New Orleans Archdiocese Is Target of Child Sex Trafficking Investigation

 

The Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans is the target of an active child sex trafficking investigation, according to a sweeping and unprecedented search warrant Louisiana state police recently served on an organization that for decades has been submerged in the global church’s clergy molestation scandal.

The clerk at the state criminal courthouse where the warrant was signed released the 11-page document Tuesday. It makes clear that troopers involved in a pending rape prosecution against one priest came to suspect that that case was part of a broader pattern of “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported to law enforcement”.

In a stunning assertion made under oath, troopers said they had already recovered documents that “back” the notion that “previous archbishops, the highest-ranking official in the archdiocese, not only knew of the sexual abuse and failed to report all the claims to law enforcement, but spent archdiocese funding to support the accused”.

The warrant requests “ANY and ALL documents that pertain in any way to the sexual abuse of a minor by clergy members employed or otherwise associated with the Archdiocese of New Orleans”, concluding those “records are believed to constitute a violation of” the state’s law against trafficking of children for sexual purposes.

It also seeks “ANY and ALL communications between the Archbishop of New Orleans and ANY department within the Vatican pertaining to child sexual abuse”, among various other files.

The warrant refers to a 48-page memorandum first reported by the Guardian in summer 2023 which summarized secret internal archdiocesan records that the church was required to produce after seeking federal bankruptcy protection in 2020 in order to shield itself from a steadily growing wave of abuse-related litigation.

The memo described that New Orleans’ current archbishop, Gregory Aymond, repeatedly ignored his own advisers who suggested he discipline and publicly reveal the identities of multiple priests and deacons facing substantial, credible accusations of abuse.

Those decisions largely kept the public – and law enforcement – from learning of the accusations until they were reported by journalists years, if not decades, later. It also let clergymen facing abuse allegations to collect lucrative financial benefits that weren’t interrupted until a bankruptcy judge ordered them to cease, and then only partially, with health and medical assistance ultimately left intact.

Attorneys for victims of clerical sexual abuse gained access to the documents forming the basis of that key memo because their clients’ cases became part of the church’s bankruptcy proceedings. Those lawyers handed the memo to law enforcement in 2022, when federal investigators – assisted by state troopers – began investigating New Orleans clergy for possibly violating federal law by taking children across state lines for the purposes of sexual abuse.

The warrant released Tuesday recounted how investigators had gathered statements from “multiple victims … transported … outside of Louisiana where they were sexually abused”.

“Additionally, it was reported that in some instances, ‘gifts’ were given to abuse victims by the accused [molesters] with instructions to pass on or give the gift to certain priests at the next school or church,” the warrant contended. “It was said that the ‘gift’ was a form of signaling to another priest that the person was a target for sexual abuse.”

The warrant also described how victims reported being brought to a seminary that trains Catholic priests in New Orleans – adjacent to the city’s archdiocese – to swim nude in the pool and get “sexually assaulted or abused”.

“This was discovered to be a common occurrence, and it was reported that other members of the archdiocese were present at the pool at the time,” the troopers’ sworn statement maintained. “Although not all, many of the alleged sexual abuse cases or incidents occurred on archdiocese property.”

Such statements gave investigators reasonable suspicion “of previous widespread child sexual [and] determined that further investigation into the archdiocese of New Orleans was necessary”.

The state trooper who obtained the warrant released Tuesday was the same one who arrested 92-year-old retired priest Lawrence Hecker – an acknowledged serial child molester – on rape and kidnapping charges that a grand jury handed up against the clergyman in the fall.

Hecker has pleaded not guilty in connection with allegations that he strangled a teenaged boy unconscious and then sodomized him while they were at a church in 1975.

The warrant released Tuesday alludes to how the victim in that case reported his attack to his principal, Paul Calamari, “but no legal action was taken”.

