Putin likely supplied the missile that downed flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, investigators say
Sinéad Baker – February 8, 2023
Lawyers attend the judges’ inspection of the MH17 wreckage, on May 26, 2021 in Reijen, Netherlands.Photo by Piroschka van de Wouw – Pool/Getty Images
Putin likely gave separatists the missile that hit flight MH17, investigators said on Wednesday.
298 people died when the Malaysian Airlines flight was shot down in 2014.
But prosecutors said they can’t pursue suspects due to the high bar of proof necessary.
Russian President Vladimir Putin likely supplied the missile system that shot down flight MH17 in July 2014, killing 298 people onboard, international investigators said on Wednesday.
The team has been investigating the crash since August 2014, and said in a statement that there are “strong indications” that the Russian president decided on supplying the missile system to separatists in Ukraine.
Investigators have previously said that the Malaysia Airlines plane was shot down by a Buk missile brought from Russia to a field in Ukraine.
They said on Wednesday that the separatists had asked for longer-range anti-aircraft systems and that there is “concrete information” that the separatists’ request was presented to the Russian president, and that this request was granted.
But, they added, it’s not known whether their request explicitly mentioned the missile system that was later used to shoot down MH17.
Nor was it ultimately clear if Putin “deliberately assisted in the downing of MH17.”
The site of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 plane crash near Grabovo in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, July 17, 2014.Reuters
Investigators said on Wednesday that the evidence was not strong enough to formally accuse Putin.
“Although we speak of strong indications, the high bar of complete and conclusive evidence is not reached. Furthermore, the President enjoys immunity in his position as Head of State,” they said in the statement.
Prosecutors also said on Monday that they did not have enough evidence to pursue criminal proceedings against anyone else associated with the crash.
A Dutch court sentenced three men — Russian nationals Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko — to life in prison last November over the downing of the plane. But the men are still at large.
The plane, a Boeing 777, was flying from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It was shot down over eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists had taken over parts of the country.
Netherlands Ukraine MH17 Digna van Boetzelaer, the Netherlands, Andy Kraag, the Netherlands, David McLean, Australia, Asha Hoe Soo Lian, Malaysia, Eric van der Sypt, Belgium, and Oleksandr Bannyk, Ukraine, from left to right, are seen during the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) holds a news conference in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023.Digna van Boetzelaer, the Netherlands, Andy Kraag, the Netherlands, David McLean, Australia, Asha Hoe Soo Lian, Malaysia, Eric van der Sypt, Belgium, and Oleksandr Bannyk, Ukraine, take their seats for the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) news conference in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023, on the results of the ongoing investigation into other parties involved in the downing of flight MH17 on 17 July 2014. The JIT investigated the crew of the Buk-TELAR, a Russian made rocket launcher, and those responsible for supplying this Russian weapon system that downed MH17. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)People walk amongst the debris at the crash site of a passenger plane near the village of Grabovo, Ukraine, July 17, 2014. An international team is presenting an update Wednesday Feb. 8, 2023 on its investigation into the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine. The announcement comes nearly three months after a Dutch court convicted two Russians and a Ukrainian rebel for their roles in shooting down the Boeing 777 and killing all 298 people on board on July 17, 2014. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky, File)
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — An international team of investigators said Wednesday it found “strong indications” that Russian President Vladimir Putin approved the supply of heavy anti-aircraft weapons to Ukrainian separatists who shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014 with a Russian missile.
However, members of the Joint Investigation Team said they had insufficient evidence to prosecute Putin or any other suspects and they suspended their 8½-year inquiry into the shooting down that killed all 298 people on board the Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
Russia has always denied any involvement in the downing of the flight over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, and refused to cooperate with the international investigation.
Dutch prosecutors said that “there are strong indications that the Russian president decided on supplying” a Buk missile system — the weapon that downed MH17 — to Ukrainian separatists.
“Although we speak of strong indications, the high bar of complete and conclusive evidence is not reached,” Dutch prosecutor Digna van Boetzelaer said, adding that without Russian cooperation, “the investigation has now reached its limit. All leads have been exhausted.”
She also said that, as head of state, Putin would have immunity from prosecution in the Netherlands. The team played a recording of an intercepted phone call in which they said Putin could be heard discussing the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
“Are we disappointed? No, because we think we came further than we had ever thought in 2014. Would we have liked to come further? Of course, yes,” said Andy Kraag of the Dutch police.
The team informed relatives of those killed in the downing of MH17 of their findings before making them public.
“There was disappointment because … they wanted to know why MH17 was shot down,” Kraag said. “We’re really clear on what has happened, but the answer to the question why MH17 was shot down still remains in Russia.”
Van Boetzelaer said that while the investigation is being suspended, phone lines will remain open for possible witnesses who may still want to provide evidence. If that happens, the inquiry could be reactivated.
Russian officials say that a decision to provide rebels with military support over the summer of 2014 was in Putin’s hands.
A decision to supply arms was even postponed for a week “because there is only one who makes a decision (…), the person who is currently at a summit in France,” the investigative team said, citing a phone conversation that was referring to Putin.
Prosecutors said that at the time Putin was at a commemoration of D-Day in France.
The announcement by the investigative team comes nearly three months after a Dutch court convicted two Russians and a Ukrainian rebel for their roles in shooting down the plane. One Russian was acquitted by the court.
None of the suspects appeared for the trial and it was unclear if the three who were found guilty of multiple murders will ever serve their sentences.
The convictions and the court’s finding that the surface-to-air Buk missile came from a Russian military base were seen as a clear indication that Moscow had a role in the tragedy. Russia has always denied involvement. The Russian Foreign Ministry accused the court in November of bowing to pressure from Dutch politicians, prosecutors and the news media.
But the November convictions held that Moscow was in overall control in 2014 over the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, the separatist area of eastern Ukraine where the missile was launched. The Buk missile system came from the Russian military’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, based in the city of Kursk.
The Joint Investigation Team is made up of experts from the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, Belgium and Ukraine. Most of the victims were Dutch. It had continued to investigate the crew of the missile system that brought down the plane and those who ordered its deployment in Ukraine.
As well as the criminal trial that was held in the Netherlands, the Dutch and Ukrainian governments are suing Russia at the European Court of Human Rights over its alleged role in the downing of MH17.
The findings revealed Wednesday will likely strengthen the case at the human rights court and could also be used by prosecutors at the International Criminal Court who are investigating possible war crimes in Ukraine dating back to the start of the separatist conflict.
Russia’s Shadow Army Accused in Mysterious Teen Abductions
Philip Obaji Jr. – February 2, 2023
Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
KENZOU, Cameroon—It was the middle of the night when armed men from the local wing of Russia’s Wagner Group, commonly referred to as “Black Russians,” allegedly arrived at Ali’s home.
“They looked straight into my eyes and said, ‘If you don’t come back to us, you and your family will be killed,’” Ali, who had spent close to a year working closely with the Wagner Group, told The Daily Beast. “They left without saying anything else.”
Ali’s wife, his three adolescent daughters and three adult brothers were allegedly at their three-bedroom home in the outskirts of Berbérati—a city in the southwest of the Central African Republic (CAR)—when the men arrived armed with machine guns. “As they stepped out of the house, one of them looked at me and said ‘Tell your husband to do what is right or else all of you will suffer,’” Fatou*, Ali’s wife, told The Daily Beast.
Minutes later, the armed men allegedly stormed the nearby home of Hassan* and issued him a similar warning, but with a more severe punishment for allegedly masterminding the exit of several Black Russians from the Wagner Group.
