Israel’s argument at The Hague: We are Incapable of Genocide
January 15, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark, Australian Independent Media
Israel’s relationship with the United Nations, international institutions and international law has at times bristled with suspicion and blatant hostility. In a famous cabinet meeting in 1955, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously knocked back the suggestion that the United Nations 1947 plan for partitioning Palestine had been instrumental in creating the State of Israel. “No, no, no!” he roared in demur. “Only the daring of the Jews created the state, and not any oom-shmoom resolution.”
In the shadow of the Holocaust, justifications for violence against foes mushroom multiply. Given that international law, notably in war, entails restraint and limits on the use of force, doctrines have been selectively pruned and shaped, landscaped to suit the needs of the Jewish state. When the strictures of convention have been ignored, the reasoning is clipped for consistency: defenders of international law and its institutions have been either missing in the discussion or subservient to Israel’s enemies. They were nowhere to be seen, for instance, when Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser was preparing for war in the spring of 1967. Israel’s tenaciously talented statesman, Abba Eban, reflected in his autobiography about the weakness of the UN in withdrawing troops from the Sinai when pressured by Nasser to do so. It “destroyed the most central hopes and expectations on which we had relied on withdrawing from Sinai.”
…………………………… Israeli authorities are resolute in their calls that Islamic terrorism is the enemy, that its destruction is fundamental for civilisation, and that crushing measures are entirely proportionate. Palestinian civilian deaths might be regrettable but all routes of blame lead to Hamas and its resort to human shields.
These arguments have failed to convince a growing number of countries. One of them is South Africa. On December 29, the Republic filed an application in the International Court of Justice alleging “violations by Israel regarding the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide […] in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Various “acts and omissions” by the Israeli government were alleged to be “genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.” What Pretoria is seeking is both a review of the merits of the case and the imposition of provisional measures that would essentially modify, if not halt, Israel’s Gaza operation.
Prior to its arguments made before the 15-judge panel on January 12, Israel rejected “with contempt the blood libel by South Africa in its application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).” The Israeli Foreign Ministry went so far as to suggest that the court was being exploited, while South Africa was, in essence, “collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of Israel.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with demagogic rage, claimed that his country had witnessed “an upside-down world. Israel is accused of genocide while it is fighting against genocide.” The country was battling “murderous terrorists who carried out crimes against humanity.” Government spokesman Eylon Levy tried to make it all a matter of Hamas, nothing more, nothing less. “We have been clear in word and in deed that we are targeting the October 7th monsters and are innovating ways to uphold international law.”
In that innovation lies the problem. Whatever is meant by such statements as those of Israel Defence Forces spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, that “Our war is against Hamas, not against the people of Gaza”, the catastrophic civilian death toll, destruction, displacement and starvation would suggest the contrary. Innovation in war often entails carefree slaughter with a clear conscience.
On another level, the Israeli argument is more nuanced, going to the difficulties of proving genocidal intent. Amichai Cohen of Israel’s Ono Academic College and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute admits that comments from right-wing Israeli ministers calling for the “emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza were not helpful. (They were certainly helpful to Pretoria’s case.) But he insists that the South African argument is based on “classic cherry-picking.” Cohen should know better than resort to the damnably obvious: all legal cases are, by definition, exercises of picking the finest cherries in the orchard.
The Israeli defence team’s oral submissions to the ICJ maintained a distinct air of unreality. Tal Becker, as legal advisor to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, tried to move judicial opinion in his address by drawing upon the man who minted genocide as a term of international law, Raphael Lemkin. Invariably, it was Becker’s purpose to again return to the Holocaust as “unspeakable” and uniquely linked to the fate of the Jews, implying that Jews would surely be incapable of committing those same acts. But here was South Africa, raining on the sacred flame, invoking “this term in the context of Israel’s conduct in a war it did not start and did not want. A war in which Israel is defending itself against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations whose brutality knows no bounds.” Israel, pure; Israel vulnerable; Israel under attack.
In yet another jurisprudential innovation, Becker insisted that the Genocide Convention was not connected in any way to “address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities on the civilian population, even when the use of force raises ‘very serious issues of international law’ and involves ‘enormous suffering’ and ‘continuing loss of life’.” The Convention, rather, was meant “to address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional severity.”
The view is reiterated by another lawyer representing Israel. “The inevitable fatalities and human suffering of any conflict,” submitted Christopher Staker, “is not of itself a pattern of conduct that plausibly shows genocidal intent.” Butcheries on a massive scale would not, in of themselves, suggest such the requisite mental state to exterminate a race, ethnic or religious group.
As for South Africa’s insistence that provisional measures be granted, Staker was unwavering in repeating the familiar talking points. They “would stop Israel defending its citizens, more citizens could be attacked, raped and tortured [by Hamas], and provisional measures would prevent Israel doing anything.”
Legal tricks and casuistry were something of a blooming phenomenon in Israel’s submissions. South Africa had, according to Becker, submitted “a profoundly distorted factual and legal picture……………………………………………..
Malcom Shaw, a figure known for his expertise in the thorny realm of territorial disputes, did his little bit of legal curation. ………………… The only thing that mattered here, argued Shaw, was the attack of October 7 by Hamas, a sole act of barbarity that could be read in terrifying isolation. That, he claimed was “the real genocide in this situation.”………………………. more https://theaimn.com/israels-argument-at-the-hague-we-are-incapable-of-genocide/#
Craig Murray: Observations on Israel’s defense in the International Court of Justice
In the UK, the BBC and Sky both ran almost all the Israeli case live, having not run any of the South African case live. I believe something similar was true in the USA, Australia and Germany too.
a hardline and uncompromising start. The judges appeared to be paying very close attention when he opened with the 7 October self-defence argument, but very definitely some of them become started to fidget and become uncomfortable when he started to talk of Hamas operating from ambulances and UN facilities. In short, he went too far and I believe he lost his audience at that point.
Malcolm Shaw speaks for Israel because he actually wants Israel to be able to continue killing Palestinian women and children to improve the security of Israel, in his view.
SOTT, Craig Murray, craigmurray.org.uk, Sun, 14 Jan 2024
As with the South African case, according to court procedure the Israeli case was introduced by their “agent”, permanently accredited to the court, Tal Becker of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He opened with the standard formula “it is an honour to appear before you again on behalf of the state of Israel”, managing to imply purely through phrasing and tone of voice that the honour lay in representing Israel, not in appearing before the judges.
Becker opened by going straight to the Holocaust, saying that nobody knew more than Israel why the Genocide Convention existed. 6 million Jewish people had been killed. The Convention was not to be used to cover the normal brutality of war.
The South African case aimed at the delegitimisation of the state of Israel. On 7 October Hamas had committed massacre, mutilation, rape and abduction. 1,200 had been killed and 5,500 maimed. He related several hideous individual atrocity stories and played a recording he stated to be a Hamas fighter boasting on WhatsApp to his parents about committing mass murder, rape and mutilation.
The only genocide in this case was being committed against Israel. Hamas continued to attack Israel, and for the court to take provisional measures would be to deny Israel the right to self-defence. Provisional measures should rather be taken against South Africa and its attempt by legal means to further genocide by its relationship with Hamas. Gaza was not under occupation: Israel had left it with great potential to be a political and economic success. Instead Hamas had chosen to make it a terrorist base.
Hamas was embedded in the civilian population and therefore responsible for the civilian deaths. Hamas had tunnels under schools, hospitals, mosques and UN facilities and tunnel entrances within them. It commandeered medical vehicles for military use.
South Africa had talked of civilian buildings destroyed, but did not tell you they had been destroyed by Hamas booby traps and Hamas missile misfires.
The casualty figures South Africa gave were from Hamas sources and not reliable. They did not say how many were fighters? How many of the children were child soldiers? The application by South Africa was ill-founded and ill-motivated. It was a libel.
This certainly was a hardline and uncompromising start. The judges appeared to be paying very close attention when he opened with the 7 October self-defence argument, but very definitely some of them become started to fidget and become uncomfortable when he started to talk of Hamas operating from ambulances and UN facilities. In short, he went too far and I believe he lost his audience at that point.
Next up was Professor Malcolm Shaw KC. Shaw is regarded as an authority on the procedure of international law and is editor of the standard tome on the subject. This is an interesting facet of the legal profession, where standard reference books on particular topics are regularly updated to include key extracts from recent judges, and passages added or amended to explain the impact of these judgments. Being an editor on this field provides a route to prominence for the plodding and pedantic.
I had come across Shaw in his capacity as a co-founder of the Centre for Human Rights at Essex University. I had given a couple of talks there some twenty years ago on the attacks on human rights of the “War on Terror” and my own whistleblower experience over torture and extraordinary rendition. For an alleged human rights expert, Shaw seemed extraordinarily prone to support the national security interests of the state over individual liberty.
I do not pretend I gave it a great deal of thought. I did not know at that time of Shaw’s commitment as an extreme Zionist and in particular his long term interest in suppressing the rights of the Palestinian people. After 139 states have recognised Palestine as a state, Shaw led for Israel thelegal oppositionto Palestine’s membership of international institutions, including the International Criminal Court. Shaw’s rather uninspired reliance on the Montevideo Convention of 1933 is hardly a legal tour de force, and it didn’t work.
