Biden's Pardon Power and the Last Federal Pot Prisoners

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter,” President Joe Biden said in a statement released by The White House on December 1st. “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.” Hunter Biden awaited sentencing for two federal criminal convictions, for lying about his drug addiction on a gun purchase form and for tax evasion. He most likely would have spent less than five years behind bars. Joe Biden correctly labeled the prosecutions as partisan and politically motivated. “Hunter was singled out only because he is my son,” Biden said. With the simple stroke of a pen, President Biden saved his son from a terrible ordeal. Before he leaves office, he should extend the same compassion to thousands of people in federal prison, victims of the so-called war on drugs. “This is definitely an opening for folks to talk about exactly how expansive we can use the pardon power of the president to make sure that we’re correcting the injustices that were done over the past 20 or 30 years when it comes to cannabis crimes,” Jason Ortiz, director of strategic initiatives at the Last Prisoner Project, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “President Biden himself was actually one of the architects of the 1994 crime bill that created a lot of the outrageous sentences that we’re now dealing with today.” Ortiz was referring to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which Biden championed as a senator, and which accelerated mass incarceration. Udi Ofer, former Director of the ACLU’s Justice Division, wrote in 2019, on the crime bill’s 25th anniversary, “Under the leadership of Bill Clinton, Democrats wanted to wrest control of crime issues from Republicans, so the two parties began a bidding war to increase penalties for crime, trying to outdo one another.” Democrats have largely accepted the failure of the 1994 crime bill. In 2015, former President Bill Clinton admitted, “The problem is, the way it was written and implemented, we cast too wide a net. We have too many people in prison.” While campaigning for president in 2019 and 2020, though, Joe Biden repeatedly denied that the law he helped write contributed to mass incarceration. Jason Ortiz continued, “There are over 3,000 federal cannabis prisoners currently incarcerated [who] also have families and have parents and loved ones…So, while I can understand why the president wants to have compassion for his own son, we’re really frustrated that he’s refusing to extend that compassion to all the parents currently watching their kids waste away in prison.” On October 6, 2022, President Biden issued a blanket pardon for those convicted federally for simple marijuana possession. The Justice Department explained then, however, that “conspiracy, distribution, and possession with intent to distribute are not pardoned by the proclamation.” The goal of The Last Prisoner Project is to expand the relief from the drug war’s draconian sentences to those convicted of distribution and other charges. “Right now, we have folks serving decades for trafficking,” Ortiz said, “exactly what the hundreds of legal cannabis businesses across the country are currently doing on a regular basis, including in Washington, D.C. We’re seeing people sitting in prison for decades for the same activity that is currently generating tax revenue for cities and states across the country. We’re paying for schools and building bridges with cannabis dollars, but still letting folks waste away in prison.” The Last Prisoner Project is not alone in calling for clemency. Last month, as President Biden prepared to pardon turkeys as part of an annual Thanksgiving photo op, more than fifty members of Congress sent a letter urging Biden to use the pardon power to address the ongoing crisis of mass incarceration. “The United States represents just 5% of the world’s population, yet we hold more than 20% of the global prison population,” progressive Minnesota Congressmember Ilhan Omar said at a news conference announcing the letter. “Over 1.9 million individuals are currently incarcerated with a disproportionate impact on communities of color. Black men are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of white men, a legacy of systematic inequalities that have persisted for generations…President, Biden has a real opportunity to make a difference in these final days of his term, we are calling on him to act.” Hunter Biden will very likely never see the inside of a prison cell, nor experience the discrimination and indignities imposed on former felons. President Biden has the power to pardon thousands of people imprisoned for federal cannabis crimes, or commute their sentences to time served and allow them to return home. The power is in his hands, but he still needs to be pushed by the millions of citizens in whose name he wields it.

