In the 1970s, during the height of the farmworker movement, United Farm Workers leader César Chávez often rallied supporters with the phrase “Sí se puede” (“Yes we can”)—a slogan coined by UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta in 1972 during Chávez’s 25-day fast in Phoenix, Arizona. Today, as undocumented farmworkers face aggressive immigration enforcement in California’s fields, a darker refrain might be more fitting: “Cuidado con ICE”—watch out for ICE.

Farmworkers say they feel like they are being “hunted like animals,” as they desperately try to avoid getting swept up by Donald Trump’s “crackdown on immigration,” the Guardian’s Michael Sainato recently reported.

During interviews with farm workers and farmworker organizers, Sainato pointed out that “Raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have caused workers to lose hours and income, and forced them into hiding at home.”

Trump has been all over the map in defining his policy toward undocumented farm workers. In April, according to Fruit Growers News, “Trump suggested that farmers could help retain key workers by submitting letters of recommendation to delay deportations and support legal re-entry.

“‘A farmer will come in with a letter concerning certain people saying, they’re great, they’re working hard, we’re going to slow it down a little bit for them and then we’re going to ultimately bring them back. They’ll go out, they’re going to come back as legal workers,’ Trump said during the Cabinet meeting.”

In late-June, CNBC reported that Trump told Fox News that “We’re working on [a plan] right now. We’re going to work it so that some kind of a temporary pass where people pay taxes, where the farmer can have a little control, as opposed to you walk in and take everybody away.”

Trump added: “What we’re going to do is we’re going to do something for farmers, where we can let the farmer sort of be in charge. The farmer knows. He’s not going to hire a murderer. When you go into a farm and he’s had somebody working with him for nine years doing this kind of work, which is hard work to do, and a lot of people aren’t going to do it, and you end up destroying a farmer because you took all the people away. It’s a problem.”

That plan, which would put farmers in charge of immigration enforcement, “alarmed workers’ rights advocates, who suggested they were being asked to surrender ‘their freedom to their employer’ just to stay in the country,” the Guardian noted.

“You can’t go out peacefully to do things, or go to work with any peace of mind anymore. We’re stressed out and our kids are stressed out. No one is the same since these raids started,” one farm worker told the Guardian. “We are stressed and worrying if it continues like this, what are we going to do because the rent here is very expensive and it has affected us a lot. How are we going to make ends meet if this continues?”

Of the more than 2.6 million farm workers in the US, most are Hispanic, non-citizen immigrants. According to the Department of Agriculture, around 40% of crop workers — roughly 500,000 individuals – are undocumented.

In a recent Iowa rally, Trump “claimed the administration is looking into legislation to defer immigration enforcement on farms to farmers. ‘Farmers, look, they know better. They work with them for years.’”

“They have really demonized us with the word ‘criminals’,” Lázaro Álvarez, a member of the Workers’ Center of Central New York and Alianza Agrícola, said. “Despite the fact we are undocumented, we pay taxes. We are invisible to the government until we pay taxes, and we don’t receive any benefits.”

Teresa Romero, president of United Farm Workers, said: “Everything that he’s doing to detain these workers is unconstitutional. They don’t have a document signed by a judge. They don’t have a court order. They want to just eliminate protections of farm workers who are currently here and have been working in the field for 20 to 30 years.

“These workers who have not committed any crime are being taken by people who are masked, are not wearing a uniform and don’t have a marked vehicle, so they are essentially being kidnapped.”

One undocumented farm worker told Sainato:  “We worked through Covid. We worked through the wildfires in Los Angeles. We get up at 4am every day. No one else is willing to work the eight-, 10-hour days the way we do. We’re not criminals. We’re hardworking people trying to give our kids a better life. And we contribute a lot to this country.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

The Trump administration’s mass deportation machine continues to shatter families and communities with violent, indiscriminate raids on schools, homes and workplaces. Farms are a particular target of its brutal, racist crackdown; around two-thirds of U.S. farmworkers are immigrants, largely from Mexico. Earlier this month, a raid on a farm in California turned fatal when 57-year-old Jaime Alanís died after falling from the roof of a greenhouse. Dozens of his fellow workers were rounded up and loaded onto buses destined for a detention center. Many of the targeted farmworkers are members of the United Farm Workers, the nation’s oldest farmworkers’ union. Its president, Teresa Romero, a longtime labor leader who is the first Latina and first immigrant to head the organization, says “farmworkers are terrified.” She says that “replacing people who are experienced, who are professional, who have been in agriculture, working sometimes for decades, [is] not how we should repay them for the sacrifice and hard work,” and adds that “sooner or later, the agriculture industry is going to suffer.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In Los Angeles, mass street protests have broken out in response to immigration raids. Local police and Border Patrol are cracking down on protesters, while the Trump administration has called in the California National Guard. “They shot thousands of rounds of tear gas, flashbang grenades, all kinds of repressive instruments,” says Ron Gochez, community organizer with Union del Barrio who helped organize some of the protests. He notes many of the protests have also been successful at turning back immigration agents, preventing ICE arrests and detention. “If we organize ourselves, if we resist, we can defend our communities from ICE terror, from the Border Patrol or from any federal agency that wishes to separate our families.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Protests over ICE raids are continuing across the United States as agents arrest immigrants at courthouses, from their workplaces, on the way to school and more. Immigration and human rights advocate Adriana Jasso with Unión del Barrio describes protests that met a massive raid in San Diego at a popular restaurant, the targeting of farmworkers, and how her organization has been conducting ICE patrols to alert the community.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Indeed, President Trump has become a walking civics lesson.

Consider some of the constitutional principles that Trump can be credited with bringing into the spotlight unintentionally during his time in office.

First Amendment (free speech, press, religion, protest, and assembly): Trump’s repeated confrontations with the First Amendment have transformed free expression into a battleground, making it impossible to ignore the protections it guarantees. From branding the press as “the enemy of the people” and threatening to revoke media licenses to blacklisting law firms, threatening universities with funding cuts for not complying with the government’s ideological agenda, and detaining foreign students for their political views, Trump has treated constitutional protections not as guarantees, but as obstacles.

Second Amendment (right to bear arms): Trump has shown an inconsistent and, at times, authoritarian approach to gun rights, summed up in his infamous 2018 statement: “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” At the same time, Trump has encouraged the militarization of domestic police forces, blurring the line between civilian law enforcement and standing armies—a contradiction that cuts against the very spirit of the amendment, which was rooted in distrust of centralized power and standing militaries.

Fourth Amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures): Trump’s expansion of no-knock raids, endorsement of sweeping surveillance tactics, sanctioning of police brutality and greater immunity for police misconduct, and the use of masked, plainclothes federal agents to seize demonstrators off the streets have revived conversations about privacy, unlawful searches, and the right to be secure in one’s person and property.

Fifth & Fourteenth Amendments (due process and equal protection): Perhaps nowhere has Trump’s disregard been more dangerous than in his approach to due process and equal protection under the law. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that neither citizens nor non-citizens can be deprived of liberty without fair procedures. Yet Trump’s Administration has repeatedly floated or enacted policies that sidestep due process, from the suggestion that he could suspend habeas corpus to the indefinite detention of individuals without trial, and openly questioned whether non-citizens deserve any constitutional protections at all.

Even the Sixth (right to a fair and speedy trial) and Eighth Amendments (protection against cruel and unusual punishment) have found new urgency: Trump has promoted indefinite pretrial detention for protesters and immigrants alike, while presiding over family separations, inhumane detention centers, and support for enhanced interrogation techniques. Trump has also doubled down on his administration’s commitment to carrying out more executions, including a push to impose the death penalty for crimes other than murder.

Tenth Amendment (states’ rights): The Tenth Amendment, which preserves state sovereignty against federal overreach, has been tested by Trump’s threats to defund sanctuary cities, override state public health measures, and interfere in local policing and elections. His efforts to federalize domestic law enforcement have exposed the limits of decentralized power in the face of executive ambition.

Fourteenth Amendment (birthright citizenship): No clause has been more aggressively misunderstood by Trump than the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. His push to strip citizenship from children born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents (birthright citizenship) ignores over a century of legal precedent affirming that citizenship cannot be denied by executive whim.

Article I, Section 8 (commerce and tariffs): Trump’s use of tariff authority provides another example of executive power run amok. Although the Constitution assigns Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on allies and used them as political leverage. These actions not only undermine the constitutional balance between the branches but also weaponize trade policy for political ends.

Article I, Section 9 (Emoluments Clause): Trump’s disregard for the Emoluments Clause—a safeguard against presidential profiteering—brought this obscure constitutional provision back into the public eye. Between continuing to profit from his private businesses while in office and his reported willingness to accept extravagant gifts, including a $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari government, he has raised urgent ethical and legal concerns about self-dealing, corruption and backdoor arrangements by which foreign and domestic governments can funnel money into Trump’s personal coffers.

Article I, Section 9 (power of the purse): Trump has trampled on Congress’s exclusive power over federal spending, attempting to redirect funds by executive fiat rather than operating within Congress’s approved budgetary plan. He has also threatened to withhold federal aid from states, cities, and universities deemed insufficiently loyal.

Article II (executive powers): At the heart of Trump’s governance is a dangerous misreading of Article II, which vests executive power in the president, to justify executive overreach and the concept of an all-powerful unitary executive. He has repeatedly claimed “total authority” over state matters, wielded executive orders like royal decrees in order to bypass Congress, and sought to bend the Department of Justice to his personal and political will.

Historical Emergency Powers and Legal Precedents: Trump has also breathed new life into archaic emergency powers. He invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify rounding up, detaining, and deporting undocumented immigrants without due process. He has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops domestically in order to deal with civil unrest, raising the specter of martial law cloaked in patriotic language.

In routinely violating the Constitution and crossing legal lines that were once unthinkable, Trump is forcing Americans to confront what the Constitution truly protects, and what it doesn’t.

Still, what good is a knowledgeable citizenry if their elected officials are woefully ignorant about the Constitution or willfully disregard their sworn duty to uphold and protect it?

For starters, anyone taking public office, from the president on down, should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. And if they violate their contractual obligations to uphold and defend the Constitution, vote them out—throw them out—or impeach them.

“We the people” have power, but we must use it or lose it.

Trump may have contributed to this revival in constitutional awareness, but as we warn in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the challenge isn’t just knowing our rights—it’s defending them, before they’re gone for good.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Indeed, President Trump has become a walking civics lesson.

Consider some of the constitutional principles that Trump can be credited with bringing into the spotlight unintentionally during his time in office.

First Amendment (free speech, press, religion, protest, and assembly): Trump’s repeated confrontations with the First Amendment have transformed free expression into a battleground, making it impossible to ignore the protections it guarantees. From branding the press as “the enemy of the people” and threatening to revoke media licenses to blacklisting law firms, threatening universities with funding cuts for not complying with the government’s ideological agenda, and detaining foreign students for their political views, Trump has treated constitutional protections not as guarantees, but as obstacles.

Second Amendment (right to bear arms): Trump has shown an inconsistent and, at times, authoritarian approach to gun rights, summed up in his infamous 2018 statement: “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” At the same time, Trump has encouraged the militarization of domestic police forces, blurring the line between civilian law enforcement and standing armies—a contradiction that cuts against the very spirit of the amendment, which was rooted in distrust of centralized power and standing militaries.

Fourth Amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures): Trump’s expansion of no-knock raids, endorsement of sweeping surveillance tactics, sanctioning of police brutality and greater immunity for police misconduct, and the use of masked, plainclothes federal agents to seize demonstrators off the streets have revived conversations about privacy, unlawful searches, and the right to be secure in one’s person and property.

Fifth & Fourteenth Amendments (due process and equal protection): Perhaps nowhere has Trump’s disregard been more dangerous than in his approach to due process and equal protection under the law. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that neither citizens nor non-citizens can be deprived of liberty without fair procedures. Yet Trump’s Administration has repeatedly floated or enacted policies that sidestep due process, from the suggestion that he could suspend habeas corpus to the indefinite detention of individuals without trial, and openly questioned whether non-citizens deserve any constitutional protections at all.

Even the Sixth (right to a fair and speedy trial) and Eighth Amendments (protection against cruel and unusual punishment) have found new urgency: Trump has promoted indefinite pretrial detention for protesters and immigrants alike, while presiding over family separations, inhumane detention centers, and support for enhanced interrogation techniques. Trump has also doubled down on his administration’s commitment to carrying out more executions, including a push to impose the death penalty for crimes other than murder.

Tenth Amendment (states’ rights): The Tenth Amendment, which preserves state sovereignty against federal overreach, has been tested by Trump’s threats to defund sanctuary cities, override state public health measures, and interfere in local policing and elections. His efforts to federalize domestic law enforcement have exposed the limits of decentralized power in the face of executive ambition.

Fourteenth Amendment (birthright citizenship): No clause has been more aggressively misunderstood by Trump than the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. His push to strip citizenship from children born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents (birthright citizenship) ignores over a century of legal precedent affirming that citizenship cannot be denied by executive whim.

Article I, Section 8 (commerce and tariffs): Trump’s use of tariff authority provides another example of executive power run amok. Although the Constitution assigns Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on allies and used them as political leverage. These actions not only undermine the constitutional balance between the branches but also weaponize trade policy for political ends.

Article I, Section 9 (Emoluments Clause): Trump’s disregard for the Emoluments Clause—a safeguard against presidential profiteering—brought this obscure constitutional provision back into the public eye. Between continuing to profit from his private businesses while in office and his reported willingness to accept extravagant gifts, including a $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari government, he has raised urgent ethical and legal concerns about self-dealing, corruption and backdoor arrangements by which foreign and domestic governments can funnel money into Trump’s personal coffers.

Article I, Section 9 (power of the purse): Trump has trampled on Congress’s exclusive power over federal spending, attempting to redirect funds by executive fiat rather than operating within Congress’s approved budgetary plan. He has also threatened to withhold federal aid from states, cities, and universities deemed insufficiently loyal.

Article II (executive powers): At the heart of Trump’s governance is a dangerous misreading of Article II, which vests executive power in the president, to justify executive overreach and the concept of an all-powerful unitary executive. He has repeatedly claimed “total authority” over state matters, wielded executive orders like royal decrees in order to bypass Congress, and sought to bend the Department of Justice to his personal and political will.

Historical Emergency Powers and Legal Precedents: Trump has also breathed new life into archaic emergency powers. He invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify rounding up, detaining, and deporting undocumented immigrants without due process. He has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops domestically in order to deal with civil unrest, raising the specter of martial law cloaked in patriotic language.

In routinely violating the Constitution and crossing legal lines that were once unthinkable, Trump is forcing Americans to confront what the Constitution truly protects, and what it doesn’t.

Still, what good is a knowledgeable citizenry if their elected officials are woefully ignorant about the Constitution or willfully disregard their sworn duty to uphold and protect it?

For starters, anyone taking public office, from the president on down, should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. And if they violate their contractual obligations to uphold and defend the Constitution, vote them out—throw them out—or impeach them.

“We the people” have power, but we must use it or lose it.

Trump may have contributed to this revival in constitutional awareness, but as we warn in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the challenge isn’t just knowing our rights—it’s defending them, before they’re gone for good.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

The Trump administration continues to escalate its authoritarian assault on higher education, free speech, and political dissent—and university administrators and state government officials are willingly aiding that assault. On the morning of April 23, at the direction of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, law enforcement officers, including FBI agents, raided the homes of multiple student organizers connected to Palestine solidarity protests at the University of Michigan. “According to the group Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items,” Michael Arria reports at Mondoweiss. “Four individuals were detained, but eventually released.” In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of graduate student workers from the University of Michigan and Columbia University about how they and their unions are fighting back against ICE abductions, FBI raids, and top-down political repression, all while trying to carry on with their day-to-day work.

Panelists include: Lavinia, a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information and an officer in the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO); Ember McCoy, a PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and a rank-and-file member of GEO and the TAHRIR Coalition; Jessie Rubin, a PhD student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University and a rank-and-file member of Student Workers of Columbia (SWC); and Conlan Olson, a PhD student in Computer Science at Columbia and a member of the SWC bargaining committee.

Additional links/info:

• Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), University of Michigan website, Instagram, Facebook page, and X page
• Student Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2710 website, Instagram, Facebook page, and X page
• TAHRIR Coalition UMich X page
• Legal Fund of Michigan Students for Palestine
• GEO Worker Solidarity Fund
• GEO Press Release: FBI and police raid homes of pro-Palestine activists, including a GEO member
• Mahmoud Khalil statement from ICE detention: “My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner”
• Allie Wong, The Intercept, “This is not about antisemitism, Palestine, or Columbia. It’s Trump dismantling the American dream“
• Grant Miner, The Nation, “Columbia expelled me for my palestine activism, but I won’t be silenced”
• Michael Arria, Mondoweiss, “FBI and police raid homes of Palestine activists in Michigan”
• Alvin Powell, The Harvard Gazette, “Harvard files lawsuit against Trump administration”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘Worse’ than McCarthyism: Trump’s war on higher education, free speech, and political dissent”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘A tremendous chilling effect’: Columbia students describe dystopian reality on campus amid Trump attacks”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘People are hiding in their apartments’: Inside Trump’s assault on universities”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are continuing our ongoing coverage of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. Things have continued to escalate since we published our episodes earlier in April where I first interviewed Todd Wolfson in Chen Akua of the American Association of University Professors, and then interviewed graduate student workers at Columbia University, Ali Wong and Caitlyn Liss. Now many since then have praised the development of Harvard University standing up and challenging Trump’s attacks in a public statement titled, upholding Our Values, defending Our University.

Harvard’s president Alan m Garber wrote Dear members of the Harvard Community. Over the course of the past week, the federal government has taken several actions following Harvard’s refusal to comply with its illegal demands. Although some members of the administration have said their April 11th letter was sent by mistake. Other statements and their actions suggest otherwise doubling down on the letters, sweeping and intrusive demands which would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university. The government has, in addition to the initial freeze of $2.2 billion in funding, considered taking steps to freeze an additional $1 billion in grants initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 5 0 1 C3 tax exempt status. These actions have stark real life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world. Moments ago, we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government’s authority.

Now at the same time at the University of Michigan, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies raided multiple homes of student activists connected to Gaza solidarity protests as Michael Aria reports at Monde Weiss. On the morning of April 23rd, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies executed search warrants at multiple homes in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Canton Township, Michigan. The raids reportedly targeted a number of student organizers who were connected to Gaza protests at the University of Michigan. According to the group, students allied for Freedom and Equality or safe agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items. Four individuals were detained but eventually released to rear coalition. A student led movement calling for divestment from Israel said that officers initially refused to present warrants at the Ypsilanti raid. They were unable to confirm whether ICE was present at the raid. A Detroit FBI office spokesman declined to explain why the warrants were executed, but confirmed that the matter was being handled by the Office of Michigan.

Attorney General Dana Nessel. Nessel has refused to confirm whether the raids were connected to Palestine activism thus far, but her office has aggressively targeted the movement. Last fall, Nestle introduced criminal charges against at least 11 protestors involved in the University of Michigan Gaza encampment. An investigation by the Guardian revealed that members of University of Michigan’s governing board had pressed Nestle to bring charges against the students. The report notes that six of eight Regents donated more than $33,000 combined to Nestle’s campaigns after the regents called for action. Nestle took the cases over from local district attorney Ellie Savitt, an extremely rare move as local prosecutors typically handle such cases. Listen, as we’ve been saying repeatedly on this show and across the Real news, the battle on and over are institutions of higher education have been and will continue to be a critical front where the future of democracy and the Trump Administration’s agenda will be decided.

And it will be decided not just by what Trump does and how university administrators and boards of regents respond, but by how faculty respond students, grad students, staff, campus communities, and the public writ large. And today we are very grateful to be joined by four guests who are on the front lines of that fight. We’re joined today by Lavinia, a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information and an officer in the Graduate Employees organization or GEO, which full disclosure is my old union. Ember McCoy is also joining us. Ember is a PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and a rank and file member of GEO and the Tare Coalition. And we are also joined today by Jesse Rubin, a PhD student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University and a rank and file member of Student Workers of Columbia.

We are also joined by Conlin Olson, a PhD student in computer science at Columbia, and a member of the Bargaining Committee for Student Workers of Columbia, Lavinia Ember, Jesse Conlin. Thank you all so much for joining us today, especially amidst this terrifying reality that we all find ourselves in. I wanted to just jump right in and start there because since we have y’all and you are new voices in this ongoing coverage that we’re trying to do of these authoritarian attacks on higher ed, I wanted to start by just going around the table and asking if y’all could briefly introduce yourselves and tell us about what your life and work have been like these past few weeks and months as all of this Orwellian nightmare has been unfolding.

Lavinia:

Yeah. Hi everyone. Thank you so much, max for putting this together. So by and large, my life just continues to revolve around research. I’m actually on an NSF fellowship and that means that I basically spend all of my time in the office doing research. That being said, over the past couple of months, especially sort of in the context of organizing, a lot of what I and other grad workers at the University of Michigan have been working on is safety planning and mutual aid efforts related to immigration. And then of course in the past couple of weeks there’s been sort of this really alarming, as you said, escalation in repression by the state government of pro-Palestine protestors. So recently a lot of organizing work has also been related to that, but just to personalize it, the people who are affected by this repression, our friends, they’re coworkers and it’s just been extremely scary recently even just sort of trying to navigate being on campus in this really kind of tense political environment.

Ember McCoy:

So for me, this is kind a continuation of the organizing that I’ve been doing throughout the PhD and before I was vice president of the grad union during our 2023 strike, and there was a lot of infrastructure that we built and organizing models that we’ve changed, that we’ve talked about. Even I think on this podcast leading into the strike, which I think then we got a contract in September of 2023 and then pretty much right away ended up transitioning our work to be very focused on Palestine Pro Palestine organizing in collaboration with undergrad students after October 7th, which I think is really important for some of the infrastructure we built and organizing models we built, thinking about how we’ve been able to transition from labor organizing to pro-Palestine organizing to ICE organizing and all the way back around and in between. On a personal level, this week, Monday morning, I had a meeting with my advisor.

I told him, I promised him I was going to lock in. I was like, I’m going to do it. I need to finish. By August, two hours later, I found out my NSF grant was terminated. I study environmental justice, I have a doctoral dissertation research grant, and then I spent Tuesday trying to do paperwork around that. And Monday morning I woke up to my friend’s houses being rated by the FBI and safe to say, I’ve not worked on my dissertation the rest of the week. So yeah, I think it’s just important like Lavinia said, to think about how, I don’t know, we’re all operating in this space of navigating, trying to continue thinking about our work and the obligations we have as workers for students at the University of Michigan. It is finals week, so the raids happen Wednesdays finals started Thursday. And also not only continuing the fight for pre Palestine, but also making sure our comrades are okay and that they’re safe.

Jessie Rubin:

Hi everyone. It’s really nice to meet you Lavinia and Ember, and thank you so much Max for inviting us to be a part of this. My name is Jessie and I’m a PhD candidate at Columbia in the music department and also a rank and file member of Student Workers of Columbia. I guess to start off with the more personal side with my own research, I guess I’m lucky in that my research has not been threatened with funding cuts the same way that embers has been, and I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now. Ember much love and solidarity to you, but my research does engage Palestine. I researched the Palestine Solidarity movement in Ireland and this past year has definitely been a whirlwind of being scared that I could get in trouble even for just talking about my own research on campus, scared that if I share my research with my students, that might be grounds for discipline.