Every criminal deserves a defence, and nobody should hold it against a barrister that they defend a murderer or rapist, as it is important that guilt or innocence is tested by a court. But I think it is fair to state that defence lawyers do not in general defend those accused of murder because they agree with murder and want a murderer to go on murdering. That however is the case here: Malcolm Shaw speaks for Israel because he actually wants Israel to be able to continue killing Palestinian women and children to improve the security of Israel, in his view.
That is the difference between this and other cases, including at the ICJ. Generally the lead lawyers would happily swap sides, if the other side had hired them first. But this is entirely different. Here the lawyers (with the possible exception of ) believe profoundly in the case they are supporting and would never appear for the other side. That is just one more way that this is such an extraordinary case, with so much drama and such vital consequences, not least for the future of international law.
For the reason I have just explained, Shaw’s role here is not that of a simple barrister plying his trade. His attempt to extend the killing should see him viewed as a pariah by decent people everywhere, for the rest of his doubtless highly-paid existence.
Shaw opened up by saying that the South African case continually spoke of context. They talked of the 75 years of the existence of the state of Israel. Why stop there? Why not go back to the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate over Palestine? No, the context of these events was the massacre of 7 October, and Israel’s subsequent right of self-defence. He produced and read a long quote from mid-October by European Commission President Ursula von Der Leyen, stating that Israel had suffered a terrorist atrocity and had the right of self-defence.
……………………………………………………………. It was South Africa which was guilty of complicity in genocide in cooperation with Hamas. South Africa’s allegations against Israel “verge on the outrageous”.
Israel’s next lawyer was a lady called Galit Raguan from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. She said the reality on the ground was that Israel had done everything possible to minimise civilian deaths and to aid humanitarian relief. Urban warfare always resulted in civilian deaths. It was Hamas who were responsible for destruction of buildings and infrastructure…………………………….
Next up was lawyer Omri Sender. He stated that more food trucks per day now entered Gaza than before October 7. The number had increased from 70 food trucks to 109 food trucks per day. Fuel, gas and electricity were all being supplied and Israel had repaired the sewage systems………………………
Perhaps noting that nobody believed him, Sender stated that the court could not institute provisional measures but rather was obliged to accept the word of Israel on its good intentions because of the Law of the Unilateral Declarations of States……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
It is important to realise this. Israel is hoping to win on their procedural points about existence of dispute, unilateral assurances and jurisdiction. The obvious nonsense they spoke about the damage to homes and infrastructure being caused by Hamas, trucks entering Gaza and casualty figures, was not serious. They did not expect the judges to believe any of this. The procedural points were for the court. The rest was mass propaganda for the media.
In the UK, the BBC and Sky both ran almost all the Israeli case live, having not run any of the South African case live. I believe something similar was true in the USA, Australia and Germany too.
While the court was in session, Germany has announced it will intervene in the substantial case to support Israel. They argue explicitly that, as the world’s greatest perpetrator of genocide, they are uniquely placed to judge. It is in effect a copyright claim. They are protecting Germany’s intellectual property in the art of genocide. Perhaps they might in future license genocide, or allow Israel to continue genocide on a franchise basis.
I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s “no dispute” argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means “no dispute”. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…
What do I think will happen? Some sort of “compromise”. The judges will issue provisional measures different to South Africa’s request, asking Israel to continue to take measures to protect the civilian population, or some such guff. Doubtless the State Department have drafted something like this for President of the Court [Joan] Donoghue already.
Comment: As Murray has previously written:
“The President of the Court, Joan Donoghue, is a US State Department, Clinton hack who has never formed an original idea in her life, and I should be astonished if she starts now. I half-expected her strings to actually be visible, emerging from holes in the hall’s magnificent deep relief-panelled wooden ceiling.”
I hope I am wrong. I would hate to give up on international law. One thing I do know for certain. These two days in the Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights. I still believe action by the court could cause the US and UK to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza.
Comment: Mr Murray also detailed the immense efforts he went to in order to report on these proceedings:
There was a very good feel at the end of the South African presentation on day one. Everyone felt it had gone extremely well, and left very little room for the court to wriggle away from provisional measures. We left the public gallery, and I went with [Jeremy] Corbyn and [Jean Luc] Mèlenchon to meet the South African delegation. This caused some concern to the security officials, who told us that members of the public had to leave immediately and not meet delegates or speak to the media, who were grouped outside the court but still within the precincts.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………..more https://www.sott.net/article/487825-Craig-Murray-Observations-on-Israels-defense-in-the-International-Court-of-Justice
An international law expert explains why South Africa’s case at the ICJ is so important
A ruling by the International Court of Justice in favor of South Africa, which has accused Israel of genocide, could mean saving thousands of lives in Gaza. The alternative, however, could be devastating and further embolden Israeli violence.
BY YUMNA PATEL https://mondoweiss.net/2024/01/an-international-law-expert-explains-why-south-africas-case-at-the-icj-is-so-important/?fbclid=IwAR0_La2MT5GTGkKo2X56cAEa15B-SPBIOwKnMKznqzCczU0XVSIz_BlNrBE
South Africa and Israel will be appearing before the International Court of Justice, on Thursday, January 11, where the court will begin hearing arguments on whether Israel is committing the crime of Genocide.
The highly anticipated public hearings, which will last for two days, are based on an 84-page appeal submitted by South Africa in December to the ICJ, the top judicial body of the United Nations. In the appeal, South Africa argues that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is “genocidal in character” and that through both action and intent to commit genocide, Israel has violated the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Both Israel and South Africa are parties to the convention, which came into being on the heels of World War II and the Holocaust. All signatories of the treaty are obligated not to commit genocide, to ensure that it is prevented, and to seek that the crime be prosecuted.
South Africa’s appeal to the ICJ, however, is not just about charging Israel with the crime of genocide – a lengthy process that could take the court months or years. It’s also seeking a more immediate solution by requesting the court institute provisional measures to immediately halt Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Essentially, South Africa wants two things: to stop the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza now and for Israel to be charged with the crime of genocide in the long term. A condensed breakdown and explanation of the 84-page brief can be found here.
Expectedly, Israel has outright denied any accusations of genocide, lambasting the South African appeal as antisemtic “blood libel”. The U.S. has also rebuked South Africa’s appeal, called it “meritless” and “completely without any basis in fact.”
Nevertheless, Israel is pressing forward, sending a carefully crafted legal team to The Hague in the Netherlands to defend Israel’s position that it is not committing genocide in Gaza.
The much-talked about public proceedings, which will take place over the course of two days on Thursday and Friday, January 11th and 12th, are being welcomed by both Palestinians, as well as a number of countries around the world, who have thus far failed to bring about a ceasefire, primarily due to the U.S. veto of UN resolutions calling for a halt to the violence.
Despite the international buzz and anticipation, many in Palestine and around the world remain skeptical as to how much weight an ICJ ruling against Israel could hold due to a long history of Israeli impunity on the global stage and Israel’s well-documented disregard for international law and human rights norms.
Still, many Palestinian international law experts and human rights groups say the ICJ proceedings are significant and could hold serious consequences not only for Israel and Palestine but for the world.
Among them is Dr. Munir Nuseibah, a Palestinian professor of International law at Al-Quds University and the Director of the Al-Quds Human Rights Clinic. Mondoweiss spoke to Dr. Nuseibah about the significance of this case, why people should pay attention to it, and what implications it holds.
Why does this case matter?
The case filed by South Africa is important for a number of reasons. First, Dr. Nuseibah notes, the fact that it was filed at the ICJ in and of itself is significant, being that the court is the highest judicial body that settles disputes between states.
“This is quite significant because it’s… based on an agreement, or treaty that is binding to both South Africa and Israel,” he said, referring to the 1948 Genocide Convention.
“This is important in the history of the Palestinian cause, since we haven’t had an opportunity to get a binding international decision on any of the important questions that we have been dealing with, including for example, the issue of the Palestinian refugees, the [Israeli] occupation, etc,” Dr. Nuseibah continued.
The last time the ICJ made a decision in relation to Palestine was a 2004 advisory opinion that found Israel’s separation wall, which at that stage was still early on in its construction, violated international law and should be torn down.
However, because that decision was a non-binding advisory opinion, Israel was not obligated to stop construction or take down the wall. Instead, Israel continued constructing the wall, which today spans across hundreds of kilometers, cutting off Palestinians from their land and swallowing up swaths of Palestinian territory.
This case, Dr. Nuseibah says, would be different, as the resulting decision from this week’s proceedings would be binding, and if the court rules in favor of South Africa, it would mean that under international law, Israel would be obligated to end its military campaign in Gaza in the short term, and in the long term, potentially provide material reparations to the victims of its genocide.
The case is also significant as a symbolic measure as well. That, in the face of an ongoing genocide, which has been well documented by Palestinians and international human rights organizations alike, the world must intervene to stop it.
“If there is no serious intervention, and if the United Nations, the world, and what we call the international community is going to continue to be silenced and made inactive, and in a certain way deactivated and demobilized, this horror will continue,” Dr. Nusaibah said, not just in Palestine but around the world.
“To not only be accused of genocide, but to be charged by the court, and to be seen as a country guilty of genocide is very important,” he said. “In my opinion, everything that happens in the International Court of Justice now, is likely to influence thousands of lives in the future.
So whatever these judges will decide will actually be a question of life and death for many, many Palestinians.”
What will South Africa be arguing on Thursday?
The crux of South Africa’s argument is that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and that it is violating its obligations under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, which defines the crime as “acts intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group.”
