000 private-sector employees who joined a union in the past decade, almost two-thirds were unionized in shops with fewer than 250 workers.
In fact, labor groups are more likely to win elections for union representation in small workplaces. In a study released this week by the Century Foundation, we analyzed microdata on every union election in the country from April 2007 to December 2018, more than 22,000 in total. We found that bargaining units of 24 or fewer employees were nearly 12 percent more likely to win a union than larger groups. Units with nine workers or under, for example, won 70 percent of their elections, compared with a win rate of 57 percent for units of 100 and 249 employees.
[Read: Can unions stop the far right?]
What’s more, the fewer employees in a workplace, the more likely they were to win elections by wider margins, underscoring that workers at smaller units are more consistent and cohesive in their support of unions. In the typical small-unit election, unions win 80 percent of the “yes” vote. For larger units, this number drops to under 60 percent.
Why, then, does organized labor focus its limited resources on organizing large workplaces, when evidence shows that it’d be more successful in smaller workplaces? A big reason is that unions continue to rely on retail organizing. Professional organizers are sent into one workplace at a time, and they try to convince a majority of workers to join a union. If a workplace is too small, or if it’s geographically isolated, or if it’s in a state with strict anti-union laws, it’s not worth most unions’ time to organize there, and so they don’t.
But what if there were a way for unions to greatly reduce the costs of organizing small workplaces, and bring that approach to scale at small and medium-sized workplaces across the country? There is—through online organizing and large-scale digital marketing to workers.
Organized labor can follow the lead of successful commercial and political campaigns, which have mastered the use of algorithms and data-mining tools to identify, engage, and influence customers and voters. Unions could use “big data” to target low-wage workers in specific locations who share traits commonly associated with union support. It’s a path toward reversing the trend of declining unionization, and recruiting millions of new members.
[Read: Can Millennials save unions?]
Imagine a fast-food worker in Alabama who sees an ad on Facebook promoting higher wages at work by joining a union. The ad could then direct workers to a free or low-cost online organizing platform, empowering them to initiate organizing drives at their workplace by providing them with resources such as step-by-step guides to gather signatures and file petitions for union recognition.
Such a model would improve the economics of winning new members, given the relative cost-effectiveness of micro-targeting and digital marketing. Lowered acquisition costs would in turn allow unions to diversify the locations and types of workplaces at which they recruit, opening up regions of the country, like the South and the Great Plains, in which unions have historically struggled to make inroads.
Online organizing would be particularly effective with Millennials, who are not only the largest generation now in the labor force, but also the most supportive of unions, at 68 percent. Younger workers increasingly navigate workplace issues online, using tools like Glassdoor and Coworker.org to advocate for better workplace conditions. A digital organizing tool would build on this generation’s growing willingness to assert rights at work, marrying it with young people’s unique ability to use technology to mobilize for change.
Online organizing isn’t a cure for all of labor’s challenges; unions shouldn’t abandon the approach of sending staffers in to organize workplaces directly. And a well-designed app won’t stop companies from threatening or retaliating against workers when they express an interest in joining a union, conduct that serves as a leading deterrent to organizing today.
[Read: The conservative case for unions]
But a platform can provide easy access to assistance if and when workers face abuse, through tools like live-assistance help lines staffed by lawyers and volunteers at nearby union shops who can share advice. Plus, research suggests that smaller groups of employees are better at staying united in the face of employer opposition. Workers at small establishments may face fewer legal challenges from their employers, who likely have fewer resources to resist an organizing drive.
While unions continue to have success winning elections when they do occur, the overall number of elections is rapidly declining. Last year, fewer than 1,600 petitions for union representation were filed with the National Labor Relations Board, the lowest number in more than 75 years. In the mid-1970s, when union activity was at its peak, some 9,000 elections were certified each year; in 2018, the number was one-tenth of that, with only 790 successful elections.
And while unions have more success with smaller bargaining units, the percentage of union density among smaller employees is much lower, underscoring the significant opportunities for unions to gain members at small and medium-size businesses. The unionization rate at workplaces with under 25 employees, for example, is under 5 percent, compared with more than 15 percent for employers with more than 250 employees.
By now, the struggles of the American labor movement are well known. But there’s at least one big bright spot: Interest in joining a union is at a four-decade high. And with good reason: The average union household earns $400 a week more than nonunion families, adding up to more than half a million dollars over a lifetime.
With inequality widening and public support for unions growing, organized labor has a real opportunity to turn the tide after decades of declining membership and dwindling power. But it requires a different approach—one that is driven by digital organizing and large-scale marketing, includes smaller workplaces and tech-savvy younger workers, and meets millions of workers online, where they already are.
I recently suggested that the rise of social media has undermined something that a great many Americans value: the ability to slip into a given domain and to adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate there, without that affecting one’s reception in other domains.
The article elicited many responses. Below is an edited selection of reader letters, beginning with one from a man who personifies the phenomenon:
I am a teacher. I have published works of fiction. I’ve written newspaper articles. And I’m a lay religious leader. I am not ashamed of anything I’ve done in any of these contexts. I would not mind having a dispassionate, mature person observe me in any of these aspects of my life.
But my religious beliefs are not appropriate for my classroom. My views as an educator make me more liberal than many in my faith. I have written PG-13 books that I would not want a young student to read. And I have people I know from my past whom I love who say things I find stupid, or whose political or cultural beliefs are silly or uninformed or flawed. They are not bad or objectively odious (e.g., racism, etc.). I am not ready to abandon relationships with these people. Nevertheless, I don’t want them to meet everyone I know on Twitter.
Part of me feels that it’s simply no one’s business what I do. But in the social-media world, it’s not only that our worlds have collapsed, it’s that people feel empowered to not only observe, but to comment and actively intrude in each world. I don’t think it even takes a misstep or mistake to cause destruction (I use that word carefully). Of more concern to me is that something absolutely appropriate in any one context could cause absolute destruction in all other domains. If I wrote a book that many people loved but a conservative-leaning parent found offensive, I could be fired at school. Something I said at church might anger someone whose progressive views made them skeptical of religion. I could be quietly ignored by a newspaper editor. If a piece I wrote conflicted with religious sensibilities, I could be expelled. If enough people made enough noise, I could lose my job, even if what I did had no bearing on what I did or said in my classroom.
In my mind, then, it’s not only that a small mistake or misstep can bring the maximum penalty, but that doing something that is absolutely right in one subgroup or place could be anathema to people in another. It wouldn’t even have to be someone who has an interest in me or what I do. They just may dislike something and want to exact maximum penalty. Suddenly one is without health insurance and the ability to find work. This is why I cherish the ability to move between worlds. Not because anything I do is wrong, but because each world has its own rules, expectations, mores, and I don’t really feel that someone from one world (or someone who is simply a voyeur and is in none of them) ought to have much impact on what I do in another.
Here’s another reader with a very different reason for domain-switching:
I use different outlets for different purposes. Facebook I use similarly to everyone else, to show a positive side of my life and share it. Instagram is what I use for public posting. Anyone can look me up and see pictures of my life. I am a PhD candidate, and I like to show the more fun aspects of my research in case anyone is interested in it.
Reddit is different for me.
I experienced sexual and emotional abuse from previous partners and family members, something that my family and most friends are unaware of. This part of my life requires me to have an outlet, one that I do not want to interfere with other relationships. Anonymity provides me with safe spaces I need to reach out or to provide support to others. It has become therapeutic to have an online presence that speaks boldly about issues I don’t feel comfortable discussing otherwise.
The links that companies are forming between sites weigh heavily on me. If my postings were revealed to those I care about, it would be detrimental to my own, and perhaps others’, mental health. My abusers have been recommended to me as friends on multiple occasions. I have received messages from them a few times. At one point I made my profile impossible to find, specifically for this reason. I have had partners (now exes) that threatened to find me on reddit and read my posts.
I have been hacked, personal images have been distributed to strangers, even my SSN/fingerprint/identifying information was stolen. Eventually, I feel that my separate online identities will be connected by someone I know. The easiest solution is to stop posting, stop supporting, and stop discussing subjects that are so personal to me.
But it is not a solution I feel is right.
The curiosity and tenacity of people is a part of what made us who we are. I understand that people feel they have the need to find the man behind the mirror. But what I have observed most recently is this feeling becoming obsessive. A simple weight-loss post I saw had a large percentage of commenters declaring it a fake simply because she had different hair colors in the two photos (face was blurred). She went so far as to share a screenshot of her own camera album with multiple angles of the same image. But the train had left the station.
It made me wonder, at what point will I have to provide proof of my own experiences in order to be heard? Rubbernecking past trauma, rather than focusing on the benefits of sharing experiences, is a real issue that is rising even among the communities I am active on. When that day comes, I will have to extricate myself from an outlet that has become somewhat important to me. As it will for many people like me.
This reader is thinking of how an inability to keep worlds from colliding can hurt others:
To answer the question of why I value the ability to maintain different identities in different domains: I work with social workers around the country who work with recently released men, and have interviewed dozens of their clients. The one thing that every one of them will tell you is that you cannot focus on past mistakes. There needs to be a path forward without judgment. And the judgment part is key. There is no incentive to try to do right if you will only ever be seen as the wrong you did.
The first thing I think of now when I see some Twitter mob trying to ruin someone because of a 30-second clip with no context is, This is why we can’t have real prison reform. We love retribution. Doesn’t matter where your politics stand, we love inflicting suffering on people as long as we can justify it morally. It’s just in us, and it sucks, and it does not make anything better, particularly for the people with whom I work.
This reader acknowledges the benefits of domain-slipping, but wonders about the costs:
I admit to being a domain-slipper. I attend a small liberal-arts college, and while I still consider myself a liberal, I often find myself at odds with many on the far left of the community. I have friends whom I discuss political issues with, but I also have some with whom it is easier not to.
I find myself doing the same thing with certain members of my family who view Trump’s rise not as an existential threat but as a messianic return. Having difficult conversations is important, but they can also be, well … difficult. Domain-slipping gives us the power to leave work at work, and this can be invaluable in a world where politics would otherwise spread to all of our domains. We should not be mere avatars of our deepest -held moral or political convictions. Life is far more complex than such virtue signaling or ideological purity would allow.
However, the freedom to slip between domains and to maintain various identities is also a freedom from attachment. Such total freedom tends to lead to a Durkheimian anomie, one where a lack of consistent ethical norms and values leaves us disconnected from each other. I find it beneficial to slip between worlds, but while it is convenient, might it not also undermine our ability to communicate within a commonly understood series of norms and values? If one of the greatest problems of our times is the inability of those with political differences to communicate, might domain-slipping exacerbate the problem?
Says another reader with similar concerns:
Having lived in NYC for 16 years now and paid a lot of attention to how my fellow New Yorkers and I behave in public, I think increasingly transgressive behavior due to an inflated sense of anonymity is at the root of our woes: the transference of internet behaviors into what we used to call in the ’90s the meat world. We are losing any sense that our actions matter in real life because they don’t much matter online (despite the real damage possible from the kind of spying/reporting/“Twitter, do your thing”-ing that you detail in your piece).