00:05:48

This Thanksgiving, Biden Should Grant Clemency to Leonard Peltier

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan While many brace for the return of Donald Trump to the White House, let’s remember that until Monday, January 20th, Joe Biden is still president, with all the power that confers. The Constitution grants the president the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States,” to remedy a criminal justice system riddled with faults. One strong candidate for presidential clemency, as recently called for by Amnesty International USA, is 80-year-old Anishinabe-Lakota elder Leonard Peltier, who has been incarcerated for close to half a century for a crime he maintains he did not commit. This Thanksgiving weekend, when people across the US enjoy a holiday based on the myth of a shared meal between native people of Massachusetts and the English settler-colonists who would later violently displace them, President Biden should free Leonard Peltier. The case of Leonard Peltier encapsulates the modern era of indigenous resistance. After centuries of genocide launched by Christopher Columbus and expanded by successive waves of European settlers, by the 1950s most of the surviving indigenous nations in North America had been contained in isolated and impoverished reservations. Hollywood appropriated, caricatured and monetized the vibrant mosaic of indigenous cultures. Many Native people moved to cities seeking economic opportunity but still faced racism and discrimination. Out of this, and amidst the civil rights and other social movements of the 1960s, the American Indian Movement, or AIM, was born. In 1973, AIM went to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where a corrupt tribal government was working in league with federal and local authorities to violently suppress a growing movement to restore traditional practices – and to block extractive industries from exploiting traditional lands. More than 50 Lakota people and their allies were murdered there over a three year period. On June 26, 1975, Leonard Peltier was present at an AIM camp on the property of a targeted family. The camp was fired upon by unknown assailants, and the AIM members returned fire. In the ensuing minutes, two FBI agents and one young AIM activist were killed. Two AIM members were later arrested for killing the agents. At trial, the jury agreed that they had fired in self-defense and acquitted them. Leonard Peltier, arrested later, was tried separately and convicted. Peltier’s trial was marked by gross FBI and federal prosecutorial misconduct, with the coercion of witnesses, fabricated testimony, and suppressed exculpatory evidence. When Peltier was on trial in 1976, Joe Biden, then a young US Senator, was a founding member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee was created after the explosive Church Committee hearings that investigated the unconstitutional and criminal conduct of the FBI and its “COINTELPRO” operations against civil rights leaders and organizations, including AIM. A global movement grew, demanding justice for Leonard Peltier. Human rights icons like South African President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for his release, as did one of the federal judges involved, and, years later, one of the prosecutors who tried the case. Amnesty International has campaigned for Peltier’s release for decades. The group recently sent a letter to President Biden, reiterating their demand. “Over the decades at Amnesty, we have been calling on administration after administration to do the right thing by Leonard. He was in hospital in June, he was in hospital again in October. It’s time to give him a chance to spend his last days with his family and with his community,” Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. In late October, President Biden traveled to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, to formally apologize for the US government’s treatment of indigenous children forced into boarding schools. “All told, hundreds and hundreds of Federal Indian Boarding Schools across the country. Tens of thousands of Native children entered the system. Nearly 1,000 documented Native child deaths, though the real number is likely to be much, much higher; lost generations, culture, and language; lost trust. It’s horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a sin on our soul,” Biden said. Nick Tilsen, executive director of the Indigenous-led NDN Collective, responded on Democracy Now!, saying, “What this means for Indian Country is that we hope that this is a beginning of an era of repair between the United States government and the Indigenous people, the First People of this land…He [Peltier] was in the Sisseton Wahpeton boarding school, in South Dakota. Leonard Peltier and many people who became leaders in the American Indian Movement were survivors of boarding school. They came out of that era, and then they resisted.” If President Biden’s apology at Gila River was genuine, he could demonstrate it by commuting the sentence of Leonard Peltier. It would be a long-overdue gesture to indigenous people across the US, for which we could all give thanks.