South Africa’s argument hinges on proving that Israel is not only committing acts of genocide in Gaza but that there is a clear intent on Israel’s part to commit genocide – the latter being a significant focus of the 84-page brief, which listed off an array of quotes from Israeli politicians, officials, and public figures using genocidal language when speaking about Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
“[South Africa’s] first argument will involve the speeches and quotes basically from Israeli officials who have been using genocidal language from the very first day actually, from October 7th,” Dr. Nuseibah said.
“In criminal law it’s not enough to do something, but you have to intend to do something. And one of the signs of intent, are the things you say. So these quotes from Israeli officials will be used to show that Israel has been calling for genocide,” he continued.
And, of course, South Africa will be providing evidence of what it says are clear genocidal acts carried out by Israel in Gaza, such as “bombing civilians, heavily targeting homes, targeting hospitals, targeting cultural centers, targeting universities, schools, etc,” Dr. Nuseibah detailed.
“So all of these targets that the Israeli army has destroyed over the past months, and of course the civilian casualties, the human beings who have been murdered or injured or made disabled, [Israel] using hunger as a weapon, etc. – all of that will be a very important part of the facts South Africa will present,” he said, adding that the denial of fuel and electricity, the siege on 2 million civilians, and the forcible displacement of Palestinians in Gaza is also “an important element of genocide and especially in this case.”
What will Israel’s legal defense look like?
While there are 84 pages to give us an insight into South Africa’s case, it’s not as apparent what exactly Israel’s defense will consist of.
If the past few months have been any indication, however, during which Israel has denied any wrongdoing in Gaza, justified it as self-defense, and has actually accused Hamas of genocide for its October 7th attack – some assumptions can be made as to how Israel will approach it’s defense.
First, Israel’s primary strategy, Dr. Nuseibah says, will be to “deny, deny, deny.”
“Israel will deny everything that South Africa claims,” Dr. Nuseibah said. “It will deny that it has starved people, or that it is trying to starve people. It will deny that it is not allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza, by showing examples where it actually did allow some trucks to enter,” he continued, noting that what little humanitarian aid has been allowed into Gaza has been critically insufficient to address the needs of the more than 2 million people trapped in the strip.
“It [Israel] will talk about any attempts they made in any of their operations to ‘reduce civilian casualties’, whether by warning civilians in certain places,” Dr. Nuseibah said, referring to Israel’s practice of dropping leaflets to notify civilians that their area is going to be attacked, or by providing QR codes and maps of “safe zones” and “combat zones” in Gaza – all practices that have been widely criticized both as insufficient to save civilian lives, and as a PR move by Israel to save face in front of the international community.
At the time of publication, 96 days after Israel began its bombardment on Gaza, more than 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, the vast majority of them civilians.
“So, Israel’s strategy will be to deny everything, because there is nothing else they can do or say,” Dr. Nuseibah said. “It is a longtime strategy and practice of Israel that we are used to. Israel always denies its crimes. Even until today, Israel denies the Nakba, that is the official position of Israel, to deny it.”
While Israel has focused much of its propaganda campaign on accusing Hamas, and supporters of the Palestinian cause in general, of carrying out or advocating for the genocide of Israelis and Jewish people, Dr. Nuseibah said he doubts that will be a feature of Israel’s arguments at the ICJ.
“I doubt that they will do this or bring this up, because if they do, then they would have to present evidence. They would have to allow an open investigation into what happened on October 7th,” Dr. Nuseibah said, noting that Israel has historically prevented access to independent investigators seeking to probe potential crimes committed in the occupied Palestinian territory.
How will this impact Palestinian lives right now?
While the deliberations on whether Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza or not could take years, South Africa’s case is expected to yield a much more immediate and time-sensitive result.
As part of its appeal to the court, South Africa is seeking an emergency interim decision by the court, or “provisional measures,” to order the Israeli military to cease its campaign in Gaza immediately, stop the displacement of Palestinians, and allow for the entry of adequate humanitarian aid into Gaza. The court could make that decision in as little as a few days or weeks.
These provisional measures, Dr. Nuseibah says, are some of the most critical elements to the case and have the biggest potential to change the course of the unfolding genocide in Gaza.
“This is very time sensitive. Every day that we lose, we are losing more lives. We are losing more casualties. There are more homes that are demolished. There are more days that children are not going to school,” he continued.”There is a lot of loss every single day of civilian life, and there is no human being in Gaza who is not heavily influenced by what is happening.”
“All of the provisional requests that South Africa has made are there to save lives immediately. And I do expect that the court will take these measures. History has shown that the ICJ has given these provisional measures in similar situations, even with less casualties and less risk,” Dr. Nuseibah said.
“So I do expect that the court will decide provisional measures, which would mean a ceasefire, which is the most important thing right now, as well as stopping the displacement, allowing for the entry of aid, and stopping the continuous demolition of Gaza.”
Israel has ignored international law before, what will be different this time?
Continue reading‘The Evidence of Genocide Is Not Only Chilling, It Is Also Overwhelming and Incontrovertible’. Quotes from International Court of Justice
by SCHEERPOST staff, https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/12/the-evidence-of-genocide-is-not-only-chilling-it-is-also-overwhelming-and-incontrovertible/
The World Court will hear the case on Jan. 11 and 12 at The Hague.
Notable quotes from Jan. 11 hearing
From South African attorney Tembeka Ngcukaitobi:
“There is an extraordinary feature in this case: that Israel’s political leaders, military commanders, and persons holding official positions have systematically and in explicit terms declared their genocidal intent… And these statements are then repeated by soldiers on the ground in Gaza as they engage in the destruction of Palestinians and the physical infrastructure of Gaza.”
“What state would admit to a genocidal intent? Yet the distinctive feature of this case has not been the silence as such but the reiteration and repetition of genocidal speech throughout every sphere of state in Israel.”
“We remind the court of the identity and authority of the genocidal inciters: the prime minister, the president the minister of defense, the minister of national security, the minister of energy and infrastructure, members of the Knesset, senior army officials, and foot soldiers… The evidence of genocidal intent is not only chilling, it is also overwhelming and incontrovertible.”
“Israel has subjected Gaza to what has been described as one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare. Palestinians in Gaza are being killed by Israeli weaponry and bombs from air, land and sea. They are also at immediate risk of death by starvation, dehydration and disease as a result of the ongoing siege by Israel, the destruction of Palestinian towns, the insufficient aid being allowed through to the Palestinian population, and the impossibility of distributing this limited aid while bombs fall. This conduct renders essentials to life unobtainable.“
“…the level of Israel’s killing is so extensive that nowhere is safe in Gaza. … Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to relentless bombing wherever they go. They are killed in their homes, in places where they seek shelter, in hospitals, in schools, in mosques, in churches, and as they try to find food and water for their families. They have been killed if they failed to evacuate. In the places to which they have fled, and even while they attempted to flee along, Israeli declared safe routes.”
“Israel has killed an unparalleled and unprecedented number of civilians with the full knowledge of how many civilian lives each bomb will take.“
The Case for Genocide
A ruling by the court could be years away. But South Africa is asking for provisional measures that would demand Israel cease its military assault – in essence a permanent ceasefire. This decision could come within two or three weeks.
The International Court of Justice may be all that stands between the Palestinians in Gaza and genocide.
By Chris Hedges /ScheerPost, https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/12/chris-hedges-the-case-for-genocide/
The exhaustive 84-page brief submitted by South Africa to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) charging Israel with genocide is hard to refute. Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate killing, wholesale destruction of infrastructure, including housing, hospitals and water treatment plants, along with its use of starvation as a weapon, accompanied by genocidal rhetoric from its political and military leaders who speak of destroying Gaza and ethnically cleansing the 2.3 million Palestinians, makes a strong case against Israel for genocide.
Israel’s smearing of South Africa as “the legal arm” of Hamas exemplifies the bankruptcy of its defense, a smear replicated by those who claim that demonstrations held to call for a ceasefire and protect Palestinian human rights are “anti-Semitic.” Israel, its genocide live streamed to the world, has no substantial counter argument.
But that does not mean the judges on the court will rule in South Africa’s favor. The pressure the U.S. will bring – Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called the South African charges “meritless” – on the judges, drawn from the member states of the U.N., will be intense.
A ruling of genocide is a stain that Israel – which weaponizes the Holocaust to justify its brutalization of the Palestinians – would find hard to remove. It would undercut Israel’s insistence that Jews are eternal victims. It would shatter the justification for Israel’s indiscriminate killing of unarmed Palestinians and construction of the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza, along with the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It would sweep away the immunity to criticism enjoyed by the Israel lobby and its Zionist supporters in the U.S., who have successfully equated criticisms of the “Jewish State” and support for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism.
Over 23,700 Palestinians, including over 10,000 children, have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas and other resistance fighters breached the security barriers around Gaza. Some 1,200 people were killed – there is strong evidence that some of the victims were killed by Israeli tank crews and helicopter pilots that intentionally targeted the some 200 hostages along with their captors. Thousands more Palestinians are missing, presumed buried under the rubble. Israeli attacks have left over 60,000 Palestinians wounded and maimed, the majority of them women and children. Thousands more Palestinian civilians, including children, have been arrested, blindfolded, numbered, beaten, forced to strip to their underwear, loaded onto trucks and transported to unknown locations.