So it’s definitely been this large existential fight of trying to write my dissertation and write it well while also feeling like Columbia doesn’t want me to be doing the dissertation that I am doing. At the same time, I’ve been really invigorated and motivated through working with my fellow union members. I’m a member of our communications committee, which has obviously taken off a ton in the past few months with social media, internal communications and press, and figuring out how we as a union can sort of express our demands to a broader audience in America and around the globe. I’m also a member of our political education and solidarity committee, and that has been really moving, I mean really exciting to see how different members of our community and also the broader union work with other groups on campus through mutual aid efforts, through actions, through all sorts of activity to fight against this attack on higher ed. And lastly, I also joined our Palestine working group last year. Our union passed a BDS resolution, which then sort of necessitated the formation of our working group. And our working group has been working to think about what Palestine might look like in our upcoming bargaining. We are just entering bargaining and Conlin who’s here with us today can probably talk more about what that’s been looking like as they’re a member of our bargaining team.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it should also be remembered from listeners from our previous episode with members of Student workers of Columbia. Don’t forget that the university expelled and functionally fired Grant Minor, the former president of Student Workers of Columbia, right before bargaining sessions opened with the university.

Conlan Olson:

Yeah, that’s right. This is Conlin. Like Jesse said, I’m a member of the bargaining committee at Student Workers of Columbia. I’m also a PhD student in computer science. I study algorithmic fairness and data privacy, which are sort of terrifyingly relevant right now. And in addition to our current contract campaign, just on a day-to-day organizing level, and we’re all really trying hard to build the left and build the labor movement among tech workers and STEM workers, which is an uphill battle, but I think is really important work. And I think there is a lot of potential for solidarity and labor power in those areas, even if at Columbia right now they feel under organized.

And in our contract campaign, we are currently, we have contract articles ready. We have a comprehensive health and safety article that includes protections for international students. We have articles about keeping federal law enforcement off our campus. And of course we have all the usual articles that you would see in a union contract. We have a non-discrimination and harassment article that provides real recourse in a way that we don’t have right now. And so we are ready to bargain and we have our unit standing behind us and the university really has refused to meet us in good faith. As Max said, they’ve fired our president and then we still brought our president because he’s still our president to bargaining. And the next time we went to schedule a bargaining session, they declared him persona non grata from campus. And so we said, well, we can’t meet you on campus because we need our president. Here’s a zoom link. And Columbia, of course refused to show up on Zoom. So we are frustrated. We are ready to bargain. We have the power, we have the contract articles and the universities refusing to meet us. So we are building a powerful campaign to ask them to meet us and to try to get them to the table and work on reaching a fair contract for all of our workers. Yeah, I think that’s most of my day-to-day these days is working on our contract campaign.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I just want to say speaking only for myself and full disclosure, I am a former GEO member at the University of Michigan. I got my PhDs there as well, and I remember after already leaving the university to come work at the Chronicle of Higher Education, but I was still a BD, meaning I hadn’t fully finished my dissertation and defended it. Then COD hit in 2020 and our university was doing the same thing of amidst this chaotic nightmare that we were all living through. My professors and administrators were saying, Hey, finish that dissertation. And I think I rightly said, I rightly expressed what many of us were feeling, which was, Hey man, I’ve earned that goddamn thing at this point. Just give me the degree. I can’t imagine how y’all are still trying to write and defend your dissertations amidst these funding cuts amidst when the future of higher education itself is in doubt. So I would just say for myself and for no one else, just give PhD candidates their goddamn doctorates at this point, man, what are you doing? But anyway, ember Lavinia, I want to go to y’all and ask if you could help us break down the FBI and police raids out there in Ann Arbor Ypsilanti all around the University of Michigan. Can you tell us more about what happened, how the people who were detained are doing, how folks on campus are responding and just where the hell things stand now?

Ember McCoy:

And you did a really thorough job covering the timeline of what happened on Wednesday morning. So on Wednesday between six and 9:00 AM the FBI, along with Michigan State police and local police officers in the three different cities and University of Michigan police conducted a coordinated raid in unmarked vehicles at the home of homes of multiple University of Michigan pro-Palestine activists. And I think that’s very important to name because the attorney general who a democrat who signed these warrants that have no probable cause is saying that in their press release that the raids don’t have anything to do with University of Michigan campus activism, and they don’t have anything to do with the encampments, but the people whose home berated are prominent pro-Palestine activists at the University of Michigan. So trying to say those things aren’t connected is not at all, and there’s no charges, right? There’s no charges that has happened for these folks whose homes have been rated. And so it’s just a crazy situation to say the least. I would say people are doing as well as they can be. Some of their immediate thoughts were like, I need to figure out my finals and I no longer have my devices or access to my university meme Michigan accounts because of duo two factor authentication.

Yeah. So I mean, I think the organizing of course is still continuing. Another big thing that’s happened. I guess to scale out a little bit, what happened Wednesday is just another thing that has happened in this year long campaign where the Attorney General of Michigan, Dana Nessel, is really targeting University of Michigan activists Ann Arbor activists for pro-Palestine free speech. So as you alluded to, there are 11 people facing felony charges from the Attorney general related to the encampment raid. There’s another four people facing charges as a result of a die-in that we did in the fall. And so that is also all still ongoing and very much a part of this. So there’s almost 40 different activists that they’re targeting across these different attacks. And we actually had Thursday, we had a court date coincidentally for the encampment 11, and it was the intention of it was to file a motion to ask the judge to recuse Dana Nessel, the Attorney General.

She has already had to recuse herself from a different case due to perceived Islamic Islamic phobic bias. And she’s a prominent Zionist in the state. And so our argument is kind of like if she’s had to recuse herself from that case, she should also have to recuse herself from this case. They would fall under similar intent. However, when we were at that court case, one of the encampment 11 also was accused of violating his bond. So as a part of their bond, they’re not allowed to be on campus unless for class or for work, though most of them have been fired from their jobs at this point. And he was accused of being, he was surveilled on campus 20 minutes after his class ended and he was walking through and stopped allegedly to say hi to friends. So he was sent to jail for four days right then and there.

The judge and the prosecutor originally said they were trying to put him in jail for 10 days, but they didn’t want him to miss his graduation and wax poetic about how they didn’t want his parents to have to miss his graduation. So instead, they sent him to jail for four days and he got out Sunday morning. And so yeah, it’s been a lot, right? There’s all these different things that are happening, but I think the organizing still continues. People are very mobilized. People are probably more agitated than they were before. And after this, a bunch of us are heading to a rally at Dana Nestle’s office in Lansing. So I would say that it definitely hasn’t curtailed the movement for a free Palestine and the movement for free speech broadly in the state of Michigan. That was long-winded, but lots going on.

Lavinia:

That was such a great summary, Amber. Great. Yeah. I also just want to add that there has been a lot of repression on campus that doesn’t rise to the level of criminal charges or legal actions. Instead, it’s stuff like, for instance, one of my friends was pulled into a disciplinary meeting because he sent a mass email about Palestine or there have been many instances of police deploying pepper spray on campus against protesters. So there’s also just kind of this general climate of fear, which is reinforced in many different contexts on campus, specifically surrounding Palestine.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and Conlin. Jesse, I wanted to bring you in here because as we discussed in the recent episode with two other members of your union, Trump’s administration really set the template for this broader assault on higher ed by first going after Columbia. So what is your message to workers and students on other campuses like Michigan who are facing similar attacks? What can we learn from Columbia that may help people at other universities be better prepared for what’s coming?

Jessie Rubin:

Great question. First and foremost, I would say the biggest takeaway is that we help us. It’s us who take care of each other. We can’t expect the university or the administration to protect the most vulnerable among us to protect our international students, to protect our research. It’s us who has to create the infrastructure to keep us safe. For example, it was the union that provided the most robust know your rights trainings and detailed information to support international students on our campus. While the university has pretty much stayed silent and offered completely hollow support, I mean, we saw this with our fellow union member, Ron Boston, who had her visa revoked for totally no reason at all, and the university immediately dis-enrolled her from her program and from her housing. So it’s really clear that the university does not have our safety as a top priority. And if anything, I mean the university’s response to the Trump administration has made it clear that they’re not just capitulating, but they are active collaborators. And I would say that we can expect the same from other universities. And through their collaboration with the Trump administration, through their appeasement, we haven’t gotten anything. Columbia has gone above and beyond here, and even still our programs are getting hit with funding cuts and this continued federal overreach.

Conlan Olson:

And I think this lesson that appeasement gets us, nothing also has a parallel lesson for activists. So as a union, as activists, we can’t just sit this tight or wait this out, we can’t stay quiet in order to survive. And I really feel that if we start appeasing or hedging our bets, we’re going to lose our values and just get beat one step at a time. And this is why our union has really not backed down from fighting for Ranjani, why we’ve not backed down from fighting for a grant minor. And it’s why we’re fighting for such a strong contract with really unprecedented articles to protect non-citizens, to keep cops off our campus, to provide for parents to ensure financial transparency and justice in Columbia’s financial investments. And of course, to get paid a living wage. I think as a union, we could have backed down or softened our position, but I really think this would’ve meant losing before we even start.

We are labor unionists. We are people fighting for justice. If we start backing off, we’re just going to get beat one step at a time. And I do think that our activism is starting to work. So yesterday, Columbia, for the first time named Mah Halil and most of madi for the first time in public communications, and they offered slightly more support for non-citizens. And so to be clear, it’s still absolutely ridiculous that they’re not doing more and really despicable that they’re only now naming those people by name. But we are starting to see the needle moved because of activist campaigns by our union, both to pressure the university and to just provide, as Jesse said, know your rights training and outreach to students on our campus.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Ember, Lavinia, I wanted to bring you all back in as well and ask if you had any kind of thoughts or messages to folks at Columbia or people on other campuses right now. I mean, of course this looks differently depending on what state people are in and what university they’re at. But I guess for folks out there who are listening to this and preparing for what may happen on their campuses, did you have any sort of messages you wanted to let folks know?

Lavinia:

Yeah, so I kind of want to echo Jesse’s point that really we keep us safe. Many of these university administrations I think historically are intransigent in their negotiations with students. So for instance, with go, we had a 2022 to 2023 bargaining cycle where the university didn’t really budget all. And I think that in some way sort of set the precedent for what’s happening now, but I think we know in general, sort of the incentive structures for these academic institutions are really not set up to support what protects grad workers or students or really people who are just in the community. So that’s why things like safety planning or for instance within NGEO, we have an immigration hotline, those sort of community infrastructures are so important. So I just really want to advocate for thinking about how you as a community can support each other, especially in the face of new or more exaggerated threats from the government and the university.

Ember McCoy:

And if I could just add quickly too, I think one, I want to name that part of the reason we were so prepared this week is because we are following the footsteps of Columbia and our Columbia comrades. We’ve been able to do similar safety planning and set up these hotlines because we witnessed first the horrors that happened to you all. And I think that’s really important to be able to directly connect with you all which we had been previously, and to help other people do the same. And as Livinia mentioned, the reason we knew the raids were happening at 6:00 AM on Wednesday is because one of the people called our hotline called our ice hotline and our ICE hotline as Jail support hotline and we’re able to get people out because that’s an infrastructure that they knew about to try to suddenly get people’s attention.

And another one of the homes we knew they were being rated because we have a group in collaboration with community partners where there’s an ice watch group and people put in the group chat that there was FBI staging nearby, and then they watched people raid someone’s homes. And that brought out tons of people immediately to the scene. And so those infrastructures, many of them were actually for ice, and there was not ice in collaboration in the FBI raid. But I think it’s really important how those infrastructures which build off each other originally were able to protect us and us safe on Wednesday.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Gang, I wanted to sort of talk about the signs of life that we’re seeing. And y’all mentioned some on your campuses, like amidst all of this darkness and repression, and as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of folks around the country, a lot of folks that I’ve talked to in higher ed have been really galvanized by seeing the news that Harvard of all places is fighting Donald Trump’s attacks. It may not be perfect, but it’s something right. And I wanted to ask if there are more efforts that you’re seeing on your campus or other campuses that are giving you hope right now?

Conlan Olson:

I just want to say, so I happen to be a Harvard alum also, and I don’t want to be too down here, but I think that the way that we should think about Harvard’s efforts are really what Max called them, which is just a sign of life. I don’t have that much faith in our institutions. I appreciate the Big 10 movement and that we need a diversity of tactics here. But we should also keep in mind that yesterday Harvard renamed its diversity office and cut all of its affinity graduation celebrations in response to pressure from the federal government. Harvard remains invested in Israeli genocide and continues to suppress student protest. They fired the leadership of the Center for Middle East Studies last month. And so while I appreciate this sort of sign of life, I really feel that our institutions are not going to save us.

And so these days looking for inspiration, I’m far more inspired by activist movements by students, staff, professors, community members. So for example, yesterday just the same day that Harvard canceled these affinity graduation celebrations, students responded committing to holding their own, and we’re still seeing student protests, we’re seeing increasing faculty support for student protests, which is really important to me. We’re seeing mutual aid projects. We’re seeing legal movements to fight against visa ramifications. And so I think these places really from the ground up and from activism by the people at these universities are much more the things that are inspiring me these days.

Jessie Rubin:

I completely agree with Conland that it’s been so heartwarming to see the power of student movements, the power of working people movements on our campuses. It’s been heartwarming to see encampments starting to pop up again around the country even though the stakes are much higher than they’ve been than ever. Students are putting their bodies on the line, they’re risking expulsion, they’re risking arrest, they’re risking physical injury. And it’s really clear that no matter how hard our administrations try to stamp out dissent, including by expelling core organizers, that students keep coming out in and greater force and developing new tools to keep each other safe. And we see that this student pressure works. Just a few days ago, MIT was forced to cut ties with Elbit systems after a targeted campaign by a BDS group on campus. EL I is an Israeli arms company and has been a target in many BDS campaigns across the globe.

Ember McCoy:

Yeah, one thing I similarly, I similarly don’t want to be a downer, but one thing I think for us that’s been really present on my mind at least this week is the importance of also making connections between not just what the Trump administration is doing to facilitate the targeting of pro-Palestine activists, but what Democrat elected officials are doing in the state of Michigan to help support that. Dana Nessel, who is our attorney general is there’s all these articles and things and she’s coming out being like, oh, she’s a big anti-Trump democrat. She’s taking an aggressive approach to these ICE and these lawsuits. But at the same time, she sent Trump’s FBI to our houses on Wednesday, and she’s continuing to prosecute our free speech in a way that is really important to connect the criminalization of international students or international community members who are then that platform is then going to be able to be used, potentially could be used to by Trump’s administration.

And so there’s all these really important connections that I think need to be made. And for me, obviously what the Trump administration is doing is horrible, but it’s also really, really important that to name that this did not start or end with the Trump administration and it’s being actively facilitated by democratic elected officials across the United States. But I think one thing that’s a bright spot is I do think that activists at the University of Michigan and in our community are doing a really good job of trying to name that and to have really concrete political education for our community members. And I’m really inspired by the ways in which our community showed up for us on Wednesday and the rest of the week and the ways in which people were able to galvanize around us and act quickly and kind of test our infrastructures as successful in that way.

Lavinia:

Yeah, I think the threats to academic freedom through things like grant withholding or threatening DEI offices or what have you, are I think waking up faculty in particular to sort the broader power structures which govern universities. And those power structures frequently don’t include faculty. So a lot of them are, I think being, I wouldn’t say radicalized, but awakened to the kind of undemocratic nature of these institutions and specifically how they can threaten their students. I mean, I know especially as PhD students, we do tend to work closely with a lot of faculty. And I think there is sort of an inspiring change happening there as well.

Ember McCoy:

One additional thing about Harvard is I would say I agree with everything Conlin said, and the University of Michigan has the largest public endowment in the country. We now have a 20 billion endowment. It’s $3 billion more than it was in 2023 when we were doing our strike. And part of I think why Harvard is able to make the statement so that they can around resisting Trump’s funding is because they have the resources to do so, and a lot of institutions do not. University of Michigan is one that absolutely does. And so I do think it helps us try to leverage that argument that what is the 20 billion endowment for if it’s not for right now, why are we just immediately bending the knee to the Trump administration, especially on a campus that is known to have a long legacy of anti-war divestment and all of these other really important things.

And two weeks ago, I think it was time is nothing right now, but we got an email from President Ono saying that the NIH is requiring that institutions who get grants from the NIH certify that they don’t have diversity, equity and inclusion programs. And this was a new thing, do not have BDS campaigns, that they’re not divesting from Israel, which is not only obviously one of the main demands of the TER Coalition, but has also been a demand that students on campus that geo has taken stand for decades for over 20 years at the University of Michigan. And so seeing that all being facilitated is really, really scary, and I think it’s really frustrating that the University of Michigan administration is doing what they’re doing. So I think for me, there’s just a little teeny glimmer of hope to be able to use that as leverage more than anything.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and as we’ve mentioned on this call and in previous episodes, I mean the Trump administration is using multiple things to justify these attacks, including the notion that universities are just overrun with woke ideology embodied in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, trans student athletes participating in sports. But really the tip of this authoritarian spear has been the charge that this administration is protecting campuses from a scourge of antisemitism that is rampant across institutions of higher education around the country. And of course, like plenty of university administrations have gone along with that framing and have even adopted policies that accept the premise that criticism of the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism, including Harvard. And so I wanted to just ask y’all, if you had a chance to talk to people out there who are buying this, what is the reality on campuses? Are they overrun with antisemitism and wokeness the way people are being told? What do you want people to know about the reality on campus versus what they’re hearing from the White House and on Fox News and stuff?

Jessie Rubin:

Yeah, I mean, I can start by answering as an anti-Zionist Jew, I would say that the schools are of course not overrun by antisemitism, but instead we’re seeing growing mass movements that are anti genocide movements, that are Palestine liberation movements, and that is by no means antisemitic. And on top of that, these new definitions of antisemitism that are getting adopted on campuses actually make me feel less safe. They completely invalidate my identity as an anti-Zionist Jew and say that my religion or my culture is somehow at odds with my politics.

Ember McCoy:

I mean, I would just echo what Jesse said. I think that’s something we’re definitely being accused of, right at the University of Michigan, like you said, the elected officials are Zionists, right? And so they’re weaponizing this argument of antisemitism on campus and while also persecuting and charging anti-Zionist Jews with felony charges for speaking out for pro-Palestine. I think for those listening really all, it seems so simple, but I feel like it’s just you have to really listen to the people who are part of these movements and look as who’s a part of it. Because I think, as Jesse said, it’s really an intergenerational interfaith group that have shared politics. And it’s really important to understand that distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism that is being inflated in really, really terrifying ways.

Conlan Olson:

And I would just say the encampments, especially last spring and now again this spring and student movements really community spaces and spaces where people are taking care of each other, and that is what it feels like being in campus activism these days. I feel cared for by my comrades and the people I organize with. And I think that when we say solidarity, it’s not just a political statement, it’s also something that we really feel. And so yeah, I would invite people worried about antisemitism or other divisive ideologies on college campuses to just listen to the students who feel cared for and who are doing the work to care for each other.

Lavinia:

Yeah, I think one thing that was really wonderful, at least about the encampment at U of M is that there were lots of people who I think did have this misconception that there was some relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and then upon visiting the encampment and seeing the kind of solidarity that was being displayed there, they sort of potentially were a bit disabused of that notion. Unfortunately, I think that’s part of why the encampments in particular were so threatening to university administrations and Zionist officials, et cetera.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now, Lavinia, Ember, Jesse Conlin, there’s so much more that we could talk about here. But with the final minutes that I have, I wanted to focus in on the fact that y’all are unions and union members, and this is a show about and for workers. And I wanted to round things off by sort of talking about what role unions and collective labor power have to play in this terrifying moment. How can graduate student unions like yours and other unions like faculty unions and unions representing staff workers on campuses, what can labor organizations do to work together to fight this?

Jessie Rubin:

Sure. Thank you for your question. The first thing that I want to say is as workers, the most powerful tool that we have is our labor, and we have the power to withhold labor. We have to remember that we’re not just bystanders who the Trump administration can cross with no consequences. Graduate students, we produce their research that saves lives in human health. We write books that shape American life and we invent the things that America is so proud of. We also teach undergraduates, the university would just simply not run without its graduate students. So a strike poses a threat that simply cannot be ignored.

Conlan Olson:

And in addition to our work in higher education, the whole point is that we believe in solidarity, and that includes solidarity across sectors and across borders. And of course, mobilizing in this way is a huge task, but we’re seeing really inspiring work. For example, UIW Labor for Palestine is a coalition of workers in manufacturing to legal services to higher education, all fighting together against investment in Israeli genocide. And so I think that cross sectoral organizing both between grad students and other unions on campuses, but even unions, not on campuses at all, is really important. And I think working to connect people is a huge part of the work that needs to be done now.

Ember McCoy:

So I think we already little mentioned a little bit at the University of Michigan, what we built during our strike and the organizing model and the networks and community that we built at that time has directly supported our pro-Palestine activism and our ICE organizing and the combination of the two through things like safety planning department meetings, and then literally being the institutions that have resources to do things like set up a hotline or to have bodies that are mobilized and already connected to each other. And so a lot of it is, I don’t feel that we’re even reinventing the real wheel right now, right? It’s like unions are this space where this collective organizing and this solidarity and financial and physical and legal resources already exist. And so we should absolutely be leveraging those to protect ourselves and our comrades. And at the University of Michigan, I know this is not the case everywhere, including Columbia, but until two weeks ago anyways, there hadn’t been a unionized staff member who was fired. So while undergrad research assistants were getting hiring bands and being fired from their jobs, they’re not unionized, grad workers were not being fired. And I think a lot of that is in part because we have an incredibly strong contract. And it would’ve been really hard to fire someone who was a graduate teaching instructor last two weeks ago. There was a full-time staff member who was fired for something or for allegedly participating in a protest that happened before she was even hired or applied to the job.

She is a part of our new United Staff University staff United Union. Is that right? Vidia? Did I? Yeah, I think it’s university. Okay. Yeah. So she’s a part of our university staff, United Union. They don’t have a contract yet though. So she is in a position where she has people that can start to try to fight for her, but then they don’t have a contract. And so I think also for workers who are not yet unionized, this is a really critical time to be able to use that type of institution to protect workers because we are seeing it work in many places.

Conlan Olson:

And just to build on that, I think one troubling pattern that we’ve seen recently is people who are nervous to sign a union card because they’re worried about retaliation for being involved with labor organizing. And just to start, I think that fear is totally understandable, and I don’t think it’s silly or invalid, but I also think that we need to remember that people are far safer in a union than they are without a union. And so in addition to our power to withhold labor, we’re also just a group of people who keep each other safe. So we have mutual aid collectives, we run campaigns to defend each other, like the one that we’re running for Rani. And so lying low is just not going to work, especially in this political moment. And so yeah, I really want people to remember that unions keep you safe.

Lavinia:

I think empirically there has been sort of a duality in the organizing conversations that we’re having for GEO as well where people both see how dangerous the situation is right now and want to be involved, but at the same time, especially if they’re not a citizen, they don’t necessarily feel comfortable exposing themselves, I guess. So I think one thing that’s just important in general for unions right now is providing avenues for people who are in that situation to get involved and contribute, even if that’s not necessarily going to the media or speaking out in a very public way.