We seem to be lacking, more and more, the feeling that, for example, waiting 30 seconds for the walk light is worth it to keep all traffic running smoothly, because we are small, each one of us, and “it’s only me” running the light and darting in front of oncoming cars:
How much trouble could one person cause? Or walking past a beggar in these winter days who is crying, “I’m cold!” ; after all, in a moment I will have walked past that person, and effectively his suffering disappears when I no longer see and hear it, right? He’s not my responsibility. It is troublesome that this sensibility, for lack of a better word, is dying, when on the other hand people adopt the stance of public enforcer with their phones. I don’t know how to dig out of this spot. Yes, doxxing and infringing on someone’s privacy in public space is a problem; I agree. Is that problem more urgent than a possible (probable) erosion of our fellowship with other human beings?
This reader has concerns about the dark side of domain-switching, too:
I suspect that the ability to adopt a different face, with different values and norms, in each of the different domains of our lives is also fueling unchecked, vicious, and violent internet aggression. That may be an inevitable collision between our desire to keep certain parts of our lives separated and the simple fact of the internet’s existence.
I think it’s the same mask exchanging that allows all the people that you and I know, and whom Megan McArdle recently described, to be pleasant and decent people as we know them and then to simultaneously and publicly fantasize on Twitter about feeding a teenager whom they don’t know and have never met into a wood chipper. The cognitive dissonance of those two things doesn’t cross our minds because we’ve become so adept at having these different spheres of our lives be separate and unaccountable to each other.
Maybe by separating all the darker angels of our natures into an anonymous compartment of our lives, we’ve also enabled ourselves to pretend it doesn’t exist, and that we are more virtuous than we actually are, forgetting what Solzhenitsyn pointed out, that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
The answer to that question may be less that we’ve destroyed the dark pieces of our hearts and more like we’ve quarantined them like a virtual machine on our home computer, partitioned from the rest of our hard drive, where we can more easily avoid thinking about it and more easily forget that it still has network access.
For some, the inability to domain-switch is stifling. A jeweler writes:
Here, in the South, religion is a biggie. I would like to post all over Facebook and Twitter my views on religion, but don’t because of wanting to keep my personal and professional lives separate. If asked, in person , I have no qualms about telling people my views, but I feel that on social media it would prove to be nonbeneficial to my job, because it’s so much easier for people to be keyboard warriors and crucify a person for having differing views from them. Truly, it’s almost as if it’s expected to denigrate those with differing views or thoughts, even those views that are from ones that you’d consider friends. In short, I keep my social-media presence to an almost ghost status because of my fear of upsetting those that I do business with and for.
For others, the ability to do so is vital, but lonely:
I consider myself to be an expert code switcher. Right now my instincts are telling me there’s no upside to sending this email from my professional email address, for instance. I’m a recovering heroin addict, and if there’s one thing you learn as an addict, it’s how to wear different masks. You show one face to co-workers, another to friends, another to cops.
Today I’m sober and manage 20 people. Obviously, I have to behave in a particular way around my employees. One of my team members recently told me they were shocked—shocked!—to find out that I smoke cigarettes. I can tell people at NA meetings I spent most of my 20s shooting up heroin, but I have to maintain entirely different personas at work, at home with my partner, and when I visit my family. It can be isolating to do so much code switching, for sure, but I also don’t want to be defined by one aspect of my past. When your entire life can be defined by one social-media misstep or past sin, you have to be be very careful about what you put out into the world. Of course, being on guard all the time is isolating in its own way.
This reader probed the relationship between domain-switching, tolerance, and privacy:
If a society could have mostly tolerant individuals, members would have less to hide from each other. Privacy is a nice stopgap in case of widespread intolerance, but its urgency diminishes the more tolerant people are. Is it easier to rein in technology or to make citizens more tolerant? I posit the latter is easier and less messy than the former. I find it preferable to a society where people feel compelled to compartmentalize and otherwise hide parts of their own selves from each other. After all, what have movements like mainstreaming sexual minorities been about if not changing society so people don’t have to suffer the ill effects of hiding parts of themselves?
This reader worries that if domain-switching is undermined, public discourse will be harmed:
I gain many things from a diversity of friends and acquaintances, and I don’t subscribe to the belief that “if someone truly loves me, they’ll accept all of me.” People are a complicated bundle of emotions, beliefs, prejudices, and desires. It’s extremely rare that someone is truly willing to accept the entire continuum of another person, and usually that spot is reserved for a spouse or long-term partner. We could even argue that no one ever truly believes another will accept every part of them, so they hide parts of themselves. It seems that divorce is likely caused by the uncovering of these elements. I rather enjoy domain-shifting; it’s fun and nice to be able to cater different aspects of my personality to different people and situations.
If we adopted a norm that disallowed domain-shifting––and I see many calls for this on social media and left-leaning websites––I believe we would start sprinting toward an intellectual version of what China is moving toward technologically. Radical elements would likely take firmer control of narrative threads without stopping to consider the end consequences. I find the idea of such a society to be pretty repulsive. In my mind, this would be the worst consequence.
If we adopted the norm, or resolidified the norm, that domain-shifting is acceptable and encouraged, we can continue to have conversations about real or perceived injustice and immorality while ridding ourselves of fear. We might risk letting unsavory individuals and their beliefs or actions slide under the table, but it is more likely to lead to discussion and understanding rather than the fearful digging-in of heals.
A reader who self-describes as “autistic-ish” writes:
Spaces opening up online were a great gift to me. Suddenly I could find conversations that do not strongly discriminate against me on the basis of age, dis/ability, married/single, parent/not, religion/nonbelief, sex, and sexual orientation. Like online, I can read all the magazines from the dentist’s office, not just those widely accepted as addressed to me. Nearly all real spaces are socially much more narrow. I only find spaces open up when I deliberately leave my details undisclosed, so then I face only the discrimination of being slightly queer in my push for so much privacy. I duck out of the definitive discrimination of being lumped in with the others who look like me. I benefit from the slack people allow to slightly foreign voices.
This next reader’s preferred domain?
I am a fan of anthropomorphics … people in this fandom are often referred to as “furries.” Many will create or recognize one or more personas, usually styled as some form of anthropomorphized creature––an alter ego, an idealized self, a representation of qualities you see in yourself, or a sort of totem animal or spirit guide … fursonas and their roles are as varied as the people within the fandom.
But fursonas also serve to compartmentalize and separate who we see ourselves to be, versus our “outside” selves. Most of us, in our online or in-person interactions with other members of the fandom, will use the names of our fursonas, consciously separating ourselves from an external identity that never seems to “fit” quite right, and recognizing each other for who we wish to be, or who we feel ourselves to be.
My workplace is progressive enough to be okay with my involvement in the furry fandom, to say nothing of my identity as a gay male. I am blessed; there are many others who are not so privileged, and rightly fear having their identities compromised. We value domain-slipping as a practical necessity. In the workplace, one might be a lawyer or a bricklayer; a fine, upstanding pillar of the community … but within the fandom, you might be something or somebody entirely different.
I’ll tell you of one fur I met.
After his death, I found out that he was a Catholic and an Army veteran, served in the Air National Guard, and ran as a Republican for statewide office. He had very good reason to keep his involvement in the fandom hidden from the outside world—can you imagine the opprobrium that would have engulfed him if that pseudonymity had been breached?
I can tell you some implications of robbing others of the right to mix or separate their identities as they see fit, because that’s a norm the furry fandom has historically held dear (though we’re as affected by the new name-and-shame social media trends as anybody else). When such a norm is valued and socially enforced, people become more open with each other. When you can let go of the “you” that is forced upon you by the expectations of the world outside, when you can reveal parts of yourself that could not be safely explored or expressed if there was any threat of them being reported back to the people in your daily life … it is incredibly freeing. It’s almost magical. That experience is usually described as a feeling of “coming home” or “finding your family.”
I can also speak to the worst consequences. In a community like the fandom, which values pseudonymity and the ability to mix or separate identities at will, it can become very difficult to track “problem people.”
Thanks to everyone who wrote to share their thoughts.
This much we know: To have been in the Syrian town of Douma, the final rebel military holdout in the suburbs of Damascus, on Saturday, April 7, 2018 must have sounded and felt very much like hell on earth. Since 2013, when a shifting cast of rebel militias wrested control of the area, the whole region of Eastern Ghouta had been under effective siege by the Syrian government. Food and medicines were expensive or impossible to come by. Already miserably poor, it was all the locals could do to stay alive. Last February, the Syrian army, backed by Russian airplanes and emboldened by joint military successes elsewhere, began a final, determined assault. The operation was branded “Damascus Steel,” and it met with surprising success. By March the Syrian army and its allied militias had carved Eastern Ghouta into three distinct enclaves, each under the control of a different militia. The first two quickly agreed to deals, under whose terms the fighters and their families could choose to be bussed out to northern Syria or take their chances by surrendering to the Syrian army. Jaish al-Islam, or the Army of Islam, which maintained a tight grip on Douma, held out. As March gave way to April the Syrian army was about a kilometer away, and closing in.
This was the endgame. For nearly two months, in between shaky truces, Syrian helicopters and airplanes had intermittently pounded Douma. After yet another ceasefire and round of negotiations failed, they returned on Friday, April 6 with a vengeance. The government was losing patience. So were many Damascenes, who’d grown sick of the volleys of mortars being sent back into central Damascus by the rebels. Tens of thousands of civilians in Douma were caught between them, enduring skyrocketing prices, malnutrition and the outbreak of disease. Cameras from regime-friendly TV channels were trained on Douma to watch the ongoing campaign, primed for imminent victory. On Saturday, according to one account, the onslaught from shelling, airstrikes, and barrel bombs lasted a full six hours. There would have been blinding clouds of dust, breaking glass, and exploding concrete from the constant shelling, the smoke and stench of ordnance, the juddering of helicopters waiting low overhead to drop their improvised barrel bombs. It was worse than anything that had happened before. Those who could took cover underground in basements, tunnels, and other subterranean shelters.
The following day, Jaish al-Islam would agree to leave in return for handing over all the hostages — both civilians and soldiers — it was holding in Douma. But before it did, it accused the Syrian army of carrying out a chemical attack that killed scores of people. Around the same time, video began trickling out showing children being treated at a makeshift underground hospital in the city for breathing problems — the kind that one might associate with a chemical attack. One of the first reports was from the opposition Violations Documentation Center, which noted that a munition had been dropped on the Saada bakery at 4 p.m. local time on Saturday, killing 25 people. Those in the vicinity thought they smelled chlorine. “We later discovered the bodies of people who had suffocated from toxic gases,” one member of a local civil defense team told the VDC. “They were in closed spaces, sheltering from the barrel bombs, which may have caused their quick death as no one heard their screams. Some of them were apparently trying to reach an open space because we found their bodies on the stairs.”