Troopers’ sworn statement reveals that they questioned Calamari, who is described but not named in the document. During that interrogation, Calamari confessed to molesting a child in the 1970s, an act which eventually led to his being included alongside Hecker in an archdiocesan-released list of priests and deacons whom the New Orleans church considered to be credibly accused molesters.

Since almost immediately following that roster’s release, clergy abuse victims and their advocates have argued that the list omits countless names that should be on it. The church has been forced to add more than 20 names to that list since it was first published, in part because of investigations by WWL and its reporting partners that scrutinized clerics whose cases fit the criteria.

Aymond released the credibly accused roster as the archdiocese struggled to manage continued fallout from the worldwide church’s ongoing clerical sexual abuse crisis.

The search warrant is believed to mark the first-time authorities have sought the entire written history of the archdiocese’s management of clergy abuse cases under its watch. New Orleans judge Juana Lombard signed the warrant on 22 April, and state police served it at a meeting with archdiocese officials three days later.

But the court clerk was not able to get a copy of the warrant until 30 April as the police prevented the clerk from accessing the document and claimed the record was part of an ongoing criminal investigation. The court provided it to WWL and the Guardian in response to a public records request.

-Ramon Antonio Vargas & David Hammer, The Guardian

Commentary:

“The gospels tell followers of Jesus to be meek, humble, generous, forgiving, loving, merciful, nonjudgmental, noncritical, and repentant. Christians must turn the other cheek when slapped, share their property and give it to those who would take it; always go the extra mile and accommodate those who would borrow from them. They must love their enemies and pray for their persecutors (Matthew 5:38-45; Luke 6:27-30; Luke 6;36-38). Jesus also forbids his followers from being angry with their brethren, on pain of judgment and hellfire, and urges them to reconcile and come to agreement with their adversaries (Matthew 5:23-25). He admonishes them to treat others as they would have others treat them (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31), and he warns them against ‘taking up the sword’ (Matthew 26:52).

“But how many self-professed Christians actually behave according to gospel values? Such believers would never, for example, deny anyone food, shelter, or medical benefits, regardless of the needy party’s condition of birth, financial circumstances, race, immigration status, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation.  They would not look down on the poor and consider them unworthy of help. They would welcome immigrants, especially those seeking asylum, rather than imprisoning them. If their churches were wealthy, they would demand the sale of church assets to help fund care for the poor. They would not hoard weapons of war or attempt to overthrow honest elections. And they would laugh at the ‘Christian prosperity’ proponents, who according to the gospels have received their reward and will receive nothing more in Heaven.

“According to Jesus, people should view life on Earth as a trial venue, an audition for Heaven, in which their behavior will largely determine where they’ll spend the rest of eternity once they die.  Those who fill his stated criteria (and also happen to be gifted with God’s ‘grace’) will ascend to Heaven (John 12:25 and 12:28). Everyone else (i.e. most of humanity) will be tortured forever in Hell. Judging by widespread Christian behavior, this torture will include enduring the company of most of the self-professed Christians who ever lived” (Davis). 

And what do we make of the Catholic Church's history of ignoring priestly pedophilia and its cultural genocide and deaths of Indigenous children by Catholic clergy?  How can we reconcile with the Catholic Church's flagrant complicity and hypocrisy?  How can we forgive Christian ethnic cleansing and the divine Manifest Destiny? And what should we make of today's theocratic fascists, these white Christian Nationalistic misogynists and homophobes who are repressing women's rights and LTGBQ? And what about Christianity's archaic ideologies and indoctrination of a need for salvation perpetuated through irrational fear and guilt?

 -Glen Brown

Davis, Dan. “How to Be a Christian according to Jesus,” Free Inquiry, August/September 2023, Vol. 43 No. 5.

The wartime outrage in Gaza that no one is talking about

 

Trust me, you do not want to watch Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary, “Screams Before Silence,” about sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 and beyond.

Trust me, you should.

You should watch it and speak out, about how rape and gender violence were deployed as weapons of war. About breasts cut from bodies. About nails driven into a woman’s vagina.

