Farm Here to Eternity

 

We know for sure that climate change will continue to wreak havoc on agriculture. Flooding in some places, unbearable drought/desertification in others. Some crops will not work in re-climatized fields. Others will have to have increasingly targeted water supplies where waste is reduced to inconsequential. Water will need to be preserved and extracted from novel sources: from saltwater, severely recycled rain and sewage water or simply pulled out of the air. New varieties of climate-appropriate plants will need to replace crops that cannot tolerate the change. We must also counter new breeds of insects and plant disease also migrating to survive. 

Most of the equipment used by farmers to grow, nurture and harvest their crops and raise their livestock is both specialized and very, very expensive. A shortage of farmworkers, exacerbated by immigration realities and rapidly increasing labor costs, makes a bad situation a lot worse. Prices on supermarket shelves are soaring, some temporary, most permanent: “Americans — especially those on tight budgets – are feeling the pinch from rapidly rising grocery prices not seen in years, according to one expert, who offered a few tips to counter food inflation at the supermarket.

“‘We're seeing 5-6% food inflation in the U.S., three [times] what we’re used to in the last decade,’ Wells Fargo Chief Agricultural Economist Michael Swanson recently told Yahoo Finance Live. ‘It's having a bigger impact on fixed income and also people that are used to using some governmental supplement income.’

“The food supply chain breakdown and labor market shortage are to blame, Swanson said. To retain workforces, food manufacturers and producers are paying higher wages and shoppers are footing the bill in the form of heftier prices… ‘We're seeing a permanent move up in labor costs,’ he said. ‘With higher labor costs at restaurants and in the food manufacturing world, it makes your labor in the kitchen more valuable.’” Yahoo Money, November 4th. See also, my September 4th $$ - Shortages, Supply Chain Disruption and Climate Change - $$ blog.

So, what challenges does agtech face and what do our choices look like? The federal government, through the US Department of Agriculture, has heavily subsidized the farming sector, but most of those supports have gone to the biggest and most corporate agriculture farms. That system needs a ground-up overhaul: “While the federal government has implemented some cost-sharing programs for farms seeking to grow more sustainably, the vast majority of federal farm support goes to the largest farms. In 2016, 60% of farm subsidies went to the richest 10% of farmers, many of whom work the land in ways that are fossil fuel intensive, exhaust soils, emit carbon, and contribute to the climate crisis.

“Additionally, government support of regenerative practices is just beginning. Whereas conventional practices are often supported through tax breaks and subsidies, funding and research programs for soil improvement techniques do not yet enjoy the same level of support. In fact, a recent study found that the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP)—a federal program designed to deliver improved water quality and increase soil health—has strayed from its goals in recent years. In 2018, for example, soil boosting funding represented less than 1% of the United States Department of Agriculture’s total annual expenditures.” Artem Milinchuk, CEO of the agriculture investment firm, FarmTogether, writing for FastCompany.com, November 5th. 

But agricultural technology (“agtech”) has accelerated with specialized research at prominent American universities. We have also learned much about water conservation and desert farming from the decades of experience of Israeli farmers. American Agtech investments have increased 370% just over the last six years according to Milinchuk. He describes the challenges facing farmers in this rapidly changing new world: “While the use of sustainable agricultural practices has a multitude of environmental and production benefits, farmers face many barriers to adoption, including increased uncertainty of yields, a lack of expert technical assistance, a lack of the right equipment or technology, and most notably, the high cost of implementation.

“The transition to sustainable farming requires conventional farmers to learn about new equipment, practices, and regulations. The largest source of farmer knowledge and technical assistance, county extension services, are geared toward conventional growers and woefully understaffed with organic and regenerative specialists needed for farmers to successfully transition.

“Even with the right equipment, a farm cannot function without the workers to operate it. Tight profit margins in today’s economic environment make hiring farm workers a challenge, and the ability to hire foreign workers through the federal government’s H2-A program requires hefty upfront expenses for transportation, attorneys, and housing that some farmers simply cannot afford… For farmers weighing the risks and benefits of transitioning to more climate-smart agricultural practices, the high costs associated with transitioning remain one of the biggest obstacles.” 