The VDC reported a second attack around 7:30 p.m. in the vicinity of al-Shuhada Square, or Martyrs Square. This one was more serious because of the weapon allegedly used. One doctor told the VDC that “there were symptoms indicative of organic phosphorus compounds in the sarin gas category,” but added that “the smell of chlorine was also present in the place.” A doctor from the Syrian American Medical Society, known as SAMS, told the VDC that colleagues had seen symptoms that included heavy foaming from the mouth and nose and burning of the corneas — injuries that, according to a local doctor reached by the VDC, “do not resemble chlorine attack symptoms.” SAMS said that more than 500 cases, mostly women and children, from the “target site” had been brought to medical centers “with symptoms indicative of exposure to a chemical agent. Patients have shown signs of respiratory distress, central cyanosis, excessive oral foaming, corneal burns, and the emission of chlorine-like odour.” Six people died at medical centers, SAMS reported, and at least 43 people had been found dead with the same symptoms, most likely from “an organophosphate element” like sarin.
Beyond the war in Syria, the cloud of misinformation that enveloped the attack in Douma stands as a cautionary tale. In the era of “fake news,” it is a case study in the choreography of our new propaganda wars.The video and photos of the more grievous evening attack, which targeted an apartment building, had been collected mainly by a group of opposition activists called Douma Revolution, who’d been working for some time in the area. The most striking were images of two yellow gas cylinders and footage from the makeshift hospital of locals, including children, being treated for breathing problems. That photo and video evidence was republished by Bellingcat, a U.K.-based organization specializing in open-source online investigations run by Eliot Higgins, whose eagle-eyed attention to photos of barrel and improvised chemical weapons earlier in Syria’s civil war on the pseudonymous blog Brown Moses had won him a reputation in the field. Bellingcat also reviewed the work of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which had estimated 55 deaths and 860 injured as a result of the apartment building attack, as well as that of the rescue organization Syria Civil Defence, generally known as the White Helmets, which like SAMS counted 43 dead and 500 injured from the same incident. Paying close attention to the publicly available imagery, Bellingcat concluded that there had been at least 34 fatalities from the apartment attack “as a result of a gas cylinder filled with what is most likely chlorine gas.”
The rest is military history. Six days later, the United States and its allies launched cruise missiles from the air and from nearby warships and submarines at targets associated with what remains of the Syrian government’s chemical weapons program. Those targets included a scientific research center in Damascus and a chemical weapons facility near Homs that had been used for the production of sarin. The massacre on April 7, said President Donald Trump, represented “a significant escalation in a pattern of chemical weapons use by that very terrible regime.” In an additional information sheet, the White House noted that “a significant body of information points to the regime using chlorine in its bombardment of Duma, while some additional information points to the regime also using the nerve agent sarin.” Following up with a characteristic tweet after the U.S. airstrikes, Trump declared, “Mission Accomplished!”
It wasn’t clear that anything had been accomplished — certainly not to the satisfaction of Syrians on any side of the conflict. Instead, it’s useful to try to understand what really happened in Douma from the ground up. During six months of research into the incident, including a trip to Douma and interviews with dozens of Syrian activists, civilians, journalists, and experts, I encountered a great deal of confusion about how the attack had played out, even among those who witnessed it.
At least one chemical attack did take place in Douma on April 7, and people died as a result. There could have been no other culprit but a Syrian army helicopter. But the way it happened bears little resemblance to what was broadcast to the world. From the start, the evidence presented by rebel media activists was fraught and confusing. That’s hardly surprising, because some of those behind it — including some who produced immediate and detailed reports — weren’t actually there. Into the gaps of that initial propaganda barrage seeped skepticism, which morphed into confusion and outright conspiracy-theorizing. State actors, Russian propagandists, and international observers joined the fray, cherry-picking details to illustrate the story they wanted told. Added to the fog of war, in other words, was a fractious new layer of electronic propaganda that turned every tweet or screengrab into a potential weapon in the hands of one of the belligerents.
Beyond the war in Syria, the cloud of misinformation that enveloped the attack in Douma stands as a cautionary tale. In the era of “fake news,” it is a case study in the choreography of our new propaganda wars. With the mainstream media in wholesale retreat — and, in the case of Syria, credibly threatened with death from many sides — new information actors have stepped into the breach. Reading the runes of their imagery is an exciting reporting tool. But their photos, video, and social media posts also offers a vanishingly narrow, excoriatingly subjective view of how conflicts unfold. As a result, such artifacts have become light weapons in an information war that easily becomes an end in itself. The sides are still massed and well-armed. Something very much like Douma will happen again, and soon. Investigative reporting now needs to be about breaking through the noise of electronic information in a climate thick with propaganda, conspiracy-thinking, and reassuring half-truths. Otherwise, the next world war might begin with a grainy, contested image launched online from some distant and inaccessible outpost right onto the pages of a newspaper that has recently sacked all its journalists.
Photo: AP
Before 2011, Douma wasn’t on many people’s travel itineraries. A satellite town at Damascus’s northeastern edge and the gateway to its lush agricultural belt in the suburban sprawl of Eastern Ghouta, the place had been built out to absorb the thousands of Syrians who’d arrived from the countryside in search of work. Douma was a bustle of mercantile activity and a great place to find a bargain; people from Damascus would flock there for its bountiful street markets. But it was also overcrowded. Just like the other suburban slums around Syria’s major cities, it was scarred by rampant unemployment, bureaucratic corruption and the daily humiliations of young, often unemployed men at the hands of the Syrian authorities. Douma had none of Damascus’s cosmopolitan mix. Long socially conservative and majority Sunni, in the last decade, a new Islamic piety and a vibrant subculture of Salafism both bloomed amid this new community of urban poor.
When the uprising began in Syria’s towns and cities in 2011, Douma was one of the first places to catch fire. If Hama was the cradle of the early revolt and Homs was its crucible, Douma was the broader Damascus region’s proudest contribution to the early rebellion and a steady thorn in the side of the authorities. Once remarkable for its markets, it now grew famous for its large, carnival-like street protests against President Bashar al-Assad and his ruling clique. On a visit to Damascus one afternoon in February 2012, I persuaded a Syrian friend to drive me into Douma. The route involved talking our way through several military checkpoints; apart from the graffiti on the walls there were few signs of life. Even then, by the evenings, Douma was under the effective control of rebel groups and the site of nightly demonstrations. Fearing what was to come, many residents, either those who supported the government or who feared the growing militarization and extremism in the uprising, left.
Those who stayed behind soon found themselves subject to a new kind of security regime. By 2013, early attempts at armed resistance and rebellion under the loose umbrella of the Free Syrian Army had given way to better-armed, more highly motivated groups — especially Jaish al-Islam, a Saudi-backed Salafist group that came to rule Douma with an iron fist. On the night of December 9, 2013, four of the country’s most prominent revolutionaries — Razan Zaitouneh, Samira al-Khalil, Wa’el Hamada, and Nazem Hamadi — were kidnapped from their offices in Douma. The so-called Douma Four were abducted by armed militias under the nose, and with what must have been the complicity, of Jaish al-Islam. Nothing has been heard from the four since; they’re very likely all dead. A prime mover behind the oppositionist Local Coordination Committees and a hero to many revolutionists, Zaitouneh had established the VDC in 2011 to investigate human rights abuses. The organization had attracted funding from the United States and Europe — especially after Zaitouneh and her team were instrumental in reporting chemical attacks in nearby Ghouta in August 2013, which killed hundreds of people and which most observers attribute to sarin gas and the Syrian government. But Zaitouneh’s reporting and her liberal values, taken with the fact that much of her funding came from the U.S., made some in Douma suspicious of her motives. Shortly before she went missing, she’d received a death threat that many have attributed to Jaish al-Islam.
An undated screenshot from a video shows Syrian activist Razan Zaitouneh as she sits inside a car in Syria.
AP
Since then there’s been little information independent of Jaish al-Islam coming out of Douma. At the time of the April 7 attacks, the VDC had no presence there, which was not surprising, given what had happened to its leaders. Like almost everyone else, the VDC was getting its information from contacts on the ground via social media. Those organizations still able to still work in Douma did so under license from Jaish al-Islam, or they operated in secret. In the best of circumstances, the reporting of pro-opposition outfits like the Local Coordinating Committees has often been nakedly partisan. But with independent media unable to operate in territory controlled by the Syrian government and hardly any outside journalists able to get into the country because of kidnapping threats from militants and incessant bombing by the government, they’re the only way to find out what’s going on.
In the immediate aftermath of the Douma attacks, Syria’s official media largely ignored the allegations about chemical weapons; they were busy celebrating their win. This time, it fell to the Russians to mount a media offensive. The day before the Douma attack, the Russian military, as it often does, had predicted that Syrian rebel groups were “plotting explosions of makeshift chemical charges containing chlorine in a number of areas under their control.”
The Russians had brokered the evacuation deal in Douma, after all, and it was their military police who were helping to enforce it. It was also their job to make the attack sites safe for the arrival of inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international body that enforces the Chemical Weapons Convention worldwide. Two days after the attacks, in footage shot by a local activist, Russian military police can be seen arriving onsite.
The OPCW inspectors took a week to get to Damascus, and then another week negotiating safe access to the sites in Douma; after that they spent 10 days visiting the hospital and the alleged attack locations, collecting samples and interviewing witnesses.
But before they’d finished, apparently concerned at the pace of events in the two weeks since the U.S. airstrikes, the Russian delegation to the OPCW threw a brazen unofficial press conference at the organization’s headquarters in The Hague. In front of the assembled cameras, they produced witnesses from Douma, including an 11-year-old boy named Hassan Diab, one of those filmed at the hospital in the aftermath of the attack. Hassan and his father told the same story: Upon hearing screaming about a chemical attack they’d run to the makeshift hospital where they’d been doused with water. In retrospect, said Hassan’s father, he didn’t believe that there had been any chemical attack. The Russians also granted the floor to a doctor and another hospital worker who’d been on duty that day, both of whom claimed that the patients they’d seen had suffered injuries consistent with smoke and dust inhalation as a result of regular bombing. Separately, Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to London, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the international media that British intelligence services, working with the White Helmets, had been “involved in this staged event.”
Photo: Bart Maat/AFP/Getty Images
Formed in 2013, the White Helmets only maintain a presence in rebel-controlled areas, as Douma was on the night of the attack. Like any other aid or reporting outfit in those areas, it operates with the permission of the controlling militias, who are either grateful for the medics’ support or tolerate their presence. Much of the White Helmets’ first-responder work is unobjectionable and utterly necessary — rescuing civilians from buildings that have just been bombed by Russian or Syrian airplanes, for example. All the same, and perhaps because the group carries cameras to document their work and has been the subject of various glorifying documentaries, it is now at the center of a brutish new media war between international supporters of the Syrian revolt, who uphold the White Helmets as unimpeachable heroes, and international defenders of the Syrian government, who have said that they’re first-aiders for Al Qaeda. The Russian government, of course, has every incentive to delegitimize and exaggerate the power of Syrian first-responders, who are sometimes the only sources of information about its bombing campaign. The Syrian government appears to have been directly targeting White Helmets from the air and on the ground for the same reason.