About the piercing screams of women being assaulted — and the appalling silence of prominent individuals and organizations, including women and women’s groups, that would ordinarily rush to condemn such atrocities but whose reaction has for some reason been muted when it comes to gender violence deployed against Israeli women.

None of this is to diminish the terrible damage inflicted on the civilian population in Gaza, the loss of life, the trauma, the hunger approaching famine proportions. But the violence described in Sandberg’s documentary, directed by Israeli filmmaker Anat Stalinsky, occupies a different plane of calculated cruelty — indeed, of evil.

The world that assails Israel for its conduct of the war in Gaza should be speaking out about Hamas’s concerted assault on women. The terrorist group can deny this all it wants, but any repudiations are belied by the facts: The sexual violence was not isolated but repeated and methodical, from bloody venue to bloody venue.

Hamas’s denials are contradicted by the findings of a United Nations report last month that found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape, in at least three locations.”

It continued, in the anodyne language of investigators: “Across the various locations of the 7 October attacks, the mission team found that several fully naked or partially naked bodies from the waist down were recovered — mostly women — with hands tied and shot multiple times, often in the head. Although circumstantial, such a pattern of undressing and restraining of victims may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence.”

Likewise, the U.N. report found, with respect to the hostages, “clear and convincing information that some have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and … reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing.” Where is the outrage?

Where is the condemnation?

“I think politics are blinding us,” Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Facebook, told me in a Zoom call. “I think people have become so polarized and so bought into their frameworks that they’re not able to see information that doesn’t align with those frameworks.”

Sandberg paused, then added, “I think there’s some antisemitism happening as part of this.”
Sandberg calls the documentary “the most important work of my life.”

You can find it on YouTube, all 57 harrowing minutes. You will see: hostage Naama Levy, 19 at the time of her abduction from the Nahal Oz military base, her gray sweatpants with an enormous apparent bloodstain around the crotch, hands bound behind her back, as she is dragged, screaming, off the back of a vehicle.

You will hear:

— Tali Binner, who hid in a trailer at the Nova music festival for seven hours as she heard the extended screams, then the silence, which gave rise to the film’s title. “When I heard someone scream and then silence, I knew that it’s probably someone gets shot,” Binner said. “But when you hear this chaos for 20 minutes … you understand something else much worse is happening right over there.”

— Raz Cohen, another survivor of the music festival, on watching a pickup truck arrive at the site. “Some terrorists got out and grabbed a girl there,” he recalled. “There was kind of a semicircle around her, and one of them raped her. I remember that her pants were halfway on, and he was behind her … and when I looked again, she was already dead, and he was still at it. He was still raping her after he had slaughtered her.”

— Rami Davidian, a first responder. “I saw girls tied up with their hands behind them to every tree here. … Their legs were spread. … Someone stripped them. Someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. … I had to close their legs and cover their bodies so no one else would see what I saw.”

You will hear, for the first time on video, Amit Soussana, held hostage for 55 days after being kidnapped from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, describe how her captor sexually abused her. “He started touching me, and I resisted, and then he dragged me to the bedroom, and then he forced me to commit a sexual act on him. 

And I remember, the entire time, I was thinking: ‘Amit, okay, you knew it’s going to happen. It’s really happening.’ I said to myself: ‘Okay, you can handle this. You just want to survive.’”

Soussana wasn’t alone. “Your body is simply open to everyone,” said another freed hostage, Agam Goldstein-Almog, 17 when she was abducted from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where her father and older sister were murdered. “They can wake you up in the middle of the night and rape you, and the whole time, a gun is pointed at your head.” Of the female captives, half were sexually and physically abused, Goldstein-Almog estimated. “And they’re still there, still living with their rapists.”

But you won’t see or hear the worst of it, partly because we will never know the full extent. Unlike in many situations of sexual violence during wartime, most of the victims were murdered; they cannot describe what they endured. For reasons of religious practice (it is Jewish custom to bury bodies quickly) and responders being too overwhelmed by the extent of the carnage, forensic evidence is lacking.