Replacing workers with automation is accelerating, but the equipment is exceptionally costly. Autonomous vehicles, planting and harvesting exist. GPS and self-driving capacity are making this improvement possible. An example is pictured above.

Milinchuk also posits where the agtech solutions can come from: “Some of the new innovators of agriculture are looking at the small—microscopically small—to innovate the sector toward a sustainable future. Indigo Ag, for example, is betting big on microbe-coated commodity seeds that can better resist pest pressure and severe weather challenges, while allowing farmers to decrease their use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Since inception, IndigoAg has built many more products on the same premise to advance regenerative agriculture, including an online grain marketplace and its voluntary carbon credit program.

“Other agtech innovations look to increase farm efficiency and decrease input waste through precision farming techniques. Precision farming utilizes satellite technology, information systems, and remote sensing in order to maximize yield while minimizing environmental footprint. Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, for example, can be used to track soil moisture, changes in the microclimate of a field, soil carbon and micronutrient levels, and rates of plant growth throughout harvest cycles. GPS technology makes planting and input application far more accurate than manual tractor methods, meaning that farmers can decrease waste and excess fertilizer use.”

The infrastructure bills that have dominated the news of late have significant government capital to help farmers in this transition. The technology and the funding to implement these capacities must reach the farmers who need that support the most. We export about $150 billion annually in agricultural exports, including to our three biggest markets: China, Canada and Mexico. But that Chinese component is shifting rapidly as the People’s Republic has declared the United States an overly politicized (read: trade wars) and unreliable source of foodstuffs.  Nevertheless, food production is now a necessary global focus as climate change reshuffles the global agriculture deck. Parts of the world are facing starvation, and all of us face shortages and higher prices. The federal government must up its support of this most vital American industry… for this nation to survive and prosper.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is just too easy to take the source of our grocery supplies for granted.

Bereft from Left

 

   Slow Turn Wedge in NYC       San Francisco’s approach

Traffic accidents kill about 30,000 Americans every year, the eighth leading cause of death in the nation. “Every year, the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) reports approximately 2.5 million intersection accidents. Most of these crashes involve left turns… Nationally, 40 percent of all crashes involve intersections, the second largest category of accidents, led only by rear-end collisions. Fifty percent of serious collisions happen in intersections and some 20 percent of fatal collisions occur there.” AutoAccident.com, March 31st. Pedestrians have the greatest risk.

According to an April 9, 2020 publication from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, “A little more than half of all crashes involving pedestrians took place at intersections in 2018, resulting in more than 6,700 serious injuries to pedestrians and more than 1,500 pedestrian fatalities. In one of the more common scenarios, a driver making a left turn crashes into a pedestrian crossing the road the driver is turning onto. These left-turn crashes accounted for nearly a third of all pedestrian-involved crashes at intersections in 2018.

“To combat the problem, some cities have begun installing left-turn traffic-calming measures at their intersections. New York City has used these methods at more than 300 intersections since 2016. The District of Columbia began a similar effort as part of its Vision Zero program in 2018, with plans to target 85 intersections by the end of this year. One turn-calming technique the city uses is centerline hardening, which consists of rubber curbs and bollards installed on the yellow center line.” Portland, Oregon is also focused on this issue.

A more detailed examination of one city’s approach, San Francisco, illustrates this nationwide reality. Nate Berg, writing for the December 6th FastCompany.com, explains: “Drivers turning left are responsible for a disturbingly high proportion of pedestrian injuries and deaths in the city of San Francisco. Solving the problem could be a matter of design… More than 300 people are injured by left-turning drivers every year in San Francisco. In 2019, 40% of traffic deaths occurred when drivers making left turns hit pedestrians – mostly people using crosswalks who weren’t seen by drivers until it was too late. Now, the city is dramatically rethinking its intersections to make these dangerous left turns a thing of the past.