“They said if I don’t return to the [Black Russians] group they’ll seize me and my family and torture us for days before they eventually kill us,” Hassan, a former Black Russian who was living in a two-bedroom home with his mother and two teenage sons when the armed men arrived, told The Daily Beast. “They believe I have been the one encouraging other members to leave the group because I was among the first to quit.”
The Wagner Group, which showed up in the war-torn Central African Republic around 2018, has relied heavily on local recruits since last year, after hundreds of its Russian mercenaries were pulled from Central Africa and sent to Ukraine to fight Vladimir Putin’s war. But poor welfare for Black Russians—and fear that they could be deployed to fight overseas without compensation or insurance—has forced many to abandon the group.
The threats to their families weren’t enough to force Ali and Hassan back to the group. Both men subsequently stayed away from their homes to avoid being captured and killed—the kind of punishment the Wagner Group is known to hand out to fighters who disobey orders or desert the organization.
“We didn’t take their threat of harming our families seriously because that is not how they [Wagner mercenaries and local recruits] are known to act,” said Ali, who—along with Hassan—had to squat in a faraway unfinished building, where construction work had long been abandoned, to hide from their former colleagues. “Throughout the time we worked with them, no one targeted anyone’s family. When you commit an offense, you face the consequences on your own.”
Ali and Hassan would later realize that they misjudged the group they had been part of—and that their refusal to rejoin the Black Russians could prove costly.
According to Hassan’s family, the same men who visited the previous week returned to his home and seized his two sons, who are 15 and 13 years old, vowing not to release them until their father returns to the Wagner unit to face discipline. Hassan and his mother, who was the only one at home with the boys when they were taken away, fled to Cameroon the following day as they feared their lives were in danger.
“They dragged my grandsons from the house and threw them into a [pickup] truck and then drove them away,” Hassan’s mother Bintou* told The Daily Beast in the Cameroonian border town of Kenzou, where she and her son live in a single-room mud house. “We don’t even know whether he is dead or alive.”
On the same day Hassan’s sons were seized, Ali’s three younger brothers, who are 27, 24, and 23 years old, left home in the morning to attend a music festival at a playground just outside Berbérati. But they never returned home and no one has seen them since then, according to family members who believe the Wagner Group is responsible for their disappearances.
“It must be the same people who came to our home to threaten us that kidnapped them,” said Ali, who also fled Berbérati to Kenzou along with his wife and daughters. “They want me to meet face to face with them, that’s why they are holding my brothers.”
Three years ago, Ali and Hassan joined the Union for Peace (UPC), a Central African rebel group fighting for control of the Ouaka central province, located at the border between the mainly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south. Their involvement with the UPC, whose leader Ali Darassa was sanctioned over a year ago by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) “for serious human rights abuses”, lasted only a few months. It was cut short by an enticing offer from Wagner Group, run by Putin’s close friend and ally Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Ali and Hassan were among hundreds of UPC rebels who surrendered to the CAR military in December 2021 after both men said they were promised a chance to work with the Wagner Group and earn a monthly pay of about $1,000.
But when Wagner stopped paying some Black Russians after a few months, and many local recruits mysteriously disappeared towards the end of 2022, both Ali and Hassan decided to leave the group and move away from their base in the capital Bangui to Berbérati.
“The main reason some of us left the [Black Russians] group is because we feared they could send us to war in Ukraine without giving us the chance to inform our families,” said Ali, who has been in touch with some of his colleagues deployed to Ukraine in the early months of Russia’s invasion and allegedly abandoned thereafter. “If we die on the battlefield, no one would know anything about it.”
Ali and Hassan believe the Wagner Group’s decision to not reveal the whereabouts of Black Russians deployed to Ukraine’s Donbas region is based on financial reasoning.
“They don’t want to pay the death benefit they promised they will pay to families of fighters who died while in active service,” said Hassan. “If families don’t know their sons are fighting in Ukraine, they won’t also know when they are killed in combat and can’t demand death benefit as a result.”
For years, and especially since a brutal civil war broke out in CAR in 2013, the Cameroonian border town of Kenzou has welcomed thousands of refugees fleeing the conflict in their country. Now, the commercial town has a new type of guests: ex-Wagner recruits running away from imminent attacks from their former employers.
“We know for sure that there are former CAR rebels now living in this town with us,” Vincent Olembe, a local chief in Kenzou, told The Daily Beast. “Luckily, they’ve assured us that they aren’t here for trouble but were forced from their country because their lives were in danger.”
The CAR government and Prigozhin did not respond to a series of requests for comment on the allegations made by Ali and Hassan. The Daily Beast sent emails to the spokesperson of the CAR government and to Concord Management, a company majority-owned by Prigozhin, but did not receive a reply.
In Kenzou, Ali and Hassan are confident that their family members wouldn’t be hurt by the Wagner Group or those working closely with them. They believe the Russians will use them as leverage.
“If they [the seized family members] were women, I would have been worried,” said Hassan, who—like Ali—turns 40 this year. “But from the way I know them to operate, anyone who is arrested or captured is offered a chance to join the Black Russians and be forgiven or punished if he refuses.”
One day, said Hassan, “I’ll reunite with my boys.”
*The names of these sources have been changed for fear of retribution.
MAPLEWOOD, N.J. — It was dark by the time Eve Morawski managed to break into her home of 60 years.
The locks had been changed by sheriff’s deputies enforcing an eviction order. Movers hired by investors who took possession of the house after she fell behind on taxes had been inside most of the day, packing up photos and knickknacks her family had spent a lifetime accumulating.
She was infuriated to find the house in disarray.
Sometime before dawn, a police report shows, she located a book of matches and a knife.
“Jersey Girl Justice will hopefully prevail in the end,” Morawski wrote to friends on Facebook just before fire trucks began roaring down the pretty block in Maplewood, New Jersey.
“Aloha.”
To neighbors, the Dec. 7 fire that burst from second-floor windows and licked at the eaves of Morawski’s former home was a spectacularly sad end to an epic real estate battle that had played out publicly on social media and in state and federal courts. To her only sister, it was a tragic, avoidable coda to a 20-year family feud.
“There’s a lingering sense of: Is there something more as a community we could have done to help?” said John Guterman, a friend of Morawski who lives down the street and shared her love of animals, smoked barbecue and the New York Mets.
Well known and well liked, Morawski was a fixture in Maplewood, a commuter town 20 miles from Manhattan. Classmates recalled her as the smart kid in advanced placement classes who went on to earn an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Returning home as an adult, she volunteered at area animal shelters and on the board of a preserved 18th-century house dedicated to sharing Maplewood’s history.
A longtime member of the local Interfaith Holocaust Remembrance Committee, she accepted a prestigious award in May for her dedication to keeping the lessons of the Holocaust alive. It was a passion fueled largely by devotion to her Polish immigrant parents, Roman Catholics who she has said were imprisoned by the Nazi and Soviet regimes during World War II. They went on to build a life in suburban New Jersey — a triumph that, to her, was embodied in the four-bedroom house they purchased at 60 Maplewood Avenue.
Privately, she was consumed by a cascade of debt and drawn-out legal battles that had pushed her to the emotional and financial brink.
Two acrimonious divorces. A three-year probate fight with her sister over their parents’ estate. A federal discrimination complaint against a former employer. Dueling lawsuits from a romance that ended badly. And, finally, bankruptcy.
Unable to afford a lawyer, she often represented herself. By her own telling, she was always the victim.
A cancer diagnosis in 2021 complicated everything.
By the time she lost the house, Morawski, 60, had accumulated more than $100,000 in unpaid taxes and fees, a burden that was further exacerbated by a state law heavily weighted toward real estate speculators. New Jersey is one of just a dozen states that permit investors to make huge profits on the debt of struggling homeowners, ultimately allowing them to foreclose on the property and keep all the profit.