And the filmmakers deemed some of the most searing evidence too gruesome and too intrusive to be shown. “It’s actually worse than you are able to show,” Sandberg said, her eyes filling with tears. “Much worse.”

The silence is deafening. The burden is on us to break it.

-Ruth Marcus, Washington Post

We have a radical democracy. Will Trump voters destroy it? by Robert Kagan

 

For some time, it was possible to believe that many voters could not see the threat Donald Trump poses to America’s liberal democracy, and many still profess not to see it. But now, a little more than six months from Election Day, it’s hard to believe they don’t.

The warning signs are clear enough. Trump himself offers a new reason for concern almost every day. People may choose to ignore the warnings or persuade themselves not to worry, but they can see what we all see, and that should be enough.

How to explain their willingness to support Trump despite the risk he poses to our system of government? The answer is not rapidly changing technology, widening inequality, unsuccessful foreign policies or unrest on university campuses but something much deeper and more fundamental. It is what the Founders worried about and Abraham Lincoln warned about: a decline in what they called public virtue.

They feared it would be hard to sustain popular support for the revolutionary liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence, and they worried that the virtuous love of liberty and equality would in time give way to narrow, selfish interest.

Although James Madison and his colleagues hoped to establish a government on the solid foundation of self-interest, even Madison acknowledged that no government by the people could be sustained if the people themselves did not have sufficient dedication to the liberal ideals of the Declaration. The people had to love liberty, not just for themselves but as an abstract ideal for all humans.

Americans are going down this route today because too many no longer care enough whether the system the Founders created survives and are ceding the ground to those, led by Trump, who actively seek to overthrow what so many of them call “the regime.”

 

This “regime” they are referring to is the unique political system established by the Founders based on the principles of universal equality and natural rights. That, plain and simple, is what this election is about. “A republic if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin allegedly said of the government created by the Constitutional Convention in 1787. This is the year we may choose not to keep it.

 

A healthy republic would not be debating whether Trump and his followers seek the overthrow of the Founders’ system of liberal democracy. What more do people need to see than his well-documented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power with the storming of the U.S. Capitol, the elaborate scheme to create false electoral slates in key states, the clear evidence that he bullied officials in some states to “find” more votes, and to persuade Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the legitimate results?

 

What more do they need to know than that Trump continues to insist he won that election and celebrates as heroes and “patriots” the people who invaded the U.S. Capitol and smashed policemen’s faces with the stated aim of forcing Congress to negate the election results? As one 56-year-old Michigan woman present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, explained: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

Trump not only acknowledges his goals, past and present; he promises to do it again if he loses this year. For the third straight election, he is claiming that if he loses, then the vote will have been fraudulent. He has warned of uprisings, of “bedlam” and a “bloodbath,” and he has made clear that he will again be the promoter of this violence, just as he was on Jan. 6.

 

Trump explicitly warned in 2020 that he would not accept the election results if he lost, and he didn’t. This year he is saying it again. Were there no other charges against him, no other reason to be concerned about his return to the presidency, this alone would be sufficient to oppose him.

 

He does not respect and has never pledged to abide by the democratic processes established by the Constitution. On the contrary, he has explicitly promised to violate the Constitution when he deems it necessary. That by itself makes him a unique candidate in American history and should be disqualifying.

 

This kind of open challenge to our democracy was never meant to be addressed by the courts. As the Founders well understood, you don’t serve a subpoena to a would-be tyrant and tell him to lawyer up. Nor was it meant to be addressed by the normal processes of democratic elections. They knew, and feared, that a demagogue could capture the allegiance of enough voters to overthrow the system.

 

That was why they gave Congress, and particularly the Senate, supposedly more immune from popular pressures, the power to impeach and remove presidents and to deny them the opportunity to run again — and not simply because they violated some law but because they posed a clear and present danger to the republic.