“The scope of the problem became evident back in 2018, when the San Francisco Department of Public Health analyzed five years’ worth of left-turn crash data. The agency then teamed up with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) to better understand why so many deaths were happening in left turn situations. What they found was a mix of design issues and common driver behaviors that unnecessarily put pedestrians at risk. To address both of these problems, SFMTA launched the Safer Intersections Project to test out new approaches to intersection design, as well as a $2 million grant-funded public education campaign aimed at reducing unsafe driving. The effort is part of the city’s Vision Zero plan, which aims to eliminate traffic-related deaths…

“On the design side, the agency found that part of the reason left turns are so dangerous is that drivers are often going too fast and turning at too tight of an angle to properly see whether a pedestrian might be crossing the street. This has deadly consequences, particularly for older people, who make up 31% of pedestrians killed in left turn situations.

“The intersection retrofits are aimed at changing the way drivers navigate during left turns, and include the placement of vertical posts partly inside intersections, six-foot rubber speed bumps that extend the centerline of travel lanes, and large painted zones that show drives where not to drive. These physical elements force drivers to slow down and make more of a right-angle turn through the intersection as opposed to a fast swooping curve. By making it harder to turn quickly, drivers have more time to see people crossing the road.

“The design interventions were installed at seven intersections in the city last fall. After a year of monitoring, SFMTA has found that the altered intersections have had significant impacts on the speed and safety of left turns. The interventions reduced the average speed at which drivers make left turns by 17%, and brought a 71% reduction in drivers taking turns faster than 15 miles per hour. More data will be collected to see whether these interventions result in reduced collisions, injuries ,and deaths.

“The interventions are focused mostly on intersections with traffic signals. Though signaled intersections make up only 13% of the city’s intersections, they are where two-thirds of all left turn collisions occur.” Additionally, a public relations campaign is attempting to inform drivers of the risks. There has been a particular focus on locations with existing high left-turn speeds, conducive street geometry, and lots of people walking and biking. The main thing is that this approach actually works, and until automotive engineering takes the driving away from human beings, this is a reasonable solution to intersection accidents.

I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes looking at the obvious and dealing with it in an obvious manner eludes too many urban planners.

AsSAD reality for Syria

 

In the struggle (which began on March 15, 2011) between rebelling Syrian Sunnis against a repressive Shiite (Alawite sect) minority government in Damascus, Vladimir Putin provided massive support to his fellow brutal autocrat, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Al-Assad killed tens of thousands (some estimates carry that to over 100,000) of his own people with Russian-supplied poison gas, barrel bombs and weapons to implement genocidal assassinations – often delivered by experienced Russia pilots. As part of a confused strategy by the United States, battling extremist Sunni fundamentalist ISIS in Iraq and Syria, there were moments when the U.S., Russia, Syria and even Iran were nominally on the same side. 

It is clear that al-Assad’s murderous assault on his own defenseless civilians, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, killed three times as many Syrians as did ISIS. Without Russian support, there is little doubt that the Assad regime would have collapsed. Pro-Iran Assad and the United States have been natural antagonists for decades, and Putin was clearly delighted successfully to support a truly brutal dictator that the United States had wanted to take down.

While the Assad regime did not collapse, and as al-Assad continues to arrest, torture and execute those who had opposed him during the struggles, Syria is now economically ravaged. Entire cities were virtually destroyed. Infrastructure was ripped to shreds. Factories, schools and hospitals lay in ruins. As a pariah nation shunned by much of the mainstream commercial nations, impacted by continuing sanctions, Syria struggled to find the money to survive. Russian support was necessary but still woefully insufficient. 

Easy button? “Built on the ashes of 10 years of war in Syria, an illegal drug industry run by powerful associates and relatives of President Bashar al-Assad has grown into a multibillion-dollar operation, eclipsing Syria’s legal exports and turning the country into the world’s newest narcostate.

“Its flagship product is captagon, an illegal, addictive amphetamine popular in Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. Its operations stretch across Syria, including workshops that manufacture the pills, packing plants where they are concealed for export and smuggling networks to spirit them to markets abroad.