“This has been an egregious travesty of justice,” she wrote in a letter to local officials shortly before the fire. “I need immediate help to stop the steal of my home.”
‘The house and legacy I need to save!’
Morawski’s childhood home on Maplewood Avenue sits three blocks from a commuter rail station and the quaint storefronts at the center of town, a pedestrian-friendly hub that residents call “the village.” Always considered a desirable community, Maplewood drew a flood of new buyers during the pandemic, and recent sales of renovated houses on the street have ranged from $755,000 to $1.6 million.
Long before the fire, the house was notable for its peeling buckskin-beige paint and tattered roof, outward signs of the difficulty Morawski had keeping up with repairs and household bills. But she was determined to hold on.
“The house and legacy I need to save!” she wrote on a GoFundMe page a friend created in 2019.
Details of Morawski’s fight to save the house are based on more than two dozen interviews with neighbors, friends, community leaders and lawyers, as well as tax documents, federal, state and county court records and her own social media posts.
After divorcing her first husband, who was in the Navy and stationed in Hawaii, she returned to Maplewood in 2000 to care for her ailing parents. She worked briefly for a management consulting firm and sometimes gave historical walking tours, but had trouble finding full-time work. An assortment of part-time jobs as a swim instructor ended with the onset of the pandemic.
But she had struggled to make ends meet since at least 2010. Desperate for money, she sold her burial plot, patched her leaky roof with tarps and, unable to buy a new water heater, took to showering at a YMCA.
“I have never said I do not owe back taxes + obscene interest,” she wrote to township leaders, “but the global pandemic impacted the intended course of action.”
She had been advised to sell the house rather than lose the accrued equity in a property that real estate sites valued at roughly $700,000 before the fire, friends, relatives and town officials said. The conversations never went far.
“She just wanted to stay in the home she grew up in,” said Andy Golebiowski, host of the Polish American Radio Program, who met Morawski on Facebook. “Those were her roots.”
Morawski spoke proudly of those roots when she accepted the Holocaust education award.
Her father, Michael (Szeliga) Morawski, earned Poland’s highest military honor, the Virtuti Militari. He had been imprisoned, she said, in concentration camps after trying to drive the Germans from the capital during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, a rebellion that lasted 63 days and led to the deaths of more than 180,000 residents.
Wanda Morawski, a nurse born in what was then the Polish city of Borszczow (it is now part of Ukraine), ran field hospitals for the Allied forces during the war after being freed from a prison in Russia, according to her 2002 obituary.
After marrying in England and moving to Brooklyn, the couple spent 10 years “saving every penny” to buy “their American dream,” Morawski wrote.
Over the next four decades, their house in Maplewood was often filled with recent immigrants of various faiths. Her mother “would order, then pick up, kosher in Brooklyn,” Morawski said at the Holocaust remembrance event. “Everyone would speak Polish and feel comfortable for a few hours as they navigated a challenging new world.”
Morawski’s parents died within five months of each other, leaving a contested estate that led to a bitter fight between the two sisters for control of the house. In the end, Morawski was instructed to pay her sister $130,000 and was awarded the house. Her sister won title to another residential property that was in their parents’ name but was told by the court that she had “no right to enter the premises” at 60 Maplewood Avenue.
Morawski’s sister said she drove by the home each day for 15 years.
Mental health concerns
Morawski was often spotted on the block walking her dog, Hana, or tending to repairs of her 1992 Dodge Dakota. She was quick with a compliment and eagerly asked about neighbors’ children.
“Always seemed to be in the same mood — pleasant,” said Kevin Photiades, who lives down the street.
“She’s a wonderful, generous, amazing person,” said Kim Brown, a friend who remained close with Morawski after they worked together in the early 1990s at a consulting firm in Linden, New Jersey.
“I couldn’t imagine, emotionally, what she was going through.”
Morawski wrote about her financial trouble on social media as foreclosure loomed in 2019 and later discussed her battle with blood cancer.
Neighbors said that they had donated to the GoFundMe campaign or lent her money directly. Friends wrote to the township’s congresswoman to ask for help and dropped off soup and meals. A member of her historical book club regularly drove her to chemotherapy.
But as the date of her eviction neared in December, close friends grew increasingly worried about her mental health. She appeared to have no future plans other than lashing out publicly against the injustice she believed had caused her to lose the house.
A federal judge assigned to Morawski’s bankruptcy case, who had attended high school with her, was “heartless and biased,” she complained to the chief judge of U.S. Bankruptcy Court. “A smart, smug jock, the epitome of a privileged white male.”
A state judge who signed the eviction order was “ridiculously obsequious to the opposing attorney, who was mocking and mean to me.”
She publicly suggested that she was considering suicide. “I expect this is the last letter I will ever write,” she said in a letter to the bankruptcy judge three days before the fire. “Too bad, because I had a LOT left to offer.”
That same day, she dropped Hana at Brown’s house. The next night, she left several cherished family mementos on the back porch of her sister’s house and emailed a niece to let her know they were there.
A friend called the police and asked officers to conduct a wellness check. They arrived at the house around dinnertime, and Morawski was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, where she spent 25 hours under psychiatric evaluation, according to her lawyer and a message she posted on Facebook.
She was cleared to leave hours after the eviction order became final and the locks to the house were changed.
Tax liens as investments
Many of Morawski’s problems stemmed from the difficulty she had paying taxes on the house at 60 Maplewood, a home her parents purchased in 1962 and had long ago paid off.
New Jersey requires communities to auction off unpaid tax and sewer debts annually. The buyers — lien holders — can charge 18% interest on debt over $1,500 and are entitled to pay any future overdue taxes on the property, expanding their investment and its steep rate of return. Bidding is often aggressive, particularly for desirable properties in affluent or gentrifying towns.
After two years, if the debt is unpaid, investors can foreclose on the property.
Unlike most other states, New Jersey permits the lien holder to keep all resale profit. Former owners get back none of their accrued equity, no matter the size of the original debt.
“When people hear about it, they think, ‘This can’t be the whole story,’” said Christina Martin, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian-leaning nonprofit that tracks lien sale foreclosures nationwide. “But it is the whole story. Government thinks it can take a windfall at the expense of society’s most vulnerable people and either keep it for the public purse or give it away to private investors for their enrichment.
“Either way, it’s gross,” Martin said.
Lawyers for the foundation are preparing to argue that the practice — they call it “home equity theft” — violates the Constitution in a Minnesota case that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in January to hear.
Between 2014 and 2021, in 31 of New Jersey’s largest communities, the owners of 661 residential properties lost homes after a foreclosure that resulted from tax or sewer debt, according to an analysis by the legal foundation. The owners forfeited roughly $115 million in equity, the group found.
The lien that led to the loss of Morawski’s house dated to 2016, when Effect Lake LLC, a Virginia-based company run by Peter Chinloy, a former Temple University professor, and his son, was the winning bidder at an October tax-certificate auction.
Three-quarters of Morawski’s unpaid taxes from 2015, $12,809, plus penalties, were put up for sale.
Competition was brisk. To win the right to buy the lien, Effect Lake not only agreed to charge zero-percent interest on the initial debt, but it paid Maplewood a $92,800 premium to do so — a routine practice used to outbid competitors.
Within weeks Effect Lake had also written checks for the $17,360.04 in taxes Morawski failed to pay in 2016, debt that would grow by the maximum 18% interest rate. The Chinloys’ company also paid all the taxes and sewer fees for the next three years.
Morawski would later say that Effect Lake deliberately mailed crucial legal notices too late for her to respond. “Real estate investors,” she wrote, “have aggressively and ruthlessly pursued foreclosure of my property so they can flip it.”