 

After Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government in 2020, Congress had a chance to use the method prescribed by the Founders in precisely the circumstances they envisioned. But Senate Republicans, out of a combination of ambition and cowardice, refused to play the vital role the Founders envisioned for them. The result is that the nightmare feared by the Founders is one election away from becoming reality…

 

-Robert Kagan

For the entire article:

Opinion | Robert Kagan: Will Trump voters destroy America’s radical democracy? - The Washington Post

 

Presidential Immunity by Joyce Vance

 

[Yesterday,] we focused on Trump’s appeal to the Supreme Court after Judge Chutkan denied his motion to dismiss the Special Counsel’s election interference case, claiming he has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.

It was a sobering experience, even with a Court that has shown a propensity to abandon first principles, precedent, history, common sense, and the good of the American people when their political allegiances demand it. The outcome of the case is far from certain. The argument was disheartening.

I had the interesting experience of commenting on the argument on location, in the “Senate Swamp,” which is across the street from the Court. The location came complete with a protestor who loudly yelled “fake news” at us for several hours, a sign of the times.

This is a court that’s concerned with future presidents and the rules that guide their conduct as much as they are with Trump. In fact, the argument was oddly devoid of mention of the former president by name. Usually, an oral argument focuses on a defendant and his conduct.

Not so here. This was all about future presidents and how they would execute their constitutional duties. The six conservative Justices left Donald Trump on the periphery for the most part, with the possible exception of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

But make no mistake about it. The case is all about Donald Trump and whether he can be prosecuted for the most serious of his crimes against the American people, trying to hold onto power after losing the 2020 election. It’s also about the legacy of the Roberts Court and whether history will view the already unpopular Justices as the Court that gave away democracy.

A big question is why Clarence Thomas, whose wife was involved in January 6, decided it was appropriate for him to participate in this case and why no one intervened. His presence on the bench today was a blot on the Court and the rule of law. We are forced to set that one aside for the moment. There is a possibility he could be part of a 5-4 majority that gives the former president a reprieve from prosecution.

After the dust cleared, it seemed that the three progressive Justices, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, and to a lesser extent perhaps, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, were interested in finding a path forward that would clear the way for prosecution.

Despite some early questions that suggested they weren’t buying absolute immunity, as the argument developed, it became increasingly clear that Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh were all willing to throw Trump a lifeline in some shape or form.

Kavanaugh dug in on a pro-Trump argument that says a former president can’t be prosecuted under any statute that doesn’t explicitly say the president can be prosecuted, an argument that has the effect of de facto immunity since few statutes do. Justice Gorsuch joined in to make the point that an obscure statute, 18 U.S.C. 1607, expressly provides for prosecuting the president.

It reads, in pertinent part, “It shall be unlawful for an individual who is an officer or employee of the Federal Government, including the President, Vice President, and Members of Congress, to solicit or receive a donation of money or other thing of value in connection with a Federal, State, or local election, while in any room or building.”

The overwhelming majority of statutes don’t, for the obvious reason that once a president leaves office he’s a private citizen and there is no need for the inclusion.

But it became clear this was a significant issue for several of the conservative justices who engaged in pearl-clutching over how broad the statute Jack Smith used to charge Trump with conspiracy to defraud the government, 18 U.S.C. 371, is.

The Special Counsel’s office argued in its brief that Trump was not entitled to absolute immunity and that even if there was some small scope of immunity for a president’s official acts, it clearly did not apply to Trump’s conduct. Jack Smith’s office reasoned that meant that applying first principles, the Court should not decide issues that were unnecessary to resolve the case in front of it and should remand the case to Judge Chutkan for pre-trial proceedings to recommence.

That doesn’t seem to be how this will go, although it can be notoriously difficult to read the tea leaves in oral argument, where the Justices sometimes appear to be arguing the case as much to each other as with the litigants.