00:06:16

COP29: The Dictatorship of the Petroletariat

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan BAKU, Azerbaijan – COP29, the 29th United Nations’ “Conference of Parties” to the climate convention, convened this year in Azerbaijan, a small, authoritarian petrostate wedged between Russia and Iran on the shores of the Caspian Sea. The worsening climate catastrophe, fueled by the world’s centuries-long embrace of fossil fuels, demands a united, world-wide response from all nations, including authoritarian ones. But does the conference itself have to be held in a country where dissent is criminalized, protests are banned and there is no free press nor right to free speech? The world’s oil addiction arguably began in Baku. It was here, in 1846, that the first industrial oil well was drilled. As revolution swept through Europe and beyond in 1848, and Karl Marx’s newly-published Communist Manifesto reminded workers that they had nothing to lose but their chains, humanity was busily chaining itself to fossil fuels. More than 175 years later, our ever-increasing burning of coal, oil and gas has heated the planet with a cascade of catastrophic consequences, from more frequent and intense hurricanes and typhoons to wildfires, droughts, and tornadoes – increasing human suffering and driving mass migration. This crisis will only accelerate unless a comprehensive solution is negotiated, implemented and enforced on a global scale. Which brings us to Baku, and the fundamentally flawed decision to hold these vital talks in a place where speaking freely can get you arrested by the government of President Ilham Aliyev. “Azerbaijan has had an abysmal rights record for many years, but it has dramatically deteriorated in the run-up to COP29,” Giorgi Gogia of the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch said on the Democracy Now! news hour. He noted HRW has “documented 33 cases of arrests and imprisonment of journalists, activists, human rights defenders and government critics on various bogus charges…think about what this COP would have been like if they were there to voice their criticism, for their voices to be heard by the globe.” Others say the number of arrests prior to COP29 is closer to 300. Gubad Ibadoghlu, an anti-corruption economist who’s taught at the London School of Economics, is currently under house arrest. His crime? Demanding greater transparency in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas revenues. In July, 2023 Ibadoghlu and his wife were violently arrested. He faces up to 17 years in prison. Their daughter Zhala Bayramova was also arrested and tortured. “I’m a human rights lawyer, but I was also working as an activist, observing elections, writing cases to the European Court of Human Rights,” Zhala said on Democracy Now!, from outside Azerbaijan. “As a result of all this torture, I cannot sleep without a neck pillow, as they injured my neck discs. They also crushed my ribs and my kneecaps.” Zhala continued, “before Ilham Aliyev, it was his father who was also president of Azerbaijan, and during the Soviet Union, a KGB general. And Ilham Aliyev, it seems, is getting his son ready to succeed himself. His wife is the vice president of Azerbaijan. So, it’s more like a monarchy. It’s a family affair, in a sense, and they own everything.” The climate summit is housed in Baku’s main sports stadium and several adjoining temporary structures, in a secure space dubbed “the Blue Zone,” where the UN controls security and sets the rules. In this Potemkin village, protest is tolerated if pre-authorized and then only at specified locations and times; at one official site, protesters can make noise, give speeches, or even sing. At the other site, only silent protest is permitted, with allowances for soft humming and finger snapping, due to its proximity to meeting rooms, the UN says. But behind the closed doors of those meeting rooms, where the future of the planet’s climate is being decided, the more than 1,700 fossil fuel lobbyists registered for COP29 are able to speak freely, to mingle with government delegations, to influence the course of the negotiations, uninterrupted by the silent protests outside. Global petroleum production and consumption are at an all-time high, while 2024 is set to be the hottest year on record, trumping last year’s record heat. Science tells us that the worst impacts of the climate emergency still can be avoided, if urgent and ambitious action is taken. Autocrats like Ilham Aliyev, and aspiring autocrats like Donald Trump, love the wealth and power that flow from oil. Trump has already promised to withdraw from the Paris Agreement…again. Grassroots movements and global solidarity will be needed as people fight the twin threats of authoritarianism and climate change in these coming crisis years. These difficult times recall the words of twentieth-century philosopher Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned by the Italian fascist Mussolini for twelve years, until his death. In his Prison Writings, translated from Italian, Gramsci wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

00:06:17

Trump's Despotic Deportation Plan Takes Shape

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan President-elect Donald Trump’s long history of vilifying immigrants is reaching a dark and likely violent escalation as he nominates to key White House cabinet and staff positions a slew of “America First” extremists and white supremacists. One of Trump’s central campaign pledges was to deport at least 12 million people, who he refers to as “illegals.” Trump’s election win drove up the stock prices of private prison corporations but it has also triggered grassroots mobilization to confront Trump’s cruel plans. “The United States is now an occupied country…nine days from now will be Liberation Day in America,” Trump said at his racist rally at Madison Square Garden (MSG) on October 27th. “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out…kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.” Except for Trump himself, no one in his circle spews anti-immigrant hate with more zeal than Stephen Miller, Trump’s nominee for Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy. At that MSG rally, Miller warmed up the crowd, bellowing, “America is for Americans and Americans only!” Miller was the architect of the anti-immigrant policies during the first Trump administration, like the Muslim ban and family separations. He’s had four years to plot, and has developed a broad plan to deliver mass deportations. Miller detailed his plans last February, speaking at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference: “Seal the border, no illegals in, everyone here goes out. That’s very straightforward [with] a series of interlocking domestic and foreign policies…You have ‘Remain in Mexico,’ finish the wall. You have robust prosecutions of illegal aliens. You do interior repatriation flights to Mexico, not back to the north of Mexico. It’s very important. You reimplement Title 42.” “Title 42” refers to a 1944 public health law that allows the president to restrict immigration and deport anyone deemed a health risk. It was deployed by Trump during the COVID pandemic and continued by President Biden into 2023. Miller continued, “The travel ban authority…You would bring those back and add new ones. You would establish large-scale staging grounds for removal flights. So you grab illegal immigrants, and then you move them to the staging grounds, and that’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home. You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement.” “Staging grounds,” not to be confused with concentration camps. Trump’s also named a so-called “Border Czar,” Thomas Homan. Homan was Trump’s acting director of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He’ll be in charge of Trump’s planned mass deportations. In an interview with 60 Minutes’ Cecilia Vega, Homan dodged the price tag of mass deportations: Vega: We have seen one estimate that says it would cost $88 billion to deport a million people a year. Homan: I don’t know if that’s accurate or not. Vega: Is that what American taxpayers should expect? Homan: What price do you put on national security? Is it worth it? Vega: Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families? Homan: Of course there is. Families can be deported together. Homan was referring to deporting children who were born in the US, thus legal US citizens, with their undocumented parents. Trump also nominated South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to be Secretary of Homeland Security. She has scant national security experience yet several times deployed the South Dakota National Guard to the U.S./Mexico border in Texas. Trump, who plans to use the US military to mass deport, has nominated Pete Hegseth, a Fox News’ weekend host and military veteran, to be Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is known to have numerous white supremacist tattoos including a Christian nationalist “Jerusalem cross” inspired by the Crusaders. People are organizing across the country in advance of this coming wave of raids, roundups, concentration camps and mass deportations. Alejandra Pablos is a reproductive justice community organizer and storyteller based in Arizona, who successfully fought against her own deportation for a decade. Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, she described her efforts with a rapid response network, “working with people on the ground, trying to inform folks on their rights and what they could do to protect each other.” The ACLU has prepared for a year, and has teams of lawyers ready to fight Trump and his deportation team in court. Trump, Miller, and Homan have tried mass deportations before. They were met with massive resistance, in the streets and in the courts. The opposition forced Trump to reverse an executive order, halting the separation of families. The challenge now is for people with the privilege and protections of US citizenship to act in solidarity with the millions of our threatened, undocumented neighbors, and confront Trump’s planned mass deportations with disciplined, sustained mass resistance.