Her sister said she offered to pay the roughly $110,000 debt in exchange for the deed to the house — a deal Morawski found unfair and refused to accept.
In 2019, Effect Lake began foreclosure proceedings.
And on Jan. 30, 2020, after an investment of roughly $175,000, it held the deed to a home worth at least three times that much. Soon after, Morawski filed for bankruptcy, arguing that the property transfer had been fraudulent, a claim the judge rejected.
While fighting to save the house in bankruptcy court, she was also undergoing chemotherapy treatments that she said sapped her energy and left her unable to focus — conditions she believed should have led the court to slow the process down.
Chinloy, who earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard and was the director of real estate programs at Temple’s business school until 2020, has written extensively about investor real estate strategies and home foreclosures. He declined to comment for this article.
‘Over her dead body’
The day of the fire Morawski lit five matches at strategic points on the first, second and third floors of the house, according to a police report.
Then she walked to the basement, “laid down on a couch and proceeded to stab herself with a knife four times in the chest,” a detective wrote.
Neighbors watched as she was taken out on a stretcher and rushed to a hospital.
Three days later, charged with aggravated arson and burglary, she was transferred to a jail in Newark. A not-guilty plea was entered on her behalf for crimes that carried a maximum penalty of more than 10 years in prison.
Her lawyer, Lisa Lopata, a public defender, stressed that Morawski was “at a very low point,” and that she “deeply regrets what happened, especially the idea that anyone could have been put at risk.”
A prosecutor, Adam Wells, argued against her release from jail, in part because of her apparent determination to risk it all to make a defiant final point.
“She made a statement and apologized for her own cliché,” Wells told a judge on Jan. 13, “that over her dead body would anyone take the house.”
Ten hours later, after more than a month in custody, Morawski walked out of jail alone wearing borrowed, oversize clothes. She waited in the dark at a nearby New Jersey Transit bus stop and transferred at Newark Penn Station, en route to a friend’s apartment in South Orange, New Jersey, where she remains in home detention.
“These property tax lien holders have gotten away with everything,” Morawski said in an interview.
“If I start crying, I’m just afraid that I won’t stop.”
Weeks after the blaze, much of the first floor of the house appeared intact, largely untouched by flames. But out front, a haunting reminder of the saga’s explosive end remained etched into a sidewalk poured months ago.
“EVE M LIVED HERE 1962-2022,” Morawski had carved into the wet concrete. “LIVE. ALOHA.”
While Ron DeSantis Is Fighting Culture Wars, Millions Of Floridians Are Losing Their Health Care
Jonathan Cohn – January 31, 2023
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis keeps making news with his self-described campaign to fight “woke” ideology. The latest headlines came about two weeks ago, when the Republican announced that he was prohibiting public high schools from offering a new Advanced Placement course in African American history. The course, his administration explained, “lacks significant educational value.”
The announcement thrilled his supporters on the political right while infuriating his critics on the left. It’s safe to assume these were precisely the reactions that DeSantis wanted because they elevate his national profile and improve his chances of winning the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, which, as you may have heard, he is likely to seek.
But DeSantis has some other governing responsibilities, too. One of them is looking out for the health and economic well-being of Florida residents, including those who can’t pay for medical care on their own because they don’t have insurance.
Floridians without insurance suffer because when they can’t pay for their medical care, they end up in debt or go without needed treatment or both. The state suffers, too, because it ends up with a sicker, less productive workforce as well as a higher charity care load for its hospitals, clinics and other pieces of the medical safety net.
DeSantis could do something about this. He has refused. In fact, as of this moment, his administration is embarking on a plan that some analysts worry could make the problem worse.
This story probably deserves some national attention as well.
DeSantis Has A Clear Record On Health Care
The simple, straightforward reason so many Floridians have no health insurance is that its elected officials won’t sign on to the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which offers states extra federal matching funds if they make the program available to everybody with incomes below or just above the poverty line.
Most states have now done just that. It’s the single biggest reason that the uninsured rate nationwide is at a record low. But eleven states have held out, leaving in place the much more limited eligibility standards they had established before the Affordable Care Act took effect.
Florida is one of them. Childless adults in the Sunshine State can’t get Medicaid unless they fall into a special eligibility category, like having a disability. And even adults with kids have a hard time getting onto the program because the standard income guidelines are so low ― about 30% of the poverty line, which last year worked out to less than $7,000 for a family of three. That’s not enough to cover rent, food and other essentials, let alone buy a health insurance policy.
The non-expansion states all have Republican governors or legislatures or both, and are nearly all in the Deep South. They represent the last line of resistance against Obamacare, which Republicans have spent more than a decade fighting and, famously, came very close to repealing in 2017.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, shown at a recent appearance in Daytona Beach, doesn’t have much to say about Medicaid expansion — or why he’s opposed it.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, shown at a recent appearance in Daytona Beach, doesn’t have much to say about Medicaid expansion — or why he’s opposed it.
DeSantis was no mere bystander to that effort. As a Republican serving in the U.S. House, he was part of a far-right caucus that voted against the first ACA repeal bill that leadership brought to the floor because, DeSantis and his allies said, it didn’t undo enough of the law’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
GOP leaders eventually put forward a more aggressive repeal. DeSantis and his colleagues voted yes on that one, but it failed in the Senate.
With repeal now off the political agenda, the main question about the Affordable Care Act is whether states like Florida will follow the lead of all the others and finally open up its Medicaid program to everybody living at or just above the poverty line.
If it did, several hundred thousand currently uninsured residents would become eligible for the program, according to independent estimates.
End of a Pandemic Relief Effort And Its Impact
Florida’s refusal to expand Medicaid is not a new story. But it is newly relevant because of an expiring federal pandemic measure and its likely effect on access to health care for low-income residents.
When COVID-19 hit, the federal government offered states extra money to fund Medicaid as long as states agreed not to disenroll anybody who joined or was already on the program ― on the theory that in the midst of a public health emergency, the overwhelming priority was maximizing the number of people with insurance.
That arrangement is about to end. States will have a year to go through their Medicaid enrollment files, removing anybody who cannot reestablish their eligibility. And in every state, significant numbers of people are likely to lose coverage ― in some cases simply because they aren’t aware their coverage is in jeopardy or because they can’t make their way through a complex, confusing process their state has put in place.
Officials in some states are going out of their way to minimize coverage losses. Oregon, for example, will be letting all children younger than 6 stay on Medicaid automatically. Illinois is making it easier for adults to stay on the program while taking more time to go through the process of reestablishing eligibility.
Florida just announced its plan and, according to Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, the state seems intent on pushing ahead quickly even though its own projections suggest 1.75 million Floridians could lose insurance as a result.
“They’re very anxious to get almost 2 million people off of Medicaid, which is scary,” Alker told HuffPost. She added that she is especially worried about children, who represent a disproportionate number of Florida’s Medicaid population because the income guidelines for young people are looser than they are for adults.
Alker was careful to say that it was impossible to be sure how Florida will ultimately handle the process of reviewing Medicaid enrollment. She also said she was pleased that state officials made statements acknowledging the special predicament of children.
A spokesperson for the Florida Policy Institute, a nonprofit organization that has been tracking the state’s plans, offered a similarly mixed assessment ― crediting state officials with an “intentional” plan that stressed communicating with parents clearly about their options while stating that it’s “too soon to tell whether the efforts outlined in the plans will be enough to make sure that Medicaid-eligible Floridians keep their coverage.”
But however Florida officials decide to handle this process, and however it works out, one thing is clear: If Florida were part of the Medicaid expansion, the number of people losing health coverage would be a lot lower.