One concession came from the Trump side early in the argument, with Trump lawyer John Sauer agreeing that there was no immunity for private acts committed by a former president while in office. The absolute immunity they claim is for official acts, not private ones.

In this case, the distinction amounts to that between official acts taken by President Trump and private ones taken by candidate Trump. That is an approach that is appealing in some ways.

The Special Counsel had argued in his brief, as a fallback position, that the indictment alleged sufficient private conduct to prosecute Trump on even if they lost all of the official conduct.

They maintained they were entitled to use certain acts that the Court might view as official—like the effort to subvert DOJ by appointing a new Attorney General or the pressure campaign on Mike Pence—as evidence of Trump’s knowledge and/or intent.

They agreed today that if this happened, the jury should get a limiting instruction, telling them they could not consider that evidence as part of the charges but only as evidence of Trump’s state of mind.

After the briefs were in, that seemed like the Special Counsel’s rock bottom worst-outcome in the case. Not ideal, but certainly a position that would let them proceed to trial with the scope of the charges narrowed but still capturing significant criminal conduct.

But, after today’s argument, it’s clear that isn’t the worst outcome that is on the table. Early in the argument, Justice Sotomayor proposed the notion that a former president might get some limited immunity for official acts that were undertaken to protect the country, like Obama’s anti-terrorism strikes, as opposed to Trump’s actions, whose only beneficiary was himself.

She pointed out that immunity means no prosecution for conduct committed for purely personal gain. That logical notion got no traction during argument.

Even Justice Alito, at one point early on, suggested an objective test rather than absolute immunity. He questioned Sauer about his claim immunity was essential to the functioning of the presidency, asking whether “full immunity” was really necessary or whether he’d agree to a rule that allowed prosecution for official acts unless no plausible justification could be imagined.

Sauer agreed that might be better than the distinction between official and private conduct, despite having conceded already that there was no immunity for private conduct. Of course, Alito’s objective standard is in the eye of the beholder, and as slick as some of the Justices have become, perhaps they could “imagine” a “plausible justification” for everything Trump has done, again bestowing de facto immunity.

The one place where it appeared Trump was likely to lose was on his argument that a former president must be impeached and convicted before he can be prosecuted for an official act. Although five votes might be there, we didn’t hear that today. But it wasn’t smooth sailing for the government beyond that.

All paths seemed to lead to the bad place. At what looked like a four-four split the vote of the Chief Justice seemed to be the one that is in play. And he was difficult to read. On the one hand, would he truly want to sign off as the last majority vote on an opinion that would be so damaging to the rule of law he has always claimed to stand for?

But on the other, he didn’t take the strong stand for the rule of law and the executive branch’s power of prosecution you might expect if he was aligned there. For instance, while Justice Jackson opined that any conduct committed by candidate Trump could clearly be prosecuted and it was essential to have a check on a criminal president or in the future, the Oval Office could be reduced to a hub for crime, Justice Gorsuch seemed more concerned with the possibility prosecutors might abuse their power.

Michael Dreeben, arguing for the Special Counsel and the Justice Department, pointed to the layers of checks on prosecutorial power, from the need to persuade a grand jury to indict, to the role of the trial judge in calling balls and strikes, to the decision of a jury, and on to the multi-tiered appellate process.

But Gorsuch didn’t seem interested. In fact, every time Dreeben tried to respond to questions they asked him and began to score points, they seemingly lost interest, never permitting him to get in a full answer.

He also argued presidents have access to extraordinarily good legal counsel from their attorney general, who could help them decide whether a course of action was legal before embarking on it and are otherwise protected from abuse by judicial construction of statutes and the availability of defense, like one called public authority, again being cut off before he could make his full argument. The Chief Justice was nowhere to be seen in any of this.

[The] argument got way down into these legal weeds. One theme emerged: the likelihood that whatever the ultimate majority in the case looks like, it’s very likely that it will involve crafting rules about the scope of immunity.