A ruling by the court could be years away. But South Africa is asking for provisional measures that would demand Israel cease its military assault – in essence a permanent ceasefire. This decision could come within two or three weeks. It is a decision that is not based on the final ruling by the court, but on the merits of the case brought by South Africa. The court would not, by demanding Israel end its hostilities in Gaza, define the Israeli campaign in Gaza as genocide. It would confirm that there is the possibility of genocide, what the South African lawyers call acts that are “genocidal in character.”
The case will not be determined by the documentation of specific crimes, even those defined as war crimes. It will be determined by genocidal intent – the intent to eradicate in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group – as defined in the Genocide Convention.
These acts collectively include the targeting of refugee camps and other densely packed civilian areas with 2,000-pound bombs, the blocking of humanitarian aid, the destruction of the health care system and its effects on children and pregnant women – the U.N. estimates there are around 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, and that more than 160 babies are delivered every day – as well as repeated genocidal statements by leading Israeli politicians and generals.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu equated Gaza with Amalek, a nation hostile to the Israelites in the Bible, and cited the Biblical injunction to kill every Amalek man, woman, child or animal. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians “human animals.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated, as the South African lawyers told the court, that everybody in Gaza is responsible for what happened on Oct. 7 because they voted for Hamas, although half the population in Gaza are children who are too young to vote. But even if the entire population of Gaza did vote for Hamas this does not make them a legitimate military target. They are still, under the rules of war, civilians, and entitled to protection. They are also entitled under international law to resist their occupation via armed struggle.
The South African lawyers, who compared Israel’s crimes with those carried out by the apartheid regime in South Africa, showed the court a video of Israeli soldiers celebrating and calling for the death of Palestinians – they sang as they danced “There are no uninvolved civilians” – as evidence that genocidal intent descends from the top to the bottom of the Israeli war machine and political system. They provided the court with photos of mass graves where bodies were buried “often unidentified.” No one – including newborns – was spared, the South African lawyer Adila Hassim, Senior Counsel, explained to the court.
The South African lawyers told the court the “first genocidal act is mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza.” The second genocidal act, they stated, is the serious bodily or mental harm inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza in violation of Article 2B of the Genocide Convention. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, another lawyer and legal scholar representing South Africa, argued that “Israel’s political leaders, military commanders and persons holding official positions have systematically and in explicit terms declared their genocidal intent.”
Lior Haiat, spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called Thursday’s three hour hearing one of the “greatest shows of hypocrisy in history, compounded by a series of false and baseless claims.” He accused South Africa of seeking to allow Hamas to return to Israel to “commit war crimes.”
Israeli jurists, in their response on Friday, called the South African charges “unfounded, “absurd” and amounting to “libel.” Israel’s legal team said it had – despite U.N. reports of widespread starvation and infectious diseases from a breakdown in sanitation and shortage of clean water – not impeded humanitarian assistance. Israel defended attacks on hospitals, calling them “Hamas command centers.” It told the court it was acting in self-defense. “The inevitable fatalities and human suffering of any conflict is not of itself a pattern of conduct that plausibly shows genocidal intent,” said Christopher Staker, a barrister for Israel.
Israeli leaders accuse Hamas with carrying out genocide, although legally if you are the victims of genocide you are not permitted to commit genocide. Hamas is also not a state. It is not, therefore, a party to the Genocide Convention. The Hague, for this reason, has no jurisdiction over the organization. Israel also claims the Palestinians are warned to evacuate areas that will come under attack and provided with “safe areas,” although as the South African lawyers documented, “safe areas” are routinely bombed by Israel with numerous civilian casualties.
Israel and the Biden administration intend to prevent any temporary injunction by the court, not because the court can force Israel to halt its military assaults, but because of the optics, which are already disastrous. The ICJ’s ruling depends on the Security Council for enforcement – which given the veto power by the U.S., renders any ruling against Israel moot. The second objective of the Biden administration is to make sure Israel is not found guilty of committing genocide. It will be unrelenting in this campaign, heavily pressuring the governments that have jurists on the court not to find Israel guilty. Russia and China, who have jurists in The Hague, are battling their own charges of genocide and may decide it is not in their interests to find Israel guilty.
The Biden administration is playing a very cynical game. It insists it is trying to halt what, by its own admission, is Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians, while bypassing Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel, including “dumb” bombs. It insists it wants the fighting in Gaza to end while it vetoes ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. It insists it upholds the rule of law while it subverts the legal mechanism that can halt the genocide.
Cynicism pervades every word Biden and Blinken utter. This cynicism extends to us. Our revulsion for Donald Trump, the Biden White House believes, will impel us to keep Biden in office. On any other issue this might be the case. But it cannot be the case with genocide.
Genocide is not a political problem. It is a moral one. We cannot, no matter what the cost, support those who commit or are accomplices to genocide. Genocide is the crime of all crimes. It is the purest expression of evil. We must stand unequivocally with Palestinians and the jurists from South Africa. We must demand justice. We must hold Biden accountable for the genocide in Gaza.
Israel Is Terrified the World Court Will Decide It’s Committing Genocide
Public hearings on South Africa’s request for provisional measures will take place on January 11 and 12 at the ICJ which is located in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands. The hearings will be livestreamed from 4:00-6:00 a.m. Eastern/1:00-3:00 a.m. Pacific on the Court’s website and on UN Web TV. The court could order provisional measures within a week after the hearings.
Other States Parties to the Genocide Convention Can Join South Africa’s Case
South Africa, a party to the Genocide Convention, charged Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice.
By Marjorie Cohn / Truthout, January 8, 2024, https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/08/israel-is-terrified-the-world-court-will-decide-its-committing-genocide/
For nearly three months, Israel has enjoyed virtual impunity for its atrocious crimes against the Palestinian people. That changed on December 29 when South Africa, a state party to the Genocide Convention, filed an 84-page application in the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
South Africa’s well-documented application alleges that “acts and omissions by Israel … are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group” and that “the conduct of Israel — through its State organs, State agents, and other persons and entities acting on its instructions or under its direction, control or influence — in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, is in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention.”
Israel is mounting a full-court press to prevent an ICJ finding that it’s committing genocide in Gaza. On January 4, the Israeli Foreign Ministry instructed its embassies to pressure politicians and diplomats in their host countries to make statements opposing South Africa’s case at the ICJ.
In its application, South Africa cited eight allegations to support its contention that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza. They include:
(1) Killing Palestinians in Gaza, including a large proportion of women and children (approximately 70 percent) of the more than 21,110 fatalities and some appear to have been subjected to summary execution;
(2) Causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza, including maiming, psychological trauma, and inhuman and degrading treatment;
(3) Causing the forced evacuation and displacement of about 85 percent of Palestinians in Gaza — including children, the elderly and infirm, and the sick and wounded. Israel is also causing the massive destruction of Palestinian homes, villages, towns, refugee camps and entire areas, which precludes the return of a significant proportion of the Palestinian people to their homes;
(4) Causing widespread hunger, starvation and dehydration to the besieged Palestinians in Gaza by impeding sufficient humanitarian assistance, cutting off sufficient food, water, fuel and electricity, and destroying bakeries, mills, agricultural lands and other means of production and sustenance;
(5) Failing to provide and restricting the provision of adequate clothing, shelter, hygiene and sanitation to Palestinians in Gaza, including 1.9 million internally displaced persons. This has compelled them to live in dangerous situations of squalor, in conjunction with routine targeting and destruction of places of shelter and killing and wounding of persons who are sheltering, including women, children, the elderly and the disabled;
(6) Failing to provide for or ensure the provision of medical care to Palestinians in Gaza, including those medical needs created by other genocidal acts that are causing serious bodily harm. This is occurring by direct attacks on Palestinian hospitals, ambulances and other healthcare facilities, the killing of Palestinian doctors, medics and nurses (including the most qualified medics in Gaza) and the destruction and disabling of Gaza’s medical system;
(7) Destroying Palestinian life in Gaza, by destroying its infrastructure, schools, universities, courts, public buildings, public records, libraries, stores, churches, mosques, roads, utilities and other facilities necessary to sustain the lives of Palestinians as a group. Israel is killing whole families, erasing entire oral histories and killing prominent and distinguished members of society;
(8) Imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births in Gaza, including through reproductive violence inflicted on Palestinian women, newborns, infants and children.
South Africa cited myriad statements by Israeli officials that constitute direct evidence of an intent to commit genocide:
“Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything,” Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. “If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week. It will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.”
Avi Dichter, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, declared, “We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” a reference to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create the state of Israel.
“Now we all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth,” Nissim Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and Member of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee proclaimed.
Israel’s Strategy to Defeat South Africa’s Case at the ICJ
Continue readingA Visit to Belmarsh Prison, Where Julian Assange Awaits His Final Appeal Against Extradition to the US
The Wikileaks founder says he fears his own imprisonment, US government surveillance, and restrictions on the group’s funding have effectively scared off potential whistleblowers.
The Nation, CHARLES GLASS, 2 Jan 24
MP BELMARSH—It is 2:30 PM on Wednesday, December 13, when Julian Assange strides into the visitors’ area. He stands out in the column of 23 prisoners for his height—6′ 2″—and flowing white locks with trimmed beard. He squints, looking for a familiar face among the wives, sisters, sons, and fathers of the other inmates. I am waiting, as assigned, at D-3, one of about 40 sets of small coffee tables surrounded by three upholstered chairs—two blue, one red—screwed into the floor of what looks like a basketball court. We spot each other, walk forward, and embrace. It is the first time I have seen him in six years. I blurt, “You’re pale.” Through a mischievous smile I remember from past meetings, he jokes, “They call it prison pale.”