The Uninsured In Florida Have A Difficult Time
Frederick Anderson, a family medicine physician, knows better than most what a difference health insurance can make for people in Florida. He oversees medical operations at a Miami-area clinic focusing on underserved populations, where large numbers of people have no insurance. He thinks a lot about one woman in particular.
She’s the primary caregiver for a son with autism, Anderson told HuffPost, and she has no insurance because her below-poverty income is too high for the state’s Medicaid threshold. She’s been suffering from serious, debilitating headaches, but she can’t pay for the MRI she needs or find a neurologist with an open appointment.
It’s a problem he sees all the time, Anderson explained, because there just aren’t enough safety net providers to meet the demand. Patients end up waiting for the care they need or skipping it altogether. “We do the best we can,” Anderson said, “but many of our patients will need to see orthopedists, or neurologists or you name it, and these individuals have no easy access to those services. Or they would benefit from certain medications that I would like to prescribe for them, but … it’s just unaffordable.”
Anderson lives and works in Miami-Dade County, where the uninsured rate is among the highest in Florida. But rural areas of Florida face their own, special challenges.
The economics of health care make it more difficult for rural hospitals to survive without help from Medicaid, which is why in states like Florida that haven’t expanded eligibility, rural hospitals are struggling and in some cases closing, depriving communities of more than just acute care.
“We think of hospitals as places to go when you have something major that is wrong,” Scott Darius, executive director of the advocacy group Florida Voices for Health Care, told HuffPost. “But in those rural areas, we’ve learned, hospitals are the primary care location for large portions of the population.”
DeSantis Hasn’t Had Much To Say On Medicaid
These accounts are consistent stories reporters covering health care hear all the time. They also echo some of the anecdotes that an organization called the Florida Health Justice Project has collected on its website as part of an ongoing campaign, in conjunction with other advocacy groups, to bring expansion to Florida.
“Florida ranks [near the bottom] for the rate of uninsured residents,” Alison Yager, executive director at the Health Justice project, told HuffPost. “Expanding Medicaid, as all but 11 of our sister states have done, would surely boost our shameful showing.”
But the cause has been a tough sell in Tallahassee, where Republicans have had nearly uninterrupted control of the Florida’s lawmaking process since 1999. Two previous efforts to get expansion through the state legislature failed. DeSantis’ spokesperson confirmed in 2021 that he remained opposed to it.
That was two years ago, and since then he’s managed to avoid saying much about the issue, including to HuffPost, despite several inquiries to his office over the past three weeks. Medicaid expansion got only sporadic attention in the 2022 gubernatorial campaign, although Democrats tried initially to make it an issue, and it didn’t draw so much as a mention in the lone debate DeSantis had with Democratic nominee Charlie Crist.
A year before that, DeSantis signed a much narrower measure: a 2021 bipartisan bill increasing Medicaid’s postpartum coverage from 60 days to a year. It was a priority for the outgoing GOP House speaker, and it’s always possible political circumstances will align and lead to more legislation like that in the future.
But DeSantis’ hostility to government health care programs runs deep.
Protesters rally near the U.S. Capitol after House Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017. DeSantis was one of those House Republicans.
Protesters rally near the U.S. Capitol after House Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017. DeSantis was one of those House Republicans.
Long before he was attacking “critical race theory” lessons and supposed sexual brainwashing in the schools, he was railing against Obama-era programs generally (as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has explained) and the Affordable Care Act specifically (as The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has written) as fundamentally incompatible with American principles of freedom and private property.
DeSantis may also have more practical objections to expanding Medicaid. Maybe he thinks it’s too big a drain on state finances or too wasteful a program, as many conservatives and libertarians argue. Maybe he thinks Medicaid does more harm than good for beneficiaries or that people on the program could find insurance on their own if only they were more industrious and got paying jobs.
Those latter claims don’t hold up well under scrutiny. The majority of Floridians missing out on Medicaid expansion are in families with at least one worker, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And when the uninsured get Medicaid, their access to care and financial security improves, according to a large and still-growing pile of research.
Their health outcomes also seem to improve, though the evidence on how the Medicaid expansion has affected mortality specifically remains the subject of somedebate.
The Politics of Medicaid May Be Different Nationally
Advocates today have their eyes on trying to expand Medicaid through a ballot initiative, which is the way it’s happened in Idaho, Missouri and several other states where Republican lawmakers had blocked it.
But Florida Republicans are already working to make that process more difficult because it’s a way for voters to circumvent GOP opposition to popular causes. And it’s not like waging a ballot campaign is easy now. Organizers recently told the Tampa Bay Times that 2026 is the earliest they could realistically get a Medicaid measure on the ballot.
As for DeSantis, his record on health care could become a key point of contrast in a hypothetical 2024 White House campaign. President Joe Biden, after all, is the guy who called Obamacare a “big fucking deal” and just signed into law reforms that make the program’s financial assistance more generous. Any conceivable replacement on the Democratic ticket would have a similar record of votes in Congress or state actions to support coverage expansions.
There’s no way to be sure how an issue will play out in the next election ― or whether it will even matter at all. But it’s not hard to imagine the contrast on health care working to the Democrats’ advantage. The Affordable Care Act is relatively popular these days, and Medicaid expansion tends to poll well even among Republican voters.
That may help explain why DeSantis and his spokespeople have so little to say on the subject. But that silence doesn’t change the real-world impact of his posture ― or what it reveals about his priorities.
DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, and Builds His Brand
Stephanie Saul, Patricia Mazzei and Trip Gabriel – February 1, 2023
Patricia Okker, facing camera, president of New College of Florida in Sarasota, is embraced by a supporter on Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2023. (Todd Anderson/The New York Times)
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, as he positions himself for a run for president next year, has become an increasingly vocal culture warrior, vowing to take on liberal orthodoxy and its champions, whether they are at Disney, on Martha’s Vineyard or in the state’s public libraries.
But his crusade has perhaps played out most dramatically in classrooms and on university campuses. He has banned instruction about gender identity and sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade; limited what schools and employers can teach about racism and other aspects of history; and rejected math textbooks en masse for what the state called “indoctrination.” Most recently, he banned the College Board’s Advanced Placement courses in African American studies for high school students.
On Tuesday, DeSantis, a Republican, took his most aggressive swing yet at the education establishment, announcing a proposed overhaul of the state’s higher education system that would eliminate what he called “ideological conformity.” If enacted, courses in Western civilization would be mandated; diversity and equity programs would be eliminated; and the protections of tenure would be reduced.
His plan for the state’s education system is in lockstep with other recent moves — banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, shipping a planeload of Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and stripping Disney, a once politically untouchable corporate giant in Florida, of favors it has enjoyed for half a century.
His pugilistic approach was rewarded by voters, who reelected him by a 19 percentage-point margin in November.
Appearing on Tuesday at the State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota, one of the state’s 28 publicly funded state and community colleges, DeSantis vowed to turn the page on agendas that he said were “hostile to academic freedom” in Florida’s higher education system. The programs “impose ideological conformity to try to provoke political activism,” DeSantis said. “That’s not what we believe is appropriate for the state of Florida.”
He had already moved to overhaul the leadership of the New College of Florida, a small liberal arts school in Sarasota that has struggled with enrollment but calls itself a place for “freethinkers.” It is regarded as among the most progressive of Florida’s 12 public universities.
DeSantis pointed to low enrollment and test scores at New College as part of the justification for seeking change there.
“If it was a private school, making those choices, that’s fine, I mean, what are you going to do,” he said. “But this is paid for by your tax dollars.”
The college’s board of trustees, with six new conservative members appointed by DeSantis, voted in a raucous meeting Tuesday afternoon to replace the president and agreed to appoint Richard Corcoran, a former state education commissioner, as the interim president beginning in March.