Maximillian Alvarez:

With the last couple minutes that we have here, I wanted to end on that note and just acknowledge the reality that this podcast is going to be listened to by students, grad students, faculty, non university affiliated folks who are terrified right now, people who are self-censoring, people who are going back in their Facebook feeds and Instagram feeds and deleting past posts because they’re terrified of the government surveilling them and scrubbing them. And people are worried about getting abducted on the street by agents of the state losing their jobs, their livelihoods, their research. This is a very terrifying moment, and the more filled with terror we are, the more immobilized we are and the easier we are to control. So I wanted to ask y’all if you just had any final messages to folks out there on your campus or beyond your campus who are feeling this way, what would you say to them about ways they could get involved in this effort to fight back or any sort of parting messages that you wanted to leave listeners with before we break?

Lavinia:

I think doubt is a wonderful time to plug in. So for people who maybe previously hadn’t been thinking about unions especially as sort of an important part of their lives or thought, oh, the union on my campus is just doing whatever it needs to do, but I don’t necessarily need to have any personal involvement in their activities, I think right now is when we need all hands on deck given the level of political repression that’s happening. And also just to maybe bring in that old Martin Eller quote about first they came for the communist and I did not speak up because I was not a communist, et cetera. I think it’s also just really important to emphasize that I don’t think any of this is going to stop here. And even within the context of pro-Palestine organizing at the university, it is basically escalated in terms of the severity of the legal charges that are being brought. Obviously bringing in the FB is kind of really crazy, et cetera. So I don’t think that this is going to stop here or there’s any reason to assume that if you are not taking action right now, that means that you’re going to be safe ultimately. Yeah,

Ember McCoy:

And I think I would add, like many of us had said in the call, I think it’s very clear that we keep each other safe. The institutions that we’ve built, the organizing communities that we’ve built are very much actively keeping each other safe. And I think we’re seeing that in many different ways. And it’s important to acknowledge that and see that we’re much stronger fighting together as a part of these networks than that we are alone.

Conlan Olson:

I think as a closing thought, I also just want to say I think it’s really essential that we expand our view beyond just higher education. And so let me say why I think that’s true. So people know about Mahmud and Mosen and Ru Mesa, but I also want people to know about Alfredo Juarez, also known as Lelo, who’s a worker and labor organizer with the Independent Farm Workers Union in Washington state. And Lelo was kidnapped by ice from his car on his way to work in the tulip fields about a month ago. He’s an incredibly powerful labor organizer. He’s known especially for his ability to organize his fellow indigenous mixed deco speaking workers, and he was targeted by the state for this organizing. I think it’s important to keep this in mind and to learn from campaigns that are going on elsewhere and also to contribute to them.

And also I want people to remember that it’s not all dark. And so one story that was really inspiring to me recently was that in early April, a mother and her three young children living in a small town on the shore of Lake Ontario and upstate New York were taken by ice. And in response, the town, which keep in mind is a predominantly Republican voting town, turned out a thousand out of 1300 people in the town to a rally, and the family’s free now. And so we’re all labor organizers. Turning out a thousand out of 1300 people is some seriously impressive organizing. And I think learning from these lessons and keeping these victories in mind is really important. Not only as just an intellectual exercise, but also solidarity is something that we do every day. So it’s for example, why we fight for divestment from genocide. It’s why we do mutual aid. It’s why we engage with the neighborhoods that our universities are in. It’s why we don’t just defend our comrades who are highly educated, who have high earning potential, but we also defend our comrades who are taken, whose names we don’t even know yet. And so I just think expanding our view beyond just higher education is both a source of wisdom and something that we can learn from and also a source of hope for me

Jessie Rubin:

Really beautifully said Conlin. And I just want to add that expanding our view beyond higher education also includes the communities that our campuses reside on. I mean, I’m coming from a Columbia perspective where my university is consistently displacing people in Harlem who have been there for decades in this project of expanding Columbia’s campus continues to this day, and it’s something that we must fight back against. It’s really important that we protect our neighbors, not just on campus but also off campus. It’s important that we get to know our neighbors, that we are truly fully members of our greater community.

Ember McCoy:

If folks listening are interested in supporting us here at the University of Michigan, and I hope our Columbia colleagues can do the same, we have a legal slash mutual aid fund for our comrades who are facing charges and who are rated by the FBI. It is Bitly, BIT ly slash legal fund, and that is all lowercase, which matters. And we’re also happy to take solidarity statements and Columbia SWC did a great one for us and we’re happy to do the same. Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Ember McCoy and Lavinia from the University of Michigan Graduate Employees Organization and Jessie Rubin and Conlan Olson from Student Workers of Columbia University. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

A three-day onslaught of junta-launched airstrikes across four major areas spanning much of Myanmar’s central plains killed 50 people and injured nearly 80, sources told Radio Free Asia.

Myanmar’s junta, which seized power in 2021, faces resistance from dozens of militias seeking autonomy. In response to insurgent attacks, the military has bombed villages suspected of sheltering rebels, often killing dozens of civilians.

In the latest assaults, the junta killed 20 people in Singu township’s Kyi Tauk Pauk village and Thabeikkyin township’s Leik Kya and Yae Htwet villages in Manadalay region between Friday and Sunday.

“A 500-pound bomb fell. Four men and two women were injured, only those who were middle-aged,” said a Kyi Tauk Pauk resident, declining to be named for security reasons, adding that three dormitories at the local school were destroyed when a junta plane attacked around 2 p.m. on Friday.

The airstrike on Leik Kya village killed 12 civilians, including one child, three women and eight men, and injured three others, said a member of a local Pyinoolwin militia under the arm of the exiled civilian National Unity Government, or NUG.

The plane came from Meiktila Air Base, on the border of Shan state and Mandalay region, dropping one 300-pound bomb and opening fire on the village, said a member of the militia, declining to be named for security reasons.

Similarly, Saturday afternoon’s attacks on Yae Htwet left 24 people dead and nearly 20 injured when two bombs struck the village, residents said, adding that the death toll is likely to rise as many people are critically injured.

Several young children were also killed in the attack, said one resident, declining to be named for security reasons.

‘Ceasefire’

The NUG announced on Monday it would take all actions necessary to punish military for its violent crimes against the public. Despite ceasefires declared by both the junta and NUG following the country’s March 28 earthquake that left thousands dead, struggles for territory, ending in junta bombings, have continued.

Other attacks also targeted villages across Rakhine state and Sagaing region. Both are considered to be hotbeds of insurgent activity under both NUG-led militias and the Arakan Army, which has captured 14 of Rakhine’s 17 townships in its fight for self-determination.

Junta airstrikes on a residential ward of Rakhine’s Kyauktaw town, which remains under military control, on Saturday afternoon. killed two civilians and injured 20 others, including three children, residents said.

A junta plane attacked a monastery in Mon state’s Bilin township on Saturday morning during a religious ceremony. The airstrike killed 10-year-old monk Kaylatha, 60-year-old Ma Wai and 69-year-old Hla Myint, the rebel administration Karen National Union, which controls parts of Kayin and Mon states, announced on Sunday. Nine more civilians were injured.

In Sagaing region, two bombs dropped on a store in Thin Taw village on Sunday evening killed six family members, said one resident, who requested to remain unnamed for fear of reprisals.

“One bomb hit the store exactly and killed the whole family,” he said. “They were all just civilians, three men, three women, all dead.”

He listed the family members as 20-year-old Mi Thay; 30-year-old Min Min; Khin Ma, who was around 50 years old; and also Kyaw Min Kyi; Phone Maw; and a woman known as ‘Mrs. Saw,’ all identified without ages.

Two other men were injured in the attack, residents said.

In Myinmu township, junta forces bombed a camp for internally displaced people on Saturday morning, killing three civilians and injuring eight others, residents said, identifying them as displaced people including three-year-old Su Myat, 17-year-old May Zun Oo and 69-year-old Tin Maung.

Four others were injured including a five-year-old child, they said.

Junta spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun has not responded to RFA’s inquiries.

Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

On March 31, also known as Cesar Chavez Day, unions and workers from across California converged on Delano, home of the historic Delano Grape Strike that began the struggle of the United Farm Workers. The Real News reports from the ground, speaking with union and community leaders who say workers are coming together across sectors to oppose Trump’s attacks on immigrants and the federal workforce.

Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Additional Footage: Bucky Gonzalez
Additional Sound: Tom Pieczkolon

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mel Buer:

On March 31st, 2025, thousands of workers from all over the state of California met in Delano, California to celebrate the life and legacy of Cesar Chavez, and stand in solidarity with immigrant workers across the United States. One in every three workers in the state of California are immigrants. And raids by ICE and border patrol agencies on immigrant communities have intensified in the months following Donald Trump’s inauguration in mid-January. In California, all across the state, immigrant workers have been detained and deported. Some of the most harrowing experiences have been in Kern County, in California’s Central Valley, where ICE raids have terrorized the immigrant community and left workers uncertain about their future in the country. In a show of solidarity, union workers from all over the state traveled to Delano to remind the country and each other that these attacks on immigrant workers won’t go unchallenged.

David Huerta:

Today’s also, not only a recognition of that, but also really standing united against the attacks against working people and the most particularly, immigrant workers, right? And so I think we stand today in the sense of saying that we stand shoulder to shoulder with one another, all workers for every worker. Doesn’t matter your status, doesn’t matter what language you speak, doesn’t matter. We have to stand united as working people at this moment in time, as we see this president continuous attacks against working people, and most particularly, against the immigrant community.

Mel Buer:

The Real News joined a caravan from Los Angeles to Delano, organized by the Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West. Dozens of workers from all over Los Angeles met early in the morning, shared breakfast together, and then made the two and a half hour journey to Delano to march. When asked about the importance of organized labor coming together in support of each other, SEIU President David Huerta had this to say.

David Huerta:

This is the moment in time that as every fight, working people have to stand united. Whether you’re a farm worker, a janitor, a hotel worker, a state worker, a nurse, all of us have to stand together because really with this administration, their attack right now is against federal employees. But that attack against federal employees is just a precursor to what he’s trying to do to the rest of the labor movement, and that’s dismantling. And we cannot allow that to happen because the labor movement is the last line of defense for working people in this country.

Mel Buer:

After arriving in Delano, workers gathered for opening speeches in Memorial Park before beginning the three-mile march to Forty Acres, owned by the United Farm Workers. Members of CWA, the Teamsters, UAW, SEIU, UNITE HERE, and other unions were represented in a massive show of solidarity with immigrant workers in California and the U.S.

Speaker 3:

So I think when we think about what Trump is doing on immigration, it’s an attack on the working class. And not just immigrant workers, the entire working class. When one group of workers is so afraid of getting deported that they’re not willing to talk about wage theft or unsafe working conditions, obviously, that’s bad for them, but that’s also bad for every other worker in that industry. So we’re looking at construction, agriculture, home care, kitchens, janitors, right? If you’re an American worker in those jobs, when undocumented workers who are essential to those industries are in those same battles, they’re afraid to speak out, that’s bad for everyone. So I think it’s literally true that an attack on any worker pushes wages and working conditions down for every worker. And so it’s so important that labor defend immigrant workers. If for no other reason then, we cannot have a labor movement in this country if the immigrant working class, which is such a large and literally essential portion of that working class, is afraid for their very life.

Mel Buer:

For members of the Chavez family, the continuation of their father’s legacy and activism as founder and leader of the United Farm Workers in modern day movements has been a high point of the Cesar Chavez Day in California and beyond.

Paul Chavez:

It’s heartwarming to see that his legacy continues to inspire whole new generations of workers and activists. My dad had commented that it would’ve been a terrible waste of a lot of hard work and sacrifice if his work ended with his life. And the fact that we’re here with people from all walks of life that have come from the many places, and a lot of times from places far away, would put a smile on the face because I think he would say that his work continues even after his passing.

Speaker 5:

And this is a great opportunity for us to do that as a community, as people, especially, people who know the struggles of the people who actually have this country moving forward, those immigrants that at times are abused or do not have the recognition that they should as people that they are. May this moment for all of us be an empowering moment so that we might remember our commitment as Christians to uphold the dignity of those who are voiceless. May we be an inspiration to others to do the same in every aspect of their lives.

Mel Buer:

Reporting from California for The Real News Network, I’m Mel Buer.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mel Buer.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is ramping up raids across the United States, arresting more than 1,000 people in operations Monday after detaining a similar number on Sunday. Immigrant communities and their allies say the raids violate human rights, the Constitution, and are being carried out in retaliation against sanctuary cities that have policies aimed at protecting undocumented residents. In Chicago, immigrant rights organizer Dulce Guzmán says there is “palpable fear and anxiety among families,” but she lauds elected officials, including Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor J.B. Pritzker, for pushing back against what she says is the Trump administration’s “white supremacist agenda.” Meanwhile, in Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka has condemned an ICE raid last week at a seafood depot where federal agents took three people into custody, including a U.S. military veteran. “Simply being in proximity to their target, which is immigrant communities, is enough to arrest and detain you, too,” says Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice. She encourages people to know their rights, such as the ability to record ICE agents and to refuse orders without a warrant. “One of their most effective tools is fear and panic,” Torres says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As the Trump administration launches what it touts as the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history, we look at how immigrant communities and advocates are fighting back. The administration already faces some setbacks, including in its attempt to end birthright citizenship, which a federal judge halted Thursday from going into effect because it was “blatantly unconstitutional.” Thursday’s ruling is the first in what’s expected to be a long legal battle against Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. “We’re in a moment where there’s a ton of fear in the community,” says Harold Solis, legal director at Make the Road New York, which has filed its own lawsuit against the government. We also speak with Columbia University historian Mae Ngai, who says the fight over birthright citizenship is part of the long history of restrictionist immigration policies in the country. “What we’re seeing this week is shock and awe. It’s meant to terrorize,” she says. “We have to fight on all levels.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Israeli forces have been ramping up operations in the occupied West Bank– mainly the Jenin refugee camp – to “distract” from the Gaza ceasefire deal, says political analyst Dr Mohamad Elmasry.

The Qatari professor said the ceasefire was being viewed domestically as a “spectacular failure” for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The ceasefire in Gaza was kind of a defeat for Netanyahu. Israeli media reports are calling it an embarrassment for him to have Hamas, after all these months, still very much alive and well and operational in Gaza,” Dr Elmasry, professor of media studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera in an interview.

• READ MORE:  Occupied West Bank’s Jenin being ‘Gazafied’ by Israel’s army
• ‘Spectacular failure’ over Hamas an embarrassment for Netanyahu
• Palestinians return home to Gaza ashes – if we want peace, face the truth
• Other Israel’s war on Gaza reports

“Now what the Israeli government is doing is trying to distract from that and sort of overcompensate by escalating in the West Bank.”

Elmasry highlighted that since the ceasefire began on Sunday, Israel had made dozens of arrests in the West Bank, — offsetting the release of 90 prisoners under the agreement so far.

“This is a way for the Israeli government to show its ardent supporters and especially those on the right wing that this is only temporary in Gaza and [Israel is] still able to do whatever we wants in the West Bank,” he said.

Dr Elmasry also said indications were growing that Israel was not taking the terms of the ceasefire seriously and was planning to restart fighting in Gaza before phase two of the agreement comes into effect.

“What we have to keep our eye on is violations,” Dr Elmasry said.

“Yesterday, there was video circulating of [Israeli forces] shooting a Palestinian [in Gaza]. It’s a clear violation, but we didn’t hear any sort of condemnation from the US, [which] is supposed to be sort of ensuring that the ceasefire continues.

“The other thing we have to keep an eye on,” Dr Elmasry added, “is what happens after phase one.

“There are increasing indications that Israel has every intention of continuing the war. They’ve apparently said as much. And then we’ve got US President Donald Trump after his inauguration saying: ‘Look, it’s their war’.

“I read that as a statement that the US is kind of washing its hands — it’s not going to intervene.”

‘Starting lives from scratch’
Meanwhile, one of several Palestinian journalists reporting on the ground for Al Jazeera, Hind Khoudary, said from Nuseirat, central Gaza:

“You can’t imagine how destroyed the infrastructure across the Gaza Strip is. Sewage is filling the streets.

“In some places, there’s a lack of water. Desalination plants are not working any more. The infrastructure has completely collapsed.

“Yesterday was the first day Israel let in heavy machinery. But civil defence teams, engineers and others working [on recovery efforts] do not know where to start.

“In every single street, neighbourhood, city infrastructure is destroyed. Palestinians are going to have to start their lives from scratch.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

As immigrant communities are bracing for raids and mass deportations promised by Donald Trump, the future for thousands of asylum seekers is also uncertain. As Trump took office, his administration immediately shut down the Biden-era CBP One mobile app, used by Customs and Border Protection to manage asylum requests at ports of entry. Thousands of asylum seekers lost their appointments scheduled for Trump’s first day in office, January 20. “People are afraid. Their lives are uncertain, especially those who have children, those who have fled extreme conditions. Now their lives are once again at risk,” says Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, who describes how immigrant communities are preparing to resist Trump’s agenda. “We stand ready, committed to push back against the policies that are being created to criminalize people of color and people of immigrant backgrounds.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Myanmar’s military has launched an operation to clear pro-democracy insurgents from a contested central area, sending nearly 10,000 villagers fleeing for safety, an aid worker and residents said on Thursday.

Junta forces have suffered significant setbacks in fighting over the past year but the army commander has vowed to recapture lost ground this dry season, when the military can take its heavy vehicles on dried roads into rebel zones.

“They’re worried for their security, they can’t go home. We’re watching the situation and waiting,” an aid worker said of the situation in Kyunhla township, 175 kilometers (108 miles) northwest of the city of Mandalay.

About 200 junta troops had raided more than 10 villages in the township in what the aid worker told Radio Free Asia was a violent campaign launched eight days ago. Residents said some homes were torched while soldiers had also occupied some homes.

Kyunhla is in Sagaing, a heartland region populated largely by members of the majority Burman community that has been torn by violence since democracy activists set up militias to battle the military after the 2021 coup.

RFA tried to reach Sagiang’s junta spokesperson, Nyan Wing Aung, but he did not respond by the time of publication.

The aid worker, who declined to be identified for security reasons, said many of the villages had sought shelter in the woods near their fields.

“If they have rice, oil and salt, they’ll be OK. At the moment, it’s very chilly, and for the people with fevers, they need blankets and medicine,” the aid worker said.

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Children make up nearly 40% of Myanmar’s 3.4 million displaced: UN

Thousands flee fighting in Myanmar’s heartland

Perhaps it would be better if Myanmar’s civil war became a ‘forgotten conflict’

The United Nations said on Wednesday more than 3.4 million people aredisplaced in Myanmar, an increase of 250,000 over the past few months, because of the conflict, severe flooding in July and September and economic collapse.

“Compounding these challenges, high inflation, sharp currency depreciation, and ongoing trade disruptions due to conflict and border closures by neighboring countries have reduced access to essential goods, further straining communities,” the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.

Myanmar has received only $279 million, or a mere 28% of the overall funding requested for 2024, the office said.

“Without immediate additional funding, the worsening crisis will push more people into extreme hardship, deepen vulnerabilities, and limit the potential for recovery for millions across Myanmar,” it said.

Translated by Kiana Duncan. Edited by RFA Staff.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

“Turkish authorities once more raided the homes of multiple journalists in the middle of the night, in order to portray them as dangerous criminals, and detained them without offering any justification. CPJ has monitored similar secretive operations in the past decade, and not one journalist has been proven to be involved with actual terrorism,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “The authorities should immediately release the journalists in custody and stop this systematic harassment of the media.”

In a statement Tuesday, Turkey’s Interior Ministry said police had conducted simultaneous operations in 30 cities and detained a total of 261 people who suspected of having ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) or alleged offshoot organizations. At least 12 journalists are reported to be held in custody:

• Erdoğan Alayumat, former reporter for the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya News Agency in Istanbul
• Suzan Demir, Istanbul-based freelance reporter
• Tuğçe Yılmaz, Istanbul-based reporter for the independent news website Bianet
• Emrah Kelekçier, Diyarbakır-based freelance photographer
• Ahmet Sümbül, Diyarbakır-based freelance reporter
• Roza Metina, chairperson of the Mesopotamia Women Journalists Association in Diyarbakır
• Bilal Seçkin, Istanbul-based freelance photographer
• Bilge Aksu, Istanbul-based freelance reporter
• Mehmet Uçar, Batman-based freelance reporter
• Doğan Güzel, Diyarbakır-based political cartoonist
• Abdurrahman Aydın, Antalya-based columnist for the independent news website Gazete Duvar
• Havin Derya, Antalya-based freelance reporter

The reasons for the detentions are unknown, as there is a court order of secrecy on the investigation, preventing the detainees and their lawyers from being informed of the investigation’s details and possible charges, a common practice in such crackdowns.

CPJ emailed Turkey’s Interior Ministry for comment but received no reply.

Separately, Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the government ally Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), threatened the pro-opposition outlet Halk TV and its commentators for criticizing his party with a vow that the MHP will make them suffer.

“We are taking note, one by one, of the ignorant and arrogant commentators, especially Halk TV,” Bahçeli said Tuesday at a MHP meeting in Ankara. In October, he had told the outlet to “watch your step.”

Editor’s note: The alert was updated to correct the name of Ahmet Sümbül.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

An alleged plot involving firearms and threatening the life of New Zealand pilot Philip Mehrtens when held hostage in Papua this year is being investigated by the Australian Federal Police.

The case involves “advancing a political cause by the separation of West Papua from Indonesia . . . with the intention of coercing by intimidation the governments of New Zealand and Indonesia”.

Named in the AFP search warrant seen by MWM is research scholar Julian King, 63, who has studied and written extensively about West Papuan affairs.

• READ MORE: Plea to bar Prabowo from UK as Indonesian security forces crack down on Papuan rally
• ‘If it’s not racism, what is it?’ — Human Rights Watch report
• Prabowo and the UK
• Other West Papua reports

He has told others his home in Coffs Harbour, Queensland, was raided violently earlier this month by police using a stun grenade and smashing a door.

During the search, the police seized phones, computers and documents about alleged contacts with the West Papua rebel group Organisasi Papua Merdeka, OPM (Free Papua Organisation) and a bid to seek weapons and ammunition.

However, no arrests are understood to have been made or charges laid.

King, a former geologist and now a PhD student at Wollongong University, has been studying Papuan reaction to the Indonesian takeover since 1963. He has written in a research paper titled “A soul divided: The UN’s misconduct over West Papua” that West Papuans:

‘live under a military dictatorship described by legal scholars and human rights advocates as systemic terror and alleged genocide.’

Also named in the warrant alongside King is Amatus Dounemee Douw, confirmed by MWM contacts to be Australian citizen Akouboo Amatus Douw, who chairs the West Papua Diplomatic and Foreign Affairs Council, an NGO that states it seeks to settle disputes peacefully.

Risk to Australia-Indonesia relations
The allegations threaten to fragment relations between Indonesia and Australia.

It is widely believed that human rights activists and church organisations are helping Papuan dissidents despite Canberra’s regular insistence that it officially backs Jakarta.

Earlier this year, Deputy PM Richard Marles publicly stressed: “We, Australia, fully recognise Indonesia’s territorial sovereignty. We do not endorse any independence movement.”

In August, Douw alleged Indonesian troops shot Kiwi Glen Conning on August 5 in Central Papua. The government version claims that the pilot was killed by “an armed criminal group” after landing his helicopter, ferrying local people who fled unharmed.

When seized by armed OPM pro-independence fighters in February last year, Mehrtens was flying a light plane for an Indonesian transport company.