But the Russian allegations about intelligence links and propaganda maneuvers did not come from nowhere. The British-led organization that branded the White Helmets and provided its training and equipment, ARK, was run by a publicity-shy former British diplomat and funded by the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office. ARK’s work in Syria started in 2012, when it paid Syrian activists to make propaganda films in favor of the revolt against Assad through a production company called Basma. Operating out of offices in Istanbul and Gaziantep in Turkey, it was soon bidding for civil defense contracts in Northern Syria for the kind of work that would end up being done by the White Helmets. A few of its employees were veterans of the British Army; others included pollsters and policy advisers, a consultant who had previously worked for a “psychological operations” firm, and a development professional with experience in “in-country information-gathering.” According to internal reports and emails provided to me by a Syrian opposition activist in 2014, ARK was also gathering intelligence on Islamist groups in the country, and those reports were being privately forwarded by a British Army liaison officer to U.S. Central Command, with an email recommending additional funding for the organization’s filmmaking arm. “It would be reinforcing success for comparatively modest costs,” noted the liaison officer.
The White Helmets are now supported by another organization, called Mayday Rescue, established by a senior ARK staffer, and no concrete evidence has emerged that ARK or its affiliates are using the White Helmets for intelligence-gathering. What’s certain is that the cameras worn by these civil defence workers see what the controlling militias allow them to see, usually the bombing runs of the Syrian and Russian air force, generating skepticism among some observers about the reliability of their reporting.
When it came to Douma, the Russians weren’t the only ones who were skeptical, at least initially, that chemical weapons had been used. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based outfit that leans toward the opposition but whose reporting network inside the country is usually seen as most authoritative by the international media, noted the day after the attack that people had died in Douma through suffocation, but couldn’t say whether chemical weapons had been used.
At least some of that caution appears to have been warranted. Three months after the attack, the OPCW released its interim report into what happened in Douma. The report found no evidence of organophosphorus nerve agents like sarin either at the site or in samples from the casualties — something of a surprise, because the suspected use of sarin had been one of the justifications for American airstrikes back in April, and alleged Syrian chemical weapons facilities their primary target. But the investigators did find something else. In the aftermath of the attack, video shot by gas mask-clad activists had fastened on the two yellow gas canisters: one lying on a bed, filmed on April 8 by Douma Revolution, and the second perched on a top-floor balcony and apparently recorded the following evening by the White Helmets. The OPCW located both those cylinders, one at the apartment block and the other in a different building nearly a kilometer away. Samples collected at both locations turned up “various chlorinated organic chemicals” along with “the residues of explosive” — not quite the same thing as saying that chlorine had been used as a chemical weapon, but evidence that seemed to head in that direction. In its final report, we might expect the OPCW to make a more conclusive judgement.
Photo: Kyodo via AP
On July 9, 2018, three days after the OPCW’s interim report was published, I traveled to Douma. It was a blisteringly hot morning, and I was in a taxi with a female translator-minder from Syria’s Information Ministry and a Japanese journalist who was going there anyway and with whom I’d hitched a ride. This was the first journalist visa I’d been allowed since March 2016. For over 18 months, I’d languished on a blacklist, the belated result of illegal trips into Northern Syria I’d taken with rebel and Kurdish groups earlier in the conflict. “No one wants to work with you,” the amiable new handler for foreign journalists shrugged on my arrival at the Information Ministry building in Mezzeh. It was, he lamented, because of my reputation for giving minders the slip.
The road from Damascus to Douma snaked through the same checkpoints I remembered from six years ago, but now these were the weary signposts of a war zone rather than the punctuation of a stressed-out security state. The Syrian army had entered Douma three months earlier, and the city was returning to nervous life. Some residents had endured the conflict and were finally beginning to rebuild, while others had returned to reclaim their homes and reopen their shops; yet others whizzing by in cars and on motorbikes seemed to have arrived from out of town, possibly carpet-bagger friends of the Syrian armed forces. The broad al-Shuhada Square was still largely empty — a few local women walked by in niqabs and abayas, clutching their children’s hands and watching us intently.
Douma was a blackened shadow of its former self, many of its buildings still listing or reduced to charred metal and concrete, but a whole new city had been quietly carved out beneath it. Our first stop, a few yards from al-Shuhada Square, was at the mouth of a 3-meter-wide underground tunnel, reinforced with corrugated steel and concrete. It had been constructed by the Islamist rebels several years back, according to a soldier who walked us through it. He told us that hostages held by Jaish al-Islam had done the building. In total, it stretched for more than 5 kilometers and was broad enough to drive a truck through.
The road from Damascus to Douma snaked through the same checkpoints I remembered from six years ago, but now these were the weary signposts of a war zone rather than the punctuation of a stressed-out security state.The tunnel had been set up to access a makeshift hospital emergency ward, whose spartan facilities were arranged over a single floor underground. Five meters below ground and reinforced by 13 meters of sandbagging above that, the hospital was still functioning when I arrived. Orderlies hovered around stretchers, as did Syrian soldiers. A woman collected medicine for her sick child. It was from here that footage had emerged of alleged gas attack victims having water poured over them from hoses and being given asthma inhalers by panicked medical workers and civilians. The first man I came across, who told me his name was Abu Nazir, explained that he didn’t work at the hospital but that on the day of the attack, he had made his way to the huge tunnel outside in search of shelter. “We were unable to breathe,” he said, “and stayed in hiding.”
The second man I came across, a laconic 20-year-old local nurse called Anas Sobheha, told me that he had seen everything. At around 7 p.m. that April evening, he said, a child of about 6 years old was brought into the hospital. His face had turned blue. “He had asthma, and there’d been a fire at his home, and the smoke had made it worse. And they thought it was a chemical attack,” Sobheha said. There were a lot of wounded people around, but Sobheha had given the boy some medicine and he had gotten better quickly. All the same, his family had elected to stay at the hospital, feeling safer in the fortified location. About 20 minutes later, Sobheha said, one of the White Helmet workers came in holding a baby and screaming about a chemical attack “and everyone starts freaking out, thinking about chemical weapons, but there was only this child, and he’d just inhaled smoke from a fire.” The White Helmet was desperate for staff to help, and chaos ensued — a man sitting in the facility with his brother grabbed the hose “and started throwing water on everyone inside.” There were around four people filming these events, Sobheha remembered, but the problem wasn’t chemicals: “The cases that came here were suffocation from smoke, and most of them were children.” The baby went back to his house, he laughed, “and he’s in Douma today.”
As we talked, several Syrian soldiers joined the conversation, just as interested in his testimony as I was. Sobheha’s words were also being translated by a minder from the Syrian Information Ministry, whose staffers report to higher-ups on who foreign journalists talk to and what they say. Clearly, Sobheha wasn’t speaking entirely freely. Nonetheless, he wasn’t shy of apportioning blame to the Syrian army (and when I contacted him later via WhatsApp from London he assured me that he’d told me the whole truth). Most of the deaths that day had already happened before the supposed chemical attacks, he told me. At about 4 p.m., he remembered, scores of people arrived at the emergency ward injured and bleeding. When I prodded him about the people who had allegedly been killed by chemical weapons that day, he flinched in exasperation. Two hundred and seventy people had been killed on April 6 and 7, according to the data kept by his improvised hospital, women and children as well as fighters, their numbers collected by the rebels, and “most of the injured and bleeding they came here.” What had killed them? “Mostly rockets.”
An underground tunnel that leads to the hospital in Douma.
Photo: James Harkin for The Intercept
There were too many patients and not enough doctors, he remembered, and you just had to do the best you could. In the afternoon, there were no camerapeople around to witness any of it, according to him, because the medical staff were under so much pressure. “These were the worst days,” he said. “I can’t explain how it felt.” He’d already been interviewed by the OPCW inspectors and was growing weary of their talk about chemical weapons. He’d been trained to treat people poisoned by such weapons, and the protocol was that staff would work outside the hospital in that event. “I didn’t treat anyone with a chemical attack,” he said, “because if I did, I’m going to get affected.” When I asked him what he thought about all this talk of chemicals, he was polite but firm. “I don’t want to repeat this word again.”
From al-Shuhada Square, and now flanked by an escort vehicle from the Syrian army, we traveled at my suggestion to Tawba, a sprawling network of tunnels between buildings that the rebels had converted into an intricate prison. We entered via the mangled remains of one municipal structure, then inched our way in darkness through a latticework of improvised prison cells into an underground passageway hewn out of earth and rock. At times, the wet earth was so cloying as to make us cough; on several occasions, a few clumps fell to the ground around us, giving even our military guide pause for thought. But, like an archaeologist marveling at the primitive ways of his forebears, he was keen to show us how his enemies had lived. The journey took us deep into the ground, after which we rose back toward the surface and emerged into completely different building several hundred meters from the first. All this, too, was the work of captives and hostages. Some were Syrian soldiers, but many others had been taken based on their religion; most were Alawi, Shia, and Ismaili Muslims from everywhere in Syria, whom their Islamist kidnappers deemed impure.
One of them was a 55-year-old called Nabeel Taha, who I met the following evening in a community center in Damascus. Taha wasn’t referred to me by the Syrian authorities; I’d begged his number from a local journalist who works for the Associated Press. Taha had been kidnapped in November 2014, he told me, 200 kilometers away in Hama. His job as an army translator made him of immediate interest to the Islamist rebels who hauled him out of a taxi with his lawyer brother. Both were Shia Muslims, which further enraged their captors. During the first few weeks of Taha’s captivity, he was beaten and tortured almost all the time — hung from the ceiling, tormented with implements, insulted for his religion. Then he was transferred to a holding cell in Tawba, where he was put to work, almost 24 hours a day, digging tunnels.
A cage used by the Army of Islam for prisoners is abandoned near Tawba prison on July 15, 2018.
Photo: Hassan Ammar/AP
When I brought up the alleged chemical weapons attacks, Taha felt sure that they couldn’t have been the work of the Syrian army. On April 7, he remembered, Jaish al-Islam informed the hostages that they were going to be released. There’s no way that the Islamists he knew would have gone ahead and released anyone, he believes, if the army had started dropping chemical weapons on civilians later that same day, yet the hostages were duly set free in two groups over the next two days. Dropping chemicals didn’t seem to make military sense either. On April 7, the Syrian army was around 400 meters from the prison, Taha guessed — he could hear the rattle of Kalashnikovs — and Douma is not a big place; it would have been stupid for the government to land chemicals near its own troops. It was “the pressure of traditional weapons” that forced Jaish al-Islam’s hand, not chlorine or sarin, Taha maintained. He can still remember the noise and the bombings that occurred during those final few days; they were the worst he’d ever heard. The focus on chemical weapons was a propaganda win for Jaish al-Islam, he said: “Every time Jaish al-Islam lose, they turn a military loss into a political gain.”