“An investigation by The New York Times found that much of the production and distribution is overseen by the Fourth Armored Division of the Syrian Army, an elite unit commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s younger brother and one of Syria’s most powerful men.” New York Times, December 5th. But even that revenue effort was not enough. Assad, used to ravaging his own people at the drop of a hat, decided that he would repeat his brutal pattern once again. This time, his minions, calling themselves “auditors,” began a massive shakedown of any Syrian with money.

A report from Greg Miller and Liz Sly writing for the December 4th Washington Post provides examples of al-Assad’s newfound “I’ll take if I want it” methodology: “The five Syrians pulled from their homes by secret police on the same night last year were not insurgents, spies or suspected of being disloyal to the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad… Instead, they were targets in a desperate new phase of Assad’s battle to survive: the hunt for cash.

“All five were executives at Syria’s second-largest cellphone company, MTN Syria, according to individuals familiar with the episode. Their arrests were part of a ruthless campaign by the president to seize MTN’s assets, along with almost every other meaningful source of revenue in Syria’s shattered economy.

“MTN was ultimately brought to its knees four months ago after protracted pressure in which those arrests were followed by demands for multimillion-dollar payments, threats to revoke the company’s operating license and a dubious court ruling that put an Assad loyalist in charge of the company.

“The South Africa-based corporation announced in August that it was abandoning the Syrian market under conditions that its chief executive called ‘intolerable.’ MTN’s cellphone towers are still working, its 6 million subscribers still paying their monthly bills… ‘But where that money is going, no one knows,’ said a Syrian executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. ‘Honestly, no one knows.’

“Similar events have played out repeatedly over the past two years, as Assad and his financially strapped regime have raided or outright seized dozens of businesses, including foreign corporations and family enterprises that rode out Syria’s decade-long war in government-held territory, according to U.S. and other Western officials, as well as Syrians with firsthand knowledge of the regime’s actions. Neither the Syrian government nor the Syrian presidency responded to requests for comment.” Simply put, Syria is a failed state that supports only Assad’s inner and most corrupt but loyal circle. In an awful anomaly, al-Assad is nevertheless firmly in charge.

“Even members of the Assad family have not been spared. Last year, Assad stripped his cousin Rami Makhlouf of companies and assets that had once been part of a massive portfolio estimated by Syria experts to be worth as much as $10 billion.

“The regime’s campaign to commandeer wealth has only intensified since then. U.S. officials and Syria experts said it has been driven by the intense financial pressure on a regime that has been bankrupted by war, daunting debts to Iran and Russia, a meltdown in neighboring Lebanon’s financial sector and continuing economic sanctions from the West.

“Assad needs the money, officials and experts said, to meet payroll for his military and security services, to buy fuel and food for the capital and other areas still under regime control, and to reward some Syrian elites who remained loyal to him through the war.

“Against this backdrop, an endgame has begun to unfold. U.S. officials and Syria experts said that Assad has so effectively consolidated his control over the country’s security apparatus and economy that he is poised to emerge from the war with a firmer grip on power than when it started. But after a decade of conflict, he is left in charge of a dismembered and decimated state where nearly half of Syria’s territory is beyond his government’s reach, entire towns lie in ruins and the currency has lost 85 percent of its value since the start of the war.” We live in a time when autocrats seem to prosper and where democracy suffers and contracts, all as climate change combined with an unending pandemic continue to erode at us all.

I’m Peter Dekom, and for those Americans pushing hard for a new white majority autocracy in our own country, the lesson needs to be rather clearly that very few ordinary citizens ever do well in the longer-term when they are subject to the whims of a single forceful leader or political party.