He was released unharmed in September after being held for 593 days by the West Papua National Liberation Army (Tentara Pembebasan Nasional Papua Barat – TPNPB), the military wing of the OPM.

AFP is investigating alleged firearms plot which threatened the life of New Zealand pilot Philip Mehrtens when held hostage in West Papua this year #auspol https://t.co/8ZXFIB1fre

— Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) November 18, 2024

Designated ‘terrorist’ group, journalists banned
OPM is designated as a terrorist organisation in Indonesia but isn’t on the Australian list of proscribed groups. Jakarta bans foreign journalists from Papua, so little impartial information is reported.

After Mehrtens was freed, TPNPB spokesman Sebby Sambom alleged that a local politician had paid a bribe, a charge denied by the NZ government.

However, West Papua Action Aotearoa spokesperson Catherine Delahunty told Radio NZ the bribe was “an internal political situation that has nothing to do with our government’s negotiations.”

Sambom, who has spent time in Indonesian jails for taking part in demonstrations, now operates out of adjacent Papua New Guinea — a separate independent country.

Australia was largely absent from the talks to free Mehrtens that were handled by NZ diplomats and the Indonesian military. The AFP’s current involvement raises the worry that information garnered under the search warrants will show the Indonesian government where the Kiwi was hidden so that locations can be attacked from the air.

At one stage during his captivity, Mehrtens appealed to the Indonesian military not to bomb villages.

It is believed Mehrtens was held in Nduga, a district with the lowest development index in the Republic, a measure of how citizens can access education, health, and income. Yet Papua is the richest province in the archipelago — the Grasberg mine is the world’s biggest deposit of gold and copper.

OPM was founded in December 1963 as a spiritual movement rejecting development while blending traditional and Christian beliefs. It then started working with international human rights agencies for support.

Indigenous Papuans are mainly Christian, while almost 90 percent of Indonesians follow Islam.

Chief independence lobbyist Benny Wenda lives in exile in Oxford. In 2003 he was given political asylum by the UK government after fleeing from an Indonesian jail.  He has addressed the UN and European and British Parliaments, but Jakarta has so far resisted international pressure to allow any form of self-determination.

Questions for new President Prabowo
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto is in the UK this week, where Papuans have been drumming up opposition to the official visit. In a statement, Wenda said:

‘Prabowo has also restarted the transmigration settlement programme that has made us a minority in our own land.’

“For West Papuans, the ghost of (second president) Suharto has returned — (his) New Order regime still exists, it has just changed its clothes.”

Pleas for recognition of Papuan’s concerns get minimal backing in Indonesia; fears of balkanisation and Western nations taking over a splintered country are well entrenched in the 17,000-island archipelago of 1300 ethnic groups where “unity” is considered the Republic’s foundation stone.

Duncan Graham has a Walkley Award, two Human Rights Commission awards and other prizes for his radio, TV and print journalism in Australia. He now lives in Indonesia. He has been an occasional contributor to Asia Pacific Report and this article was first published by Michael West Media.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater is many things. It is:

• A family history
• A social history
• A history of the left-wing in Aotearoa
• A chilling reminder of the origin and continuation of the surveillance state in New Zealand, and
• A damn good read.

The book is a great example of citizen or activist authorship. The author, Maire Leadbeater, and her family are front and centre of the dark cloud of the surveillance state that has hung and still hangs over New Zealand’s “democracy”.

What better place to begin the book than the author noting that she had been spied on by the security services from the age of 10. What better place to begin than describing the role of the Locke family — Elsie, Jack, Maire, Keith and their siblings — have played in Aotearoa society over the last few decades.

And what a fitting way to end the book than with the final chapter entitled, “Person of Interest: Keith Locke”; Maire’s much-loved brother and our much-loved friend and comrade.

In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country.

The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.

I have often deprecatingly called myself a mere footnote of history as that is all I seem to appear as in many books written about recent progressive history in New Zealand. But it was without false modesty that when Maire gave me a copy of the book a couple of weeks back, I immediately went to the index, looked up my name and found that this time I was a bit more than a footnote, but had a section of a chapter written on my interaction with the spooks.

But it was after reading this, dipping into a couple of other “person of interest” stories of people I knew such as Keith, Mike Treen, the Rosenbergs, Murray Horton and then starting the book again from the beginning did it become clear on what issues the state was paranoid about that led it to build an apparatus to spy on its own citizens.

These were issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, de-colonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought. These are the issues that come up time and time again; essentially it was seditious or subversive to be part of any of these campaigns or ideologies.

Client state spying
The other common theme through the book is the role that the UK and more latterly the US has played in ensuring that their NZ client settler state plays by their rules, makes enemies of their enemies and spies on its own people for their “benefit”.

It was interesting to read how the “5 Eyes”, although not using that name, has been in operation as long as NZ has had a spying apparatus. In fact, the book shows that 3 of the 5 eyes forced NZ to establish its surveillance apparatus in the first place.

Maire, and her editor have arranged this book in a very reader friendly way. It is mostly chronological showing the rise of the surveillance state from the beginning of the 19th century, in dispersed with a series of vignettes of “Persons of Interest”.

Maire would probably acknowledge that this book could not have been written without the decision of the SIS to start releasing files (all beit they were heavily redacted with many missing parts) of many of us who have been spied on by the SIS over the years. So, on behalf of Maire, thank you SIS.

Maire has painstakingly gone through pages and pages of these primary source files and incorporated them into the historical narrative of the book showing what was happening in society while this surveillance was taking place.

I was especially delighted to read the history of the anti-war and conscientious objectors movement. Two years ago, almost to the day, we held the 50th anniversary of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS); an organisation that I founded and was under heavy surveillance in 1972.

We knew a bit about previous anti-conscription struggles but Maire has provided much more context and information that we knew. It was good to read about people like John Charters, Ormand Burton and Archie Barrington as well more known resisters such as my great uncle Archibald Baxter.

Within living memory
Many of the events covered take place within my living memory. But it was wonderful to be reminded of some things I had forgotten about or to find some new gems of information about our past.

Stories around Bill Sutch, Shirley Smith, Ann and Wolfgang Rosenberg, Jack and Mary Woodward, Gerald O’Brien, Allan Brash (yes, Don’s dad), Cecil Holmes, Jack Lewin are documented as well as my contemporaries such as Don Carson, David Small, Aziz Choudry, Trevor Richards, Jane Kelsey, Nicky Hager, Owen Wilkes, Tame Iti in addition to Maire, Keith and Mike Treen.

The book finishes with a more recent history of NZ again aping the US’s so-called war on terror with the introduction of an anti and counter-terrorism mandate for the SIS and its sister agencies

The book traverses events such as the detention of Ahmed Zaoui, the raid on the Kim Dotcom mansion, the privatisation of spying to firms such as Thomson and Clark, the Urewera raids, “Hit and Run” in Afghanistan. Missing the cut was the recent police raid and removal of the computer of octogenarian, Peter Wilson for holding money earmarked for a development project in DPRK (North Korea).

When we come to the end of the book we are reminded of the horrific Christchurch mosque attack and massacre and prior to that of the bombing of Wellington Trades Hall and the Rainbow Warrior. Also, the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.

We cannot but ask the question of why multi-millions of dollars have been spent spying on, surveilling and monitoring peace activists, trade unionists, communists, Māori and more latterly Muslims, when the terrorism that NZ has faced has been that perpetrated on these people not by these people.

Maire notes in the book that the SIS budget for 2021 was around $100 million with around 400 FTEs employed. This does not include GCSB or other parts of the security apparatus.

Seeking subversives in wrong places
This level of money has been spent for well over 100 years looking for subversives and terrorists in the wrong place!

Finally, although dealing with the human cost of the surveillance state, the book touches on some of the lighter sides of the SIS spying. Those of us under surveillance in the 1970s and 1980s remember the amateurish phone tapping that went on at that time.

Also, the men in cars with cameras sitting outside our flats for days on end. Not in the book, but I have one memory of such a man with a camera in a car outside our flat in Wallace Street, Wellington.

After a few days some of my flatmates took pity on him and made him a batch of scones which they passed through the window of his car. He stayed for a bit longer that day but we never saw him or an alternate again.

Another issue the book picks up is the obsession that the SIS and its foreign counterparts had with counting communists in NZ. I remember that the CIA used to put out a Communist Yearbook that described and attempted to count how many members were in each of the communist parties all around the world.

In NZ, my party, the Workers Communist League, was smaller than the SUP, CPNZ and SAL, but one year near the end of our existence we were pleasantly surprised to see that the CIA had almost to a person, doubled our membership.

We could not work out why, until we realised that we all had code names as well as real names and we were getting more and more slack at using the correct one in the correct place. Anyone surveilling us, counting names, would have counted double the names that we had as members! We took the compliment.

Thank you, Maire, for this great book. Thank you and your family for your great contribution to Aotearoa society.

Hopefully the hardships and human cost that you have shown in this book will commit or recommit the rest of us to struggle for a decolonised and socialist Aotearoa within a peaceful and multi-polar world.

And as one of Jack Locke’s political guides said: “the road may be long and torturous, but the future is bright.”

Robert Reid has more than 40 years’ experience in trade unions and in community employment development in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a former general secretary the president of FIRST Union. Much of his work has been with disadvantaged groups and this has included work with Māori, Pacific peoples and migrant communities. This was his address tonight for the launch of The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa New Zealand, by Maire Leadbeater.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Myanmar junta authorities arrested nearly 750 people, including more than 240 Chinese nationals, in a raid on an online scam near Myanmar’s border with China, sources close to regional authorities told Radio Free Asia on Wednesday.

China has been pressing authorities in Myanmar for the past year to crack down on the online fraud gangs, many of which target Chinese citizens, and the arrests in the Shan state border town of Muse follow recent Chinese efforts to help Myanmar’s junta quell armed opposition to its rule.

A resident of Muse said junta forces raiding the scam center on Monday had clashed with guards there, members of a pro-junta militia who were apparently caught unaware by the raid.

“A shootout between the junta’s local militia and junta soldiers erupted in Muse’s Mingalar neighborhood and many people were arrested, including Chinese nationals,” said the resident, who declined to be identified for security reasons.

“Security control at the town’s gates has been tightened more than ever.”

It was not clear if there were any casualties in the shooting but sources close to Myanmar authorities said junta troops had detained nearly 750 people and 247 Chinese nationals among them would be handed over to authorities in China. 

RFA called Myanmar military officials in Muse and Shan state’s junta spokesperson, Khun Thein Maung, for more information but neither responded by the time of publication. 

The Chinese embassy in Myanmar did not respond to inquiries from RFA by time of publication.

Illegal casinos, online gambling and scam centers have proliferated along Myanmar’s borders with both China and Thailand, as well as in Laos and Cambodia, many run by Chinese gangsters, law enforcement organizations say. 

The operations often thrive on the labor of people tricked into thinking they’ve landed legitimate jobs but forced to adopt false identities online in what have become known as “pig-butchering” schemes, forming relationships with victims then tricking them into investing in fake schemes.

University of Texas researchers estimated in a March report that scammers had tricked investors out of more than US$75 billion since January 2020. 

China has turned to both junta authorities and its insurgent enemies, who control increasingly large areas in Shan state, for help in tackling the gangs.

Chinese media reported early this year that 44,000 telecom fraud suspects had been handed over to China including 2,908 “fugitives” but action against the scam centers appeared to dwindle later in the year as fighting intensified between the Myanmar military and anti-junta forces.

China is keen to see an end to the turmoil in Myanmar that threatens its economic interests, which include oil and natural gas pipelines from the Indian Ocean coast, and has in recent weeks pressed main insurgent forces in Shan state to agree to halt their offensives against the junta, although neither side appears ready to lay down their arms.

Analysts say China is hoping that an election the junta has promised to hold next year can pave the way for a resolution of Myanmar’s conflict, and it has offered help to organize the vote and a census that the military said will be held soon.

RELATED STORIES

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Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Mike Firn. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The Israeli military has launched its biggest operation in the occupied West Bank in close to two decades, with hundreds of troops, backed by armored vehicles, bulldozers, fighter jets and drones, conducting simultaneous raids in the northern cities of Jenin and Tulkarm. At least nine Palestinians were killed overnight, with an additional 11 injured. In total, at least 652 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since October — nearly 150 of them children — most of them during near-daily raids by the Israeli military. Israeli officials have indicated that the raids are just the first stage of an even larger operation in the West Bank. “They are trying to repeat the Nakba. … They are trying to repeat the same ethnic cleansing, the same genocide that is committed in Gaza,” says Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, who joins us from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. “Their goal is ethnic cleansing. Their goal is annexation of the West Bank.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Sagaing region has been regularly battered by airstrikes and artillery bombardments as junta forces crack down on insurgent groups that have stepped up attacks in the past nine months.

On Thursday, about 150 junta soldiers in a convoy of vehicles raided at least nine villages in Kanbalu township, residents said, following an attack on an army camp by members of an anti-junta People’s Defense Force allied with the shadow National Unity Government, which was formed by civilians after the military seized power in a 2021 coup.

“After the Kyi Kone Bridge camp was attacked, the army launched an offensive on the villages,” said one resident who declined to be identified in fear of his safety.

“The junta troops stationed at Tha Yet Khaung village are burning houses this morning. Revolutionary groups are monitoring the situation,” he said, referring to anti-junta fighters.”

Three civilians in Tha Yet Khaung and Tha Pyay Thar villages were killed in junta artillery and drone attacks.

Kanbalu district and Ye-U township-based People’s Defense Forces said  they killed 16 soldiers and seized weapons in their attack on the army camp. RFA has not been able to independently verify the claim. 

RFA called Nyunt Win Aung, the junta spokesman for the Sagaing region, to request comment on the incident, but he did not answer the phone.

RELATED STORIES

Junta deploys first round of military recruits to Myanmar’s frontlines
Some 13,700 schools in Myanmar are closed due to civil war
Myanmar airstrike on monastery where villagers were sheltering kills 17 activists

Sagaing, for years a peaceful heartland region of central Myanmar, inhabited mostly by members of the majority Burman community, has seen unprecedented opposition to the military since the 2021 coup dashed hopes for reform. 

In the months that followed, the junta crushed protests against military rule and many activists then took up arms, some linking up with ethnic minority insurgents who have battled for self-determination from remote border lands for decades. 

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Mike Firn. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces raided the northern city of Jenin early Tuesday morning, killing at least eight Palestinians, including a doctor shot dead on his way to work and a teenager riding his bicycle. About a dozen others were injured, including a journalist. Motasem Abu Hasan, an actor at The Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp who escaped the invasion, describes the ongoing attack on the camp. “They are shooting everything,” says Abu Hasan. The Freedom Theatre was about to premiere their first play since October 7 as part of their wider effort to share the Palestinian narrative and “reveal the truth about the Israeli occupation.” The raid began just as Spain, Ireland and Norway became the latest European states to recognize the Palestinian state. “It’s a result of the cultural intifada,” says Abu Hasan. “That’s why we really believe in the power of narrative, especially in The Freedom Theatre, in Palestine, in Jenin camp.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

New York police in full riot gear stormed Columbia University and the City College of New York Tuesday night, arresting over 300 students to break up Gaza solidarity encampments on the two campuses. The police raid began at the request of Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who has also asked the police to remain a presence on campus until at least May 17 to ensure solidarity encampments are not reestablished before the end of the term. Police also raided CUNY after the administration made a similar call for the police to enter campus. Democracy Now! was on the streets outside Columbia on Tuesday night and spoke with people who were out in support of the student protests as police were making arrests. We also speak with two Columbia University students who witnessed the police crackdown. “When the police arrived, they were extremely efficient in removing all eyewitnesses, including legal observers,” says journalism student Gillian Goodman, who has been covering the protests for weeks and who says she and others slept on campus in order to be able to continue coverage and avoid being locked out. We also hear from Cameron Jones, a Columbia College student with Jewish Voice for Peace, who responds to claims of antisemitism, saying, “There is a large anti-Zionist Jewish voice on campus, and it’s also important to recognize the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Protesters instead gathered at Wat Samaki Rainsy in the capital after the government didn’t grant permission for the use of Phnom Penh’s Freedom Park – the site of large political demonstrations in past years.

The nearly 1.3-million strong Khmer Krom indigenous community live in a part of Vietnam that was once southeastern Cambodia. They have faced serious restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly and movement.

Additionally, the Vietnamese government has tried to restrict and control Buddhist temples attended by Khmer Krom people.

In late March, Vietnamese police in Vinh Long province arrested four Buddhist monks and an activist from the Khmer Krom indigenous group during a raid at Dai Tho Pagoda, known as the Tro Nom Sek pagoda in Khmer language.

Two days before that raid, police arrested the head of the pagoda, Thach Chanh Da Ra, and two other followers. 

The dispute between local authorities and the pagoda dates back to November and has resulted in several other arrests, as well as the destruction of a lecture hall linked to the pagoda. 

Motorbike procession

Several civil society organizations devoted to the rights of the Khmer Krom participated in Wednesday’s protest. 

Ten monks and other representatives took part in a motorbike procession through the streets of Phnom Penh to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to Son Chhum Chuon, vice president of Khmer Kampuchea Krom Association for Human Rights and Development. 

They handed petitions to Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials and asked that they be forwarded to the Vietnamese, Japanese and United States embassies, Son Chhum Chuon said. 

“We ask that Cambodia and embassies intervene with the Vietnamese government to release the activists and monks who are being detained,” the petitions read. “We ask the authorities to release them to freedom. Return to them their freedom and religious freedom.”

The petitioners also asked that Vietnamese authorities allow for the lecture hall to be rebuilt, Son Chhum Chuon said. 

RFA was unable to reach Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Chum Sounry for comment on the protest on Wednesday. The Vietnamese Embassy in Phnom Penh was also unavailable for comment. 

Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.

They are the latest to be left homeless by the three-year conflict in the country, where more than 2.8 million people are displaced and in need of humanitarian assistance amid access challenges, according to the United Nations.

On Wednesday evening, approximately 150 junta troops entered eastern Monywa township from neighboring Ayadaw township, prompting the evacuation of thousands of villagers from Kyauk Kar, Hta Naung Win and Ywar Ton, according to residents of the area.

A resident of Hta Naung Win, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns, said the column of troops carried small arms and heavy weapons.

“The junta troops spent a night in Kyauk Kar village and [Thursday] morning they advanced to Hta Naung Win, where they remain stationed,” he said.

March raids on Monywa

The seat of Monywa township is Sagaing’s largest city, located about 135 kilometers (85 miles) northwest of Mandalay on the banks of the Chindwin River. Home to around 372,000 people – nearly half of whom live in rural settings – Monywa serves as a major commerce hub and cultural center for the nation’s poets.

Kyauk Kar, Hta Naung Win and Ywar Ton villages collectively comprise more than 1,000 households, residents said.

Attempts by RFA to contact Nyunt Win Aung, the junta’s social affairs minister for Sagaing and the regional spokesperson, for comment on the raids went unanswered.

Wednesday’s raid marks the second time in just over a month that junta troops attacked eastern Monywa township, forcing residents to seek shelter.

In early March, the military set fire to several villages in the area, destroying more than 150 homes and displacing over 5,000 people, residents told RFA.

Translated by Kalyar Lwin. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The Israeli army has raided dozens of homes in the West Bank and detained 20 Palestinians, including two women — journalist Bushra al-Taweel and activist Sumood Muteer.

Quoting witness accounts, Quds News Network reported that al-Taweel was beaten up by an officer who insulted her before she was arrested.

Today is International Women’s Day.

• READ MORE: Biden to an­nounce Gaza port as Is­rael blocks aid from com­ing by road – 20 starve to death in Gaza

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said 57 journalists have been detained since October 7, with 38 of them still in jail. The organisation added that 22 of them were detained without charge.

Since October 7, at least 424 Palestinians, including 113 minors, three women and 12 prisoners in Israeli custody, have been killed in the West Bank alone.

At least 7450 Palestinians have been detained since the start of the war in Gaza.

Female Palestinian journalist and ex-prisoner Bushra Tawil was arrested by Israeli occupation soldiers last night during a raid into the city of Al-Bireh in the occupied West Bank.

According to eyewitnesses, Al-Tawil was subjected to a brutal attack by soldiers during a field… pic.twitter.com/59aRvQLrgA

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) March 7, 2024

The Gaza Media Office has reported at least 180 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 7.

Israeli forces ‘likely’ machinegunned reporters
Meanwhile, a new digital forensic report has found that Israeli forces “likely” shot machinegun at reporters after shelling them, killing one journalist and wounding six others on the Lebanese border last October 13.

The Israeli army targeted a group of journalists including AlJazeera’s crew, a colleague from another agency was killed and two of our colleagues at Aljazeera were injured, along with several others.

— Ali Hashem علي هاشم (@alihashem_tv) October 13, 2023

An Israeli tank crew fired shells at a clearly marked group of journalists near the border, killing one Reuters reporter and wounding six others, including two Al Jazeera reporters and an Agence France-Presse reporter.

An analysis by the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), commissioned by Reuters, has found that the journalists were also targeted with machineguns, likely fired by the same Israeli forces.

“It is considered a likely scenario that a Merkava tank, after firing two tank rounds, also used its machine gun against the location of the journalists,” TNO’s report said.

“The latter cannot be concluded with certainty as the direction and exact distance of [the machinegun] fire could not be established.”

AFP global news director Phil Chetwynd, reacting to the finding, said: “If reports of sustained machine gun fire are confirmed, this would add more weight to the theory this was a targeted and deliberate attack.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

As Israeli forces raid Nasser Hospital in Gaza, trapping hundreds of patients there and arresting medical staff, we speak with emergency room physician Dr. Thaer Ahmad, who just recently returned to the United States after three weeks volunteering at the hospital. “We’re just asking that hospitals not be targeted, that they not be bombed, and that doctors and nurses can provide for their patients without being worried that they may be killed, that they may be abducted or arrested,” says Ahmad. “We need a ceasefire now. Hospitals need to be protected and functioning.” He also criticizes the American Medical Association for speaking out against Russian attacks on hospitals in Ukraine but staying silent on much more widespread attacks on medical facilities and personnel in Gaza.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We’re all potential victims.

— Peter Christ, retired police officer

Sometimes ten seconds is all the warning you get.

Sometimes you don’t get a warning before all hell breaks loose.

Imagine it, if you will: It’s the middle of the night. Your neighborhood is in darkness. Your household is asleep. Suddenly, you’re awakened by a loud noise.

Barely ten seconds later, someone or an army of someones has crashed through your front door.

The intruders are in your home.

Your heart begins racing. Your stomach is tied in knots. The adrenaline is pumping through you.

You’re not just afraid. You’re terrified.

Desperate to protect yourself and your loved ones from whatever threat has invaded your home, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, a baseball bat, or that licensed and registered gun you thought you’d never need.

You brace for the confrontation.

Shadowy figures appear at the doorway, screaming orders, threatening violence, launching flash bang grenades.

Chaos reigns.

You stand frozen, your hands gripping whatever means of self-defense you could find.

Just that simple act—of standing frozen in fear and self-defense—is enough to spell your doom.

The assailants open fire, sending a hail of bullets in your direction.

In your final moments, you get a good look at your assassins: it’s the police.

Brace yourself, because this hair-raising, heart-pounding, jarring account of a SWAT team raid is what passes for court-sanctioned policing in America today, and it could happen to any one of us or our loved ones.