00:06:23

Biden Can Make Every Lame Duck Day Count by Stopping the Killing Now

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Donald Trump will become President of the United States on Monday, January 20th, 2025. Until that time, though, President Joe Biden remains in the Oval Office. Biden spoke to his cabinet and staff Thursday in a Rose Garden address: “Now we have 74 days to finish the term, our term. Let’s make every day count. That’s the responsibility we have to the American people.” There is much Biden can and should do in this “lame duck” period, before disappearing over the horizon in one final trip aboard the presidential helicopter, Marine One (unless he takes the train to Delaware, as he proudly did throughout his Senate career). He has a narrow window in which to act, and could do significant good, repairing some of his own mistakes and blunting some of what Donald Trump has pledged will begin on Day One. First and most importantly, Biden should suspend all arms shipments to Israel. Period. Not one more bomb, not one more bullet. Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza is increasingly described as outright, livestreamed genocide. The Israeli military is now forcing the entire population of the northern quarter of the Gaza Strip to leave for the south. This follows the release of “The Generals’ Plan,” drafted by retired Israeli military officers, calling for the systematic denial of humanitarian aid in the north, which has been labeled ethnic cleansing. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week, “The army has begun the stage of cleansing the northern Strip while it prepares to hold onto the area for a long time to come.” Israel is using US taxpayer-funded arms to decimate Palestinians in Gaza, in clear contravention of US and international law. The people of Gaza are trapped, under siege, surrounded by the Israeli army and navy, with armed drones, helicopters and military jets overhead. They are being driven from their homes, starved, bombed, shot by snipers, killed by tank shells, and forced to live without clean water, sanitation, functioning hospitals, or the basics of survival. Every aspect of their society, their culture, their history, is being erased by Israel’s unrelenting bombardment and by smiling, selfie-snapping IDF demolition crews. None of this would have been possible without Biden’s support. Haaretz also reported, in early September, that a “senior air force official told Haaretz that without the Americans’ supply of weapons to the Israel Defense Forces, especially the air force, Israel would have had a hard time sustaining its war for more than a few months.” A leaked letter to Israel from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin demanded Israel immediately allow US humanitarian aid shipments to Gaza or face an interruption in arms shipments. They gave Israel until November 13th to comply. But the laws governing arms shipments don’t include a month-long grace period; the cessation is supposed to be immediate. Nevertheless, as the deadline approaches, and with the situation in northern Gaza becoming more catastrophic by the day, it seems that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a staunch Trump ally, has no intention of allowing in aid. Domestically, Biden could preempt some of the violence expected from the incoming Trump administration. Biden promised to end the federal death penalty when he was campaigning in 2020, after President Trump ordered the execution of 13 federal death row prisoners in his final six months in office. With the stroke of a pen, Biden could commute the sentences of the forty current federal death row prisoners to life in prison. This would empty federal death row, denying Trump the opportunity to engage in another killing spree. Biden could also commute the sentences of the four prisoners awaiting execution on the US military’s death row. Biden could also impact Trump’s anticipated mass deportation that was a central pledge of his campaign. Law professors Peter Markowitz and Lindsay Nash from the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York have revived an argument proposed by scores of advocacy groups in the waning days of the Obama administration, that “the President possesses the constitutional authority to categorically pardon broad classes of immigrants for civil violations of the immigration laws and to thereby provide durable and permanent protections against deportation.” Biden could act on the admittedly novel legal theory, by granting millions of undocumented immigrants relief from the myriad and often violently inflicted injustices of the US’s failed immigration policies. Such a move would certainly be challenged in court, but would potentially slow down what will almost certainly be a horrendous attempt by Donald Trump to deport up to 12 million US residents. People are organizing now on how to resist the incoming Trump administration. Biden could join them, by using the constitutional powers of the office of the President of the United States, the most powerful position on earth.