That could mean sending the case back on remand, Sauer suggested to the trial court, for a decision about whether or not, on the facts in this case and given whatever rule the Supreme Court lands on, Trump is entitled to immunity.

And that, of course, would take more time. Delay is a win for Trump, putting the case out of even theoretical reach for prosecution before voting starts, since Judge Chutkan has already told Trump he has at least 81 days left on the clock for trial preparation after jurisdiction is restored to her.

We don’t know for certain where Chief Justice Roberts is and how he will vote. But if this comes to a decision that some conduct does get immunity and the trial judge must make those rulings, there is one possible silver lining. Judge Chutkan could hold an evidentiary hearing on remand to facilitate her decision.

That would mean briefs and even live testimony where the government would get to lay out all of its evidence against Trump.

It’s not a full trial followed by a jury verdict. But if this case isn’t going to trial, it would be one way of getting more information about Donald Trump’s conduct out for public consumption.

The House January 6 committee hearings gripped the nation. The Special Counsel, with access to the powers of an investigative grand jury and the possibility of more cooperating witnesses, especially from other charged cases, would have an even larger story to tell.

When it comes to delay, there was an interesting filing in Mar-a-Lago today. Trump’s lawyer, Chris Kise, notified the court he would be out for surgery from April 29 to May 14.

His absence will likely delay the CIPA Section 5 proceedings over classified information and its use at trial. More delay. Sometimes delay is legitimate and unavoidable. Set your expectations accordingly.

Near the end of today’s argument, Justice Jackson put all the cards on the table, suggesting the Court should just answer the question they took the case on: Is a former president entitled to immunity for criminal acts committed while president, and if so, what is the scope of that immunity?

It would be the right way to resolve the important question the nation faces. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like where we’re headed.

Enormous thanks to those of you who, through your monthly and yearly subscriptions, are providing financial support for the work I do. You let me devote the time and resources necessary to write Civil Discourse. If you’re not already a paid subscriber and you’re enjoying the newsletter, I hope you’ll consider it. We live in challenging times, and I understand that not everyone can or wants to buy a paid subscription. I’m happy to have you here either way!

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance

 

Palestinians as “The Others” by Ralph Nader

 

Image by Sohaib Al Kharsa

Throughout history, military empires have reduced their victims, their subjugated, and their abducted to a state of “The Others.” The political and mass media institutions usually follow suit by supporting their empire’s predatory policies with slanted coverage.

 

Such is the case with the U.S. global and the Israeli regional empires. The U.S. federal government and the mainstream media often move in lockstep.

 

For example, take the word “terrorism.” The New York Times regularly refers the Hamas regime as “terrorists,” while describing the far more extensive Israeli acts of state terrorism as “military operations.” Since October 7^th, the Israeli military superpower has killed over 500 times more children than Hamas killed in their raid through a still uninvestigated collapse of Israel’s vaunted multi-tiered border security.

 

Apart from a massively greater overall civilian toll inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza – the vast undercount stands at 34,000 Palestinian deaths compared to the deaths of 1,139 Israeli civilians, soldiers, and foreign workers.

 

This staggering ratio – over 14,000 Palestinian children (with many thousands under the rubble) compared to 30 Israeli children – escapes proper reporting. “The Others” don’t get accurate coverage as was also the case with huge Iraqi losses during the Bush/Cheney criminal war. (See, the March 5, 2024, column: Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza).

 

Take the use of the term “hostage.” Hamas seized over 240 Israelis hostages on October 7^th. Since then, the Israeli army has seized about 9000 Palestinians, including women and children, and taken them without charges, along with many more thousands languishing in these prison camps also without charges for years (it’s called Israel’s “administrative detention”). Many of the imprisoned Palestinians are being tortured. Who has gotten the far greater attention? Aren’t these Palestinian hostages also? Again “The Others.”