In Douma the Syrian authorities had been happy to show me around Tawba prison, and they were also happy for me to see the hospital. But they were less keen to bring me to the sites of the alleged chemical attacks. As the day wore on and we made our way back to al-Shuhada Square, it became apparent that the sites would not be on our itinerary. My minder-translator didn’t know where the attacks were supposed to have taken place, and the major escorting us claimed to have no clue either. Losing patience and without any signal on my mobile phone to check their location, I broke away and walked around the square asking passersby in English and Arabic if they knew anything about the alleged chemical attacks. No one seemed to know what I was talking about — or, if they did, they didn’t seem eager to help. Presently, I noticed a young man covered in grease, revving a motorbike at the side of the square and watching the disturbance. I asked him the same question. “You will not find anyone like me,” he quipped, rearranging a pair of badly bent spectacles on his face. “I am from Douma and I’m going to help you.”
My minder-cum-translator warned me that we should get back into the car and wait for the return of our military escort but the motorcyclist looked anxious at the idea and unwilling to hang around. On a whim, I jumped onto the back of his bike and we rode a few blocks back from al-Shuhada Square, stopping outside an apartment building on an abandoned, heavily blitzed street. Was this the place, I asked him? “Yes.” How many people were killed? “Fifty.” He couldn’t remember the exact day and didn’t know any of the dead, but he was sure it had been chemicals because of the odor. “A very strong smell,” he told me, holding his nose for effect. “Salaam-Alaikum,” he said, wanting to be gone. Was it just this block of apartments? “No, the whole street.” Then he zoomed off into the distance.
Photo: James Harkin for The Intercept
This much we know: Amid the carnage in Douma on April 7, a single horrific incident unfolded in which several dozen civilians, many of them children, were killed. It happened exactly where that young local had taken me on the back of his motorbike. When I forwarded Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins a short iPhone video I’d shot at the location he recognized it as the same street, and the same apartment block, where several vehicles full of Russian military police had arrived on April 9 in response to claims of a chemical attack. Bilal Abo Salah, a Douma Revolution cameraperson who’d shot footage from the apartment block with the dead people that evening, recognized it as the same building. It was also the place, it turns out, where reporters from CBS News and the Swedish channel TV4 were taken days after the attack when they, like me, traveled to Douma with the Syrian Ministry of Information and struck out on their own in search of the attack site. Together with a survivor called Nasser Hanan who’d lost most of his family to the attack, the CBS journalist was escorted to the top of the building to be shown a yellow gas canister, whose location looked identical to the one that the activists had recorded a week earlier. That canister, its nose neatly wedged into a balcony roof, would become Douma’s smoking gun.
The apartment building was also one of five locations the OPCW inspectors visited later in April. The Saada bakery, allegedly the site of a key chemical attack earlier on April 7, was not in the same area of Douma as either canister and the OPCW inspectors did not stop there. Its early identification by the VDC as a key chemical attack site with many dead was a mistake, the result of local propaganda and the fog of war. While chlorine had been dropped at 4 p.m. near the bakery and had caused some breathing problems, according to the VDC’s then-regional manager, nobody died as a result of chemicals there. The manager confirmed to me that the figure of 25 casualties, including many dead, in that attack was wrong; those deaths had been caused by shelling, not toxic gases.
The imperative to grab the fleeting attention of an international audience certainly seems to have influenced the presentation of the evidence. In videos and photos, there were some signs that the bodies and gas canisters had been moved or tampered with after the event for maximum impact.The story of what happened at the apartment building was also convoluted. The testimony of Nasser Hanan, one of the few survivors who was in the house when the attack happened, only added to the confusion. According to him, the inhabitants of that apartment block, like most civilians in Douma, had been cowering in the basement around 7 p.m. when the attack happened. “The women and children were sitting in here,” he told the Swedish television reporter Stefan Borg, pointing to dank concrete rooms cushioned with blankets, “and boys and men over here.” But Fadi Abdullah, who arrived at the building between 8:30 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. and says he was the first media activist on the scene, found bodies on the ground floor, the first floor, and in the stairwells. The people he’d seen, he maintained, hadn’t seemed like they’d ever been in any basement; they hadn’t seemed to be running anywhere. It was as if they’d been killed on the spot.
It appears to have been an honest misunderstanding on Abdullah’s part. Two other camerapeople who’d arrived in the same place shortly afterward told me, in separate phone conversations from Northern Syria, that their best guess was that the victims had taken refuge from the intense shelling in a cellar or basement when the attack happened and had run frantically upstairs to escape — unaware that that’s exactly where the bomb happened to be. Both agreed that most of the bodies they had seen were on the ground floor and first floor, with about four lying in front of the building; many were gathered around the kitchen and the bathroom. All three camerapeople agreed, like the young man who had driven me there on his motorbike, that the smell had been bad and caused them sharp chest pains. “The victims were only in that building,” said one cameraperson, Emad Aldin, “but the whole street could smell it.” None had felt safe enough to spend any time in the upper floors of the apartment block because of the smell, the dead bodies and the threat from continued shelling. Some, however, did take pictures of the “balcony” canister against the night sky from a room directly downstairs, where it seemed white rather than yellow. Higgins and Forensic Architecture, a research organization that examines the built environment as evidence in cases of human rights violations, have argued, convincingly to the weapons specialists I spoke with, that this was due to a coating of frost, best explained as an “auto-refrigeration” effect that occurs when liquid chlorine cools. The canister also had wheels to ease its departure from a helicopter and fins to give it ballast on its way down.
Other things, however, required much more explanation. “Suddenly we heard a sound like the valve of a gas cylinder being opened,” the survivor Hanan told Borg, the Swedish journalist. What was not included in either Borg’s TV4 package or the CBS broadcast was that Hanan was, at least publicly, blaming the Islamist rebels for the attack — and the White Helmets for not coming to the victims’ aid sooner. Surrounded by minders from the Syrian Ministry of Information and possible secret police, he could scarcely have blamed the Syrian army for a controversial chemical weapons attack, but viewers might have liked to know what he was saying all the same. Then there was the chain of events put forth in Hanan’s testimony. In the basement with the rest of his family and others, he immediately ran outside to get help, where he grew dizzy and short of breath. Almost everyone else ran back inside, and some headed in the direction of the bathroom to wash off the toxic chemicals. “The ones who ran back inside died at once,” he told Borg. But why would anyone run back into a building full of toxic gas?
Not everyone, even those with opposition sympathies, agreed that this had been a chlorine attack. Two months after the event, one opposition reporter working with a team inside Syria, who spoke to me anonymously for fear of jeopardizing his relationship with other rebel outfits, said that while he believed that chlorine had been dropped just before 4 p.m. that day by Syrian army helicopters and had caused some breathing problems among children near the bakery (confirming the VDC’s view that chlorine had been dropped there), his best guess was that the deaths at the apartment building had been the result of smoke inhalation — the tragic consequence of cloying war-zone dust and several dozen people who’d unwittingly found themselves trapped in a basement. His thinking, he told me, was shaped by suspicions about the agenda of the White Helmets and their Western backers, as well as both their and Douma Revolution’s close relationship with Islamists on the ground. Noting the giant gas masks worn by activists days after the attacks, which didn’t always feel necessary, he complained that “this is all a huge game.”
“We have no idea who interfered with the evidence. But we are close to certain that in both sites the location of the canisters when photographed is not their original fall position.”The imperative to grab the fleeting attention of an international audience certainly seems to have influenced the presentation of the evidence. In the videos and photos that appeared that evening, most analysts and observers agree that there were some signs that the bodies and gas canisters had been moved or tampered with after the event for maximum impact. The Syrian media activists who’d arrived at the apartment block with the dead people weren’t the first to arrive on the scene; they’d heard about the deaths from White Helmet workers and doctors at the hospital. When I asked Fadi Abdullah whether he thought the bodies might have been moved around before he arrived, he told me that he’d asked the civil defense crews the same question. They’d told him that they’d only moved the bodies on the stairwells, and the only reason they’d moved anyone was that they suspected some of the victims might still be alive.
Then there was the position of the gas canisters, which seemed to some a little too neat. An investigation by Forensic Architecture, published last June, found that both gas canisters appear to have been rotated, turned, or moved since they had fallen — and that the one on the bed, whose valve remained more or less intact, looked particularly implausible unless it had been moved after the drop. “We have no idea who interfered with the evidence,” Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman told me. “But we are close to certain that in both sites the location of the canisters when photographed is not their original fall position.”
No one I spoke to in Syria seemed to know why the canisters might have been moved around or tampered with; most of the activists from Douma Revolution flatly denied it. Most likely they had been rotated or moved short distances for safety reasons, to gather urgent evidence for the cameras, or to encourage greater emotive effect. But if they were moved, the result was self-defeating; it stoked suspicions that they’d been staged to cast blame on the Syrian government.
One former OPCW official who’s worked on Syria cases and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of his observations was also unimpressed by the location of the canisters. Launched from a Syrian air force helicopter thousands of meters up, he told me, a gas canister like the one on the balcony would ordinarily have fallen right through the concrete roof, rather than puncturing the roof with its nozzle but not falling through. It was also unlikely to have made a hole in the concrete as big as that shown, he said, and the canister valve was unlikely to have snapped off so neatly without the benefit of a detonator. It was possible that the concrete and wire mesh makeup of the roof allowed for a kind of ricochet effect that enabled the canister to spring back up, according to the former OPCW official, but not likely. “A lot of stars would have to align,” he felt, to give rise to that kind of evidence. The canister on the bed from an entry point in the roof several meters away looked even less plausible. His supposition? “This was a setup rather than an actual aerial attack.”
But suspicions that the canisters had been moved didn’t lead the former OPCW official to conclude that there hadn’t been a chemical attack by Syrian military aircraft. In fact, given the dozens dead, which didn’t fit with the usual toll of injuries from breathing difficulties and vomiting that result from a Syrian chlorine bomb, and that the victims had apparently dropped unconscious on the spot, he thought it possible that the Syrian air force had used another more murderous poison, one that hadn’t been captured in the OPCW report. But for camerapeople desperate to show they had the goods and get the world on their side, he guessed, those videos of gas canisters and outsized gas masks made “compelling images.” The temptation, he said, is to “bring your own munition in.”
He’d seen such staging himself, the former OPCW official confided. In an infamous attack on an aid convoy on the outskirts of Aleppo in September 2016, which killed 14 civilians, he concluded that pieces of alleged photographic evidence had very likely been introduced or faked. In addition, he maintained, “some opposition witnesses had clearly been coached.” Ultimately, it didn’t matter, the official said; six months later the United Nations had rightly declared the Syrian government responsible. It was just “media ops,” he said; the activists had simply been concerned to get their narrative out as quickly and forcefully as they could.