Climate Change – Das Gift that Keeps on Taking

 

  From historyincharts.com/world

“The coast of California is marked by massive inequality. People don’t realize that because they go to Malibu, they go to Santa Barbara. Those are the beaches that people see and are familiar with…They don’t think of [polluted and 

lower income] places like Wilmington, West Long Beach, Barrio Logan, West Oakland, Richmond, Bayview-Hunters Point. You can name all these communities, and it’s the same story.” Environmentalist Lucas Zucker

It’s not as if the current X, Boomer and beyond generations are totally responsible for climate change. It just that the accumulation of pollution and greenhouse nasties that began in the late 19th century (with the Industrial Revolution) aggregated, that it began to come to our attention in the 1970s, before it slammed into us and our planet really, really hard in the 21st century. Compounded by global conflict and, as the above chart shows, explosive population growth accompanied by parallel demand for agricultural and urban land to hold all the people. We extracted, consumed and polluted. Modernity demanded massive food supplies, electrical power, autonomous mobility (cars, trains, trucks, planes and trust with supporting infrastructure) and manufacturing at a level that is difficult to contemplate.

Along the way, rivers, streams, seas and landfills were convenient dumping grounds for our accelerating waste. Laws, designed to stimulate business growth, also relieved massive polluters from any real responsibility for their environmental carelessness. Even where direct corporate responsibility could be identified, a simple filing in bankruptcy eliminated any real source to clean up the problem. Governments added to the problem with war waste (including nuclear waste and unexploded mines) and a proclivity of corporate, agricultural and governmental entities to bury what they could not otherwise get rid of.  Just about every nation became awash with toxic waste sites. Ultra-modern America was no exception. 

Our toxic waste problem became so bad that by the 1970s, we all knew something had to be done. But since then, we have discovered new sources like leaking drums of nuclear waste on the Columbia River, chemical deposits in drinking water everywhere (e.g., Flint Michigan) and in our waterways and land (there’s a reason paper-and-oil producing Louisiana is the cancer capital of the United States just as West Virginia generated massive black lung problems) with so many corporations disavowing responsibility that our own government had to step in to clean up the mess. An impossible task, particularly as companies continue to pollute without much risk of being held accountable.

We created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, about the time some scientists were also discovering hints of the global catastrophe in the making: global warming from greenhouse gasses. But the immediate issue was cleaning up large pockets of pollution and waste that were scattered everywhere. The notion of an environmental superfund was soon born as the EPA website explains: “Thousands of contaminated sites exist nationally due to hazardous waste being dumped, left out in the open, or otherwise improperly managed. These sites include manufacturing facilities, processing plants, landfills and mining sites… In the late 1970s, toxic waste dumps such as Love Canal and Valley of the Drums received national attention when the public learned about the risks to human health and the environment posed by contaminated sites. .. In response, Congress established the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) in 1980.   

“CERCLA is informally called Superfund. It allows EPA to clean up contaminated sites. It also forces the parties responsible for the contamination to either perform cleanups or reimburse the government for EPA-led cleanup work… When there is no viable responsible party, Superfund gives EPA the funds and authority to clean up contaminated sites.” 

Of course, Congress has never authorized enough spending even to begin to clean up that mess, and the backlog of projects is often measured in decades. Which means, basically, that we are unlikely to see sufficient measurable progress for most of this century and beyond. And that should make you ask the question of how global climate change will impact toxic waste sites left to fester. Particularly with coastal erosion and sea rise. A look at California, a very progressive state by national standards, may provide a clue.

California has identified over 400 toxic sites, mostly and obviously in less affluent areas, that are at serious near- and midterm risk from sea level rise, including near military bases that have been particularly irresponsible. Floods and recent wildfires have only contributed to the level of toxic flows into California’s environment. Writing for the December 1st Los Angeles Times, Rosanna Xia tells us the bad news: “Across California, high surf is already flooding homes. Major roads, utility lines and other critical infrastructure are dangling ever closer to the sea… In just the next decade, the ocean could rise more than half a foot — with heavy storms and cycles of El Niño projected to make things even worse.

“A growing body of research is now investigating how rising water will flood communities built on or near contaminated land. Efforts to study this issue in the San Francisco Bay Area have become increasingly coordinated, and state toxic substances control officials have started their own mapping project. At Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Northridge, a team of researchers recently launched a project to examine which communities in the state could be most harmed by potential flooding of industrial chemicals currently stored underground.