He has not been outdoors—apart from a minute when police dragged him into a paddy wagon—since he took refuge in London’s cramped Ecuadorian Embassy in June 2012. The embassy’s French windows had afforded glimpses of sky. Here at Belmarsh maximum security prison in southeast London, his abode since April 11, 2019, he has not seen the sun. Warders confine him to a cell for 23 out of every 24 hours. His single hour of recreation takes place within four walls, under supervision. His paleness is best described as deathly……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Julian and I sit down, face to face, me on the red chair, he on one of the blues. Above us, glass globes hide cameras that record the interactions between inmates and their guests.
…………………………. Julian had thought prison meant communal meals at long tables, as in the movies. Belmarsh’s warders shove the food into the cells for prisoners to eat alone. It is hard to make friends that way. He has been there longer than any other prisoner apart from an old man who had served seven years to his four and a half. There are occasional suicides, he tells me, including one the night before.
……………………………… I ask whether he still has the radio he had struggled to obtain in his first year. He did, but it was not working due to a defective plug. Regulations permit each prisoner to have a radio purchased from prison stores. The authorities, however, said no radios were available for him. When I heard about it, I sent him a radio. It was returned. I then sent him a book on how to make a radio. That too was returned………………………………………………………………
How did he, a news addict, keep in touch? The prison allows him to read printouts of news stories, and friends write to him. With the invasions of Ukraine and Gaza, I say, now is an important time for whistleblowers to send documents to WikiLeaks. He regrets that WikiLeaks is no longer able to expose war crimes and corruption as in the past. His imprisonment and US government surveillance and restrictions on WikiLeaks’ funding wards off potential whistleblowers. He fears that other media outlets are not filling the vacuum.
Belmarsh does not offer him education programs or communal activity, like orchestra practice, sports, or publishing a prison journal, that are standard at many other prisons. The regime is punitive; although Belmarsh’s 700-odd inhabitants are on remand, awaiting trial or appeal. They are Category A prisoners, those who “pose the most threat to the public, the police or national security” and stand accused of terrorism, murder, or sexual violence.
We talk about Christmas, which is just another day in Belmarsh: no turkey, no carols, no presents. The prison is closed to visitors on Christmas Day and the day after, and the prison has informed his wife, Stella Moris, that she and their two young sons, Gabriel and Max, may not see him on Christmas Eve. He can attend Catholic Mass celebrated by the Polish chaplain, who has become a friend.
………….Apart from occasional visiting days, his days are all the same: the confined space, the loneliness, the books, the memories, the hope that his lawyers’ appeal against extradition and life imprisonment in the United States will succeed……….. https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/julian-assange-wikileaks-belmarsh-prison/
Constitutional Violations: Julian Assange, Privacy and the CIA
December 28, 2023, Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.com/constitutional-violations-julian-assange-privacy-and-the-cia/
As a private citizen, the options for suing an intelligence agency are few and far between. The US Central Intelligence Agency, as with other members of the secret club, pour scorn on such efforts. To a degree, such a dismissive sentiment is understandable: Why sue an agency for its bread-and-butter task, which is surveillance?
This matter has cropped up in the US courts in what has become an international affair, namely, the case of WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange. While the US Department of Justice battles to sink its fangs into the Australian national for absurd espionage charges, various offshoots of his case have begun to grow. The issue of CIA sponsored surveillance during his stint in the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been of particular interest, since it violated both general principles of privacy and more specific ones regarding attorney-client privilege. Of particular interest to US Constitution watchers was whether such actions violated the reasonable expectation of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Four US citizens took issue with such surveillance, which was executed by the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global and its starry-eyed, impressionable director David Morales under instruction from the CIA. Civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler and media lawyer Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass, took the matter to the US District Court of the Southern District of New York in August last year. They had four targets of litigation: the CIA itself, its former director, Michael R. Pompeo, Morales and his company, UC Global SL.
All four alleged that the US Government had conducted surveillance on them and copied their information during visits to Assange in the embassy, thereby violating the Fourth Amendment. In doing so, the plaintiffs argued they were entitled to money damages and injunctive relief. The government moved to dismiss the complaint as amended.
On December 19, District Judge John G. Koeltl delivered a judgment of much interest, granting, in part, the US government’s motion to dismiss but denying other parts of it. Before turning to the relevant features of Koeltl’s reasons, various observations made in the case bear repeating. The judge notes, for instance, Pompeo’s April 2017 speech, in which he “‘pledged that his office would embark upon a ‘long term’ campaign against WikiLeaks.’” He is cognisant of the plaintiffs’ claims “Morales was recruited to conduct surveillance on Assange and his visitors on behalf of the CIA and that this recruitment occurred at a January 2017 private security industry convention at the Las Vegas Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.”
From that meeting, it is claimed that “Morales created an operations unit, improved UC Global’s systems, and set up live streaming from the United States so that surveillance could be accessed instantly by the CIA.” The data gathered from UC Global “was either personally delivered to Las Vegas; Washington, D.C.; and New York City by Morales (who travelled to these locations more than sixty times in the three years following the Las Vegas convention) or placed on a server that provided external access to the CIA.”
Koeltl preferred to avoid deciding on the claims that Morales and UC Global were, in fact, “acting as agents of Pompeo and the CIA.” Such matters were questions of fact “that cannot be decided on a motion to dismiss.”
A vital issue in the case was whether the plaintiffs had standing to sue the CIA in the first place. Citing the case of ACLU v Clapper, which involved a challenge to the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program, Koeltl accepted that they did. In doing so, he rejected a similar argument made by the government in Clapper – that the injuries alleged were simply “too speculative and generalized” and that the information gathered via surveillance would necessarily even be used against them. “In this case, the plaintiffs need not allege, as the Government argues, that the Government will imminently use their information collected at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.” If the search of the conversations and electronic devices along with the seizure of the contents of the electronic devices “were unlawful, the plaintiffs have suffered a concrete and particularized injury fairly traceable to the challenged program and redressable by favorable ruling.”
Less satisfactory for the plaintiffs was the finding they had no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their conversations with the publisher given that “they knew Assange was surveilled even before the CIA’s alleged involvement.” The judge thought it significant that they did “not allege that they would not have met Assange had they known their conversations would be surveilled.” Additionally, it “would not be recognized as reasonable by society” to have expected conversations held with Assange at the embassy in London to be protected, given such societal acceptance of, for instance video surveillance in government buildings.
This reasoning is faulty, given that the visits by the four plaintiffs to the embassy did not take place with their knowledge of the operation being conducted by UC Global with CIA blessing. In a general sense, anyone visiting the embassy could not help but suspect that Assange might be the object of surveillance, but to suggest something akin to a waiver of privacy rights on the part of attorneys and journalists aiding a persecuted publisher is an odd turn.
The US Government also succeeded on the point that the plaintiffs had no reasonable expectation to privacy regarding their passports or their devices they voluntarily left at the Embassy reception desk. In doing so, they “assumed the risk that the information may be conveyed to the Government.” Those visiting embassies must, it would seem, be perennially on guard.
That said, the plaintiffs convinced the judge that they had “sufficient allegations that the CIA and Pompeo, through Morales and UC Global, violated their reasonable expectation to privacy in the contents of their electronic devices.” The government even went so far as to concede that point.
Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, the biggest fish was let off the hook. The plaintiffs had attempted to use the 1971 US Supreme Court case of Bivens to argue that the former CIA director be held accountable and liable for violating constitutional rights. Koeltl thought the effort to extend the application of Bivens inappropriate in terms of the high standing nature of the defendant and the context. “As a presidential appointee confirmed by Congress […] Defendant Pompeo is in a different category of defendant from a law enforcement agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.” More’s the pity.
Leaving aside some of the more questionable turns of reasoning in Koeltl’s judgment, public interest litigants and activists can take heart from the prospect that civil trials against the CIA for violations of the US Constitution are no longer unrealistic. “We are thrilled,” declared Richard Roth, the plaintiffs’ attorney, “that the court rejected the CIA’s efforts to silence the plaintiffs, who merely seek to expose the CIA’s attempt to carry out Pompeo’s vendetta against WikiLeaks.” The appeals process, however, is bound to be tested.
Former chair of Ohio utility regulator surrenders in $60 million bribery scheme linked to energy bill
PBS Newshour , Julie Carr Smyth, Associated Press 27 Dec 23
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio’s former top utility regulator surrendered Monday in connection with a $60 million bribery scheme related to a legislative bailout for two Ohio nuclear power plants that has already resulted in a 20-year prison sentence for a former state House speaker.
Sam Randazzo, former chair of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, self-surrendered at U.S. District Court in Cincinnati after being charged in an 11-count indictment that was returned on Nov. 29, U.S. Attorney Kenneth L. Parker’s office announced. Randazzo was scheduled for an initial court appearance later in the day.
“Today’s indictment outlines an alleged scheme in which a public regulatory official ignored the Ohio consumers he was responsible for protecting, instead taking a bribe from an energy company seeking favors,” FBI Cincinnati Special Agent in Charge J. William Rivers said in a statement.
Randazzo, 74, resigned in November 2020 after FBI agents searched his Columbus townhome and FirstEnergy revealed in security filings what it said were bribery payments of $4.3 million for his future help at the commission a month before Republican Gov. Mike DeWine nominated him as Ohio’s top utility regulator.