Corcoran will replace Patricia Okker, a longtime English professor and college administrator who was appointed in 2021.
While expressing her love for the college and its students, Okker called the move a hostile takeover. “I do not believe that students are being indoctrinated here at New College,” she said. “They are taught. They read Marx and they argue with Marx. They take world religions. They do not become Buddhists in February and turn into Christians in March.”
DeSantis also announced Tuesday that he had asked the Legislature to immediately free up $15 million to recruit new faculty and provide scholarships for New College.
In all, he requested from the Legislature $100 million a year for state universities.
“We’re putting our money where our mouth is,” he said.
New College is small, with nearly 700 students, but the shake-up reverberated throughout Florida, as did DeSantis’ proposed overhaul.
Andrew Gothard, president of the state’s faculty union, said the governor’s statements on the state’s system of higher education were perhaps his most aggressive yet.
“There’s this idea that Ron DeSantis thinks he and the Legislature have the right to tell Florida students what classes they can take and what degree programs,” said Gothard, who is on leave from his faculty job at Florida Atlantic University. “He says out of one side of his mouth that he believes in freedom and then he passes and proposes legislation and policies that are the exact opposite.”
At the board meeting, students, parents and professors defended the school and criticized the board members for acting unilaterally without their input.
Betsy Braden, who identified herself as the parent of a transgender student, said her daughter had thrived at the school.
“It seems many of the students that come here have determined that they don’t necessarily fit into other schools,” Braden said. “They embrace their differences and exhibit incredible bravery in staking a path forward. They thrive, they blossom, they go out into the world for the betterment of society. This is well documented. Why would you take this away from us?”
Corcoran, a DeSantis ally, had been mentioned as a possible president of Florida State University, but his candidacy was dropped following questions about whether he had a conflict of interest or the appropriate academic background.
A letter from Carlos Trujillo, the president of Continental Strategy, a consulting firm where Corcoran is a partner, said the firm hoped that his title at New College would become permanent.
Not since George W. Bush ran in 2000 to be “the education president” has a Republican seeking the Oval Office made school reform a central agenda item. That may have been because, for years, Democrats had a double-digit advantage in polling on education.
But since the pandemic started in 2020, when many Democratic-led states kept schools closed longer than Republican states did, often under pressure from teachers unions, some polling has suggested that education now plays better for Republicans. And Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 victory in the Virginia governor’s race, after a campaign focused on “parents’ rights” in public schools, was seen as a signal of the political potency of education with voters.
DeSantis’ attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs coincides with the recent criticisms of such programs by conservative organizations and think tanks.
Examples of such initiatives include campus sessions on “microaggressions” — subtle slights usually based on race or gender — as well as requirements that candidates for faculty jobs submit statements describing their commitment to diversity.
“That’s basically like making people take a political oath,” DeSantis said Tuesday. He also attacked the programs for placing a “drain on resources and contributing to higher costs.”
Supporters of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and diverse curricula say they help students understand the broader world as well as their own biases and beliefs, improving their ability to engage in personal relationships as well as in the workplace.
DeSantis’ embrace of civics education, as well as the establishment of special civics programs at several of the state’s 12 public universities, dovetails with the growth of similar programs around the country, some partially funded by conservative donors.
The programs emphasize the study of Western civilization and economics, as well as the thinking of Western philosophers, frequently focusing on the Greeks and Romans. Critics of the programs say they sometimes gloss over the pitfalls of Western thinking and ignore the philosophies of non-Western civilizations.
“The core curriculum must be grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization,” DeSantis said. “We don’t want students to go through, at taxpayer expense, and graduate with a degree in zombie studies.”
The shake-up of New College, which also included the election of a new board chair, may be ongoing and dramatic, given the six new board members appointed by DeSantis.
They include Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute who is known for his vigorous attacks on “critical race theory,” an academic concept that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions.
At the time of his appointment, Rufo, who lives and works in Washington state, tweeted that he was “recapturing” higher education.
Another new board member is Eddie Speir, who runs a Christian private school in Florida. He had recommended in a Substack posting before the meeting that the contracts of all the school’s faculty and staff be canceled.
The other new appointees include Matthew Spalding, dean of the Washington, D.C., campus of Hillsdale College, a private college in Michigan known for its conservative and Christian orientations. An aide to the governor has said that Hillsdale, which says it offers a classical education, is widely regarded as the governor’s model for remaking New College.
In addition to the governor’s six new appointees, the university system’s board of governors recently named a seventh member, Ryan T. Anderson, the head of a conservative think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which applies the Judeo-Christian tradition to contemporary questions of law, culture and politics. His selection was viewed as giving DeSantis a majority vote on the 13-member board.
U.S. woman detained in Russia after walking calf on Red Square
February 1, 2023
U.S. citizen Alicia Day, detained for walking a calf in Red Square, attends a court hearing in Moscow
(Reuters) – A U.S. woman was detained and fined by a Russian court on Wednesday for walking a calf on Moscow’s Red Square that she said she had bought to save from slaughter, Russian state media reported.
Alicia Day, 34, was fined 20,000 roubles ($285) for obstructing pedestrians in an unauthorised protest and sentenced to 13 days of “administrative arrest” on a separate charge of disobeying police orders.
“I bought the calf so that it wouldn’t be eaten,” TASS news agency quoted her as saying.
Video shared by state media showed Day explaining that she had got a driver to bring the calf to Red Square by car. “I wanted to show it a beautiful place in our beautiful country,” she said.
The U.S. embassy did not immediately comment when asked about the case.
Day had been living in a suburb of Moscow on a tourist visa, the RIA news agency said, and had carried out similar acts of protest before in other countries.
In 2019, the Daily Mail newspaper reported that she had “rescued” a pig she named Jixy Pixy from slaughter in western England, brought it to London by taxi and taken it for walks and restaurant meals, but had to hand it to an animal welfare charity after her landlord discovered she was keeping it in a small apartment.
($1 = 70.15 roubles)
(Reporting by Caleb Davis; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
Florida rejected AP African American Studies. Here’s what’s actually being taught in the course
Marina Pitofsky, USA TODAY – February 1, 2023
The head of the College Board defended its new Advanced Placement course on African American studies, weeks after Florida said it would ban the class.
The College Board on Wednesday released its official – and revised–framework for the course, and CEO David Coleman told USA TODAY that “at the College Board, we don’t really look to the statements of political leaders.
“We look to the record of history.”
About a week earlier, on Jan. 24, a spokesperson for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed on Twitter that the College Board “will be revising the course for the entire nation” due to the governor’s “principled stand for education over identity politics.”
The new framework does address many of the concerns Florida raised, and those topics are not included, or they are included only as optional project topics. But Coleman was firm that the changes to the framework have been in the works for a year.
The course, which is 10 years in the making, already is being taught in 60 high schools. Next school year, it will be taught at approximately 500 high schools nationwide before being offered at any school interested in providing the course. It emerges at the same time as a racial reckoning in the United States and the debate over the teaching of critical race theory, a college-level concept about systemic racism.
“We hope that everyone will give (the course) a fresh look, a fresh read because we think that that people will be impressed with what they see there,” he said. “What they’ll find is an unflinching encounter with the facts and evidence of African American history and culture.”
Why is AP African American Studies in the spotlight?
Officials in Florida rejected the new AP course,arguing that the class for high school students does not comply with state law.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis addresses a crowd before publicly signing the Stop Woke bill in April 2022.
Florida education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. last month shared a list of concerns about the course, ranging from broad concepts to specific authors. DeSantis said the state rejected the course because it included the study of “queer theory” and movements that advocate for “abolishing prisons.”