“‘This is where the conversation absolutely has to go,’ said Patrick Barnard, whose research team at the U.S. Geological Survey has done extensive flood modeling used by officials across the state. ‘We’ve made a lot of progress in terms of sea level rise projections. The next important step is: How do we translate that into vulnerability and impacts?’

“With [this] new Toxic Tides project, two environmental health scientists — Rachel Morello-Frosch at UC Berkeley and Lara Cushing at UCLA — teamed up with [Lucas] Zucker [policy director for the economic and environmental justice group CAUSE] and a number of community groups to design an online tool that could help fill some data gaps in this less-talked-about realm of sea level rise...

“Throughout the process, they turned to those living in threatened communities for help identifying data gaps. Community organizers also provided insight into which data points to use — beyond race and income — as a measure of social vulnerability… If most of the residents living near a toxic site are not fluent in English, for example, the barriers to understanding the flood risks — and how to advocate for solutions — are far greater. Voter turnout, unemployment and the percentage of people who own their home (or even a car) are also factors indicating how much a community lacks political power, insurance protection and even the ability to evacuate in an emergency…

“‘We know from past flood events that the wealthy communities are not the ones that suffer the greatest impacts,’ Cushing said, pointing to recent disasters in New Orleans and Houston. ‘The vulnerabilities of environmental justice communities to sea level rise have not been front and center in the conversation in a way that it should be.’” And most of the above represents just “progressive” California. How many communities embracing the top five percent of America’s wealth face parallel problems with buried and vulnerable toxicity? Exactly.

I’m Peter Dekom, and after well over a century of polluting ourselves, the piper has come a-calling with climate change as his greatest threat.

American Justice – Don’t Allow Defendants’ Access to Exculpatory Evidence

     Abu Ghraib Prison

American federal, state and local governments are beginning to earn a reputation for secrecy, efficiency at the expense of justice, hiding behind the “national security” ruse to avoid embarrassment and understaffing public defenders/investigators for those who cannot afford a lawyer. In our system of justice, for most people accused of a crime, it is effectively the prosecutor who determines the fate of a defender, guilty or innocent. With conviction rates in the high 90% range for federal cases and only slightly lower for state prosecutions, criminal justice has mostly devolved into world of plea bargains under a threat of a much longer sentence if a defendant, often with an inability to pay for a good defense, has the audacity to seek a full trial. See my January 18, 2020 Innocent, Broke and without Hope blog for more.

Prosecutors are focused on winning and almost never fairness. Police misconduct has often been swept under the rug, including planting evidence and making “witness” deals with clearly mendacious individuals. But absolutely nothing can compare to the “judicial” outrage of those “terrorists” who have been incarcerated at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – presumably free of normal constitutional protections since the “trials” are taking place outside of the United States. There is obviously no practice of a sixth/fourteenth Amendment speedy trial or equal protection under the law at Gitmo. Some purported terrorists have sat in that prison for almost two decades without a trial. Some have even sought justice in foreign courts.

Most of the detainees have, over the years, been released. Those few that remain, most probably guilty, have faced torture – mislabeled “enhanced interrogation” – while in our custody, albeit usually in their pre-Gitmo captivity. Some at our Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Others in “black sites” in friendly eastern European facilities, such as one purportedly in Poland. Waterboarding. Sleep deprivation. Hanging naked by their arms. Humiliation. With a little bit of physical beating thrown into the mix. When appointed lawyers for these “defendants” want to introduce evidence of this harsh and unlawful (according to international law) treatment, US prosecutors have denied access to the necessary information by invoking the necessity of protecting “state secrets.” As noted, some prisoners are seeking vindication in the courts of those nations that held such “dark sites,” such as Poland. The US is refusing to cooperate in those trials.