He faces one count of conspiring to commit travel act bribery and honest services wire fraud, two counts of travel act bribery, two counts of honest services wire fraud, one count of wire fraud and five counts of making illegal monetary transactions.
A message seeking comment was left for his lawyer. If convicted as charged, the defendant could face up to 20 years in prison.
Ohio Consumers’ Counsel Maureen Willis, who represents the state’s utility ratepayers, said the indictment was “an important first step to bring justice to Ohio utility consumers” — but that more is needed.
“It underscores the need for near-term reform of the PUCO selection process that led to his appointment as Chair of the PUCO,” Willis said in a statement. “OCC’s calls for reform so far have gone unanswered. Ohioans deserve better from the public officials in this state.”
The long-awaited indictment marks the latest development in what has been labeled the largest corruption case in Ohio history.
Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was sentenced in June to 20 years in prison for his role in orchestrating the scheme, and lobbyist Matt Borges, a former chair of the Ohio Republican Party, was sentenced to five years.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Cincinnati indicted three others on racketeering charges in July 2020.
Lobbyist Juan Cespedes and Jeffrey Longstreth, a top Householder political strategist, pleaded guilty in October 2020. The third person arrested, statehouse lobbyist Neil Clark, pleaded not guilty before dying by suicide in March 2021. The dark money group used to funnel FirstEnergy money, Generation Now, also pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge in February 2021.
All were accused of using the $60 million in secretly funded FirstEnergy cash to get Householder’s chosen Republican candidates elected to the House in 2018 and then to help him get elected speaker in January 2019.
The money was then used to win passage of the tainted energy bill, House Bill 6, and to conduct what authorities have said was a $38 million dirty-tricks campaign to prevent a repeal referendum from reaching the ballot…………………………………….. more https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/former-chair-of-ohio-utility-regulator-surrenders-in-60-million-bribery-scheme-linked-to-energy-bill
Tokyo High Court holds Japan government not liable for Fukushima nuclear disaster
Sean Nolan | Southwestern Law School, US, DECEMBER 28, 2023
Tokyo’s High Court found the government of Japan not liable Tuesday for damages related to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and associated mass evacuations, leaving responsibility solely with plant operator the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO).
The ruling also reduced the damages amounts of a previous court order from $414,400 to $165,000 for 44 of 47 petitioners. The decision mirrors a previous ruling in 2022 which found that the government “was highly unlikely to been able to prevent the flooding” that damaged the plant. Ultimately, the court held that more stringent regulatory actions would have been insufficient to prevent the disaster since the size, direction and scale of the tsunami exceeded estimations for such an event. This is the latest in a series of decisions with different outcomes over the last several years including court cases in 2020 and 2017 which litigated the government’s role in failing to prevent the disaster. There is also a 2022 court case that found TEPCO executives personally liable.
Motomitsu Nakagawa, a lawyer, representing the evacuees expressed dismay with the decision and raised the possibility of another appeal calling the decision a “copy and paste” of the previous Supreme Court ruling. The nuclear disaster has already caused $82 billion in damages to victims, decommissioning work and storage for contaminated materials. While TEPCO has been responsible for all the decommissioning, including contaminant storage, it’s financial position has deteriorated over the last few years amid the massive costs associated with the work and multiple postponements due to technological challenges.
Legal fallout has also extended to the cleanup itself with court cases from South Korea fisheries and Japanese fisherman over the release of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The discharge also sparked international concern from neighboring countries and protests from activists who fear pollution and widespread destruction of wildlife and marine ecosystems.
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Tokyo court holds only the utility responsible to compensate Fukushima evacuees, and reduces damages
A Tokyo court has ruled that only the operator of the tsunami-wrecked
Fukushima nuclear power plant had to pay damages to dozens of evacuees,
relieving the government of responsibility. Plaintiffs criticized the
ruling as belittling their suffering and the severity of the disaster. The
Tokyo High Court also slashed the amount to half of a lower court’s
decision, ordering the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, known as
TEPCO, to pay a total of 23.5 million yen ($165,000) to 44 of the 47
plaintiffs.
AP News 27th Dec 2023
Judge Rules Assange Visitors May Sue CIA For Allegedly Violating Privacy
Kevin Gosztola, Dec 19, 2023, The Dissenter
A federal judge ruled that four American attorneys and journalists, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was in the Ecuador embassy in London, may sue the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for their role in the alleged copying of the contents of their electronic devices.
The Americans sufficiently alleged that the CIA and CIA Director Mike Pompeo—through the Spanish security company UC Global and its director David Morales—“violated their reasonable expectation of privacy” under the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Richard Roth, attorney for the four Americans, reacted, “We are thrilled that the court rejected the CIA’s efforts to silence the plaintiffs, who merely seek to expose the CIA’s attempt to carry out Pompeo’s vendetta against WikiLeaks.”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The U.S. government on behalf of the CIA will likely appeal the decision. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable development because there is a distinct possibility that there may be a civil trial, where CIA spying on Americans is challenged. And all while the U.S. government pushes forward with the unprecedented act of putting a publisher on trial for engaging in journalism. https://thedissenter.org/judge-assange-visitors-may-sue-cia-for-spying/?ref=the-dissenter-newsletter&fbclid=IwAR1S-KR9qxfueGXiIYf0quxldvaXEus_rLZsBUQbwIbPaTmZ_VjSft9KBzI
Day X Marks the Calendar: Julian Assange’s ‘Final’ Appeal
December 22, 2023, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark https://theaimn.com/day-x-marks-the-calendar-julian-assanges-final-appeal/—
Julian Assange’s wife, Stella, is rarely one to be cryptic. “Day X is here,” she posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter. For those who have followed her remarks, her speeches, and her activism, it was sharply clear what this meant. “It may be the final chance for the UK to stop Julian’s extradition. Gather outside the court at 8.30am on both days. It’s now or never.”
Between February 20 and 21 next year, the High Court will hear what WikiLeaks claims may be “the final chance for Julian Assange to prevent his extradition to the United States.” (This is qualified by the prospect of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.) Were that to take place, the organisation’s founder faces 18 charges, 17 of which are stealthily cobbled from the aged and oppressive US Espionage Act of 1917. Estimates of any subsequent sentence vary, the worst being 175 years
The WikiLeaks founder remains jailed at His Majesty’s pleasure at Belmarsh prison, only reserved for the most hardened of criminals. It’s a true statement of both British and US justice that Assange has yet to face trial, incarcerated, without bail, for four-and-a-half years. That trial, were it to ever be allowed to take place, would employ a scandalous legal theory that will spell doom to all those who dive and dabble in the world of publishing national security information.
Fundamentally, and irrefutably, the case against Assange remains political in its muscularity, with a gangster’s legality papered over it. As Stella herself makes clear, “With the myriad of evidence that has come to light since the original hearing in 2018, such as the violation of legal privilege and reports that senior US officials are involved in formulating assassination plots against my husband, there is no denying that a fair trial, let alone Julian’s safety on US soil, is an impossibility were he to be extradited.”
In mid-2022, Assange’s legal team attempted a two-pronged attempt to overturn the decision of Home Office Secretary Priti Patel to approve Assange’s extradition while also broadening the appeal against grounds made in the original January 4, 2021 reasons of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser.
The former, among other matters, took issue with the acceptance by the Home Office that the extradition was not for a political offence and therefore prohibited by Article 4 of the UK-US Extradition Treaty. The defence team stressed the importance of due process, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta of 2015, and also took issue with Patel’s acceptance of “special arrangements” with the US government regarding the introduction of charges for the facts alleged which might carry the death penalty, criminal contempt proceedings, and such specialty arrangements that might protect Assange “against being dealt with for conduct outside the extradition request.” History shows that such “special arrangements” can be easily, and arbitrarily abrogated.
On June 30, 2022 came the appeal against Baraitser’s original reasons. While Baraitser blocked the extradition to the US, she only did so on grounds of oppression occasioned by mental health grounds and the risk posed to Assange were he to find himself in the US prison system. The US government got around this impediment by making breezy promises to the effect that Assange would not be subject to oppressive, suicide-inducing conditions, or face the death penalty. A feeble, meaningless undertaking was also made suggesting that he might serve the balance of his term in Australia – subject to approval, naturally.
What this left Assange’s legal team was a decision otherwise hostile to publishing, free speech and the activities that had been undertaken by WikiLeaks. The appeal accordingly sought to address this, claiming, among other things, that Baraitser had erred in assuming that the extradition was not “unjust and oppressive by reason of the lapse of time”; that it would not be in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (inhuman and degrading treatment)”; that it did not breach Article 10 of ECHR, namely the right to freedom of expression; and that it did not breach Article 7 of the ECHR (novel and unforeseeable extension of the law).
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Other glaring defects in Baraitser’s judgment are also worth noting, namely her failure to acknowledge the misrepresentation of facts advanced by the US government and the “ulterior political motives” streaking the prosecution. The onerous and much thicker second superseding indictment was also thrown at Assange at short notice before the extradition hearing of September 2020, suggesting that those grounds be excised “for reasons of procedural fairness.”
An agonising wait of some twelve months followed, only to yield an outrageously brief decision on June 6 from High Court justice Jonathan Swift (satirists, reach for your pens and laptops). Swift, much favoured by the Defence and Home Secretaries when a practising barrister, told Counsel Magazine in a 2018 interview that his “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies.” Why? “They take preparation and evidence-gathering seriously: a real commitment to getting things right.” Good grief.