Image: Bilal Abo Salah
In Douma, the position of the Russian authorities from the outset was that the chemical attack was a mise en scène — a total fabrication. When the gas canisters took center stage, the Russian government didn’t try to conceal that evidence; instead, it supplied its own version of the story. Shortly after the opposition media activists had departed, a crew from the Russian TV channel Zvezda, run by the Russian Ministry of Defence, arrived in Douma to declare that that the entire balcony scene had been staged as a “provocation.” The intactness of the canister, coupled with the fact that it had punctured but not fallen through the roof, were deemed wholly inconsistent with such a huge drop from the sky of a fast-moving, weighty object. A rebel lab was discovered with a similar yellow gas canister and other sinister-looking bottles of chemicals, which the Russian TV reporters and their presumed sources in the Syrian military suggested could have been used for the deception. A neighbor who’d complained to CBS of being enveloped by what he thought was chlorine gas now turned up to decry all the talk of chemical weapons as needless panic. “It was clear that there was no chemical substance,” he now appeared to be saying, if we can believe the Russian dubbing. “For example, I don’t have any issues with my health. We don’t exclude the fact that some people were brought here on purpose to stage this theater play.”
The TV crew, embedded with the Russian military, then moved to the other site, where the second yellow canister still lay snugly on a bed. It was a scene “well-known to the entire world,” the reporter noted, because of the gas masks worn by the activists. A pudgy, bespectacled Russian chemist wearing full military uniform and a green hard hat was called upon to demonstrate that the distance between the hole in the roof and the bed — and the general tidiness of a room, which had just received a gas canister from several thousands of meters up — made the whole thing fishy in the extreme. “The authors of this fabrication,” according to the military chemist, “obviously carried the canister in from the street, as can be seen from the shards and traces on the tile.” (In fact, the footage showed no obvious traces or track marks, only pieces of broken tile that looked like normal wear and tear.) As for the canister itself, “the valve is not ripped off — just slightly opened so that it leaks or lets the gas out.” These facts, concluded the reporter, “point to the incident being staged by persons working on the orders of people aiming to destabilize the situation in the region.” The owner of the apartment was shown feeding the chickens he kept there, with the gas canister still on display. “And the chickens? The chickens are making eggs as they did before.”
The Russians, by cutting back and forth between the two different gas canisters, had made it look like the feeding chickens rendered ridiculous the claim that this was the “epicenter of an explosion which, according to the White Helmets, killed hundreds of people.” But the fact that the valve on the bed canister was almost intact, and the one on the balcony wasn’t, was perfectly consistent with the original messages of the camerapeople that the latter had caused many people to die, while the former hadn’t. The angle of the Russian footage was also selective. Many observers, for example, struggled to believe that the hole in the roof aligned with the bed canister, because it seemed to be at the other end of the room. Even Fadi Abdullah, who’d seen the canister in situ, was under the impression that it had arrived through a nearby window rather than the roof. But several unpublished videos of the bed canister sent to me by Abo Salah, at higher definition and over a range of angles, make it easier to see how the canister could have fallen from the roof onto the bed if it descended at an angle from the sky.
4Propaganda and TerrorAmong those experts, reporters, and obsessives who chronicle the gory litany of improvised munitions in use on battlefield Syria, the Syrian government is generally acknowledged to have been dropping chlorine gas bombs for some time. Last February, OPCW inspectors found that chlorine had “likely” been used in an attack on a rebel-held city in Northern Syria that caused several people to suffer breathing difficulties, but no deaths.
The same Syrian opposition reporter who’d been skeptical that the April 7 fatalities had been caused by chemicals told me that between February 18 and March 30, he’d catalogued a number of incidents in which the Syrian air force had dropped canisters filled with chlorine from helicopters in an effort to force out civilians and Islamist rebels. It had done the same in Douma, he said, “not to kill anyone but to scare people, to have them put pressure on Jaish al-Islam to leave.”
That dropping chlorine gas canisters might be a terror weapon and not a “kill” weapon makes sense. Unlike sarin, which is a colorless, odorless liquid that often kills its victims even before they know they’ve been attacked, chlorine, at least as it’s been used in improvised munitions in Syria doesn’t usually kill; its victims can smell, see, and sometimes even hear it coming, and they run as fast as they can in the other direction. Many Syrians living in rebel-held areas, prepped by rebels or aid workers, know that chlorine is denser than air and quickly sinks, which is why it might find its way so easily from the roof down to the basement. The presence of chlorine might also explain something Abo Salah, the Douma Revolution cameraperson, had told me. The apartment attack site is only 150 meters from the huge tunnel I’d seen by the emergency medical ward and close to an entrance to that tunnel. The toxic gases, he said, “leaked to the main medical center via the tunnel, which contained hundreds of families fleeing the shelling.”
What’s clear is that Douma remains a fearful, dangerous place. When I visited, its citizens appeared to be under a kind of quarantine, suspected of harboring “terrorist cells” and unable to leave.The trajectory taken by chlorine gas and its cloying visibility might also explain why, according to Nasser Hanan, most of his family had run back inside the building to their deaths. When I showed videos of the canisters to Theodore Postol in Boston, he was immediately certain that both had been launched from the sky by the Syrian military and that any “brouhaha” from the Russians to the contrary could be safely ignored. Postol, professor emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at MIT, is a controversial figure in Syria analysis. Earlier in the conflict his work querying accounts from the OPCW and the UN about the use of sarin in two infamous gas attacks made him deeply unpopular among many Syria analysts, including Higgins, who felt that his analysis wrongly let Assad off the hook for war crimes. Postol, however, has many years of experience analyzing munitions, including the relative efficacy of Saddam Hussein’s SCUD missiles and U.S. Patriot anti-missiles during the first Gulf War. More recently, together with his late colleague Richard Lloyd, he’s devoted considerable attention to the development of improvised munitions in Syria, including chlorine canister bombs. When I showed him the Douma footage, he immediately concurred with the analysis of internet investigators like Higgins, with whom he often ferociously disagrees. The canister, he reckoned, would have weighed around 250 pounds and carried about 120 kilos of chorine. But it landed in an entirely unexpected way. Since the concrete-and-steel-mesh roof wasn’t very strong, the bomb punched a hole in the ceiling. The effect was as if the nose of the canister had been deliberately rammed into the external wall, so as to point gas directly into the room below, creating a gas chamber. That room would have filled with chlorine in one or two minutes. Drawing on Forensic Architecture’s modeling of the building onto which it fell, Postol estimated that the chlorine gas would have poured out into the upper floor at a magnitude several hundred times higher than a lethal dose, its density much greater because the release occurred in an enclosed space. As it made its way down into the two floors below, its density would have decreased, but still would have been much more than enough for a lethal dose.
When it filled the building, the chlorine would have spilled out via open windows and doors and then drifted along the street, like a thick fog, at much lower concentrations. As it sank through the building, the residents hunkered down in the basement would have smelled it too. Many likely ran headfirst onto the street, only to be confronted by a chlorine gas cloud forming all around them. Instinct and training likely kicked in; since chlorine is thicker than air, the instructions they’d been given would have been to head for the roof. Under most circumstances, this would have been excellent advice, like the injunction to workers at the World Trade Center on 9/11 to stay put at their desks, but in this case, it failed the residents of Douma. As they ran back upward through the building, they’d have been rendered unconscious very quickly and dead within minutes. Delivered at that kind of dosage — thousands of milligrams per cubic meter — chlorine could easily have caused the frothing at the mouth, skin burns, and damaged corneas observed by medical workers, as well as the horrible smell and breathing difficulties of which residents complained. It also makes sense of what the motorbike rider had told me: that the whole street had been affected by the foul odor. To panic and terrorize the population was, after all, what this was for.
The murderous result, concluded Postol, was “a very peculiar set of circumstances” and a terrible twist of fate. If the building had had been larger with a firmer roof, the balcony canister would probably not have fallen through; even if it had broken open and begun dispersing its payload, the chlorine would have wafted off into the open air and likely not injured anyone. If the roof had been even weaker and the canister had fallen right through onto the third floor, its valve might not have opened at all, like the one on the bed. But because of the way the canister punctured the concrete, its valve snapped so as to spew the contents directly into the enclosed space below. A lot of stars would have had to align for something like this to happen, just as the former OPCW inspector had said. But in this case, they did.
If chlorine gas canisters killed all those people in the apartment building on April 7, what do we make of Anas Sobheha, the nurse I met at that makeshift emergency ward in Douma, who told me that he’d seen no evidence of a chemical attack? What’s clear is that Douma remains a fearful, dangerous place. When I visited, its citizens appeared to be under a kind of quarantine, suspected of harboring “terrorist cells” and unable to leave; when I suggested to Sobheha that we meet in central Damascus he told me that simply wasn’t possible. I did, however, discreetly arrange another meeting with a 28-year-old Syrian soldier named Hassan, who I’d met that day in Douma.
Over a drink in Central Damascus, I’d thought Hassan might tell me something about the assault on Douma, but he was tight-lipped and a little nervous. I soon found out why. Hassan wasn’t a regular soldier at all but a junior mukhabarat with one the most feared of Syria’s secret police fiefs, Jawiya — the Air Force Intelligence Service, which runs a secretive network of political prisons in which many oppositionists, rebels, and ordinary civilians have been tortured or disappeared. He was about 900 meters away from Douma in the final days of the fighting, he told me, and had arrived in the city just hours after the rebels agreed to leave. As might be expected from someone who works for the Syrian intelligence apparatus, he couldn’t believe that the army would have used chemical weapons. “The Syrian army have made some mistakes,” he conceded, “but the rebels have made bigger mistakes.” I asked him what it was like to serve in Douma, and he told me that some of the locals had been very supportive, helping him “catch” some remaining terrorists. All the same, he and his company had been ordered by their military superiors to leave. “We were told to be good to the people and to be polite, but some are scared of us.”
What unfolded at the hospital appears to have been largely a result of panic and propaganda, spurred by Syrian army chlorine and by activist camerapeople who knew how sensitive the use of chemical weapons is to the United States and the international community.Was Sobheha lying to me because he was scared? I don’t think so. He wouldn’t necessarily have seen the immediate casualties from the apartment building because they were all dead. Those who did make their way to the hospital were mostly suffering from minor breathing difficulties, or they’d panicked into thinking that they’d suffered a chemical attack. Likewise, the young Hassan Diab, who the Russian government produced at the press conference at The Hague. While Hassan was shaken up and likely appearing under duress, he’s clearly the same boy who appeared in the hospital video from April 7, and he seemed unaffected by exposure to chemicals at the press conference. What unfolded at the hospital appears to have been largely a result of panic and propaganda, spurred by Syrian army chlorine and by activist camerapeople who knew how sensitive the use of chemical weapons is to the United States and the international community. Given the fall of Douma to the Syrian army and the Trump administration’s cruise missile strikes against Syrian army bases and research facilities, some might say, both strategies worked.