00:05:57

Hatred and Racism: Trump’s Ominous Closing Argument

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Donald Trump made his “closing argument” at a Madison Square Garden rally in New York, the same city where he was recently convicted of 34 felonies. The spectacle was an orchestrated, six-hour orgy of hate. Speaker after speaker worked the crowd by attacking immigrants, Jews, Black people, women and more, directing special invective against the woman of color challenging Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris. Celebrity white supremacist Tucker Carlson, for example, warned Harris could be “the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ, former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” The evening’s opening act, a so-called comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, set the tone with a vile, racist routine. “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” Hinchcliffe’s crude shtick was vetted by the Trump campaign, since they reportedly deleted his intended use of the “C” word to describe Kamala Harris. There are more than 8 million Puerto Ricans in the United States, all of whom are U.S. citizens. Due to Puerto Rico’s colonial status, though, the 3 million residents of Puerto Rico can’t vote in the U.S. presidential election. But the more than five million who do live in the continental U.S. can. Of those, almost half a million live in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, with an additional half million spread across the swing states of Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada. Puerto Rican voters are angry. As proud Puerto Rican Sunny Hostin, co-host of ABC’s popular talk show The View, said the day after Trump’s rally, “We know how to take the trash out, Donald Trump – trash that has been collecting since 2016. And that’s you, Donald Trump. … My fellow Puerto Ricans: trash collection day is November 5th, 2024.” Trump, predictably, referred to his rally as a “lovefest.” He notoriously refuses to apologize for anything, and his invitations to the racist comedian or to any of the other inflammatory speakers at his rally are no exception. If his naked racism weren’t enough, Trump has repeatedly said he wants to be a dictator. He admires dictators, he associates with dictators, he praises dictators. “This is the language of fascism and violence,” NYU History Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat said on the Democracy Now! news hour. She wrote the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, and sees striking parallels between historical fascism and Trump’s MAGA movement. Struck by the vulgarity from the podium throughout Trump’s MSG rally, Ben-Ghiat said: “We think about authoritarianism as imposing controls on people and silencing people, and it certainly does that. But it also is designed, from fascism forward, to make people become their worst selves, to give them permission to be as violent and unrestrained as possible…this kind of profanity, you know, at women, the misogyny, anti-Black statements, calling Latinos garbage, it’s not only a tradition of dehumanization that starts with fascism and goes through authoritarian movements up to our day, it’s also designed to make people feel, the foot soldiers of MAGA, that there are no restraints, there are no controls, and everything will be accepted as long as it is in the service of targeting the enemy within.” Ben-Ghiat was referring to Trump’s pledge to target “the enemy within,” as he has said repeatedly, like this, on Fox News. “The bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. … It should be very easily handled by — if necessary, by the National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military.” Several top military appointees from the former Trump administration have warned against a second Trump presidency. Ben-Ghiat observed, “Retired military officers, especially generals, don’t speak out unless they feel there’s a real need. The fact we’re seeing General Kelly, General Milley, former Defense Secretary Esper speak out and use the ‘F’ word, calling Trump a fascist, means that they are highly concerned.” Last Sunday was not the first time fascists gathered at Madison Square Garden. In 1939, the German American Bund brought 20,000 people there to celebrate the rise of Nazi Germany. Seven years ago, filmmaker Marshall Curry assembled archival footage into the short documentary, A Night at the Garden, which received an Oscar nomination. “When I first saw that footage, I was completely shocked to see the American flag and George Washington and hear people singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and then offering a stiff-armed salute and cheering white supremacy,” Curry explained on Democracy Now! The U.S. government has far too often undermined democracies abroad, leading to dictatorships or military regimes, from Iran to Guatemala to Congo to Chile. Now, with a right-wing Supreme Court doing Trump’s bidding and the potential for a compliant, MAGA-controlled Congress, only a galvanized, engaged electorate, supported by resilient, pro-democracy grassroots movements, can prevent autocracy from coming home to roost.