The decision quickly drew criticism inside and outside of the state.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the move “incomprehensible,” responding to a question from USA TODAY “Let’s be clear. They didn’t block AP European history. They didn’t block our art history. They didn’t block our music history.”
And last week, civil rights attorney Ben Crump said if Florida officials continue to reject the course, legal action could follow.
What’s actually being taught in this class for teenagers? What can high school students expect to learn? USA TODAY analyzed the official framework for AP African American Studies.
What’s actually being taught in AP African American Studies
Brandi Waters, AP African American Studies’ senior director, told USA TODAY the class is “an exciting course for students because it helps them to see a fuller picture of the world around them.”
The course – which students can use to earn college credit depending on their scores on its exam and whether an institution accepts the class – is broken up into four units, each of which includes dozens of potential topics and assignments.
“So what (students are) really asking for when they asked for this class is the tools that the field of African American Studies gives them, which is this picture of how different communities are really interrelated,” Waters said, “a diversity of lived experience and feeling like they now have more lenses through which to view American life and how disparate communities in America are connected to the broader world.”
The framework also includes a research project for students, asking them to analyze a topic or theme from the field of African American Studies. The document stresses that the project topics can “be refined by local states and districts.”
Here’s how the class is laid out for educators and students:
Origins of the African Diaspora: This unit includes information on early African empires and kingdoms, before and during the transatlantic slave trade.
Freedom, Enslavement and Resistance: Students may learn about the slave trade, how slavery worked to “assault the bodies, minds and spirits of enslaved Africans and their descendants,” the abolition of slavery and more. It includes sources such as maps snowing the slave trade out of Africa, Frederick Douglass’ speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” and other materials.
The Practice of Freedom: This section includes the period known as Reconstruction in America, as well as Jim Crow laws and other political, social and cultural movements. Students might explore the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, writings from W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington or the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, when the court ruled racial segregation was constitutional.
Movements and Debates: Students may learn about the Civil Rights Movement, housing discrimination against Black Americans, the Black Power Movement, feminist movements and “diversity within Black communities.” The course materials for the final unit include writings from Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and other political figures, in addition to Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and others.
The Florida Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment about the framework published Wednesday
Coleman noted that the process of “moving beyond the pilot materials” of the course has taken a year and involved consulting with about 300 professors. He also said no state has seen the framework before it was released on Wednesday.
Corruption rife across Latin America; Guatemala, Nicaragua reach all-time lows: report
Steven Grattan – January 31, 2023
FILE PHOTO: Demonstrators protest the alleged corruption in the government, in Guatemala City
SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Guatemala, Nicaragua and Cuba reached all-time lows on Transparency International’s corruption index released on Tuesday due to increased organized crime by public institutions, co-optation by political and economic elites and increased human rights abuses.
“Weak governments fail to stop criminal networks, social conflict, and violence, and some exacerbate threats to human rights by concentrating power in the name of tackling insecurity,” said Delia Ferreira Rubio, head of Transparency International, a Berlin-based anti-corruption group.
Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index ranks countries by their perceived levels of public sector corruption on a scale of zero (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). The average for the Americas stands at 43.
In Latin America, Nicaragua and Venezuela are the lowest ranked as each struggles with public institutions infiltrated by criminal networks, the report notes.
The governments of Guatemala, Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba and Peru did not immediately reply to requests for comment on the report.
Guatemala has seen state institutions co-opted by political and economic elites and organized crime, the report said.
Over the past year, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei has faced a growing chorus of critics claiming he has slammed the brakes on anti-corruption efforts, as well as forced some judges and prosecutors to flee the country, the main reasons for the country’s decline in the index.
Repression of the political opposition, human rights abuses and cracking down on freedom of speech is what lowered Nicaragua’s ranking, while Cuba has a historic low due to the “ongoing repression” and the “absolute lack of any kind of freedom in the country,” one of Transparency International’s researchers told Reuters.
The report adds that the combination of corruption, authoritarianism and an economic downturn proved “especially volatile” in Brazil where ex-President Jair Bolsonaro’s term was marked by dismantling anti-corruption efforts, the use of corrupt schemes to favor allies and amass support in Congress, as well as promoting disinformation.
Neighboring Uruguay scored best in the region with a ranking of 74, the same as Canada.
Transparency International pointed to years of instability in Peru with its cycle of different governments including last December’s ouster of then-President Pedro Castillo, himself a target of corruption investigations.
Weak law enforcement and high-level corruption have also allowed drug cartels to expand in the Caribbean, the report said.
“The only way forward is for leaders to prioritize decisive action against corruption to uproot its hold and enable governments to fulfill their first mandate: protecting the people,” Rubio said.
(Reporting by Steven Grattan; Editing by David Alire Garcia and Lisa Shumaker)
How Reagan Convinced Himself He Didn’t Sell Arms for Hostages
Philip Taubman – January 28, 2023
Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
Shocking news about secret arms-for-hostage deals rocked Washington in late 1986. The first hint came with a White House announcement on November 2, that David Jacobsen, an American held hostage in Lebanon by Iranian-directed Islamic forces, had been released. As Secretary of State George Shultz read a draft White House statement about the development, he noted that it referred to freed “hostages,” with the “s” crossed out. That told him that the White House had expected Jacobsen would not be alone. Shultz suspected that the news meant that clandestine White House efforts to free captive Americans in the Middle East by sending arms via Israel to Iran might be responsible. He had first heard about the possibility in mid-1985.
Within a few weeks, the dimensions of the story expanded exponentially with word that some Iranian payments for American arms had been secretly diverted to the rebel Contra forces in Nicaragua that Washington hoped would topple the leftist Sandinista regime. The funding was in clear violation of a congressional cutoff of aid to the Contras. Overnight, the affair, quickly dubbed the Iran-Contra scandal, engulfed the White House.
Shultz realized that President Ronald Reagan faced an explosive crisis similar to Watergate that might upend his presidency. The fiasco staggered Shultz. It exposed his own failure to stop the arms-for-hostage dealing at several critical moments when he heard about pieces of it, objected to it but stopped short of forcefully intervening. He had deliberately kept his distance, telling the White House officials who managed the arms shipments to Iran that he did not want to know the details.
The scandal also forced Shultz to face up to Reagan’s weaknesses as president, for the affair, at its core, was a colossal blunder. As Shultz confronted the issue, he struggled mightily to remain loyal to Reagan while simultaneously protecting his own reputation and legacy. In doing so, he barely escaped indictment for obstruction of justice.
The sudden crisis had been a long time in the making, born of two international flashpoints that the Reagan administration struggled to manage: the Middle East and Central America. The U.S.-Iran skirmish opened on November 4, 1979, when a mob of young Iranians overran the American embassy in Teheran and seized fifty-two Americans as hostages. On January 20, 1981, after 444 days in captivity, the hostages were freed moments before Reagan was sworn in as president. In the years that followed, the Khomeini regime supported Shiite proxy groups in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East that killed or kidnapped Americans.
Although Reagan administration policy clearly barred making concessions to hostage takers, Reagan yearned to free them. He also bought the untenable proposition that by selling arms to Iran he could establish a less adversarial relationship with the ayatollahs and turn Iran into a moderating Shiite influence in the region. Israel, for its part, offered to sell American arms in its arsenal to Iran to secure the release of hostages.
While the Middle Eastern plot was taking shape, the American officials who favored it—including CIA Director William Casey, National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane, and marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, a National Security Council staff member—grew increasingly concerned about Soviet and Cuban inroads in Central America. When congressional Democrats cut off American support to paramilitary forces trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, these men first looked to Israel and South Africa as potential sources of money for the Contras. Over time, the Middle East and Central America vectors converged. The result was an elaborate plot in which Israel sold American weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages, and profits from the arms sales were funneled to the Contras. Reagan enthusiastically endorsed the arms sales but was not informed about the diversion of money to the Contras.