Nationwide, SWAT teams routinely invade homes, break down doors, kill family pets (they always shoot the dogs first), damage furnishings, terrorize families, and wound or kill those unlucky enough to be present during a raid.

No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day.

SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of so-called criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling.

Police have also raided homes on the basis of mistaking the presence or scent of legal substances for drugs. Incredibly, these substances have included tomatoes, sunflowers, fish, elderberry bushes, kenaf plants, hibiscus, and ragweed. In some instances, SWAT teams are even employed, in full armament, to perform routine patrols.

These raids, which might be more aptly referred to as “knock-and-shoot” policing, have become a thinly veiled, court-sanctioned means of giving heavily armed police the green light to crash through doors in the middle of the night.

No-knock raids, a subset of the violent, terror-inducing raids carried out by police SWAT teams on unsuspecting households, differ in one significant respect: they are carried out without police even having to announce themselves.

Warning or not, to the unsuspecting homeowner woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, there is no way of distinguishing between a home invasion by criminals as opposed to a police mob. In many instances, there is little real difference.

According to an in-depth investigative report by The Washington Post, “police carry out tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year nationwide.”

While the Fourth Amendment requires that police obtain a warrant based on probable cause before they can enter one’s home, search and seize one’s property, or violate one’s privacy, SWAT teams are granted “no-knock” warrants at high rates such that the warrants themselves are rendered practically meaningless.

In addition to the terror brought on by these raids, general incompetence, collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids are also characteristic of these SWAT team raids.

In some cases, officers misread the address on the warrant. In others, they simply barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building. In another subset of cases, SWAT teams have conducted multiple, sequential raids on wrong addresses; executed search warrants despite the fact that the suspect is already in police custody; or conducted a search of a building where the suspect no longer resides.

That appeared to be the case in Ohio, when a botched SWAT team raid in pursuit of stolen guns at a home where the suspects no longer resided resulted in a 17-month-old baby with a heart defect and a breathing disorder ending up in the ICU with burns around the eyes, chest and neck. In that Jan. 10, 2024, incident, police waited all of six seconds after knocking on the door before using a battering ram to break in and simultaneously launch two flash-bang grenades into the home. The baby’s mother, having lived in the house for a week, barely had time to approach the door before she was grabbed at gunpoint, handcuffed and hustled outside. Only later did police allow her to enter the home to check on the baby, who had been hooked up to a ventilator near the window that police shattered before deploying the flash grenades.

Aiyana Jones is dead because of a SWAT raid gone awry. The 7-year-old was killed after a Detroit SWAT team—searching for a suspect—launched a flash-bang grenade into her family’s apartment, broke through the door and opened fire, hitting the little girl who was asleep on the living room couch. The cops weren’t even in the right apartment.

Exhibiting a similar lack of basic concern for public safety, a Georgia SWAT team launched a flash-bang grenade into the house in which Baby Bou Bou, his three sisters and his parents were staying. The grenade landed in the 2-year-old’s crib, burning a hole in his chest and leaving him with scarring that a lifetime of surgeries will not be able to easily undo.

The horror stories have become legion in which homeowners are injured or killed simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home invasion by criminals.

That’s exactly what happened to a 16-year-old Alabama boy. Mistaking a pre-dawn SWAT team raid for a home invasion, the boy grabbed a gun to protect his family only to be gunned down by police attempting to execute a search warrant for drugs. The boy’s brother, not home at the time of the raid, was later arrested with 8 grams of marijuana.

Then there was Jose Guerena, the young ex-Marine who was killed after a SWAT team kicked open the door of his Arizona home during a drug raid and opened fire. According to news reports, Guerena, 26 years old and the father of two young children, grabbed a gun in response to the forced invasion but never fired. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. Police officers were not as restrained. The young Iraqi war veteran was allegedly fired upon 71 times. Guerena had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

All too often, botched SWAT team raids have resulted in one tragedy after another for those targeted with little consequences for law enforcement.

The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”

A study by a political scientist at Princeton University concludes that militarizing police and SWAT teams “provide no detectable benefits in terms of officer safety or violent crime reduction.” The study, the first systematic analysis on the use and consequences of militarized force, reveals that “police militarization neither reduces rates of violent crime nor changes the number of officers assaulted or killed.”

SWAT teams, designed to defuse dangerous situations such as those involving hostages, were never meant to be used for routine police work targeting nonviolent suspects, yet they have become intrinsic parts of federal and local law enforcement operations.

There are few communities without a SWAT team today.

In 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT team-style raids in the US.

Incredibly, that number has since grown to more than 80,000 SWAT team raids per year, often for routine law enforcement tasks.

In the state of Maryland alone, 92 percent of 8200 SWAT missions were used to execute search or arrest warrants.

Police in both Baltimore and Dallas have used SWAT teams to bust up poker games.

A Connecticut SWAT team swarmed a bar suspected of serving alcohol to underage individuals.

In Arizona, a SWAT team was used to break up an alleged cockfighting ring.

An Atlanta SWAT team raided a music studio, allegedly out of a concern that it might have been involved in illegal music piracy.

And then there are the SWAT team raids arising from red flag gun laws, which gives police the authority to preemptively raid homes of people “suspected” of being threats who might be in possession of a gun, legal or otherwise.

With more states adding red flag gun laws to their books, what happened to Duncan Lemp—who was gunned down in his bedroom during an early morning, no-knock SWAT team raid on his family’s home—could very well happen to more people.

At 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that had most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, a masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother. The entire household, including Lemp and his girlfriend, was reportedly asleep when the SWAT team directed flash bang grenades and gunfire through Lemp’s bedroom window. Lemp was killed and his girlfriend injured.

No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, had a criminal record.

No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, was considered an “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, at least not according to the search warrant.

So, what was so urgent that militarized police felt compelled to employ battlefield tactics in the pre-dawn hours of a day when most people are asleep in bed, not to mention stuck at home as part of a nationwide lockdown?

According to police, they were tipped off that Lemp was in possession of “firearms.”

Thus, rather than approaching the house by the front door at a reasonable hour in order to investigate this complaint—which is what the Fourth Amendment requires—police instead strapped on their guns, loaded up their flash bang grenades and acted like battle-crazed warriors.

This is what happens when you use SWAT teams to carry out routine search warrants.

These incidents underscore a dangerous mindset in which the citizenry (often unarmed and defenseless) not only have less rights than militarized police, but also one in which the safety of the citizenry is treated as a lower priority than the safety of their police counterparts (who are armed to the hilt with an array of lethal and nonlethal weapons).

Yet it wasn’t always this way.

There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary, safe and secure from the threat of invasion by government agents, who were held at bay by the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Fourth Amendment, in turn, was added to the U.S. Constitution by colonists still smarting from the abuses they had been forced to endure while under British rule, among these home invasions by the military under the guise of “writs of assistance.” These writs gave British soldiers blanket authority to raid homes, damage property and wreak havoc for any reason whatsoever, without any expectation of probable cause.

We have come full circle to a time before the American Revolution when government agents—with the blessing of the courts—could force their way into a citizen’s home, with seemingly little concern for lives lost and property damaged in the process.

If these aggressive, excessive police tactics have also become troublingly commonplace, it is in large part due to judges who largely rubberstamp the warrant requests based only on the word of police; police who have been known to lie or fabricate the facts in order to justify their claims of “reasonable suspicion” (as opposed to the higher standard of probable cause, which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property); and software that allows judges to remotely approve requests using computers, cellphones or tablets.

This sorry state of affairs is made even worse by the U.S. Supreme Court, which tends to shield police under the guise of qualified immunity. As Reuters concluded, “the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense.”

Rubber-stamped, court-issued warrants for no-knock SWAT team raids have become the modern-day equivalent of colonial-era writs of assistance.

Given President Biden’s determination to expand law enforcement and so-called crime prevention at taxpayer expense, our privacy, property and security may be in even greater danger from government intrusion.

Be warned: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the American police state has become a powder keg waiting for a lit match.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

On January 24, security forces arrested Rasouli and took him to a prison work camp in the northern city of Kelardasht to serve a prison term of six months, according to local news reports. Rasouli works as a freelance commentator, journalist, and writer, focusing on coverage of domestic political policies for various publications.

In 2023, Rasouli was found guilty of “insulting the Supreme Leader of Iran” in an article published in the state-run newspaper Kayhan and sentenced to six months in prison. The Tonekabon Appeals Court and the Supreme Court rejected Rasouli’s appeals, and authorities took the journalist into custody when he responded to a summons from the revolutionary court in Nowshahr city in the northern province of Mazandaran to begin serving his sentence, according to those reports.

Separately, Islamic Republic authorities continued placing legal pressure on several journalists throughout the country in late December 2023 and January 2024.

“CPJ is closely monitoring what is becoming an epidemic of arresting journalists in Iran. This trend is resulting in the criminalization of all forms of journalism,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “Authorities must immediately and unconditionally release journalist Arsalan Rasouli Amarlooi and halt the intimidation and harassment of all Iranian journalists.”

CPJ has documented the following incidents of raids and legal action against Iranian journalists in recent weeks:

• Authorities filed a lawsuit against Shahrzad Hemati, the social desk editor at the moderate state-run Shargh Daily, on January 30 for a post on her personal Instagram account condemning the January 29 execution of four Kurdish citizens in the country. CPJ was unable to confirm further details about the lawsuit, and no court date has been set yet.

• On January 26, Karaj Revolutionary Court sentenced Parisa Salehi, an economic reporter at the state-run financial newspaper Donya-e-Eqtesad, to one year in prison, a two-year ban on leaving the country, two years of internal exile, and a two-year ban on any activities on social media platforms, after convicting her on charges of “spreading propaganda against the system” for her reporting, although no specific report was mentioned.

• On January 22, security forces raided the home of Elahe Ramezanpour in the central city of Gorgan in Golestan province after an order issued by the office of Gorgan’s prosecutor and confiscated her cell phone, laptop, and notes. According to those reports, Ramezanpour, a health reporter for the local news website Golestanrasa.ir, was earlier threatened by the prosecutor’s office after publishing several critical articles.

• On December 30, 2023, eight security forces raided the family home of Ebrahim Rashidi, a freelance Iranian-Azeri journalist, in a village in Meshginshahr county in the northwestern province of Ardabil, and arrested the journalist without providing any warrant. The agents also confiscated Rashidi’s personal devices, including a laptop, cell phone, and some books, and transferred him to an undisclosed location. On January 16, Rashidi was able to make a brief call to let his family know that he was being held in Ardabil central prison. Authorities have yet to publicly announce any charges against Rashidi.

CPJ’s email to Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York asking for comment on these cases did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

"We will, in the months to come, have to accelerate the scale of our support," Macron said in a speech on January 30 during a visit to Sweden. The "costs...of a Russian victory are too high for all of us."

EU leaders will meet in Brussels on February 1 for a meeting of the European Council, where they will discuss aid to Ukraine as the war approaches its second anniversary.

Ukraine continues to hold off large-scale Russian grounds attacks in the east but has struggled to intercept many of the deadly missiles Moscow fires at its cities on a regular basis.

Earlier in the day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia had launched nearly 1,000 missiles and drones at Ukraine since the start of the year as Kyiv maintained a missile-threat alert for several regions on January 30, hours after Russian strikes killed at least three civilians.

"Russia has launched over 330 missiles of various types and approximately 600 combat drones at Ukrainian cities since the beginning of the year," Zelenskiy said on X, formerly Twitter.

"To withstand such terrorist pressure, a sufficiently strong air shield is required. And this is the type of air shield we are building with our partners," he wrote.

"Air defense and electronic warfare are our top priorities. Russian terror must be defeated -- this is achievable."

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

A man was killed and his wife was wounded in the Russian shelling early on January 30 in the village of Veletenske in Ukraine's southern Kherson region, the regional prosecutor's office reported.

U.S. lawmakers have been debating for months a supplementary spending bill that includes $61 billion in aid to Ukraine. The aid would allow Ukraine to obtain a variety of U.S. weapons and armaments, including air-defense systems. The $61 billion -- if approved -- would likely cover Ukraine's needs through early 2025, experts have said.

Separately, regional Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said that Russian forces had fired 272 shells at Kherson from across the Dnieper River.

In the eastern region of Donetsk, one civilian was killed and another one was wounded by the Russian bombardment of the settlement of Myrnohrad, Vadym Filashin, the governor of the Ukrainian-controlled part of the region, said on January 30.

Also in Donetsk, in the industrial city of Avdiyivka, Russian shells struck a private house, killing a 47-year-old woman, Filashkin said on Telegram.

Russian forces have been trying to capture Adviyivka for the past several weeks in one of the bloodiest battles of the war triggered by Moscow's unprovoked invasion in February 2022.

Indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas has turned most of Avdiyivka into rubble.

Earlier on January 30, Ukrainian air defenses shot down 15 out of 35 drones launched by Russia, the military said.

The Russian drones targeted the Mykolayiv, Kirovohrad, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, and Kharkiv regions, the Ukrainian Air Force said.

Russian forces also launched 10 S-300 anti-aircraft missiles at civilian infrastructure in the Donetsk and Kherson regions, the military said, adding that there dead and wounded among the civilian population.

The Ukrainian Air Force later said that the Kirovohrad, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhya regions remained under a heightened level of alert due to the danger of more missile strikes.

Meanwhile, Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses had destroyed or intercepted 21 Ukrainian drones over the Moscow-occupied Crimean Peninsula and several Russian regions.

On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces fought 70 close-quarters battles along the entire front line, the General Staff of the Ukrainian military said in its daily report early on January 30. Ukrainian defenders repelled repeated Russian attacks in eight hot spots in the east, the military said.

In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on January 29 warned that Ukraine's gains over two years of fighting invading Russian troops were all in doubt without new U.S. funding, as NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg visited to lobby Congress.

WATCH: In February 2022, Ukrainian Army medic Yuriy Armash was trying to reach his unit as the Russian invasion was advancing fast. He was caught in Kherson, tortured, and held for months. While in captivity, he used his medical training to treat other Ukrainian prisoners. Some say he saved their lives.

Tens of billions of dollars in aid has been sent to Ukraine since the invasion in February 2022, but Republican lawmakers have grown reluctant to keep supporting Kyiv, saying it lacks a clear end game as the fighting against President Vladimir Putin's forces grinds on.

Blinken offered an increasingly dire picture of Ukraine's prospects without U.S. approval of the so-called supplemental funding amid reports that some progress was being made on the matter late on January 29.

In Brussels, European Union leaders will restate their determination to continue to provide "timely, predictable, and sustainable military support" to Ukraine at a summit on February 1, according to draft conclusions of the meeting.

"The European Council also reiterates the urgent need to accelerate the delivery of ammunition and missiles," the draft text, seen by Reuters, also says.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Soldiers also arrested 10 people in the Jan. 18 attack on Me Oe village in Tabayin township, a local resident close to the victims told Radio Free Asia.

“One dead body was cut at the neck, and two others were killed after brutal torture. Their body parts were cut off,” the resident said.

Sagaing has been a hotbed of armed resistance and conflict between rebels groups and junta troops ever since the military’s takeover in a February 2021 coup d’état. 

There was a brief pause earlier this month when the junta agreed to a ceasefire in neighboring Shan state with the Three Brotherhood Alliance, which is made up of three ethnic armies. The alliance’s Operation 1027 began in October with a series of simultaneous attacks in multiple towns in northern Shan state.

But in the last two weeks, local residents in Sagaing have told RFA that junta forces are again setting fire to homes and killing civilians in Tabayin, Ye-U, Khin U, Budalin, Ayadaw and Kanbalu townships. 

Junta troops also shelled the villages of Salingyi township on Jan. 20, leaving a child and two adult civilians dead, residents said.

Thousands displaced

Nearly 20,000 people fled from their villages in Salingyi, Tabayin, Ye-U and Khin U townships between Jan. 16 and Jan. 24, according to volunteers who are providing assistance to the displaced persons.

Junta troops have surprised some of the villages in the recent raids, a People’s Defense Force official in Tabayin told RFA anonymously. Previously, villagers could hear gunfire or see smoke from neighboring villages just before their own village was attacked.

The junta is targeting civilians because they are increasingly unable to defeat opposition forces on the battlefield, according to Aung Kyaw Moe, the deputy minister for human rights for the shadow National Unity Government.

“They have no capacity to conduct battles,” he said. “They have lost their ethics and morality by targeting civilians.”

A lawyer told Radio Free Asia on condition of anonymity for security reasons that the killing of five civilians in Tabayin was a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which regulates the conduct of armed conflict. 

“After the junta suffered great losses to Operation 1027, they became more brutal to cover their losses,” the lawyer said. “However, these are war crimes with the maximum punishment of life sentence or the death penalty.”

Calls by RFA to Sai Naing Naing Kyaw, the junta’s ethnic affairs minister for Sagaing region, seeking comment on the recent attacks went unanswered Monday.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The raids on Hpakant township’s Hway Hkar village began on Jan. 9 and followed attacks by anti-junta People’s Defense Force paramilitaries on military outposts in the area three days earlier, sources told RFA Burmese.

A resident of Hway Hkar who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity citing security concerns, said the military retaliated with airstrikes and artillery before junta troops stormed the village and seized around 20 male residents who he said earn a living as scavengers at nearby jade mines.

“When you leave Hway Hkar, there is a place called a ‘strategic hill’ where [the troops] are now stationed, and [detained] people are taken there,” he said. “They are local residents who live as scavengers. We haven’t been able to contact them.”

Since the initial raid, the military has been attacking areas near Hway Hkar every day with Russian-made Mi-35 combat helicopters and heavy artillery fired from the strategic hill, located around 11 kilometers (7 miles) outside of the village, residents said.

Another villager told RFA that the entire population of Hway Hkar and nearby Nam Tein had been forced to flee to take shelter from the attacks, as had residents from the surrounding area, leaving as many as 20,000 displaced.

“The fighting is taking place on the ground, but the junta is sending aircraft to drop bombs,” he said. “The entire village [of Hway Hkar] fled in panic … [The military] sent [planes] three times and dropped two or three bombs each time … in and around the village.”

Displaced people in need

More than 1,000 people who fled Hway Hkar have been taking temporary shelter in area religious buildings, said a person who is helping internally displaced persons, or IDPs, in Hseng Taung village.

“They have been taking shelter in churches and monasteries,” he said. “Residents [of Hseng Taung] who can afford it have been providing food for them.”

The aid worker said the IDPs include the ill and elderly, and that they need access to emergency health services.

Another resident of Hway Hkar told RFA that villagers fled with only what they could carry and now have no way to earn an income.

“This is a place where people scavenge to make a living – migrant workers across the country and laborers depend on the income from jade,” he said. “But now, it is difficult for scavengers to make ends meet and the prices of commodities are rising. We’re in deep trouble because fighting has resumed in Hpakant.”

Nay Phone Latt, the spokesman for Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, or NUG, said that the junta is increasingly using airstrikes and heavy artillery to terrify the public.

“While the [junta] is facing defeat on the ground, we are witnessing them kill people every day with airstrikes and shelling,” he said. “[The NUG is] continuously conducting campaigns – not only in the areas that we control, but also elsewhere – to keep people alert for danger at all times.”

Displaced residents of Hpakant told RFA that junta troops have blocked the Hpakant-Hway Hkar road since Jan. 6, so that even if fighting stops, they may not be able to return home.

Civilians targeted

Kachin Human Rights Watch, which has been monitoring and documenting human rights violations in Kachin state since the military’s Feb. 1, 2021, coup, said that the junta is committing its worst rights violations against civilians.

“The junta has not only conducted airstrikes on non-military targets, but on civilian areas such as villages and IDP camps,” the group recently said in a report. “This kind of thing should never occur and it’s a clear violation of international humanitarian laws.”

Calls by RFA to Sai Naing Naing Kyaw, the junta’s ethnic affairs minister for Sagaing region, seeking comment on the situation in Hpakant went unanswered Wednesday.

According to Myanmar’s 2014 census, more than 300,000 people live in Hpakant township, most of whom are migrant workers from around Myanmar and local ethnic residents.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs announced on Dec. 15 that there are currently more than 2.5 million people displaced by conflict in Myanmar.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The Israeli military this week raided the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, a renowned cultural institution whose mission is to fight for Palestinian justice, equality and self-determination. It’s part of a wave of violence Israel has unleashed across the occupied West Bank since October 7, killing 58 people in Jenin alone even as the country intensifies its assault on Gaza. We speak with Freedom Theater artistic director Ahmed Tobasi, who was just released after being held for 24 hours. Two of his colleagues remain in Israeli detention. “The Israeli soldiers believe we are not human beings,” says Tobasi. “You are under occupation, and that’s your destiny as a Palestinian.” He decries the decades of international impunity under which the oppression of Palestinians operates, and calls on Americans to resist the use of their tax dollars to fund Israel’s violence. “They believe no one in this world can ask them to stop,” he says. We also get a reaction from Peter Schumann, the founder and director of the Bread and Puppet Theater, the legendary political and social justice-oriented theater company, marking its 60th year with a puppet show in New York City that is an ode to Gaza.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On Saturday, intelligence agents with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps arrested Tavafzadeh, editor-in-chief of the local news website Moroor.org, and Nategheh, an environmental reporter for the outlet, in the northern city of Rasht and took them to an undisclosed location, according to news reports.

The two journalists were among about 20 people who were detained and had their electronic devices confiscated in Saturday’s mass raids in Rasht, according to multiple news reports. The majority of those arrested were women, those sources said.

“It is vitally important for the Iranian people to access truthful reporting on government policies, like the environment,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. “Iranian authorities must immediately and unconditionally release the two female journalists and the many others arrested in Rasht and realize that censoring the media does nothing to address the challenges that the government is facing.”

At the time of going to press, authorities had not disclosed the reason for detaining Tavafzadeh and Nategheh or the potential charges against the two journalists.

Iran ranked as the world’s worst jailer of journalists when CPJ conducted its most recent census of imprisoned journalists worldwide on December 1, 2022. Iranian authorities detained at least 95 journalists in the wake of nationwide protests following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in morality, who was in police custody for allegedly violating Iran’s conservative dress law. Many have been released on bail while awaiting trial or have been issued summonses to serve multi-year sentences.

CPJ emailed Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York requesting comment on Tavafzadeh and Nategheh’s arrests but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In the aftermath of Palestinian group Hamas’ terror attack inside Israel on October 7 and the Israeli state’s even more terrifying attacks on Palestinian urban neighbourhoods in Gaza, the media across many parts of Asia tend to take a more neutral stand in comparison with their Western counterparts.

A lot of sympathy is expressed for the plight of the Palestinians who have been under frequent attacks by Israeli forces for decades and have faced ever trauma since the Nakba in 1948 when Zionist militia forced some 750,000 refugees to leave their homeland.

Even India, which has been getting closer to Israel in recent years, and one of Israel’s closest Asian allies, Singapore, have taken a cautious attitude to the latest flare-up in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

• READ MORE:  Israel-Gaza crisis: NZ must condemn atrocities but keep pushing for a two-state solution
• 7 journalists killed since beginning of Israeli aggression on Gaza
• Jakarta workers protest outside US Embassy, call for end to Hamas-Israeli war
• Other Hamas-Israel conflict reports
• Al Jazeera live news blog on the Hamas-Israel conflict

Soon after the Hamas attacks in Israel, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that he was “deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks”.

He added: “We stand in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour.” But, soon after, his Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) sought to strike a balance.