00:06:01

Teens Are Being Burned Alive in Gaza, Often with U.S. Weapons

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Last February, Sha’ban al-Dalou, a student at Gaza’s al-Azhar University, made an online plea to the world: “Hello from the tent where we reside. I’m Sha’ban Ahmad, 19 years old. I’m a student studying software engineering. In this barbaric starvation war, we have been displaced five times so far. Now we are in Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Hospital in the middle of Gaza, Deir al Balah. I’m taking care of my family as I’m the oldest. I have two sisters and two little brothers, and my parents.” For over six months, up until last week, he and his family had been living in a tent near Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital. In the early hours of Monday, October 14th, Israel bombed the crowded makeshift camp, setting many tents on fire. The tent that Sha’ban built with his own hands became his funeral pyre. Horrific video footage of the attack went viral, showing Sha’ban, leaning up in his bed, raising his arm with an intravenous drip still attached, being burned alive. His mother was also incinerated, and several other family members grievously burned. It was just days before Sha’ban’s 20th birthday. In the following days, his younger brother Abdul Ruhman and his sister Farah both died of their wounds. His death only amplifies the tragedy of his earlier plea for funds: “We live in very hard circumstances, suffering from homelessness and limited food and extremely limited medicine, and the only thing between us and the freezing temperature is this tent that we constructed by ourselves. I made this campaign to restart a new life in Egypt and evacuate. Thank you.” In the video, an Israeli drone whines overhead, a constant reminder that no place is safe in Gaza. Sha’ban, Abdul and Farah were just three of Israel’s victims in what has increasingly been described as a genocide. Estimates of the death toll range from just over 42,000 to as high as 300,000 Palestinians killed during Israel’s year-long assault on Gaza following Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023. Of course, none of this violence would be possible were it not for the unfettered support that the United States gives to Israel, with tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons, diplomatic cover, and now with troops on the ground. Abubaker Abed, a young Gaza journalist, lives near the scene of the attack that killed Sha’ban. He shared his reaction, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour: “We are about the same age. He memorized the Qur’an. I memorized the Qur’an. He dreamt of completing his studies. I also dream of completing my studies. Our message is very clear from here: We are young men that have nothing to do with this war. We have no connection with Hamas. But we are daily being subjected to violence and brutality…It just keeps going on and on, and without any stop, even after the news of the killing of the Hamas leader. What more should we really endure so this war will stop?” B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, says the international community must take action to force Israel to stop its assault, especially given its latest siege on northern Gaza, now entering its fourth week. “This is ethnic cleansing,” Sarit Michaeli, B’Tselem’s international advocacy lead, said on Democracy Now! “All this indicates one clear goal, which is to remove the people from northern Gaza, to empty that area…we called last week on the international community to really take responsibility for what is going on in Gaza. We stated openly that it’s not just Israeli policymakers who should be held accountable and face consequences for these crimes, but also that the international community cannot but be considered complicit if Israel goes ahead and empties north Gaza of its inhabitants.” Michaeli says Israel’s “absolutely horrific plan..includes provisions that are absolutely and clearly war crimes and could probably also be viewed as crimes against humanity.” If these crimes weren’t enough, Israel is also violating US law, using arms from the US against a civilian population, and directly preventing US humanitarian aid shipments from reaching their intended recipients. Yet, the Biden administration seems unwilling to put a stop to Israel’s unrelenting and illegal attack on the Palestinians trapped in Gaza. Secretary of State Antony Blinken just finished his 11th trip to Israel over the last year. Blinken and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent a letter to Israel on October 13th, threatening that a failure to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza “within 30 days” may result in a halt in arms shipments to Israel. “Nowhere in the law does it say, ‘Give them 30 days to see if they can fix it,’” Josh Paul, a former State Dept. official who managed arms transfers then resigned over Biden’s Gaza policy, said on Democracy Now! For Sha’ban and so many others, it is too late. But for the living in Gaza, including those held hostage, there must be a ceasefire, now.

00:06:20

Medical Workers Demand a Ceasefire in Gaza

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Palestinians in Gaza have endured more than a year of Israel’s constant bombardment, ground assaults with tanks and troops, sniper fire, displacement and starvation. Armed drones constantly buzz overhead, a reminder that no place in Gaza is safe, and that death could come at any moment. Over 42,000 Gazans have been killed already. Prior to Hamas’s raid on Israel on October 7th, 2023, the Gaza Strip was considered the world’s largest open-air prison, with its impoverished population of 2.3 million walled in by the Israeli military since 2006. Half of the population of Gaza is under the age of 18, born under siege, raised while denied adequate access to clean water, education, employment, nutrition, and freedom of movement. The scale of the violence that Israel, with full US support, is raining on Palestinians in Gaza is without precedent, and is widely considered an ongoing genocide. One of Israel’s stated goals has been to kill Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, which it claims to have done in Rafah on Wednesday. Will Israel now accept a ceasefire, and will the hostages in Gaza come home? Apparently not. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the war will go on. The protests in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu, led by the families of hostages, continue. News of the situation in Gaza is hard to obtain, as Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering. Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been doing remarkable reporting, but Israel has killed well over 120 of them in the past year. Some of the best, first-hand accounts of the horrors have come from foreign medical workers. This week, the New York Times published an opinion piece titled, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza,” written by Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who volunteered for two weeks at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza. Sidhwa wrote, “I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8…Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total.” The article included three X-ray images showing the upper body of different Palestinian children. Each showed a bullet lodged in the head or neck. “It’s pretty clear that when there’s a pattern — every time any international has been around, for an entire year, on a daily basis, a child has been shot in the head in a place of 2 million people, it seems unlikely to me that that’s an accident,” Dr. Sidhwa said on the Democracy Now! news hour. Rajaa Musleh is a Palestinian nurse who grew up in Gaza. She worked in Gaza City, trapped at one point in the Al-Shifa Hospital for over 40 days. “We received a huge number of injured persons coming to the emergency department, and the majority of the cases, unfortunately, women and children,” Musleh said on Democracy Now! “Many children come without legs, without arms…I witnessed a father holding his children in two bags.” She described the guilt she felt when compelled to leave a dying ten-year-old girl, in order to attend to others who had a chance of living: “Ninety percent of her body was burned. She asked me to stay beside her and hold her hand. I will never, ever forget her burned skin in my hands. I feel guilty because I did not stay beside her in the bed…I feel guilty when she asked me about her mother and father and sister, brothers, and I didn’t respond because the whole family had been killed during the bombing of her house.” Rajaa Musleh continued, “I will never forget the dogs, eating a dead body inside Al-Shifa Hospital at the front of the emergency department.” Netanyahu and his war cabinet are agitating for a wider war, promising an imminent attack on Iran as the United States has sent Israel a high-tech missile defense battery and 100 US troops to operate it. The US also used B2 Stealth bombers to strike Yemen this week. Forgotten amidst the geopolitics, beneath the warplanes and the uninterrupted flow of arms from the US to Israel, are both the Palestinian civilians, trapped with no place safe in Gaza, and the remaining Israeli hostages, seemingly sacrificed by Netanyahu as just another cost of his endless war. Meanwhile, trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa will continue telling the world what he saw in Gaza: “I personally wish that Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs, it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.”