Nothing illustrates this catch-22 more than the case of Guantanamo Bay prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to brutality, as CIA interrogators pushed him for information. Writing for the October 7th Los Angeles Times, David Savage explains this incredible and clearly unjust case, which has made its way up to the US Supreme Court even before a trial has truly commenced: “[The issue is whether:] the U.S. government can prevent court testimony that describes the CIA’s brutal treatment of alleged terrorists captured in Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“This is hardly a secret. Justice Department lawyers agreed it is ‘public knowledge’ that certain ‘high value’ prisoners were held at ‘black sites’ overseas and subjected to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. Many of these techniques were widely seen as torture… A former president of Poland even acknowledged the existence of the CIA site there in news interviews. But the Department of Justice lawyers urged the high court to invoke the ‘state secrets privilege’ to block two former CIA contractors from telling Polish prosecutors what happened at the sites, since U.S. officials have refused to confirm their existence.

“Acting U.S. Solicitor Gen. Brian Fletcher said it would be a ‘serious breach of trust’ if the U.S. courts cooperated in confirming the black site was in Poland. He said judges should defer to U.S. officials on matters of national security… The case of U.S. vs. Abu Zubaydah is a test of how far the high court will go to shield the executive branch — past and present — from accountability in the courts for possible abuses and wrongdoing. In this instance, however, it is a Polish court looking into the allegations of torture… Some justices wondered how this could be decided as a matter of state secrets… ‘At a certain point, it becomes a bit farcical ... if everybody knows’ the supposed secret, said Justice Elena Kagan. ‘Maybe we should rename it or something. It’s not a state secrets privilege anymore.’

“Abu Zubaydah was shot and captured in Pakistan in 2002, and U.S. officials wrongly believed for a time that he was a close associate of Osama bin Laden who could reveal the next plot to attack this country… When he revealed little, he became the CIA’s first victim of its brutal post-9/11 methods for seeking to extract information.

“For 83 times in one month, he was strapped to a board while water was poured into his mouth and nose, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The aim was to simulate drowning. He was hung naked from hooks on the ceiling, spent 11 days in a tiny coffin, was slapped, thrown against a wall and deprived of sleep for 11 consecutive days. He lost an eye and since 2006 has been locked up at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facing no charges but given no opportunity to speak about what happened to him.

“The worst moment for the Justice Department lawyer came near the end when Justice Neil M. Gorsuch pressed him to explain why Abu Zubaydah has been denied that right… ‘Why not make the witness available?’ he asked. ‘What is the government’s objection to the witness testifying to his own treatment and not requiring any admission from the government of any kind?’… In response to Gorsuch, Fletcher said the Guantanamo prisoner could speak about the conditions of his confinement there but not about ‘classified information’ and other matters.

“‘I’d just really appreciate a straight answer to this,’ Gorsuch said. ‘Will the government make the petitioner available to testify as to his treatment during these dates?’… Fletcher said he could not say. ‘I cannot offer that now because that’s a request that has not been made.’… Gorsuch said he should check further and submit an answer to the court.

“The state secrets privilege is not written in the Constitution or federal law, but the Supreme Court invoked it in 1953 to shield military secrets from being revealed in a lawsuit over the crash of an Air Force plane that was carrying secret electronic equipment. The widows of three men who died had asked to see the accident report. Decades later it was released, and it showed the crash was caused by an engine fire and revealed nothing about secret equipment.

“The case before the court began in 2010 when lawyers for Abu Zubaydah filed criminal complaints in Poland and before the European Court of Human Rights seeking to expose what happened to him. When a Polish prosecutor asked the Guantanamo prisoner to submit evidence, U.S. officials said he was being held ‘incommunicado for the remainder of his life.’”

The reputation of the United States for equal justice is beyond tarnished. Abu Ghraib and Gitmo are just icing on a cake that has exposed Iran Contra Scandal during the Reagan Administration, the CIA clandestine efforts to topple leaders in Chile, Nicaragua, and Iran, to name a few, and the efforts of the George W Bush administration to justify torture as merely “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a policy reversed quickly under the Obama Administration. The Trump policies (not completely rejected by President Biden) on our southern border didn’t help our reputation. We have long since lost the moral high ground to complain about human rights violations, however horrific, in countries like North Korea and China. But we still complain.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder if we have forever relinquished any hope of restoring our now long-lost commitment to equal justice under the law and whether we even care about getting that back.