 

How about the application of the right to self-defense? Every state has the right to self-defense. Count the many times you have heard, “Israel has a right to defend itself” compared to “Palestine has a right to defend itself.” Members of Congress who bellow the former declaration daily cannot get themselves to say the latter.

 

It is a forbidden phrase. Yet, who is the violently occupying, colonizing, land, and water-stealing party? Israel. For over fifty years, more than 400 times more innocent Palestinians have been killed and injured compared to innocent Israeli civilians. Where is the detailed coverage of the loss of life from enforced destitution and denial of life-saving medicines, equipment, and emergency transport to health facilities? Again, it is “The Others.”

 

“The Others” are always described with less charitable words. In a meticulous content analysis by The Intercept of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post between October 7 and November 24, the use of the words “slaughtered,” “horrific” and “massacre” in relation to Israeli and Palestinians killed was 218 to 9!

 

The Intercept said Israel’s war on Gaza is “perhaps the deadliest war for children – almost entirely Palestinian – in modern history.” There is scant mention of the word “children” and related terms in the headlines of articles in that span of time.

 

(Note, reporters from these papers are like the rest of the mainstream Western media reports, including Israeli journalists, who have been long banned by the Israeli government from freely reporting from inside Gaza, but have managed to write some exceptionally graphic stories from a distance.)

 

Palestinian Arabs are denied the description of armed-force anti-semitism by the Israeli war machine. Arabs are Semites and have long been the victims of violent racist, hate-filled anti-semitism by brutal Israeli leaders. (See the “Anti-Semitism Against Arab and Jewish Americans” speech by Jim Zogby and DebatingTaboos.org).

 

The Intercept reported that the three newspapers mentioned anti-semitism against Jews in the U.S. 549 times compared to 79 mentions of Islamophobia, notwithstanding, far more frequent, and violent assaults on Muslims and Arabs.

 

Western medical doctors spending a few weeks in bombed Gaza hospitals are personal witnesses of scenes beyond any level of deliberate slaughter they have ever experienced in their courageous service in troubled areas around the world.

 

Ambulances, hospitals, and thousands of families – adults, children, women, and babies alike – huddling in areas outside these facilities are routinely bombed, and shelled by Israeli planes and tanks, and targeted by Israeli snipers. Courageous Israeli human rights groups and refuseniks will detail more of the mayhem over time.

 

Biden’s chosen humanitarian aid emissary David Satterfield did not mince words in his remarks during a virtual event hosted by the American Jewish Committee, “there is an imminent risk of famine for the majority, if not all, the 2.2. million population of Gaza.” According to Satterfield, “This is not a point in debate. It is an established fact, which the United States, its experts, the international community, its experts assess and believe is real…”

 

Still, the duplicitous Netanyahu twirling the hapless Joe Biden around his bloody fingers continues to obstruct the entry of hundreds of trucks with critical food, water, and medicine, sometimes paid for by U.S. taxpayers that are lined up daily at the borders of Gaza. Netanyahu continues to enforce, whenever he can, the genocidal orders by his barbaric ministers on October 8 – “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water. …We are fighting animals and will act accordingly.”

 

To the White House and the Netanyahu-dominated U.S. Congress, violating numerous federal laws, (See the April 19, 2024, Letter to President Joe Biden), the response is to make the American taxpayers continue to pay billions of dollars to unconditionally weaponize further the Israeli death machine in Gaza, right down to 2000-pound bombs that destroy entire civilian neighborhoods. After all, Gazans are “The Others.”

 

The streets of America have come alive with valiant Jewish, Muslim, and Christian protestors joining together and showing up wherever Biden and other callous politicians speak such as Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) who said, “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza.”

 

After 76 years of Congress blocking testimony by leading Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates, more lawmakers are starting to listen. But many more in Congress –– are still mired in their clenched-jaw obeisance to the AIPAC lobby. It is time to stop the rubble ‘bouncing’ over decomposing bodies in the besieged tiny Gaza Strip.

 

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 

-CounterPoint