00:06:16

The Message from Helene and Milton: the Climate Crisis is Real

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “Helene” and “Milton” could be a favorite aunt and uncle; instead, they have become emblems of the deepening climate disaster as the names of hurricanes that have brought death and destruction. Amidst these two epic storms, an historic election is underway, with one political party actively spewing lies and disinformation about the cause of the hurricanes and the deployment of disaster relief – lies that can take lives. Meanwhile, marginalized communities, like prisoners and farmworkers, suffer heightened risks from extreme weather events but, like the mention of climate change itself, rarely appear on the major networks’ nonstop coverage. One lesson from these back-to-back hurricanes: the climate emergency is real and it impacts us all. As this column goes to press, Floridians are still assessing Milton’s impact. The storm threatened to devastate Tampa, with one projection that a direct, Category 5 hurricane impact on that low-lying city could cause over $230 billion in damage–not to mention the lives lost. While Milton’s path diverged slightly from that worst-case scenario, early damage assessments still paint a dire picture. More than 100 tornado warnings were issued as the powerful, climate-fueled weather system approached Florida’s Gulf Coast. One tornado touched down on Florida’s east coast, killing at least 4 people. Rescuers were still sifting through the wreckage on Thursday, searching for more victims. Scientists are speaking with ever more precision about the impact of the human-induced warming climate on hurricanes and other extreme weather events. Exceptionally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico supercharged both Helene and Milton. NASA’s Earth Observatory noted, “Sea surface temperatures helped fuel [Milton]’s rapid intensification …with winds increasing from 80 to 175 miles per hour in 24 hours.” The World Weather Attribution project, researching links between climate and extreme weather, reported “climate change is enhancing conditions conducive to the most powerful hurricanes like Helene, with more intense rainfall totals and wind speeds,” predicting hurricanes will be more frequent – at least 1.5 times as likely – and stronger, as a result of human-caused climate change. While the science is clear, Republicans like presidential candidate Donald Trump and Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia have been spreading lies with alarming success, falsely claiming that the federal government is directing emergency response funds to immigrants, or, in Green’s case, claiming the government is actually controlling the weather to hurt red states. “I think we’re entering into a really dark new phase reckoning with the climate crisis,” David Wallace-Wells, a columnist with The New York Times, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “Many people are choosing to retreat into little cocoons of disinformation and paranoia. That scares me, in some ways, even more than the weather itself.” While demagogues distract, real people continue to suffer. Far from the 24-hour Milton coverage on cable networks, Florida’s roughly 28,000 incarcerated people were trapped in prisons and jails. Jordan Martinez, an organizer with the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, pressured officials to evacuate incarcerated people before the hurricane hit. “The ongoing situation in Florida has been one of almost complete neglect and fiction writing by the Florida Department of Corrections and various county sheriff’s offices, jails, etc, claiming that incarcerated people are in fact, being evacuated,” Martinez said on Democracy Now! “We were able to achieve one evacuation of the Orient Road Jail in Hillsborough County. But Manatee County, Lee County, Pinellas County, as well as St. Johns County on the eastern coast, all left prisoners in mandatory evacuation zones in the jails.” The Intercept reported that during Hurricane Helene, prisoners in North Carolina, stranded without power, were forced to drink water from toilets and to store their human waste in plastic bags, abandoned by prison guards who protected themselves. Florida’s vast and largely immigrant agricultural workforce also face extraordinary and largely unreported hurricane risks, including inadequate housing. “[Most workers’] mobile homes are really, really old. They are not safe places to be,” Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a farmworker and organizer at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in southwest Florida said on Democracy Now! “Sadly, the conditions of vulnerability, living conditions especially, are horrible in most agricultural communities. It’s all the dangers of climate change. This time, we were lucky that it didn’t hit us directly, but we know that other communities are suffering and are going to be needing support that are in a desperate situation right now. We will be taking steps to try to support them as much as we can.” The Atlantic hurricane season typically runs through November. How many more Helenes and Miltons, how many more preventable climate deaths and wasted billions of dollars, not only here but around the world, will it take before the United States, the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gas pollution, rises to the challenge and genuinely confronts this devastating climate emergency?