Shultz’s first inkling about irregular activity came in mid-April 1984 during administration debates about Central America policy and possible third-country aid to the Contras. Shultz wanted to maintain American assistance to the guerrilla forces, but not by funneling foreign money to them. He preferred to persuade Congress to extend American aid, if possible. When Casey suggested enlisting South Africa’s help in April 1984, Shultz was appalled, fearing covert foreign funding might lead to the impeachment of Reagan.
The arms-for-hostages operation came up formally in a July 13, 1985, McFarlane memo to Shultz. The national security adviser described an Israeli proposal to ship American arms to Iran to encourage a political dialogue and dislodge hostages from captivity. To get the dialogue started, Iran wanted one hundred American antitank missiles. Shultz told McFarlane to “make a tentative show of interest without commitment.” Shultz neither opposed nor supported the missile transfer—he did not address the question. He advised McFarlane to manage the initiative personally. Reflecting later on his response to McFarlane, Shultz said, “I was uneasy about my response, but I well knew the pressures from the president to follow up on any possibility of gaining the release of our hostages. I felt that Bud would in fact go ahead no matter what I said and that I was better off to stay in close touch with him and thereby retain some influence over what happened.”
Eight days later, McFarlane outlined the Israeli proposal at a White House meeting. Shultz, apparently reluctant to reiterate his earlier equivocation, objected to the arms transfer, arguing that it brazenly violated the administration’s firm stance against trading guns for hostages or making any concessions to terrorists. Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger agreed. The meeting ended inconclusively, but two days later Reagan told McFarlane to move ahead with the plan. On August 20, Israel shipped 96 antitank missiles to Iran, followed by another 408 two weeks later. One American hostage, Benjamin Weir, was soon freed. Upping the ante, Iran requested a shipment of more powerful weapons, medium-range surface-to-air HAWK missiles. When Israel could not deliver the larger weapons directly to Iran and efforts to ship them via a third country failed, Oliver North enlisted the help of the CIA.
Reagan enthusiastically supported the effort, acting on a humanitarian conviction that the United States should do everything possible to gain the release of the hostages. In doing so, he persuaded himself that the United States was not trading arms for hostages but instead was engaged in a noble attempt to save the lives of his countrymen..
Once news of the deal broke into the open in November 1986, Shultz’s attempts to dent the Reagan illusion grew frantic—and perilous for him. His challenge was threefold: convince Reagan that McFarlane, Vice Admiral John Poindexter (who had succeeded McFarlane as national security adviser), Casey, and North had misled him; end the arms-for-hostage strategy; and help Reagan survive the firestorm. Reagan did not want to hear that he had approved an arms-for-hostage strategy. On November 6, three days after the Lebanese newspaper report about the McFarlane mission to Teheran, Reagan declared that news coverage of the trip had “no foundation” and denied that the U.S. was exchanging arms with Iran for the release of hostages.
Shultz tried repeatedly to convince Reagan that his administration was trading arms for hostages and brazenly violating its own policies for dealing with terrorists. Reagan repeatedly rejected his appeals and grew increasingly impatient with Shultz. As the tension escalated, Shultz ruminated about his own failure to act more decisively in 1985 and 1986 as evidence of the operation caught his attention. “I felt I should have asked more, demanded more, done more, but I did not see how,” he recalled. “Did I have myself to blame for the aggrandizement of the NSC staff? I agonized. Ever since my first days as secretary of state, I had sought to make the national security adviser my channel to the White House and, on day-to-day matters, to the president.”
On one level, he was right. Secretaries of state cannot operate independent of the White House and the national security adviser. But on another level, Shultz was wrong. His willingness to rely on the White House national security staff after repeated setbacks caused by the incompetence and ideological rigidity of the staff does not make for a persuasive defense of his failure to act more decisively to stop the Iran-Contra affair before it reached critical mass.
Shultz’s assertion at the time that he was unaware of many incremental developments in the arms-for-hostage operation, a defense repeated in his memoirs, does not conform with detailed notes kept by Charles Hill, Shultz’s executive assistant. The memory lapse can be explained by the dizzying demands that descend daily on a secretary of state and Hill’s failure to capture all the relevant information about Shultz’s awareness of the Iran-Contra activities when he reviewed his notes for Shultz to help prepare Shultz’s congressional testimony. But Shultz’s selective memory also evoked Richard Nixon’s years-earlier warning to Reagan that Shultz had “a wonderful ability to, when things look iffy or are going wrong, he’ll contend he never heard about the issue and was never briefed and was not a part.”
Shultz’s defective memory, compounded by Hill’s handling of his notes, nearly proved disastrous when Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh discovered that Shultz had withheld relevant information about the Iran-Contra affair in his 1987 congressional testimony, delivered under oath. Walsh weighed charging Shultz with obstruction of justice but ultimately found that “Shultz’s testimony was incorrect, but it could not be proven that it was willfully false.”
Shultz’s faith in Reagan was shaken by the scandal. The president’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of exchanging arms for hostages was dumbfounding. In a nationally televised address on November 13, 1986, Reagan said he had authorized a small shipment of arms to Iran but was not bartering arms for hostages. “We did not—repeat—did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.” After the speech, Shultz tried to make sense of Reagan’s blind spot. “The president’s speech convinced me that Ronald Reagan still truly did not believe that what had happened had, in fact, happened. To him the reality was different. I had seen him like this before on other issues. He would go over the ‘script’ of an event, past or present, in his mind, and once the script was mastered, that was the truth—no fact, no argument, no plea for reconsideration, could change his mind.”
On November 16, Shultz made a fateful appearance on the CBS News Sunday-morning interview program Face the Nation. When host Lesley Stahl repeatedly pressed Shultz to state whether any further arms shipments would be made to Iran, he replied, “Under the circumstances of Iran’s war with Iraq, its pursuit of terrorism, its association with those holding our hostages, I would certainly say, as far as I’m concerned, no.” Stahl then asked if Shultz was speaking for the entire administration. “No,” he answered. It was a stunning moment—the secretary of state acknowledging that he could not speak for the U.S. government.
He barely survived his candid answer. The White House announced that Shultz did speak for the administration and that Reagan had “no desire” and “no plans” to send further arms to Iran. Yet Reagan continued to defend the operation privately. Meanwhile, Poindexter and North kept working on plans for new arms shipments. Sensing that Shultz’s persistence was annoying Reagan, Casey urged the president to select a new secretary of state.
The same day Casey urged the president in writing to do so, he joined Bush, Shultz, Weinberger, Poindexter and others at the White House for a National Security Planning Group meeting with Reagan to hear from Attorney General Edwin Meese. Reagan had commissioned Meese to investigate the arms-for-hostage operation. Reagan brushed aside Shultz’s objections.
That evening, as Shultz lamented the latest developments, Poindexter, who had strongly defended the operation earlier in the day, called from the White House. His tone was entirely different—mild, even meek. The change in tone pleased but puzzled Shultz. Two days later he learned the reason behind the turnabout: Meese aides had discovered the secret payments to the Contras. When top officials gathered again at the White House, Meese told the group that between $10-30 million dollars had been sent to the Contras. Reagan had not approved the diversion or even known about it. As a result, Poindexter was out and North reassigned. On November 26, three weeks after the first news reports about the deals broke, Shultz and Reagan stilled the rancor that had agitated their relationship and agreed Shultz should stay on as secretary of state through the end of the Reagan presidency.
Philip Taubman is a lecturer at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining CISAC, Taubman worked at the New York Times as a reporter and editor for nearly 30 years. He is the author of The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb (2012); Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage (2003); and In The Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz (2023).