Addressing a media briefing on October 12, MEA spokesperson Arindam Bagchi reiterated New Delhi’s “long-standing and consistent” position on the issue, telling reporters that “India has always advocated the resumption of direct negotiations towards establishing a sovereign, independent and viable state of Palestine” living in peace with Israel.

Singapore has also reiterated its support for a two-state solution, with Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam telling Today Daily that it was possible to deplore how Palestinians had been treated over the years while still unequivocally condemning the terrorist attacks carried out in Israel by Hamas.

“These atrocities cannot be justified by any rationale whatsoever, whether of fundamental problems or historical grievances,” he said.

“I think it’s fair to say that any response has to be consistent with international law and international rules of war”.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has blamed the rapidly worsening conflict in the Middle East on a lack of justice for the Palestinian people.

Lack of justice for Palestinians
“The crux of the issue lies in the fact that justice has not been done to the Palestinian people,” Beijing’s top diplomat said in a phone call with Brazil’s Celso Amorim, a special adviser to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, according to Japan’s Nikkei Asia.

The call came just ahead of an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on October 13 to discuss the Israel-Hamas war. Brazil, a non-permanent member, is chairing the council this month.

Indonesian President Jokowi Widodo called for an end to the region’s bloodletting cycle and pro-Palestinian protests have been held in Jakarta.

“Indonesia calls for the war and violence to be stopped immediately to avoid further human casualties and destruction of property because the escalation of the conflict can cause greater humanitarian impact,” he said.

“The root cause of the conflict, which is the occupation of Palestinian land by Israel, must be resolved immediately in accordance with the parameters that have been agreed upon by the UN.”

Indonesia, which is home to the world’s largest Muslim population, has supported Palestinian self-determination for a long time and does not have diplomatic relations with Israel.

But, Indonesia’s foreign ministry said 275 Indonesians were working in Israel and were making plans to evacuate them.

Sympathy for the Palestinians
Meanwhile, Thailand said that 18 of their citizens have been killed by the terror attacks and 11 abducted.

In the Philippines, Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo said on October 10 that the safety of thousands of Filipinos living and working in Israel remained a priority for the government.

There are approximately 40,000 Filipinos in Israel, but only 25,000 are legally documented, according to labour and migrant groups, says Benar News, a US-funded Asian news portal.

According to India’s MEA spokesperson Bagchi, there are 18,000 Indians in Israel and about a dozen in the Palestinian territories. India is trying to bring them home, and a first flight evacuating 230 Indians was expected to take place at the weekend, according to the Hindu newspaper.

It is unclear what such large numbers of Asians are doing in Israel. Yet, from media reports in the region, there is deep concern about the plight of civilians caught up in the clashes.

Benar News reported that Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has spoken with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about resolving the Palestine-Israel conflict according to UN-agreed parameters.

Also this week, the Malaysian government announced it would allocate 1 million ringgit (US$211,423) in humanitarian aid for Palestinians.

Western view questioned
Sympathy for the Palestinian cause is reflected widely in the Asian media, both in Muslim-majority and non-Muslim countries. The Western unequivocal support for Israel, particularly by Anglo-American media, has been questioned across Asia.

Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post’s regular columnist Alex Lo challenged Hamas’ “unprovoked” terror attack in Israel, a narrative commonly used in Western media reporting of the latest flare-up.

“It must be pointed out that what Hamas has done is terrorism pure and simple,” notes Lo.

“But such horrors and atrocities are not being committed by Palestinian militants without a background and a context. They did not come out of nowhere as unadulterated and uncaused evil”.

Thus Lo argues, that to claim that the latest terror attacks were “unprovoked” is to whitewash the background and context that constitute the very history of this unending conflict in Palestine.

US media’s ‘morally reprehensible propaganda’
“It’s morally reprehensible propaganda of the worst kind that the mainstream Anglo-American media culture has been guilty of for decades,” he says.

“But the real problem with that is not only with morality but also with the very practical politics of searching for a viable peace settlement”.

He is concerned that “with their unconditional and uncritical support of Israel, the West and the United States in particular have essentially made such a peace impossible”.

Writing in India’s Hindu newspaper, Denmark-based Indian professor of literature Dr Tabish Khair points out that historically, Palestinians have had to indulge in drastic and violent acts to draw attention to their plight and the oppressive policies of Israel.

“The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), under Yasser Arafat’s leadership, used such ‘terrorist’ acts to focus world attention on the Palestinian problem, and without such actions, the West would have looked the other way while the Palestinians were slowly airbrushed out of history,” he argues.

While the PLO fought a secular Palestinian battle for nationhood, which was largely ignored by Western powers, this lead to political Islam’s development in the later part of the 1970s, and Hamas is a product of that.

“Today, we live in a world where political Islam is associated almost entirely with Islam — and almost all Muslims,” he notes.

Palestinian cause still resonates
But, the Palestinian cause still resonates beyond the Muslim communities, as the reactions in Asia reflect.

Indian historian and journalist Vijay Prashad, writing in Bangladesh’s Daily Star, notes the savagery of the impending war against the Palestinian people will be noted by the global community.

He points out that Hamas was never allowed to function as a voice for the Palestinian people, even after they won a landslide democratic election in Gaza in January 2006.

“The victory of Hamas was condemned by the Israelis and the West, who decided to use armed force to overthrow the election result,” he points out.

“Gaza was never allowed a political process, in fact never allowed to shape any kind of political authority to speak for the people”.

Prashad points out that when the Palestinians conducted a non-violent march in 2019 for their rights to nationhood, they were met with Israeli bombs that killed 200 people.

“When non-violent protest is met with force, it becomes difficult to convince people to remain on that path and not take up arms,” he argues.

Prashad disputes the Western media’s argument that Israel has a “right to defend itself” because the Palestinians are people under occupation. Under the Geneva Convention, Israel has an obligation to protect them.

Under the Geneva Convention, Prashad argues that the Israeli government’s “collective punishment” strategy is a war crime.

“The International Criminal Court opened an investigation into Israeli war crimes in 2021 but it was not able to move forward even to collect information”.

Kalinga Seneviratne is a correspondent for IDN-InDepthNews, the flagship agency of the non-profit International Press Syndicate (IPS). Republished under a Creative Commons licence.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In the aftermath of Palestinian group Hamas’ terror attack inside Israel on October 7 and the Israeli state’s even more terrifying attacks on Palestinian urban neighbourhoods in Gaza, the media across many parts of Asia tend to take a more neutral stand in comparison with their Western counterparts.

A lot of sympathy is expressed for the plight of the Palestinians who have been under frequent attacks by Israeli forces for decades and have faced ever trauma since the Nakba in 1948 when Zionist militia forced some 750,000 refugees to leave their homeland.

Even India, which has been getting closer to Israel in recent years, and one of Israel’s closest Asian allies, Singapore, have taken a cautious attitude to the latest flare-up in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

• READ MORE:  Israel-Gaza crisis: NZ must condemn atrocities but keep pushing for a two-state solution
• 7 journalists killed since beginning of Israeli aggression on Gaza
• Jakarta workers protest outside US Embassy, call for end to Hamas-Israeli war
• Other Hamas-Israel conflict reports
• Al Jazeera live news blog on the Hamas-Israel conflict

Soon after the Hamas attacks in Israel, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that he was “deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks”.

He added: “We stand in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour.” But, soon after, his Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) sought to strike a balance.

Addressing a media briefing on October 12, MEA spokesperson Arindam Bagchi reiterated New Delhi’s “long-standing and consistent” position on the issue, telling reporters that “India has always advocated the resumption of direct negotiations towards establishing a sovereign, independent and viable state of Palestine” living in peace with Israel.

Singapore has also reiterated its support for a two-state solution, with Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam telling Today Daily that it was possible to deplore how Palestinians had been treated over the years while still unequivocally condemning the terrorist attacks carried out in Israel by Hamas.

“These atrocities cannot be justified by any rationale whatsoever, whether of fundamental problems or historical grievances,” he said.

“I think it’s fair to say that any response has to be consistent with international law and international rules of war”.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has blamed the rapidly worsening conflict in the Middle East on a lack of justice for the Palestinian people.

Lack of justice for Palestinians
“The crux of the issue lies in the fact that justice has not been done to the Palestinian people,” Beijing’s top diplomat said in a phone call with Brazil’s Celso Amorim, a special adviser to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, according to Japan’s Nikkei Asia.

The call came just ahead of an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on October 13 to discuss the Israel-Hamas war. Brazil, a non-permanent member, is chairing the council this month.

Indonesian President Jokowi Widodo called for an end to the region’s bloodletting cycle and pro-Palestinian protests have been held in Jakarta.

“Indonesia calls for the war and violence to be stopped immediately to avoid further human casualties and destruction of property because the escalation of the conflict can cause greater humanitarian impact,” he said.

“The root cause of the conflict, which is the occupation of Palestinian land by Israel, must be resolved immediately in accordance with the parameters that have been agreed upon by the UN.”

Indonesia, which is home to the world’s largest Muslim population, has supported Palestinian self-determination for a long time and does not have diplomatic relations with Israel.

But, Indonesia’s foreign ministry said 275 Indonesians were working in Israel and were making plans to evacuate them.

Sympathy for the Palestinians
Meanwhile, Thailand said that 18 of their citizens have been killed by the terror attacks and 11 abducted.

In the Philippines, Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo said on October 10 that the safety of thousands of Filipinos living and working in Israel remained a priority for the government.

There are approximately 40,000 Filipinos in Israel, but only 25,000 are legally documented, according to labour and migrant groups, says Benar News, a US-funded Asian news portal.

According to India’s MEA spokesperson Bagchi, there are 18,000 Indians in Israel and about a dozen in the Palestinian territories. India is trying to bring them home, and a first flight evacuating 230 Indians was expected to take place at the weekend, according to the Hindu newspaper.

It is unclear what such large numbers of Asians are doing in Israel. Yet, from media reports in the region, there is deep concern about the plight of civilians caught up in the clashes.

Benar News reported that Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has spoken with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan about resolving the Palestine-Israel conflict according to UN-agreed parameters.

Also this week, the Malaysian government announced it would allocate 1 million ringgit (US$211,423) in humanitarian aid for Palestinians.

Western view questioned
Sympathy for the Palestinian cause is reflected widely in the Asian media, both in Muslim-majority and non-Muslim countries. The Western unequivocal support for Israel, particularly by Anglo-American media, has been questioned across Asia.

Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post’s regular columnist Alex Lo challenged Hamas’ “unprovoked” terror attack in Israel, a narrative commonly used in Western media reporting of the latest flare-up.

“It must be pointed out that what Hamas has done is terrorism pure and simple,” notes Lo.

“But such horrors and atrocities are not being committed by Palestinian militants without a background and a context. They did not come out of nowhere as unadulterated and uncaused evil”.

Thus Lo argues, that to claim that the latest terror attacks were “unprovoked” is to whitewash the background and context that constitute the very history of this unending conflict in Palestine.

US media’s ‘morally reprehensible propaganda’
“It’s morally reprehensible propaganda of the worst kind that the mainstream Anglo-American media culture has been guilty of for decades,” he says.

“But the real problem with that is not only with morality but also with the very practical politics of searching for a viable peace settlement”.

He is concerned that “with their unconditional and uncritical support of Israel, the West and the United States in particular have essentially made such a peace impossible”.

Writing in India’s Hindu newspaper, Denmark-based Indian professor of literature Dr Tabish Khair points out that historically, Palestinians have had to indulge in drastic and violent acts to draw attention to their plight and the oppressive policies of Israel.

“The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), under Yasser Arafat’s leadership, used such ‘terrorist’ acts to focus world attention on the Palestinian problem, and without such actions, the West would have looked the other way while the Palestinians were slowly airbrushed out of history,” he argues.

While the PLO fought a secular Palestinian battle for nationhood, which was largely ignored by Western powers, this lead to political Islam’s development in the later part of the 1970s, and Hamas is a product of that.

“Today, we live in a world where political Islam is associated almost entirely with Islam — and almost all Muslims,” he notes.

Palestinian cause still resonates
But, the Palestinian cause still resonates beyond the Muslim communities, as the reactions in Asia reflect.

Indian historian and journalist Vijay Prashad, writing in Bangladesh’s Daily Star, notes the savagery of the impending war against the Palestinian people will be noted by the global community.

He points out that Hamas was never allowed to function as a voice for the Palestinian people, even after they won a landslide democratic election in Gaza in January 2006.

“The victory of Hamas was condemned by the Israelis and the West, who decided to use armed force to overthrow the election result,” he points out.

“Gaza was never allowed a political process, in fact never allowed to shape any kind of political authority to speak for the people”.

Prashad points out that when the Palestinians conducted a non-violent march in 2019 for their rights to nationhood, they were met with Israeli bombs that killed 200 people.

“When non-violent protest is met with force, it becomes difficult to convince people to remain on that path and not take up arms,” he argues.

Prashad disputes the Western media’s argument that Israel has a “right to defend itself” because the Palestinians are people under occupation. Under the Geneva Convention, Israel has an obligation to protect them.

Under the Geneva Convention, Prashad argues that the Israeli government’s “collective punishment” strategy is a war crime.

“The International Criminal Court opened an investigation into Israeli war crimes in 2021 but it was not able to move forward even to collect information”.

Kalinga Seneviratne is a correspondent for IDN-InDepthNews, the flagship agency of the non-profit International Press Syndicate (IPS). Republished under a Creative Commons licence.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Troops took several people with them to use as human shields, according to an organization helping victims of the conflict.

The junta sent in a Russian-made attack helicopter on Wednesday morning, targeting villages between Salingyi and Yinmarbin townships. 

On Thursday morning, hundreds of troops stormed Let Taung Gyi village in Pale township.

Local People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) had planted landmines near the entrance of the village but it’s not known whether the junta troops suffered any casualties. They arrested people suspected of planting the mines after entering the village, according to a local who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

“About 10 residents were arrested while they were fleeing to safety from Let Taung Gyi village this morning,” the resident said, adding that the identities of those arrested are not yet known. 

“The column [of soldiers] was in a convoy and moving slowly from one village to another. It had been going for a long time.”

The local said the convoy contained around 300 soldiers and 17 military vehicles that opened fire on villages along the route while a helicopter strafed villages in Salingyi and Yinmarbin townships, according to an aid worker who also asked not to be named for safety reasons.

“Helicopters shot at two villages,” they said. “The Mi-35 fired along both sides of the village road because [the junta] were worried PDFs would come along the road.”

Around 5,000 residents of at least five villages fled their homes ahead of the raids, said the aid worker.

Calls to Sagaing region’s junta spokesperson Sai Naing Naing Kyaw by RFA went unanswered Thursday. 

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

A Tongan RSE worker, whose case sparked an independent review of Immigration New Zealand’s “out-of-hours compliance visit” practices, is still on edge.

Pacific community members have compared the actions to the infamous “Dawn Raids”.

Keni Malie’s lawyer, Soane Foliaki, said his client’s case should have ended such exercises.

• READ MORE: Ponsonby march highlights Dawn Raids pain and overstayer uncertainty

However, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s (MBIE) Immigration Compliance and Investigations team has only temporarily suspended “out-of-hours compliance visits” to residential addresses.

“At least until this work is completed,” MBIE Immigration Investigations and Compliance General Manager Steve Watson said.

He said the visits would not resume until new standard operating procedures came into effect and staff had been fully trained in the new procedures.

It is uncertain how these new procedures will be different, and what this will mean for migrant workers.

Detained in front of wife, family
In the early hours on April 19 this year immigration officials showed up at Keni Malie’s residence and detained him in front of his wife and children. He was then taken away and shortly after served with a deportation order.

“Four children were in the house, with three sleeping downstairs and at least one woken up by the activity,” the independent review states.

Malie’s lawyer broke the story to the media, out of desperation. The story gained traction and following a public outcry, Immigration New Zealand admitted this was not a one-off incident.

Keni Malie has since been granted a temporary visa while he and his lawyer work though his residency application but he said he was still nervous about it.

Malie explained in Tongan, as his lawyer translated:

“The hardest thing for me was trying to make sure that I can put a loaf of bread on the table for my children. I hope for the day that I can feel secure and get residence,” Malie said.

Immigration New Zealand has confirmed it has been conducting out-of-hours compliance visits — known as “Dawn Raids” — for the past eight years.

Figures released under the Official Information Act show Pacific community members were the third highest after Indian and Chinese nationals of the total number of people located, between July 1, 2015, and May 2, 2023.

Out of 95 out-of-hours compliance visits, which in some cases multiple people were found, 51 were Chinese, 25 Indian and 17 Pacific.

There was one from the USA and one person from Great Britain on the list.

MBIE reviews
An independent review of what Pasifika community leaders have called MBIE’s Dawn Raids-style visits has now been completed.

The review was led by Mike Heron.

Leaders and members of the Pacific, Indian and Chinese communities were interviewed, along with immigration lawyers and advisers and representatives.

One of the reasons given for this review was that the raids of the 1970s were a “racist application of New Zealand’s law”.

“Immigration officials and police officers entered homes of Pacific people, dragged them from their beds, often using dogs and in front of their children. They were brought before the courts, often barefoot, or in their pyjamas, and ultimately deported,” Heron report reads.

Tongan community leaders were outraged to find out Keni Malie, who is Tongan, went through what they see as a similar trauma.

According to the report, Malie was in New Zealand as an RSE worker when he did not turn up to work because he was getting married.

Added to ‘process list’
After being stopped by police for driving without a licence, Crime Stoppers were also sent a notification for another issue. He was then added to Immigration’s National Prioritisation Process list.

In the Immigration Officers’ view, their “compliance visit” to Malie was carried out reasonably and respectfully.

“They stressed that the operation was calm, respectful and did not require any use of force,” the review states.

But his lawyer, Soane Foliaki disagrees that it was “respectful”.

“In the dark of the night they were back at it, you know, without any consideration? Why did the Prime Minister apologise?” Foliaki said.

To him this was reminiscent of the Dawn Raids. Something the former Prime Minister had only just apologised for.

An INZ spokesperson told RNZ Pacific at a Pacific community event earlier this year that in some cases officers sit down with a cup of tea to build rapport with overstayers.

Trauma for community
“I want to again acknowledge the impact the Dawn Raids of the 1970s had on the Pacific community and that the trauma from those remains today,” MBIE’s Steve Watson said.

We know we have more to do as we learn from the past to shape the future. This continues to be at the centre of our thinking as we move forward,” he said.

Lawyer Soane Foliaki who has been fighting for justice for 30 years still has hope, hope for his client and hope that there will be change.

“We always felt that New Zealand was always a decent country, they’ll always give us a fair go. This is also our home here,” Foliaki said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“The arrest of NewsClick editor Prabir Purkayastha and the raids on NewsClick and the homes of at least 12 of its former and current journalists are an act of sheer harassment and intimidation,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Frankfurt, Germany. “This is the latest attack on press freedom in India. We urge the Indian government to immediately cease these actions as journalists must be allowed to work without fear of intimidation or reprisal.”

On Tuesday, Delhi police arrested Purkayastha and NewsClick’s head of human resources, Amit Chakravarty, as part of an investigation into suspected foreign funding of the media outlet, a charge that NewsClick denies.

Earlier in the day, police searched the office of NewsClick and the homes of several of its staff and contributing journalists and seized several electronic devices, including laptops and phones.

The homes of the following journalists were searched; the six names marked with an asterisk were also questioned by the Delhi Police Special Cell, a unit of Delhi Police that investigates cases of terrorism and organized crime:

• Purkayastha*
• Subodh Varma, an editor
• Satyam Tiwari*, a reporter
• Paranjoy Guha Thakurta*, a contributor  
• Abhisar Sharma*, a contributor  
• Urmilesh*, a contributor  
• Aunindyo Chakraborty*, a contributor
• Bhasha Singh, a contributor
• Anuradha Raman, a contributor
• Aditi Nigam, an editor
• Sumedha Pal, a contributor
• Irfan K., a cartoonist

Independent non-profit news website The Wire reported that Delhi Police’s Special Cell initiated an investigation into NewsClick in August, alleging violations of five sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, including raising funds for terrorist acts and conspiracy, as well as two sections of the Indian Penal Code, including promoting enmity between different groups based on various factors.

In 2021, the Enforcement Directorate searched NewsClick premises and the residences of four members of senior management as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering linked to foreign funding.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Dozens of Pacific Islanders and Palagi defied the bitterly cold wind and rain for a peaceful “remember the Dawn Raids” march along Auckland’s Ponsonby Road at the weekend.

The Savali ole Filemu march recognised the anxiety which currently faces overstayers, and the pain still felt from the Dawn Raids.

Tongan community leader Pakilau Manase Lua said coming to New Zealand to improve their lives should not be a crime.

• READ MORE: Dawn Raids peace march to go ahead, despite amnesty announcement
• Other Dawn Raids reports

“They took a risk, OK, they broke the law, but so is breaking the speed limit. It’s not a criminal act to come here and try and find a life,” he said.

Holding a photo frame of his late father, Siosifa Lua, Pakilau said they would remember those who had never got justice for how they were treated.

“We came to build this country, and we’re still building this country, and how are we treated? Like dogs!”, he shouted.

‘Those days are over’
“Those days are over. Our children are here. The generations that build this country are here.”

Labour’s Papakura candidate ‘Anahila Kanongata’a-Suisuiki says being an overstayer had personal consequences when her grandfather died in 1977.

“My mother was still an overstayer here, and she had to make a decision … return to Tonga to say farewell to her father, or remain here, for the betterment of the future of her children.”

The government apologised for the Dawn Raids in 2021, and the Labour Party is now promising an amnesty for overstayers of more than ten years, if elected.

But Polynesian Panther activist Will ‘Ilolahia says these political promises are too little, too late.

“We’ve got a deputy prime minister that’s a Pacific Islander, and now they’re bribing our people to vote for them so they can stay in. Sorry, you’ve missed the bus.”

Green Party candidate Teanau Tuiono agrees more should have been done.

“Healing takes time, it takes discussion, and it’s not just something that you can just apologise for and then it ends.

“Yes, the Dawn Raids apology was a good thing, but we also need to have an amnesty for overstayers and pathways for residency. Because let’s be clear, that amnesty could have happened last year.”

Mesepa Edwards says they are continuing the legacy of the Polynesian Panthers’ original members.

“I’m a 21st Century Panther. What they fought for, back in the 70s and 60s, we’re still fighting for today.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Green Party co-leader James Shaw has compared the language of New Zealand First leader Winston Peters to former US president Donald Trump, saying it may be emboldening violence against candidates in Aotearoa NZ’s election campaign.

It comes after several candidates from different parties have spoken out about being targeted, including a home invasion on Te Pāti Māori’s youngest candidate, an assault on a Labour candidate, and another Labour candidate saying she has faced the “worst comments and vitriol” this campaign.

Te Pāti Māori candidate Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, whose home was ram raided and invaded, put the blame on what she called race-baiting from right-wing parties.

• READ MORE:  Police investigate after invasion of Te Pāti Māori candidate’s home
• Other NZ elections 2023 reports

Peters told Newshub Nation that notion was wrong, and accused Te Pāti Māori of being a racist party.

But Shaw — who himself was assaulted in 2019 — suggested Peters could be empowering and emboldening extremists.

“It makes me really angry. Because political leaders, through the things we say create an air of permissiveness for that kind of extreme language and now physical violence to take place and it’s not too dissimilar to what we saw in the United States under Donald Trump,” he said.