00:06:15

Israel Cannot Bomb Its Way to Peace

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Renowned dissident Noam Chomsky wrote in “Fateful Triangle,” his seminal book on Israel/Palestine, “For some time, I’ve been compelled to arrange speaking engagements long in advance. Sometimes a title is requested for a talk scheduled several years ahead. There is, I’ve found, one title that always works: ‘The current crisis in the Middle East.’ One can’t predict exactly what the crisis will be far down the road, but that there will be one is a fairly safe prediction.” While Noam at 95 has left public life, his words from 35 years ago ring chillingly true today. Only now, Israel, backed by the United States, is fanning the flames of what could quickly become a much wider war. One year after Hamas’s attack on Israel, the bombardment, military assault and intense siege of the Gaza Strip continues. The October 7th death toll in Israel included over 1,100 people, while the official death toll in Gaza since then is close to 42,000 (a number many observers consider a gross undercount), climbing daily with ongoing attacks on schools, residential buildings and displacement camps. Reporting on the continued slaughter in Gaza is largely overlooked now, with global attention focused on Lebanon. On one day in Gaza this week, Israel killed over 100 people, with 51 in Khan Younis alone, including 12 children. Gaza’s media office told the Turkish Anadolu Agency that, since last October, Israel has eliminated “902 Palestinian families, erasing them from the civil registry by killing all their members,” and has “exterminated 1,364 Palestinian families by killing all their members, leaving only one individual per family, and…3,472 Palestinian families, leaving just two individuals per family.” An earlier Israeli strike reportedly hit an orphanage. But in a conflict that has created the term, “WCNSF,” for “Wounded Child, No Surviving Family,” perhaps the entire Gaza Strip should be considered an orphanage. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, Israel has begun its ground incursion and stepped up the intensity and range of its aerial assault. This follows its assassination last week of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the massive exploding pager and walkie-talkie attack in Lebanon, which killed over 35 people and injured more than 3,500. Lebanese authorities estimate that the number of displaced has now risen to 1.2 million people, in a nation of 5.8 million. As of Thursday, according to NBC, Lebanese health officials reported 1,300 people in Lebanon had been killed by Israeli military action. Israel, meanwhile, reported eight of its soldiers had been killed in southern Lebanon. In response to the assassination of Nasrallah, Iran launched an estimated 180 ballistic missiles at military targets in Israel, with little damage reported. “We were left with no choice but to respond. If Israel decides to retaliate, then it will face harsher reactions,” Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said, following the attack. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told CNN,“Now is the time that we can attack, because Iran is fully vulnerable. The Islamic Republic of Iran, it’s time to hit.” Lebanese attorney Nadim Houry has simple advice for Israel: “Don’t do it.” Houry, executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative, spoke from Paris on the Democracy Now! news hour: “Don’t do it. You will fail. You’ve failed in the past. We know that there is another pathway. There are two central questions that as long as they’re not resolved, the Middle East is not going to know peace. The first one is the Palestine question. And the second one has been central to the region since 1979, which is: What is the legitimate place of Iran…if the region is to know proper peace, we need to answer these two questions.” Nadim Houry points to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the U.S./Israeli claim that the occupation of Iraq would ultimately hurt Iran and reshape the Middle East: “At the time, I remember a younger Netanyahu telling the Americans in Congress, ‘It’s all going to be fine. Iran is going to lose. We’re going to have democracy. Everyone is going to welcome us.’ Well, guess what: It didn’t turn out exactly the same way. Yes, the U.S. had overwhelming power. Yes, the U.S. invaded and occupied Iraq. And the occupation was a disaster. And today, Iran is stronger than it ever was.” Last week, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq attacked Eilat, the southern Israeli city on the Red Sea, with a drone. Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthis fired missiles and drones at Israel. Israel bombed Yemen in retaliation. Hamas remains active, and Hezbollah is fighting where it is strongest, on its own terrain. Israel cannot bomb its way to peace, and certainly shouldn’t be allowed to do so with U.S. arms and ammunition. The time is long past for ceasefire and negotiation.

00:06:28