In such a cosmically unattached world, Swift only took three pages to reject the appeal’s arguments in a fit of premature adjudication. “An appeal under the Extradition Act 2003,” he wrote with icy finality, “is not an opportunity for general rehearsal of all matters canvassed at an extradition hearing.” The appeal’s length – some 100 pages – was “extraordinary” and came “to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made and rejected by the District Judge.”
Thankfully, Swift’s finality proved stillborn. Some doubts existed whether the High Court appellate bench would even grant the hearing. They did, though requesting that Assange’s defence team trim the appeal to 20 pages.
How much of this is procedural theatre and circus judge antics remains to be seen. Anglo-American justice has done wonders in soiling itself in its treatment of Britain’s most notable political prisoner. Keeping Assange in the UK in hideous conditions of confinement without bail serves the goals of Washington, albeit vicariously. For Assange, time is the enemy, and each legal brief, appeal and hearing simply weighs the ledger further against his ailing existence.
Assange Appeal Hearing Set for February
Julian Assange’s wife Stella Assange confirmed that the hearing will take place at the Royal Courts of Justice in the middle of February.
By Joe Lauria / Consortium News, https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/19/assange-appeal-hearing-set-for-february/
Imprisoned publisher Julian Assange will face two High Court judges over two days on Feb. 20-21, 2024 in London in what will likely be his last appeal against being extradited to the United States to face charges of violating the Espionage Act.
Assange’s wife Stella Assange confirmed that the hearing will take place at the Royal Courts of Justice. Assange had had an earlier request to appeal rejected by High Court Judge Jonathan Swift on June 6.
Assange then filed an application to appeal that decision and the dates have now been set. Assange is seeking to challenge both the home secretary’s decision to extradite him as well as to cross appeal the decision by the lower court judge, Vanessa Baraitser.
Baraitser had ruled in January 2021 to release Assange from Belmarsh Prison and deny the U.S. request for extradition based on Assange’s mental health, his propensity to commit suicide and conditions of U.S. prisons. On every point of law, however, Baraitser sided with the United States.
The U.S. appealed her decision, issuing “diplomatic assurances” that Assange would not be mistreated in prison. The High Court, after a two-day hearing in March 2022, accepted those “assurances” and rejected Assange’s appeal.
His application to the U.K. Supreme Court to hear the case was then denied. Assange then applied for a new appeal of Baraitser’s legal decisions and the home secretary’s extradition order.
Swift rejected Assange’s 150-page argument in a three-page rejection. The appeal of that decision will now take place two months from now.
If convicted under the World War I-era Espionage Act, the WikiLeaks publisher and journalist is facing up to 175 years in a U.S. dungeon for publishing classified material revealing crimes by the U.S. state, including war crimes.
Assange was also charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, though the indictment agains him does not accuse him of stealing U.S. documents or even of helping his source, Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, to do so.
Buried secrets, plutonium poisoned bodies
Why did a Truchas woman die with extraordinary amounts of plutonium in her body — and why was she illegally autopsied? For this reporter, the answers hit close to home.
Searchlight, by Alicia Inez Guzmán, December 20, 2023
The first reference to her comes, of all places, on an airplane. It’s the end of April and sitting next to me is Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Both of us are on our way back to Santa Fe from Washington, D.C., after the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability’s weeklong annual gathering. Coghlan, galvanized by the last several days of activities, spends most of the flight ticking down his list of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s most recent sins. But suddenly he turns to the past.
“Did you know that the person with the highest levels of plutonium in her body after the atomic detonation at Trinity Site was a woman from Truchas?” he asks me. The remark, more hearsay than fact, piques my interest. As Coghlan knows, that’s my pueblito, the place in northern New Mexico where I grew up on land passed down through many generations of women. Tina Cordova — co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium — would know more, he adds. “Ask her.”
Truchas, short for Nuestra Señora del Rosario, San Fernando y Santiago del Río de las Truchas, sits on a ridge in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, 8,000 feet above sea level. With some 370 people in town, most everybody keeps up with the latest mitote, or gossip, at the local post office. A regional variation of Spanish is still spoken by elders. Bloodlines go back centuries. And neighbors might also be relatives. If she is from this tiny, but remarkable, speck on the map, I must at least know of her. My mom, a deft weaver of family trees, definitely would.
Truchas is also 225 miles north of the Trinity Site, the location of the world’s first atomic blast. On July 16, 1945, at the peak of monsoon season, a clandestine group of scientists lit up the skies of the Chihuahuan Desert with the equivalent of 24.8 kilotons of TNT. In the first 10 days, wind would carry the radioactive fallout across 46 states — so far, in fact, that the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, traced spots on film to radioactive material released by the bomb.
It’s plausible, given such an expansive reach, that this Trucheña who Coghlan casually mentions is among a wave of Trinity’s first unknowing victims. Historically, she signals a profound rupture in time — before nuclear weapons and after. But at the moment, his comment seems impossible to grasp. It’s only in hindsight that the single most important question takes form, one that will dog me for more than six months: Who is she?
Incomprehensible autopsies
Just over a month later, I hear about her for the second time, at a journalism conference…………………………………………………. this time adding the original source of the information: the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment project, known as the LAHDRA report.
Published in 2010 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and based on millions of classified and unclassified documents from the earliest years of the Manhattan Project to the late 1990s — the report’s stated purpose was to identify “all available information” concerning radioactive materials and chemicals released at Los Alamos National Laboratory (known as the Los Alamos Scientific Library from 1947 to 1981).
Some of the documents are autopsy records, I come to find. The lab routinely released plutonium into the air from several facilities on its campus, but it wasn’t until 1978 that it began to measure those releases consistently. One question that preoccupied researchers was whether data culled from the autopsies would reveal higher rates of plutonium in people who lived near or worked in those nuclear facilities.
There is another cache of autopsies, too, for the scientific equivalent of a control group — randomly selected people who simply lived and died in northern New Mexico. Cases from the control group were also analyzed, the report added, “in an effort to review the possible plutonium exposure from the July 16, 1945 Trinity test.”
I quickly scroll down to see which person in this group had the highest plutonium levels. And there it is: The highest levels do indeed belong to an unnamed woman from Truchas, alive at the time of the Trinity detonation.
But what comes next in the report will preoccupy me for months: “The plutonium concentration in her liver was 60 times higher than that of the average New Mexico resident.”
The number is incomprehensible to me. First, the actual amount is never stated, nor is the amount for the average New Mexican. But there is also a glaring contradiction that I detect only after reading the paragraph’s final cryptic line many times over. Fallout from Trinity, it essentially explains, didn’t cascade over Truchas until 12 hours after the initial blast. At that distance, there was no telling whether fallout could be inhaled or ingested — the most direct and harmful paths of entry.
It’s a paradox. Trinity stood out as the most obvious culprit — she was, after all, alive when it was detonated — but even the researchers weren’t certain. The only fact is the plutonium itself. Somewhere, somehow it entered her body in the form of barely visible specks of alpha radiation. And once there, those particles began a long migration, from her bloodstream to her kidneys and, ultimately, to her liver. The question is how?
The entry is most striking for its brevity, no more than a paragraph amid the report’s 638 pages. Partly, this has to do with the expansive scope of the LAHDRA project, which covers far more than these autopsies, and partly because of the secrecy and laws that protect personal privacy.
Through the prism of science, this Trucheña is a single, mysterious data point. From this same prism, the unwritten parts of her life look like negative space. But when I imagine who she is, I also imagine what would fill that space — all the parts of her story that must exist but have been left out.
For now, I don’t even know her name.
Exotic poison
In an interview with the Atomic Heritage Foundation in 1965, chemist Glenn Seaborg described plutonium as “one of the most exotic metals in the periodic table — maybe the most.” Seaborg had created plutonium out of uranium in 1940 and still, 25 years later, at least some of its properties were anomalous.
How plutonium poisoned the body was also largely unknown. The survivors in Nagasaki, Japan, where U.S. forces dropped a plutonium bomb on August 9, 1945, began to see increased rates of leukemia in the years immediately following the blast, most notably among children. Twelve years later, tumor registries were founded to track the cancer incidences in both Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the United States detonated “Little Boy,” a uranium bomb, on Aug. 6, 1945.
But in Los Alamos, there were only three instances of acute radiation poisoning — Harry Daghlian in 1945, Louis Slotin, in 1946, and Cecil Kelley, in 1958. Daghlian and Slotin both received a fatal blast of radiation while handling the same core of plutonium, the “demon core” as it was later dubbed. Daghlian died 25 days after the accident; Slotin survived for only nine. Kelley died within 35 hours of performing an operation to purify and concentrate plutonium in a large mixing tank. As the tank swirled, the plutonium inside it assumed the right shape and size to produce a brief nuclear chain reaction. The injuries the men suffered were ghastly.
Besides those were the less dramatic cases: Nuclear workers who were routinely exposed to much smaller amounts of plutonium on the job, and citizens exposed through atmospheric testing, which began in Nevada in 1951 and didn’t end in America until 1963. By the time of Kelley’s death, data on those other groups had yet to be collected, much less analyzed.
When I email Joseph Shonka, the primary author of the LAHDRA report, I get my first insights about the Human Tissue Analysis Program, a landmark project that gathered data about how plutonium exposure affected people’s health long-term.