“Half of the argument about Trump was whether he personally intervened to make those things happen and at one level it doesn’t matter, he created an atmosphere where these extremists felt empowered and emboldened to kind of enact their kind of crazy, racist, misogynist fantasies.

Lead to physical violence
“And that did lead to physical violence there and it’s leading to physical violence here too.”

However, Shaw told RNZ he was not surprised given the “misogynist and racist rhetoric”, which he said had been at least in part been given permission by political parties in this election campaign.

“[It] has created a situation where that kind of online hate and violent language is only one or two steps from actual acts of physical violence and now you’re starting to see those manifest. It is really worrying.

“I think all of us have a responsibility to try and create an atmosphere for democracy to take place, which is respectful, where people can have different opinions and for that to be okay.

“And I think that at the moment we’re seeing a rise in this kind of culture or language which is imported from overseas, that is not just unhelpful but downright dangerous.”

Te Pāti Māori said the break-in at Maipi-Clarke’s house was yet another example of political extremism in New Zealand.

Co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said some right-wing politicians were emboldening racist behaviour and needed to take responsibility.

‘Harmful inciting’
“We have seen a harmful inciting, a very harmful emboldening of extremism, this is an example of that.

“We’ve had it with our billboards – they’ve been so destroyed that we haven’t been able to afford to replace a lot of them now. It’s just been disgusting, the extent of racism.”

This year’s election had brought some of the worst abuse Te Pāti Māori had ever experienced, she said.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters claimed of Maipi-Clarke’s incident that “it couldn’t have been a home invasion” and he would answer more questions about the case when he knew all the facts.

“As for the first one [alleged assault on Labour’s Angela Roberts], violence of that sort is just not acceptable, full stop.”

He believed the time for candidates was worse was during the Rogernomics period of the 1980s.

“With respect, I can recall during the period of Rogernomics, there was a full scale fight going on inside the Labour Party convention.”

Minorities persecuted
Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins — who has vowed to call out racism — said a number of parties were deliberately trying to persecute minorities and it was reprehensible.

Assaulting candidates or threatening their safety “shows total contempt for the very principle of democracy”, he said.

He had made it clear to all Labour’s candidates that if they thought their physical safety might be at risk, they should not do that activity, Hipkins said.

“I think there has been more racism and misogyny in this election than we’ve seen in previous elections.”

Hipkins said he had respect for women and Māori who put themselves forward in elected office, but they should never have to put up with the level of abuse that they have had to in this campaign.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon told reporters his party had referred several incidents to the police too.

Luxon said he condemned threats and violence on political candidates, or their family and property, as well as all forms of racism.

Number of serious incidents
“It’s entirely wrong. We’ve had a number of serious incidents that we’ve referred to the police as well, over the course of this campaign.

“I think it’s important for all New Zealanders to understand that politicians are putting themselves forward, you may disagree with their politics, you may disagree with their policies, but we can disagree without being disagreeable in this country.”

He would not detail the complaints his party had made to police.

He said political leaders had a responsibility not to fearmonger during the campaign.

“Running fearmongering campaigns and negative campaigns just amps it up, and I think actually what we need to do is actually everyone needs to respect each other. We have differences of opinion about how to take the country forward, we are unique in New Zealand in that we can maintain our political civility, we don’t need to go down the pathway we’ve seen in other countries.

“It’s just about leadership, right, it’s about a leader modelling out the behaviour and treating people that they expect to treated.”

Asked if National had a hand in being responsible for fearmongering, he said it did not, and their campaign was positive and focused on what mattered most to New Zealanders.

Worry over online abuse
Shaw was worried for his candidates, having seen the online abuse they were subjected to.

“It’s vile, it is really extreme and it is stronger now than it has been in previous election campaigns and like I said I don’t think it takes much for a particularly unhinged individual from whacking their keyboard to whacking a person.”

But it was worse for female candidates and Māori, he said.

“Not just a little bit, not just an increment, but orders in magnitude, from what I’ve seen my colleagues be exposed to. It is just unhinged.”

There has been increased police participation in this campaign, Shaw said.

“Parliamentary security have got new protocols that we are observing. We have changed, for example, the way we campaign, the way we do public meetings, or when we’re out and about, we’re observing new security protocols that we haven’t had in previous years.”

Hipkins said where there might be additional risk, they have worked with Parliamentary Service on a cross-party basis to ensure there was additional support available for some MPs.

All parties have an interest in ensuring the election campaign was conducted safely, he said.

What has happened?
This week, Te Pāti Māori candidate Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke’s home was ram raided and invaded, with a threatening note left.

Police said they were investigating the burglary of a Huntly home, which was reported to them on Monday.

Te Pāti Māori issued a statement saying it was the third incident to take place at Maipi-Clarke’s home this week.

Also this week, Labour candidate for Taranaki-King Country Angela Roberts said she had laid a complaint with the police about being assaulted at an election debate in Inglewood.

Hipkins said he had great respect for Roberts, and he told her she could take any time off if she needed to, but she has chosen not to.

“She’s an incredibly staunch and energetic campaigner and I know it knocked the wind out of her sails a little bit, but I know that she’s bouncing back.”

On Thursday, Labour candidate for Northland Willow-Jean Prime told reporters she has faced the “worst comments and vitriol” in the seven campaigns she has been through – two in local government and five in central government.

“I was being shouted down every time I went to answer a question by supporters of other candidates primarily, there were not many of the general public in there,” she said of a Taxpayers Union debate in Kerikeri.

“Whenever I said a te reo Māori word, like puku, for full tummies, lunches in schools, I was shouted at.

“When I said Aotearoa, the crowd responded ‘It’s New Zealand!’. When I said rangatahi, ‘stop speaking that lanugage!’ that is racism coming from the audience, that’s not disagreeing with the gains I’m explaining that we’ve made in government.”

She said she noticed that type of “dog-whistling” in other candidate debates, but not whilst out and about with the general public.

“What is really worrying is that they feel so emboldened to be able to come out and say this stuff publicly, they don’t care that other people that might be in the audience, that might be listening or the impact that has on us as candidates.”

The New Zealand general election is on October 14, but early voting begins on October 2.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

They said an infantry battalion of around 100 troops entered Khin-U township’s Pin Din village, prompting around 2,500 residents of nearby villages to abandon their homes.

At the same time, around 3,500 people abandoned villages in the southwest of the township because another battalion was shelling their homes with heavy artillery.

“Junta troops are raiding Khin-U township every day,” said a local who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. “The raids only stopped for one day.”

One man died as he ran from his home during heavy shelling, the man said.

On Friday, RFA phoned the junta spokesperson for Sagaing region Tin Than Win to seek comment on the raids but he didn’t answer.

Four days earlier he denied any knowledge of current military operations in the region.

There have been repeated raids on Khin-U township this year. Residents and local defense groups said troops destroyed 6,000 houses there, leaving 30,000 villagers homeless.

Sagaing has the highest number of internally displaced people of all the states and regions in Myanmar.

More than 800,000 people in the region have been forced to abandon their homes since the February 2021 coup due to intense fighting between junta troops and People’s Defense Forces, according to the U.N.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules.  Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.

— Mike Thomas, sports editor, Sportscasting, November 9, 2020

What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of football: it’s called the pile on, a brutal, frenzied, desperate play to seize control and gain power while crushing the opposition.

In this particular analogy, “we the people” are trapped at the bottom of that pile, buried under a mountain of bread-and-circus distractions, economic worries, environmental disasters, power plays, power grabs, police raids, indictments and circus politics.

The Maui wildfires. The Trump indictments. Hunter Biden’s legal troubles. The looming 2024 presidential election. The Ukraine-Russia conflict.

In the midst of this pile on of woes, worries and semi-manufactured crises falling with sledgehammer-like frequency, monopolizing the media narrative and eclipsing all other news, it’s difficult to stay focused on what’s really going on, and yet something is brewing.

Pay attention.

Caught up in the partisan boxing match that is politics today, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s real.

The indictments against Trump, the investigation of Hunter Biden, and the chatter of the political classes aren’t real; they are more sound and fury, signifying nothing in the end.

As Aldous Huxley observed in Brave New World Revisited:

Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation… Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.

So what is real?

What’s real is the $5,000 fine and five-year jail sentence that could be levied against anyone found driving an illegal immigrant in their car in the state of Florida.

What’s real are the hi-tech policing tools such as robotic dogs equipped with all manner of weaponry and surveillance technology that are rewriting the ground rules when it comes to privacy and security.

What’s real is the North Carolina pastor who was fined $60,000 for ministering to the homeless on church property without a permit.

What’s real is the revelation that Boston officials created and sent police a watch list of the mayor’s most vocal critics, not unlike the government’s own growing databases for anti-government dissidents.

What’s real is what happened in Marion, Kansas, on Friday August 11, 2023, when police raided the office of the Marion County Record, blowing past the constitutional safeguards intended to safeguard the freedom of the press.

Are you starting to get the picture yet?

The manufactured media spectacles, piled on one after another, have a very real purpose, which is to distract us from the government’s constant encroachments on our freedoms.

In the larger scheme of things, these individual incidents—the police raid of a small-town newspaper, a state ban on who gets to be inside your car, an outrageous fine for feeding the destitute, a politician’s use of an enemies list to silence critics—might easily go unremarked, yet they are all part of the police state’s tendency to pile on: pile on the distractions, pile on the retribution, pile on the show of force in order to completely eviscerate anything that even remotely resembles opposition.

The police state has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on anyone who even questions its authority, let alone challenges its chokehold on power.

“We the people”—the proverbial nails to the police state’s heavy-handed tactics—will be hammered into compliance, intimidated into subservience, and terrorized into silence.

It doesn’t matter which party dominates in Congress or the White House: all of us are in danger from these fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics.

In this way, anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.

Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the prison walls holding the American people captive become ever more inescapable.

The upcoming election and its aftermath will undoubtedly keep the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats, so busy fighting each other that they never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.

Yet the winner has already been decided.

As American satirist H.L. Mencken predicted almost a century ago:

All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, nothing will change.

You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Florida-based independent journalist Tim Burke awoke on May 8, 2023, to the sound of FBI agents banging on the door of his Tampa home with a search warrant. By the time the raid ended approximately 10 hours later, agents had seized virtually all of the electronics in his newsroom.

The Tampa Bay Times reported that the raid was connected to a criminal probe into “alleged computer intrusions and intercepted communications at the Fox News Network.” At least six behind-the-scenes clips of former Fox host Tucker Carlson were leaked over the past year. The broadcaster has asserted that it did not authorize the release of the footage and that its systems could have been hacked.

Burke, who worked previously at Deadspin and The Daily Beast, has made a career of capturing publicly available livestreams. The Times reported that he launched Burke Communications in 2019, offering contract work and consulting, as well as access to his 181,000-gigabyte video archive.

According to the search warrant for his home, which was unsealed on May 26, officers were authorized to seize all of Burke’s electronics or physical records of alleged violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The warrant also stipulated that officers could force residents to unlock devices enabled with biometrics, including fingerprints or facial recognition.

In total, federal agents seized nine computers, seven hard drives, four cellphones and four notebooks from Burke’s home and the guest house that serves as his office. Two computers belonging to Lynn Hurtak, Burke’s wife and a Tampa City Council member, were also seized, along with a third that the couple both used, Burke told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker in August.

Attorney Mark Rasch, who is representing Burke and created the Justice Department’s Computer Crime Unit, denied any criminal behavior by Burke.

“Hacking is not simply obtaining information that someone would rather you not,” Rasch told the Tracker. “And hacking is also not going to a website that someone would prefer that you not or finding information that they would prefer that you not.”

Rasch said that Burke uses no special software or tools to access or record live feeds, and that viewing them does not require a username or password. Rather, Burke has cultivated search skills and sources that direct him to the URLs where they are publicly visible.

Burke told the Tracker that he’s worked as an assignment editor his entire career, and sees his current work as an extension of that: sifting through content to identify newsworthy material for publication.

“I have always promoted my approach of taking video in its most raw nature as being the best we have when it comes to veracity,” Burke said. “The raw video is the truth. That’s what journalism is, that’s what we’re reporting.”

But Burke told the Tracker that the seizure of his electronics has made it impossible for him to continue his journalistic work.

“It’s very difficult for me to do most of the things that I do as a journalist without my contacts that are on my phone or without the video editing softwares that are on my computer,” Burke said. “I just want to get back to doing this thing that I’ve dedicated my life to.”

The seizures also caused Burke to be locked out of his email, social media, banking and other important accounts. According to Rasch, federal prosecutors asked that Burke waive his Fifth Amendment rights and provide the passcode to his cellphone so it could be cloned. Burke refused.

Burke told the Tracker that prosecutors later said they no longer needed the passcode, and allowed him to access the device to transfer the two-factor authentication applications he needed.

On July 21, Rasch filed a motion for the return of Burke’s devices and to unseal the affidavit submitted in support of the search warrant, which he believes will provide insights into the basis on which Burke is being investigated.

Rasch also highlighted that multiple Justice Department officials — including the U.S. attorney general — are required to approve searches involving journalists or newsrooms, and details of whether investigators followed that procedure should be in the affidavit.

The government response to Rasch’s motion is due by Aug. 9, according to court records.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

They said a junta column raided a village in Salingyi township this morning, prompting locals from other villages in the area to abandon their homes.

“In the past people normally returned to their villages if the junta column left and went away,” said a villager who didn’t want to be named for security reasons. 

“But now it’s raining and hot, so the roads are bad and it's hard for people [to move around].”

The local said the junta had been carrying out systematic raids on villages almost every day since July 21.

Residents said they are also scared to return home because they fear junta gunboats will come up the river firing heavy artillery.

RFA reached out to the junta’s Sagaing region spokesman, Saw Naing, for comment but he did not answer calls on Tuesday.

Nearly 800,000 Sagaing region residents have been forced to flee their homes due to the conflict since the junta staged a February 2021 coup, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn and Josh Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Junta troops shelled Moebye (also known as Moe Bye and Mobye) in the south of the state from May 25, and targeted the township with air raids. Rescue workers say they are treating another 20 locals and still looking for bodies.

“Most of the injured were shot,” said an official from a local aid group, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.

“In addition, the number of the deaths from May 27 to July 4 is about 28 people who were hit and killed by heavy artillery.”

He added that Moebye Hospital has been closed since the Feb. 1, 2021 military coup, so the injured had to be sent to Loikaw Hospital in Kayah state and Aungban Hospital in southern Shan state.

Aid groups say it has been difficult to look for bodies and take the injured for treatment because the main road is impassable during battles and closed at night.

“[The junta troops] do not harm us, but if you pick up [bodies] near where they are, you have to ask for permission,” said a local who has been collecting bodies and who also requested anonymity for safety reasons.

“Some dead bodies have been around for almost a month. The deceased were buried in the nearest cemetery to where their bodies were found.”

The volunteer told RFA some neighborhoods are still inaccessible so it has been impossible to bury the dead there.

Shadow government condemns killings

Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government issued a statement on June 14, saying the bodies of 14 locals had been discovered near a pagoda to the north of Moebye between June 6 and 8. It strongly condemned the killings.

RFA tried to contact the Mobye People’s Defense Force and the Karenni Defense Forces about the military situation in Moebye township, but telephone services had been cut.

A report Wednesday by local paper Mekong News quoted a local defense force member as saying the fighting was ongoing, phone and internet communication had been cut and people should stay in their homes.

Ba Nyar, founder of the Karenni Human Rights Group, said most of the civilians who died in Moeby were deliberately targeted by junta troops.

“These actions can be viewed as war crimes. They are deliberate killings,” he told RFA.

“If we look at some of the ways things have been done: for example, continuous bombing by fighter jets is a war crime which makes it impossible for people to live there.”

RFA called Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the junta's deputy information minister, and also Shan state spokesperson Khun Thein Maung, seeking their comments but nobody answered.

Locals said more than 20,000 people, or two thirds of Moebye’s population, fled their homes at the height of the fighting and have been unable to return.

They said that junta troops are stationed in the center of the town and only a few people have stayed behind to guard homes.

According to the figures from the Karenni Human Rights Group, more than 260,000 people in Moebye – which borders Kayah state – and in the whole of Kayah state have been unable to return home.

Moebye and Kaya state are close to Myanmar’s capital and junta stronghold Naypyidaw, leading some analysts to speculate that the junta is trying to prevent them being used as bases to attack the regime's leaders.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The military likely carried out some of the attacks after intercepting phone calls between rebels or gleaning information from the interrogation of captured PDF members, according to a former military officer who joined the country’s anti-junta Civil Disobedience Movement following the February 2021 military coup d’etat.

A junta force of about 80 soldiers raided a PDF camp in Sagaing on June 7, killing and burning four anti-regime fighters and two civilians in Monywa township’s Yae Kan Su village, an acting battalion commander of Monywa district PDF’s Battalion 27 told Radio Free Asia on condition of anonymity.

“When we gathered about 200 people and went back into the village, we found the pieces of the burned bodies that the junta soldiers had left,” he said. “We found the blood and flesh of the victims.”

The four fighters killed by the junta troops were between the ages of 17 and 20, including two girls.

The Sagaing region has been an anti-junta stronghold and cradle of resistance to the country’s brutal military rule since the coup.

PDF fighters escaped a raid on their camp near the town of Ayadaw in Sagaing on May 28, but their cook – a 40-year-old woman – was captured, killed and burned, according to a Ayadaw township PDF soldier who refused to be named for security reasons. 

“The military council troops of about 40 or 50 soldiers raided the camp,” he said. “They burned down a hut, a car and four motorcycles.” 

RFA called junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun regarding the claims that military troops killed and burned the fighters and civilians, but his phone rang unanswered. 

Phone calls tracked

The camps are often unexpectedly raided after the military intercepts telephone conversations, said Kaung Thu Win, a former military captain now with the Civil Disobedience Movement.

“We should only talk briefly if we need to use the phone. We should be cautious of security information in our conversation,” he said. 

“The same goes with walkie-talkies,” he said. “The junta has appointed people who understand ethnic languages when they intercept the telecommunications of the revolutionary forces.” 

The raids won’t seriously damage the anti-regime fight, political analyst Than Soe Naing said.

“Just as the anti-junta forces attack the military, collect their information and capture their supporters and informers, there are some pro-junta informers and supporters,” he said.

The National Unity Government’s Ministry of Defense said in a statement Monday that there were 500 armed clashes in four regions and states, including Sagaing and Magway, last month, with 41 resistance soldiers killed and 113 injured.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

They say a column of nearly 100 troops under the command of Shwebo Training Corps No. 8 entered Khin-U township’s Ywar Thit village at dawn, torching homes. Residents of Ywar Thit and four nearby villages fled, saying they didn’t even have time to bring any possessions.

“The column was stationed at Ye-U Hospital, and entered the Khin-U side this morning,” said a local who didn’t want to be named for fear of reprisals.

“We couldn’t even bring anything as the troops are still in the village and it is not yet known how many houses have been damaged. Smoke is still rising from the side of Ywar Thit village.”

Locals said many children, elderly and sick people are among those forced to flee and they urgently need food and shelter.

Khin-U township has fiercely resisted the junta since the military seized power in 2021 and troops have repeatedly raided and burned villages there.

According to the 2014 census, the township has a population of nearly 150,000, of which more than 92% live in rural areas.

RFA called Aye Hlaing, the junta social affairs minister and spokesperson for Sagaing region, on Thursday seeking comment on the latest raids but nobody answered.

More than 60,000 civilian buildings have been destroyed by fire across Myanmar since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), as many as three quarters of which were in Sagaing region. Some 1.5 million people nationwide have been forced to flee their homes.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

They said troops started burning homes in eight villages, including Koke Tet, Yone Pin and Thin Paung, on May 7.

A 60-year-old woman from Koke Tet village, who did not want to be named for security reasons, told RFA the displaced people no longer have enough food.

“There is nothing at home. Villages were torched,” she said. 

“Now people are hiding in the forest. And we are fleeing from place to place as the army is raiding villages and we were not able to take anything from home when we fled.”

The number of houses burned by the military is not yet known as locals said they were too afraid to return home while troops were still in the township.

Khin-U has come under repeated attack by junta forces since the 2021 coup. Around 70 villages have been attacked by the junta, who burned more than 20,000 homes in the township between Feb. 1, 2021 and April this year, according to the pro-democracy Khin-U Information Group.

A 60-year-old man, who also requested anonymity, told RFA he was forced to flee his home in Khin-U township four times over the past two years and he and his fellow villagers are struggling to survive.

The situation is similar across Sagaing region. Nearly 750,000 people have fled their homes due to fighting and insecurity since the coup, according to a May 6 statement by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

RFA’s calls to the junta spokesman for Sagaing region, Aye Hlaing, who is also the regional minister for social affairs, went unanswered Thursday.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The National People's Congress passed amendments to the Counter-Espionage Law on April 26 that broaden the scope of material that can be used to back up allegations of spying.

"Documents, data, materials, and items related to national security and the national interest," are now treated as state secrets under the law, state news agency Xinhua reported. 

The raids come amid growing concern that the amended law will give state security police and other investigators new powers to access corporate facilities and electronic equipment. There’s also concern that normal business activities like gathering intelligence on local markets, competitors and partners could be treated as "espionage" amid growing tensions between Beijing, the United States and its allies.

The Chinese authorities have typically employed a highly elastic definition of what constitutes a state secret, and national security charges are frequently leveled at journalists, rights lawyers and activists, often based on material they posted online.

The newly amended law gives no definition of what constitutes a matter of national security or the national interest, but expands the definition of espionage to cover cyberattacks against government departments or critical information infrastructure, Xinhua said.

Under the amendment, authorities may now access data and electronic equipment and issue travel bans to individuals.

The move came as police in Shanghai visited U.S. management consultancy Bain & Co.'s office in Shanghai and questioned staff there.

“We can confirm that the Chinese authorities have questioned staff in our Shanghai office. We are cooperating as appropriate with the Chinese authorities,” Bain & Co. said in a written statement sent to Reuters and the Associated Press on April 26.

Meanwhile, The Financial Times reported that police took away computers and phones but did not detain any employees, and that they had made more than one visit to the office.

Last month, authorities in Beijing raided the office of U.S. due diligence firm Mintz, detaining five Chinese nationals in the process.

Japan seeks clarification

Japan said on Wednesday that it had asked Beijing to clarify exactly which activities constitute espionage, and that it was advising its nationals to be alert regarding the revised law. At least 17 Japanese nationals have been detained in China on "spying" allegations since the law first took effect in 2014.

An employee of Japanese drugmaker Astellas Pharma was detained in March on suspicion of "spying," prompting a protest from Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi during a visit to Beijing this month.

Jeremy Daum, a senior fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center, told Reuters that the amended law has adopted "an expansive understanding of national security."

The EU Chamber of Commerce in China said the investigation of Bain would affect investor confidence in the wake of three years of stringent pandemic restrictions.

"At a time when China is proactively trying to restore business confidence to attract foreign investment, the actions taken send a very mixed signal," the chamber said in a statement on Friday.

U.S.-based economist Xia Yeliang said Sino-US relations are at their lowest ebb in 50 years.

"There is a kind of us-and-them relationship that is emerging out of tense diplomatic relations and [recent] military and strategic confrontation," Xia said. "China uses its wolf-warrior diplomacy to smear the United States and other Western countries."

"Foreign companies should be sensitive to this risk and divest if necessary," he said.