I think it’s likely that Shobeha was more frustrated than scared. According to him, 270 people, both civilians and fighters, had died over two days of heavy, unrelenting shelling by the Syrian armed forces. Did anyone care about that? If a 500-pound bomb had collided with the roof of that apartment block near al-Shuhada Square instead of a chlorine canister, it would have punched clean through and landed slap on one of the higher floors. There would have been a tiny delay, only a fraction of a second, while the fuse sensed that it had reached its destination, after which the building would have blown apart and its entire weight fallen downward onto the basement. Everyone hiding there would likely have been buried alive.
What government pummels its citizens with bombs and chlorine to get them to pressure rebels to leave their city? At the same time, Jaish Al-Islam was sending volleys of improvised rockets into Damascus and snatching activists and members of religious minorities for ransom or to be disappeared. It’s between these two violent truths that the real story of the Syrian conflict begins to emerge — not in a bewildering collage of images sent from a war zone, designed to terrify and outrage.
The author’s research was supported by a fellowship at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. Benjamin Decker at the Shorenstein Center’s Information Disorder Lab provided open-source investigative support and Rahaf Safi at Harvard’s Kennedy School contributed research. Other research and translation support was provided by Victor Lutenco of the Kennedy School and Hannah Twomey of the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London.
The post What Happened in Douma? Searching for Facts in the Fog of Syria’s Propaganda War appeared first on The Intercept.
The Metropolitan Detention Center on Feb. 4, 2019 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
As a late-January polar vortex hit New York with frigid temperatures, the Metropolitan Detention Center, a waterfront federal prison, experienced an electrical fire, leaving incarcerated people inside without heat, light, warm food, or access to legal counsel for days. Following a furious response from protesters and legal advocates, public officials and a federal judge toured the facility, witnessing inhumane conditions far beyond the temporary and harrowing loss of heat and power.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department, which oversees all federal prisons and jails through the Bureau of Prisons, announced that it has asked an internal watchdog to investigate the Metropolitan Detention Center’s response to the electrical fire and heating failure, as well as broader infrastructural problems. That is to say: After the very public revelation of torturous neglect and brutality in New York City’s largest federal detention facility, the Justice Department is going to investigate itself.
To have faith that such an investigation will lead to significant change, one would have to believe that recent events and conditions at Metropolitan Detention Center are anomalous in the facility and the broader prison system. They are not.
“Department of Justice attorneys, who represent the Bureau of Prisons, cannot be trusted to provide accurate information about the conditions at MDC Brooklyn, or to investigate the Bureau of Prisons.”Abuse, misconduct, and neglect have consistently been found to pervade federal prisons — and the entire carceral system — with internal investigations by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General often leading to little more than recommendations, window dressing reform, and the flimsy appearance of accountability.
“Department of Justice attorneys, who represent the Bureau of Prisons, cannot be trusted to provide accurate information about the conditions at MDC Brooklyn, or to investigate the Bureau of Prisons,” said New York-based civil rights lawyer Gideon Oliver, who assisted the legal counsel in hearings this week for two people incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center.
The proceedings, as Nick Pinto reported for The Intercept, uncovered that prison officials told numerous lies about the temperature and conditions in the facility — lies which their government attorneys repeated without hesitation. “Beyond the obvious conflict,” Oliver told The Intercept, “BOP attorneys, and the assistant U.S. attorneys representing the BOP, have undermined whatever credibility they might otherwise have enjoyed by providing defense attorneys and judges with misinformation about the recent conditions at MDC Brooklyn.”
It’s worth noting that it was not the Justice Department, but the tireless work of protesters, prisoners’ families, and lawyers that deserves credit for drawing necessary attention to last week’s freezing emergency. As a result, the power and heat are back on, and federal judges and lawmakers are — for a moment at least — paying attention to incarcerated people.
The Justice Department, on the other hand, has known about poor conditions at the detention facility and done little to resolve them. Indeed, there can be no pretense that the dire conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center, which holds 1,654 people, were previously unremarked upon.
A 2016 report by the National Association of Women Judges following visits to the jail described the conditions as “unconscionable.” Citing lack of light, air, medical services, and recreational space, the report claimed that the jail violated both the American Bar Association Standards on Treatment of Prisoners and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Treatment of Prisoners.
In the last three years alone, three corrections officers — including two lieutenants — were convicted of raping women incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center. In the decade prior, guards at the facility were found to have beaten and violated the civil rights of Muslim people held in federal custody after post-9/11 arrest sweeps. Eleven guards, including a captain and three lieutenants, were indicted for brutal prisoner beatings between 2002 and 2007; four were sentenced in 2008 for the beatings and subsequent cover-up attempts.
There’s no evidence to put much stock in the Justice Department and Bureau of Prisons radically improving conditions, of which they have long been well aware, without ongoing and intense public pressure.
“Without sustained community pressure, courts and politicians may be fooled by the partial clean-up of common areas and cages, but we know better,” the community activist group No New Jails NYC said in a statement. “This recent crisis at MDC has brought new attention to an old reality. What has taken place at MDC is not exceptional.”
“This recent crisis at MDC has brought new attention to an old reality. What has taken place at MDC is not exceptional.”Similar conditions to those reported at Metropolitan Detention Center — the cold, the dank, the dark, extreme isolation, untreated medical crises, ignored suicide attempts, neglect, and retaliation from guards — have been reported at various points in many of the U.S.’s 122 federal prisons. And New York’s federal facilities in particular have long been sites of abuse.
When the toilets broke in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, guards gave prisoners bags in which to defecate, according to 2015 lawsuit reviewed by Gothamist. In the lawsuit, a prisoner also stated that he had “found rats in his bed and seen rats crawling on inmates while they slept.” At the Metropolitan Correctional Center, numerous guards have been accused and convicted of sexually assaulting and beating prisoners over the last 15 years. Staff at the prison tried to cover up the 2017 fatal beating of 35-year-old Roberto Grant by telling his family that he overdosed; medical examiners found no drugs in his system.
When the elevators break — which happens at least once a month — at a high-rise federal facility in Houston, the whole prison is held on lockdown. During a record breaking heat wave in California last year, people incarcerated at the Mendota federal prison had to wrap their heads in wet towels when the air conditioning failed. Meanwhile, toxic mold — a problem at many detention facilities across the country — was found to have given staff and inmates respiratory diseases.
This is not to say that the the Justice Department’s investigations, conducted by the Office of the Inspector General, do not take note of problems found in Bureau of Prisons facilities. The ongoing barbarity at prisons like the Metropolitan Detention Center and Metropolitan Correctional Center, however, betrays how little interest there is in relieving incarcerated peoples’ suffering. If that suffering were taken seriously, the Justice Department and government officials would dedicate their energies to abolishing the cash bail system and other efforts toward abating America’s mass incarceration crisis.
Plans like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s — slowly shuttering Rikers Island prison, only to open four new state-of-the-art city jails in its place — are not the challenge to mass incarceration we need. Nicer prisons are no substitute for the goal of fewer prisons. Yet, as No New Jails NYC note in their statement, “even as we organize for abolition, we recognize the necessity and urgency of ensuring that currently incarcerated people have access to the resources they need to survive.” With that aim prioritized, the task of providing federal prisoners with livable conditions cannot be entrusted to the government body that has overseen and permitted the very brutality in need of urgent remedy.
“There is a great need for the court to appoint an independent special master, at a minimum,” Oliver, the civil rights lawyer, told me. A special master would be a third party, often a retired judge, appointed by the court, accountable only to the court and the parties involved. That we not leave a historically neglectful government agency to investigate itself, when the issue at hand is no less than torture, should indeed be the absolute minimum.
The post Why the Justice Department Can’t Be Trusted to Investigate Abysmal Conditions in Federal Prisons appeared first on The Intercept.
In his first public comments about his office’s January decision to fight a new appeal from incarcerated activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner asked for patience from critics.
The appeal, argued Krasner, is based on a judge’s decision that has implications that stretch far beyond Abu-Jamal’s case. Once his motion is filed, he said, opponents may view it differently.
“This is a narrow, technical decision in one sense, but incredibly complex and nuanced and affects many other cases,” Krasner said, adding that his previous discovery of six boxes of evidence in the case, which he turned over to the defense, should be evidence of his commitment to a just outcome.
Last week, the organizers of the Rebellious Lawyering Conference at Yale Law School disinvited Krasner as their keynote speaker, citing the Abu-Jamal case.
Despite the emotional and political potency of the Abu-Jamal appeal — he was convicted in 1982 of killing a police officer, and his case, which his supporters say was a frame up by police, has generated controversy in Philadelphia and around the country for decades — Krasner told The Intercept, the process must play out.
“I hope that the people who are critical take a deep breath and wait and see what it is we actually say in the brief that we file in this matter,” said Krasner.
The Abu-Jamal case is a test of Krasner’s limits.
Philadelphia voters elected Krasner as district attorney in 2017 on the back of his radical, criminal justice reform-minded platform. Thus far, results have been generally in line with those promises: Krasner’s office has effectively decriminalized marijuana possession and stepped in to allow parole for members of the MOVE 9. He fired a bloc of prosecutors he said were unwilling to rethink their approach to justice and issued sweeping new guidelines for bail and prosecutions that have become a model for reformers.
But the Abu-Jamal case is a test of his limits. Critics say that by attempting to block Abu-Jamal’s appeal, Krasner is acting in line with police interests — even though he sued the department 75 times before becoming the district attorney. The district attorney, for his part, says there’s much more to Abu-Jamal’s case than meets the eye.
Abu-Jamal was accused of murdering police officer Daniel Faulkner on December 9, 1981, and he was convicted and sentenced to death the following year. Abu-Jamal was a longtime Philadelphia activist with the city’s famous MOVE organization, and his supporters have consistently held that the case was corrupted from the beginning by a police setup and the cooperation of the city’s judicial system. They believe the city was prepared to sentence Abu-Jamal to death whether or not he committed the crime, a view that they say is backed up by the contradictory evidence brought forth by the prosecution and the possibility of another gunman at the scene. (Abu-Jamal’s sentence was changed in 2011 to life in prison.) Meanwhile, throughout the lengthy appeals process that is typical of death penalty cases, advocates for Faulkner’s family, including his widow, Maureen, fought vociferously to keep Abu-Jamal behind bars.
Abu-Jamal’s case, for opponents of police brutality and mass incarceration, was a cause célèbre for decades in progressive circles, and took on just as much symbolism for police unions, who see any support of Abu-Jamal as justification of violence against police.
Abu-Jamal’s right to appeal appeared exhausted in 2012, when an attempt to rehear forensic evidence was rejected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. But the process was revived in 2018, when Abu-Jamal’s defense team identified a new target: one of the judges on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Ronald Castille, who ruled on a number of Abu-Jamal’s appeals between 1998 and 2012. Abu-Jamal’s team argued that Castille should not have been involved in the case because he was Philadelphia’s district attorney from 1986 to 1991, a period overlapping some of Abu-Jamal’s appeals. On December 28, 2018, Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Leon Tucker agreed and ruled that Abu-Jamal had the right to appeal.