“During the concerns about global fallout in the late 1950s and 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted a research program to measure the levels of plutonium in US residents,” he replied by email in August. The research was based on “plutonium workers who voluntarily agreed to contribute their bodies to research, as well as appropriately obtained tissues from autopsies from nearby residents of AEC facilities and from random individuals across the US, including New Mexico.”
I can’t help but obsess over two words: “appropriately obtained.” History tells of doctors performing grisly acts in the name of science, but that was before the dawn of biomedical ethics. I’d assumed that those ethics had become self-evident in modern-day autopsy practices and that tissues were always “appropriately obtained.” That’s not the case here, I realize after an Internet search. How the tissues for this research program were obtained was, in fact, deeply controversial, if not unlawful.
Autopsy authority from ‘God’
In 1996, Cecil Kelley’s wife and daughter filed a class-action lawsuit against the Regents of the University of California, the school that had managed the lab since 1943, and 10 other defendants, including former lab director Norris E. Bradbury. The autopsies, unlawful and fraudulent, were conducted on both lab employees and the general public “without the knowledge, informed consent, or permission of the families involved,” the complaint asserted. What occurred, it went on, was the “unauthorized and illegal research and experimentation” on the corpses of hundreds of New Mexico residents and others around the country. And plaintiffs only became aware of it, “to their extreme shock and horror,” many decades after the fact. In the press, it was known as the case of the “body snatchers.”
The human tissue program began on Jan. 1, 1959, a day after Cecil Kelley’s horrific death. Clarence Lushbaugh, who worked for the lab and was also the pathologist and chief of staff at Los Alamos Medical Center, had long been waiting for “an employee with known exposure to radioactive substances to die so that the body could be autopsied and the radioactivity of the lungs could be counted,” legal filings said. “Mr. Kelley’s accident and subsequent death provided Defendant Lushbaugh with the opportunity he’d been waiting for.”
By the program’s end in 1985, 271 lab workers and 1,825 members of the general population, from New Mexico and across the country, had been secretly autopsied and their organs sent to the lab to be studied for plutonium content. Besides the obvious transgressions, the project had a number of other yawning flaws, including 489 tissue samples that were lost when a freezer failed.
Participating pathologists, first at Los Alamos Medical Center, the program’s unofficial headquarters in New Mexico, and then in other cities, ostensibly performed the autopsies to determine a person’s cause of death. But that was just a cover for the real motive, which was to entirely remove and analyze lungs, kidneys, spleen, vertebrae, lymph nodes and, in men, gonads, the class action asserted.
The pathologists “exercised a clause in their autopsy permit form that allowed collection of tissues for ‘scientific research,’ a U.S. General Accounting Office report later said. “As a result, Los Alamos officials did not feel it was necessary to obtain their own informed consent documentation.” Families, in other words, were never asked for permission.
Among the records, I read about Kelley’s particularly ghoulish autopsy; Lushbaugh stored his entire nervous system in a mayonnaise jar and sent his brain to Washington, D.C., for study. When asked in his deposition who granted him the authority to do so, Lushbaugh said “God.”
Clues without names
A kind of armor protects the lab’s nuclear secrets. For that reason alone, I have little faith that I will be able to identify her — the anonymous Trucheña with 60 times more plutonium in her body than any other New Mexican autopsied in this hair-raising study. But I keep looking. Maybe it’s that I believe finding her can reaffirm, in some small measure, her humanity. All I know is that I need a tangible public record. And the class-action lawsuit is the best and only place to start.
……………………………………………………………………………………………. volume 37 of “Health Physics,” a medical journal devoted to radiation safety. Published in 1979, it contains the biggest lead yet — a list of the Human Tissue Analysis Program’s decedents in New Mexico and across the country, all unnamed.
Each entry reads like a bullet point: Case number, occupation, residence, state and cause of death. A separate column includes sex, age, years of living in Los Alamos — if they did live there — and year of death. The columns reveal, in clinical and unnerving detail, each organ by weight and radioactivity, if any.
Here, there is no whole greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, it’s the parts that so preoccupied researchers — line after line of organs measured down to the gram, and line after line of radioactivity measured down to disintegrations per minute. But the story I glean is more complicated than these facts and figures alone. It’s about the scientific desire to reduce people into mere objects of study and the violence of that reduction.
…………………………………………………………………………..“Epifania S. Trujillo, a lifelong resident of Truchas died at the age of 91, September 26, in the Los Alamos Medical Center following a long illness,” reads the October 1972 obituary in the Rio Grande Sun. “She is survived by two daughters, Mrs. Cosme Romero of Truchas and Mrs. Glenn Manges of Gallup; a sister Veronice Padilla of Truchas, 25 grandchildren and 35 great-grandchildren.”
…………………………………………….I tell them (descendants of Epifania Trujillo), she had by far the most plutonium in her body of any other New Mexico resident who was autopsied as part of that macabre program.
…………………It might explain, she (Cecilia Romero, granddaughter) continues, “why so many in the family have gotten cancer.” She begins to run down the list.
“My oldest brother, Sam, died of multiple myeloma. Susie had pancreatic cancer. My mom died of pancreatic cancer. Nora got pancreatic cancer, which is metastatic, so she now suffers from lung cancer. Mary Helen and I have both had breast cancer. And Henry had prostate cancer.” Only one sibling, Bernice, was spared. (Cecilia and Nora said they had genetic testing for both pancreatic and breast cancer risk that showed those cancers were not hereditary.)
I’m shocked. The only time I’ve heard of such a pervasive history of cancer is in conversations with Tina Cordova, Bernice Gutierrez and Mary Martinez White, all members of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, who lived within 50 miles of the Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated. But this is different. Truchas is 225 miles from Trinity. How did a woman living at that distance end up with such an extraordinary amount of plutonium in her liver?
As I keep talking to the two sisters, I realize the answer might lie closer to home — Los Alamos.
Cosme (Cecilia’s father) was the only one in the family who worked at the lab. That he could have unwittingly carried home undetectable radioactive particles on his clothing and boots and trigger illness throughout the family had long flickered in the Romeros’ minds. But they never could have guessed that Epifania might be the bellwether. She lived to the age of 91 — no small feat — and did not suffer from cancer herself. But over the long arc of time, almost everyone around her did.
…………………………………………………. Cosme worked at Technical Area 8, a “hot site.”
Rare photos from TA-8
Technical Area 8, also known as Gun Site, was named after the gun-type design used in Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The War Department built the facility off of Los Alamos’s West Jemez Road, complete with three “bombproof” concrete buildings and a firing range for scientists to study projectiles and ballistics. Research there involved “high explosives, plutonium, uranium, arsenic, lithium hydride, and titanium oxide,” as one lab document read.
……………………………………………………… What, precisely, did Cosme do at the lab? And could he have brought home the plutonium that affected Epifania?
……………………….Safety measures at LANL have changed since Cosme’s time and today include shielding, protective clothing, air sampling, radiation safety evaluations and other precautions, all aimed at safeguarding workers, the environment and the community, according to LANL spokespeople.
………. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself has recorded instances of radioactive “take-home toxins.” How many times might workers have taken toxins home and never known?
“I’ve visited hundreds of nuclear workers’ homes over the years, possibly thousands,” says Marco Kaltofen, a specialist in nuclear forensics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, who wrote a 2018 report on nuclear workers’ house dust.
…………………………………….. The kind of plutonium used to make nuclear weapons, plutonium 239, has a 24,000-year radioactive half-life. With that lifespan, the particles could still be present today in a forgotten corner of an attic, cellar or basement, Kaltofen says. Radioactive dust is not only a “potential source of internal radiation exposure to nuclear site workers,” his report warned: It could also expose their families “via secondary contamination.”
Plutonium and cancer
Health studies have shown that residents downwind of the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington state, where plutonium was first produced at full-scale, have high incidences of all cancers, including uterine, ovarian, cervical and breast.
There is also evidence suggesting that exposure to ionizing radiation, which includes alpha particles emitted by plutonium, is linked to an increase in pancreatic cancer. Additional research at LANL — the unpublished Zia Study — posits that increased radiation exposure among male employees between 1946 and 1978 led to increased rates of pancreatic cancer deaths. Any cumulative exposure to low doses of radiation is associated with higher risks of death by cancer, recent research shows.
………………………………………..It’s almost too easy to think of all the ways the Romero children, and the cousins who occasionally lived with them, could have come into contact with radioactive dust, and how their bodies, still growing, could have been poisoned.
The last clue
…………………………………………………………………………. Seeing her name among the court records is definite proof — Epifania was unlawfully autopsied as part of the Human Tissue Analysis Program.
……………………………………Indeed, it’s not until over a decade after the suit was settled that the Romeros get all the wrenching news at once: Their father might have brought home toxic plutonium on his work clothes; their grandmother was unlawfully autopsied; the family was left out of the settlement altogether; and Los Alamos had a hand in all of it. Epifania, emblematic of so much, fell through the cracks in every way possible…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Alicia Inez Guzmán
Raised in the northern New Mexican village of Truchas, Alicia Inez Guzmán has written about histories of place, identity, and land use in New Mexico. She brings this knowledge to her current role at Searchlight. https://searchlightnm.org/buried-secrets-poisoned-bodies/?utm_source=Searchlight+New+Mexico&utm_campaign=c42014a33e-12%2F20%2F2023+-+Buried+secrets%2C+poisoned+bodies&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8e05fb0467-c42014a33e-395610620&mc_cid=c42014a33e&mc_eid=a70296a261
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