“There is no evidence that Justice Castille was directly involved with the case as a prosecutor,” wrote Tucker, “but it would be difficult for a judge in his position not to view a case being reviewed on appeal that was handled by his office when he was the District Attorney, as a criticism of his former office and perhaps of his own leadership.”
Following Tucker’s decision, Krasner’s office filed notice on January 25 that it would be submitting a brief in opposition to Abu-Jamal’s request for a new appeals process. Krasner, who told The Intercept he was limited in what he could or couldn’t say about the ongoing litigation, repeatedly stressed that Tucker’s order could have ramifications beyond the Abu-Jamal case.
“The opinion that was written by the court contained language that, potentially, could result in having to rehear possibly thousands of cases,” Krasner said. “Thousands.”
A protester holds up a poster depicting Mumia Abu-Jamal during a demonstration outside the offices of District Attorney Larry Krasner on Dec. 28, 2018, in Philadelphia.
Photo: Matt Slocum/AP
Abu-Jamal’s advocates widely celebrated Tucker’s decision and are very critical of Krasner’s position on the issue. Criminal justice reform advocates have also rebuked Krasner for the move.
Retired attorney Rachel Wolkenstein, who spent decades of her life fighting for Abu-Jamal’s freedom as an activist and represented him during the appeals process from 1995 to 1999, told NPR that the ruling was “the best opportunity we have had for Mumia’s freedom in decades.”
In an interview, Sam Spital, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who works on the Abu-Jamal case, said that Tucker’s ruling underscored the importance of a lack of bias in a case like Abu-Jamal’s. “This is an incredibly important principle,” said Spital. “The decision-maker, the judge, has to not have actual bias or the appearance of bias.”
Rebecca Kavanagh, a New York City based public defender, found Krasner’s decision to have his office fight Abu-Jamal’s appeal baffling — and a fall from grace for an inspirational figure who instituted a reformist agenda in his office. By attempting to block Abu-Jamal’s efforts to continue his appeal, Kavanagh said, Krasner betrayed the principles that put him into office and made him a national figure.
“It is difficult to read this as anything other than District Attorney Krasner bowing to pressure from the police unions, which was something we have not seen him do before,” wrote Kavanagh. “To do it now in this seminal case, to speak the usual spin we hear from district attorneys, but not normally from him, is profoundly disheartening.”
“I am no less concerned about all of the unfamous, poor, nameless people whose cases deserve individual justice.”Krasner, in his interview with The Intercept, suggested that people invested in reopening Abu-Jamal’s case might unknowingly be ignoring how the ruling might affect other cases. “I understand that Mumia Abu-Jamal is a celebrity. I understand that his story, much like Meek Mills’s story, captured the interest of people because he’s a known figure,” said Krasner, referring to the rapper whose 2017 arrest brought attention to criminal justice issues in Philadelphia. “But I am no less concerned about all of the unfamous, poor, nameless people whose cases deserve individual justice.”
Kavanagh pushed back on that framing of the case. “There is nothing about doing justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal individually here that would somehow prevent justice being done for others,” Kavanagh said. “Krasner is clearly putting Mr. Abu-Jamal into a category separate and apart from other people who have also been targets of state-sponsored violence and corruption.”
Local activist Mike Africa Jr. said he suspected a different motivating factor for Krasner. In an interview with the District Sentinel on Wednesday, Africa said that Krasner’s decision to fight Abu-Jamal’s appeal was hard to understand — though it could have something to do with city politics.
“He has a lot of pressure on him from the [Fraternal Order of Police],” said Africa, in comments emblematic of a lack of faith in the system. “And I know that he has a lot of pressure on him from Maureen Faulkner and that side of the politics.”
The police organization, which has referred to Abu-Jamal as “our country’s most notorious cop-killer” cheered Krasner’s decision. Philadelphia Police Foundation President John McNesby, a member of the city’s Fraternal Order of Police, called the decision to fight the appeal “the right thing to do” in January comments to Philly.com.
In support of his argument that the situation is more complicated than critics say, Krasner cited the fact that his office had turned over six boxes of previously unseen files to Abu-Jamal’s attorneys on January 10. Abu-Jamal’s supporters have said that the existence of so many files that had not previously been accounted for could be evidence of Abu-Jamal’s innocence.
“What these missing boxes represent is confirmation of what we’ve known for decades,” Wolkenstein told NPR. “There’s hidden, exculpatory evidence in Mumia’s case, and that is evidence that Mumia’s guilt was intentionally manufactured by the police and prosecution and the truth of his innocence was suppressed.”
The district attorney also acknowledged the political trickiness of the process. “This is a case that, no matter what decision you make, you’ll have a lot of upset people,” said Krasner. He said he hopes that “people on both sides take a breath, look at all the developments in the case, including our revelation of the existence of the six boxes we found and including our brief in this matter and understand that this is part of a decades-long period of litigation in this case, that doesn’t look like it’s going to end anytime soon.”
According to Krasner, decisions his office has made in the case thus far shouldn’t be seen as indicative of future choices in pursuing the case. The top priority for his office remains justice, the district attorney told The Intercept, making clear that he would attempt to find the balance between the interests of both sides.
“As this case evolves, we will continue to try to make the right decisions and to see things in all their complexity and nuance,” said Krasner. “At the same time, we will try to do individual justice to all of the people affected by the case involving Mumia Abu-Jamal.”
The post Larry Krasner Responds to Progressive Critics: Mumia Abu-Jamal Appeal Is “Incredibly Complex and Nuanced” appeared first on The Intercept.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is prepared for the possibility that Democrats in New York could redraw her district after the 2020 election, she told The Intercept in an interview.
Following the 2020 census, every state will draw new district boundaries to reflect changes in the population, the political implications of which will stretch for at least the next decade. In 2014, New York approved a constitutional amendment establishing a nonpartisan redistricting commission, which is set to take over the redistricting process starting in 2020. The 10-member commission, meant to be independent from the legislature, is made up of individuals selected by leaders from the state Senate and Assembly, and the original eight members pick two additional members.
But Ocasio-Cortez’s most determined adversaries are not partisan Republicans, but Democrats who say that she has been a disruptive influence. The Hill recently reported that at least one member of Congress has been urging New York party leaders to recruit a Democratic primary challenger to Ocasio-Cortez. But the news led to a surge of donations to Ocasio-Cortez, suggesting that a more efficient means of ousting her might be simply to eliminate her district.
The 29-year-old congressperson noted (accurately) that it’s generally expected that New York will likely lose a seat, despite the city itself growing at a consistent pace. “I don’t know if that means that all of our districts are going to be redrawn dramatically, because they have been historically gerrymandered, or what will happen, but there’s certainly a possibility, if not a guarantee, that my district in the coming years will not look like my district today,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “So I think it’s entirely possible, and New York politics being what it is, we have no idea where things are going to go.”
New York politics are famously insular, with a tight circle controlling major decision-making for years. That began to shift in 2018, not just with Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, but also wins from a number of insurgent candidates against Democrats who had caucused with Republicans in the state Senate.
Ocasio-Cortez, during a podcast interview with The Intercept, was joined by former North Carolina Rep. Brad Miller, who earned his “former” status as a result of statewide redistricting that eliminated his seat in 2012. The 2010 tea party wave handed control of the legislature to Republicans, who drew him out of the district. He decided not to run for re-election. He told The Intercept that his work on the House Financial Services Committee taking on powerful banks “probably” played a role in the redistricting. “And Republicans, it turned out, did not value my service, and they divided my district six different ways, and there was no one piece that was really recognizably the old district. And also it was true on the Democratic side,” he said, noting that his own party leaders weren’t thrilled with his work in a state dominated by financial interests, such as Bank of America.
Miller, however, did not have Ocasio-Cortez’s national profile, suggesting that the lesson may be that if you’re going to be a problem for party bosses, it’s better to be a huge problem than a medium-sized irritation.
Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez could just run, and probably win, in any nearby New York City district the party may try to draw for her. She noted that when it comes to future redistricting, she’s in a unique situation because her name recognition is so strong “that even when I won my primary in New York [District] 14, we won like a third ballot, a third-party primary in a different congressional district the same day.” And that was in November 2018, before an endless media cycle that has been all Ocasio-Cortez, all the time.
Moving her into a different district would pit her against another incumbent Democrat, and that Democrat has an incentive to avoid that race. ”Maybe some people wouldn’t want trouble for themselves,” she noted.
Another reason not to target Ocasio-Cortez would be Chuck Schumer. The Democratic Senate minority leader, and a major player in New York politics, is up for re-election in 2022. The commission redrawing the lines may be technically independent, but Schumer’s power is no secret. If Ocasio-Cortez were gerrymandered out of the House, she’d need something new to do — and primarying Schumer would be an obvious option on the table. That could make Schumer Ocasio-Cortez’s strongest advocate at the redistricting negotiating table.
The potential loss of a congressional district as a result of falling population has focused extra attention on the Trump administration’s push to add a controversial citizenship question to the next census. That ploy is driven in significant part by a desire to dampen participation in the process. “This is one of the reasons why we’ve been fighting the 2020 census question, and between the federal government really looking to fund the census at a much lower rate, communities like mine are the ones that are essentially targeted by the current administration,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Opponents say the citizenship question would intimidate immigrants and their families into not completing the form, reducing the participation of people of color and undercounting the population. A federal judge earlier this month blocked the citizenship question, but the Trump administration is appealing the ruling in the lead lawsuits. Aside from the court battles, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is set to testify about the citizenship question before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which Ocasio-Cortez is now a member of.
“Communities that are poor, more working class, communities that are diverse, communities that have high immigrant populations, whether they’re documented or not,” she said. “It’s all, all the actions that the administration is taking is around really dense urban areas losing congressional seats.”
So far, the effort to primary Ocasio-Cortez, however, isn’t going well. The Daily Caller followed up on the article in The Hill and spoke to New York Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who said three names were floating around as potential challengers to Ocasio-Cortez: New York City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, Sen. Julia Salazar, and Assembly Member Catalina Cruz.
“The Daily Caller is trash. 1. I would never primary @AOC, even if I lived in her district (which I do not). 2. I have no intentions of ever running for Congress. 3. Who on earth calls Jimmy Van Bramer ‘James?’” Salazar tweeted.
Van Bramer tweeted “This whole thing is crazy. I’m kind of loving having @AOC as my Congressmember! I’m not taking her on. I’m backing her up!”
.@DailyCaller clearly doesnt have a fact checking department- ya’ll over there gossiping and we are over here doing the work @AOC #HermanasEnLaLucha #NiceTryTho pic.twitter.com/wvklFlTTRf
— Catalina Cruz, Esq. (@CatalinaCruzNY) January 30, 2019
The post New York Democrats Could Eliminate Ocasio-Cortez’s District After 2020 appeared first on The Intercept.
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