Rising risk of doing business in China

New York-based lawyer Chen Chuangchuang said the risk of doing business in China is likely to keep on rising with the ongoing clampdown on the flow of information in China under supreme leader Xi Jinping.

"The Chinese market isn't easy to operate in, and if you can manage to get a foothold and stay there, it suggests that your company doesn't ... care about justice or human rights," Chen said.

He said the Chinese authorities already had the ability to surveil and search foreign company executives even before the amendments were passed.

"This has been going on for a long time," Chen said. "It's just that foreign companies feel that they used to enjoy special treatment in China, whereas it was just that they didn't dare to go after them before because they wanted good relations with the United States."

He said it is likely that consultancy firms and other companies gathering information in China could be deemed too sensitive to be allowed to operate there under the current regime.

"It's very simple. Xi Jinping wants to stabilize the country to minimize threats to his [grip on power], so all external contacts must be controlled by the government," he said.

"It all depends on whether you benefit the Chinese Communist Party in any way," Chen said. "If you don't, you'll have to leave."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kai Di for RFA Mandarin.

The man, who didn’t wish to be named, said a column of 150 troops descended on the township on Thursday morning, leading residents of nine villages to flee.

“Residents from those villages are still on the run,” he said. “There have been no arrests.”

He said that the column of troops was made up of soldiers based in Salingyi town and others from a Chinese-owned copper project in the township.

The Strike Committee member said troops had killed five civilians who they had brought with them from other villages. He didn’t know the names of the dead.

The military has intensified an already bloody campaign in Sagaing region this year, declaring martial law in 11 townships in February to try to wrest control of them from People’s Defense Forces and defend foreign-owned mining interests.

This month alone, troops have torched hundreds of homes in Sagaing region, and killed around 200 civilians in the bombing of Pa Zi Gyi village.

There were more than 1.8 million internally displaced persons across Myanmar as of April 10, 2023, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Nearly 1.5 million of them fled their homes due to fighting since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Indonesian security forces have intensified operations in various conflict areas in West Papua, reports Human Rights Monitor.

According to information received by the international watchdog, security force members have raided villages and set residential houses on fire.

The raids reportedly occurred in conflict hotspots in West Papua, predominantly in the Puncak, Nduga, and Intan Jaya regencies, but also in less conflict-affected places such as the districts Elilim and Apahapsili in the Yalimo regency on 1 and 2 April 2023 – two weeks  before last weekend’s clash between Indonesian soldiers and pro-independence militia.

• READ MORE: UK minister grilled on West Papua human rights in House of Lords
• Other West Papua reports

Indigenous Papuans, including women and children, were arrested and tortured.

Observers predicted an aggravation of the conflict weeks ago after the Indonesian military deployed more than 2000 additional personnel to West Papua throughout March 2023.

‘Ground combat ready’
Meanwhile, the Indonesian chief-of-armed forces, General Laksamana Yudo Margono, announced that the mode of operations against the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) was switched from a “soft approach” to “ground combat ready” operations after a disputed number of soldiers were killed in a firefight with TPNPB members in Nduga on 15 April 2023.

Meanwhile, the increased security force presence comes with government-driven “socialisation” programmes, where military and police members directly interact with local communities.

They participate in collective work, visit schools, and take over or accompany essential healthcare services.

For decades, many indigenous Papuans have been traumatised due to the history of violent military operations in West Papua, says Human Rights Monitor.

They fear becoming victims of arbitrary arrest, torture, killings, or enforced disappearance.

The military presence in schools, health facilities, and churches limits indigenous Papuans from accessing essential public services.

• Human Rights Monitor’s Annual Report 2022

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A column of around 100 troops staged a dawn raid on Myin Daung village on Wednesday killing five defense force members, according to a PDF official who declined to be named. The defense force responded by detonating mines and exchanging gunfire with junta forces.

A resident of nearby Aung Thar said that after the battle, the junta column shelled other villages in Khin-U township, destroying a monastery and burning down three houses in his village.

He added that five men who were farming outside the village were taken by troops to act as human shields when they left Aung Thar village.

A resident of Myin Daung, who also requested anonymity, said thousands of residents of nearby villages fled their homes

“There are more than 10 villages to the south of Myin Daung with a population of about 18,000 people,” the local said. 

“Along with the people leaving villages to the north there will be more than 20,000 people fleeing.”

A People’s Defense Force member who also declined to give his name told RFA that 21 villages are now empty.

RFA called Sagaing region junta spokesperson Aye Hlaing but no one answered.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Locals said that a junta column with more than 70 troops fired heavy artillery and entered Nyaung Pin Thar village on March 30. A 20-year-old woman named Zar Chi Win was killed by a shell.

“Zar Chi Win was hit by the junta’s heavy artillery shell and died on March 30, while she was trying to escape,” said a resident, speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“The shell landed in the vicinity of Nyaung Pin Thar village.”

Another column with more than 70 troops raided nearby Sit Tan village killing 30-year-old Than Pe Lay as he tried to escape, the local told RFA.

“Than Pe Lay was shot dead by a column that entered Sit Tan village on April 2, while he was trying to escape near the village monastery,” he said.

On the evening of April 3, the column that entered Nyaung Pin Thar village and the column that entered Sit Tan village combined and left the township.

Calls to the military junta spokesman for Sagaing region, Aye Hlaing, went unanswered.

According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, between Feb. 1, 2021, when the military seized power in a coup, and April 3, 2023, a total of 3,206 people, including pro-democracy activists, were killed by the junta.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

A resident of Anju city in South Pyongan province said that of the 25 households in their neighborhood-watch unit, five were caught by security agents and had their homemade alcohol confiscated. 

“Residents who were quickly able to hide the alcohol before the unexpected house searches were able to avoid getting caught,” the resident said.

Many families in the neighborhood make a living making moonshine, which can be started easily with just 10 kilograms (22 lbs.) of corn, he said. 

One household was caught using 30 kilograms (66 lbs.) of corn as ingredients for moonshine, and family members had to write a letter of self-criticism.

But four households that bought more than 100 kilograms (220 lbs.) of corn were accused of being “anti-socialists” who helped fuel the country’s food crisis, and were sentenced last week to more than a year in a correctional labor camp.

Anju is known as one of the largest cities in North Korea for producing bootleg alcohol. The area is a producer of bituminous coal, which is used as fuel in the bootlegging process. 

Bootlegging rose following 1990s famine

In North Korea, bootleg alcohol is mainly made by distillation rather than fermentation. The 40% alcohol produced in the first part of the distillation process is the most expensive and is usually transported to Pyongyang, where it is refined and sold as premium alcohol.

The second part of the distillation process produces 20-30% alcohol known as soju – the most bootlegged form of alcohol that North Koreans usually drink. It is mainly sold in private restaurants, marketplaces, street vendors and private homes in the provinces. 

Bootlegging became a more common way to earn a living when North Korea’s food ration system collapsed in the 1990s and a subsequent famine resulted in the death of millions. 

People bought food with the money earned and also used the leftover mash from the moonshine process to feed livestock. Raising pigs became another side job.

In the 2000s, private marketplaces were made legal, and the scope of what could be sold by merchants was expanded in the 2010s. Various types of businesses were allowed by North Korean authorities with the payment of market usage fees to the state. The number of people making moonshine – which was still illegal – decreased. 

Food shortages

But in 2020, when the border was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, car parts and food imports were blocked and some merchants turned to bootlegging to make up the shortfall in business, a resident of Chunggang county in the northern province of Chagang told RFA on Wednesday. 

The area has also seen recent raids and arrests – the crackdown seems to be a reaction by authorities to food shortages, the resident said.

“The authorities punished the residents by giving them more than a year of correctional labor camp punishment as an example,” the resident said. “However, residents complained, saying, ‘Isn’t it right to solve the problem of food shortages first and then start cracking down on bootlegging?’” 

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Korean.

Residents said 12 villages in Shwegyin township in the east of Bago had been abandoned.

A military column with around 80 villages started raiding villages on March 9, according to a local woman who was forced to flee.

“Htaung Laung, Waing, Baw Ka Htar, Pa De Kaw, Nyaung Pin Gyi and other villages were raided by troops, shelling us with heavy artillery and leaving casualties,” she told RFA, speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“Even while I am talking now there are people fleeing around me. The junta column is stationed at Inn Ga Ni village now and firing artillery in eight directions.”

She said she did not know how many people had been killed or injured by shelling and firing of live rounds because residents were too scared to return to their homes..

Locals are taking refuge in religious areas like monasteries and pagoda squares in Shwegyin town, the woman said.

There have been frequent battles between junta troops and Karen National Union fighters in Shwegyin township but neither side has released a statement on the recent fighting.

However, Tin Oo, the junta’s spokesperson for Bago region denied that any residents had been forced to flee their villages.

According to United Nations figures data to Feb. 27, more than 1.6 million people have become internally displaced persons in Myanmar, with 1.3 million of them forced to flee their homes due to conflict and insecurity following the Feb. 1, 2021 coup.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

On Tuesday, February 14, about 10 armed Taliban members raided the headquarters of the privately owned broadcaster in Kabul, beat several staff members, and held them for 30 minutes, according to news reports and a journalist familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

That journalist said they did not know what led to the raid. Tamadon TV is predominantly owned and operated by members of the Hazara ethnic minority, and covers political and current affairs as well as Shiite religious programming. Hazara people have faced persecution and escalated violence since the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021.

“The Taliban’s raid of Tamadon TV and attacks on its employees show the group’s failure to abide by its professed commitment to freedom of expression in Afghanistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Access to information in Afghanistan is critical. The Taliban must stop harassing journalists and stifling the work of the free press.”

While entering the broadcaster’s premises, Taliban members beat a security guard, two journalists, and two media workers, the journalist who spoke to CPJ said.

The Taliban members then pointed guns the station’s staff members, confiscated their mobile phones, and transferred them to a meeting room, where they were held for 30 minutes while Taliban members verbally harassed them, referring to one as an “infidel Hazara journalist,” according to that journalist.

Taliban members roamed around the headquarters, but it was not clear if they conducted any additional searches, and then confiscated two of the broadcaster’s vehicles when they left the scene.

CPJ contacted Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid for comment via messaging app but did not receive any response.

In August 2022, CPJ published a special report about the media crisis in Afghanistan, showing a rapid deterioration in press freedom since the Taliban retook control of the country, marked by censorship, arrests, assaults, and restrictions on women journalists.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

“Raiding the BBC’s India offices in the wake of a documentary criticizing Prime Minister Narendra Modi smacks of intimidation,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Indian authorities have used tax investigations as a pretext to target critical news outlets before, and must cease harassing BBC employees immediately, in line with the values of freedom that should be espoused in the world’s largest democracy.”

Officials from the Income Tax Department sealed the offices as part of an investigation into alleged international taxation irregularities, according to the BBC. Tax officials told news website NDTV that they were checking account books and that the raids “are not searches.” Multiple reports citing unnamed employees said authorities seized employees’ laptops and mobile phones.  

The BBC is “fully cooperating” and hopes to “have this situation resolved as soon as possible,” the broadcaster said on Twitter.

The Indian government ordered YouTube and Twitter to take down links sharing the first episode of the two-part BBC documentary investigating Modi’s alleged role in 2002 riots in Gujarat.

Indian tax authorities raided news outlets Newslaundry and Newsclick in 2021 following critical coverage of government policies and Modi’s supporters on the Hindu right wing.

CPJ emailed the Income Tax Department for comment but did not receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Madeline Earp.

With Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva warning his administration "will not allow illegal mining on Indigenous lands," the government announced Wednesday that environmental special forces destroyed at least one helicopter, an airplane, and a bulldozer used by "mining mafias" in the territory of the Yanomami people in the Amazon rainforest this week.

The raids aimed at removing illegal mining operations involving tens of thousands of ore and gold miners from the region began on Monday, just over a month after the leftist president, known as Lula, took office.

The Guardian reported that the special forces set up a base near the Uraricoera River, which illegal miners used during right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro's administration.

"The Yanomami want peace—that is all they want. And this is what we are going to give them."

Bolsonaro condemned the Yanomami people's control of the land, the largest Indigenous territory in Brazil, and encouraged deforestation and mining in the Amazon. Roughly 25,000 illegal miners poured into the region during his four-year term.

The forces have seized aircraft, boats, and weapons from miners this week.

"We are in the process of removing illegal miners from Roraima," Lula said on social media Tuesday, referring to Brazil's northernmost state. "The situation that the Yanomami find themselves [in] near the [mining camp] is degrading."

The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), and the newly-created Indigenous affairs ministry took part in coordinating the raids, with Defense Minister José Múcio monitoring the operation.

Sonia Guajajara, who was appointed by Lula to be Brazil's first-ever minister of Indigenous affairs, surveyed the region, where nearly 30,000 Yanomami live, ahead of the operation.

\u201cA Ministra dos Povos Ind\u00edgenas, @GuajajaraSonia, sobrevoou neste domingo (5) a regi\u00e3o de Homoxi, na Terra Ind\u00edgena Yanomami afetada pelo garimpo ilegal. Hoje mais um beb\u00ea Yanomami morreu v\u00edtima de desnutri\u00e7\u00e3o.\n\n\ud83d\udcf7 Gilvan Alves/@TVBrasil\u201d

— Sonia Guajajara (@Sonia Guajajara) 1675640915

"The Yanomami want peace—that is all they want," Guajajara told GloboNews. "And this is what we are going to give them."

In addition to degrading the landscape and polluting the waterways of the Brazilian Amazon, illegal mining in the Yanomami land has had a "devastating impact" on the health of the community, Greenpeace said last week:

The use of mercury in the activity poisons the land the Indigenous people use to plant their food and the rivers they use to fish. By poisoning the water, mercury also gets into the people's bodies, causing serious health problems, and even death.

Besides that, the presence of the miners in the Indigenous territory exposes those living there to other diseases. An explosion in cases of malaria and malnutrition, due to the lack of access to food and traditional ways of production in the Yanomami land, has been a serious threat to the lives of the Indigenous people, especially children. 11,530 confirmed cases of malaria were recorded in 2022 alone.

At least 570 Yanomami children reportedly died of curable diseases during Bolsonaro's administration, and dozens of children have been airlifted to hospitals in recent weeks, suffering from malnutrition and malaria.

"More than a humanitarian crisis, what I saw... was a genocide," Lula said last month after a visit to the region. "A premeditated crime against the Yanomami, committed by a government impervious to the suffering of the Brazilian people."

On Tuesday, the president said his administration will "restructure everything that exists from the point of view of controlling our Indigenous lands, the environment."

"We are going to try to create a new dynamic," he added, "to have the results that Brazilian society wants."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Soldiers descended on Khin-U Wednesday morning, a township already hit by indiscriminate arson attacks, locals told RFA.

“At around 4 a.m., a column with 30 soldiers entered Myin Daung village as scouts,” said a former resident who wished to remain anonymous. “Then 15 soldiers were added from Mu Tein Chaung. More than 90 troops from Ye-U township joined the column and entered Myin Daung.”

Locals say almost all the 2,600 people living in Myin Daung village fled on Monday ahead of the raids. They said they were too scared to stay, fearing they would be arrested and killed by the troops.

Earlier this month the junta declared martial law in Khin-U, along with 10 other townships in Sagaing region where it has struggled to win control from local pro-democracy militias.

Khin-U based People’s Defense Forces said the military column that entered Myin Daung on Wednesday was under the command of Infantry Battalions 364 and 701 but RFA has not been able to confirm this.

Calls to the junta spokesman for Sagaing region, Aye Hlaing, went unanswered for a second day.

Last December he told RFA he doesn't comment on the military situation but – as junta social affairs minister for the region -- he was compiling a district-level list of displaced people in order to provide them with food.

More than 3,700 houses in 63 villages in Khin-U township have been destroyed by arson attacks in the two years since the military toppled Myanmar’s democratically elected government.

According to a United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report on Feb. 2, fighting since the coup has led to nearly 650,000 people being forced to abandon their homes and live in makeshift camps in Sagaing region.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

A spokesman, who didn’t want to be named, said a column of troops entered five villages in Kanbalu township over the weekend.

“Before the troops entered Pon Nar Gyi village, they fired heavy artillery and a man in the village was hit by shell fragments,” he said. “The residents of nearby villages also had to flee because the troops were getting close.”

After raiding Pon Nar Gyi on Saturday troops moved on to nearby Chat Lel. The following day they moved on to three other villages, including Pi Tauk Pin which has more than 100 homes, burning 12 of the houses there, the activists’ group said.

Locals told RFA the military column comprised about 120 troops from junta Infantry Battalion 368 and the junta aligned Pyu Saw Htee militia.

Calls to Sagaing region junta spokesman Aye Hlaing went unanswered Tuesday. In the past he told RFA he is not able to comment on security issues.

Last month troops burned down 274 houses in Kanbalu and Kyunhla townships, according to the Kyunhla-Kanbalu Activists Group. It said seven people were burned to death.

The military has stepped up a scorched earth campaign in Sagaing region this year, torching 4,271 houses in January and killing 17 civilians, Myanmar’s ousted National Unity Government said last week.

In the last five months of 2022, the number of people in Sagaing region fleeing fighting and arson attacks rose 17% to 616,500 the Market Analysis Unit said on Jan. 29. That accounts for half of the newly displaced persons nationwide between August and December, according to the unit of the Myanmar Information Management Unit, which supplies data to the humanitarian and development community.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

We speak with journalist Lynzy Billing, whose investigation for ProPublica details how CIA-backed death squads, known as Zero Units, have yet to be held accountable for killing hundreds of civilians during the U.S. War in Afghanistan. The Afghan units, which were routinely accompanied by U.S. soldiers, became feared throughout rural Afghanistan for their brutal night raids, often descending upon villagers from helicopters and carrying out summary executions before disappearing. Families of victims continue to demand answers, but since the operations were directed by the CIA rather than the military, there is almost no oversight or disclosure when things go wrong. “Many people I spoke to feel that these operations … were counterproductive and actually had turned their families against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and against the U.S.,” says Billing.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

March 2019 • Rodat District, Nangarhar Province

This story contains graphic descriptions and images of war casualties.

On a December night in 2018, Mahzala was jolted awake by a shuddering wave of noise that rattled her family’s small mud house. A trio of helicopters, so unfamiliar that she had no word for them, rapidly descended, kicking up clouds of dust that shimmered in their blinding lights. Men wearing desert camouflage and black masks flooded into the house, corralling her two sons and forcing them out the door.

Mahzala watched as the gunmen questioned Safiullah, 28, and 20-year-old Sabir, before roughly pinning them against a courtyard wall. Then, ignoring their frantic protests of innocence, the masked men put guns to the back of her sons’ heads. One shot. Two. Then a third. Her youngest, “the quiet, gentle one,” was still alive after the first bullet, Mahzala told me, so they shot him again.

Her story finished, Mahzala stared at me intently as if I could somehow explain the loss of her only family. We were in the dim confines of her home, a sliver of light leaking in from the lone window above her. She rubbed at the corner of her eyes; her forehead creased by a pulsing vein. The voices of her sons used to fill their home, she told me. She had no photos of them. No money. And there was no one who would tell her, a widow in her 50s, why these men dropped out of the sky and killed her family or acknowledge what she insisted was a terrible mistake.

But now there was me. I had ended up in Rodat in the heart of Nangarhar province while researching my own family’s story of loss in this desolate rural region in eastern Afghanistan.

Mahzala’s neighbors had pressed me to meet her; I was a foreigner, I must be able to help. Three months had passed since the raid. The neighbors believed it was the work of the feared Zero Units — squadrons of U.S.-trained Afghan special forces soldiers. Two more homes in the area were targeted that night, they said, though no one else was killed. Everyone acknowledged the Taliban had been in the area before; they were everywhere in Nangarhar province. But Mahzala’s sons? They were just farmers, the neighbors told me.

That trip was the first time I’d heard of the secretive units, which I’d soon learn were funded, trained and armed by the CIA to go after targets believed to be a threat to the United States. There was something else: The Afghan soldiers weren’t alone on the raids; U.S. special operations forces soldiers working with the CIA often joined them. It was a “classified” war, I’d later discover, with the lines of accountability so obscured that no one had to answer publicly for operations that went wrong.

Back in Kabul, I tried to continue my personal hunt, but Mahzala’s story had changed the trajectory of my journey. Her words and her face, with its deep-set wrinkles that mirrored the unforgiving landscape, lingered in my thoughts. Who were these soldiers? And what were they doing in remote farming villages in Afghanistan executing young men under the cover of night? Did anyone know why they were being killed?

As a journalist, I knew that Afghanistan’s story was most often told by outsiders, by reporters with little cause to explore barren corners like Rodat. Far from the world’s eyes, this story felt like it was being buried in real time. It was clear no one would be coming to question what happened that night or to relieve Mahzala’s torment.

Mahzala’s sons’ lives, it seemed, were being shrugged away, without acknowledgement or investigation, disappearing into the United States’ long war in Afghanistan. I began to focus on a basic question: How many more Mahzalas were there?

As I write this today, America’s war in Afghanistan is already being consigned to history, pushed from the world’s consciousness by humanity’s latest round of inhumanity. But there are lessons to be learned from the West’s failures in Afghanistan. Other reporters, notably at The New York Times, have documented the cover-up of casualties from aerial bombardment and the drone war in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. This story is a deep look inside what happened after America embraced the strategy of night raids — quick, brutal operations that went wrong far more often than the U.S. has acknowledged.

As one U.S. Army Ranger ruefully told me after the Taliban’s triumph last year: “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.”

May 2019 • Kabul

Although I hadn’t revealed it to Mahzala, I’d come to Afghanistan hoping to answer questions similar to her own.

Like Mahzala, I’m from Afghanistan. People call me “lucky” because I was adopted by a British family running a school across the border in Pakistan. At age 12, I moved with them to Israel and then on to England, where I attended university and later became a journalist. I had a few traces of my Afghan and Pakistani origins: a couple photographs of my biological mother — a Pakistani, young and lovely with hands like my own — a newspaper clipping advertising me, an orphan girl, for adoption and a few other scraps of information. But really, I had nothing.

I’d returned to Afghanistan as an adult, and with plans to also go to Pakistan, to investigate my past: Who were my birth parents? And what had happened to them? I was spurred by a mix of emotions from curiosity to a desire for closure.

Thirty years earlier, when I was 2, my mother, a refugee to Afghanistan, and younger sister were killed in a nighttime raid in the very same district as Mahzala’s sons — long before the Americans arrived. Like her, I also had no answers. A distant relative told me that my Afghan father was likely the intended target of the attack. He would be killed two years later during the increasingly violent civil conflict, but the people who murdered my mother and sister would never be held to account. One war bled into the next, and one family’s story of loss was replaced by another’s.

Trauma, I’ve learned, creates a rippling pool; its ravages spread to unseen edges. After I was adopted, I underwent numerous medical and psychological assessments. One declared that I’d had a “neurological insult” likely from an incident of trauma to the brain. I have no idea when or with what I was hit. The doctors observed that I had an “abnormal gait” that stymied my ability to run and a string of learning disabilities that affected my speech and my ability to interact with others. Doctors suggested that my adoptive father slowly push me on a swing to introduce me to movement. But I’d shut down and go rigid or, with white knuckles gripping the swing, scream.

My adoptive father recalls some friends suggesting that I “had demons and wouldn’t be at rest until they were cast out.”

Even as my physical and psychological ailments faded, questions of my origins taunted me. My personality and interests didn’t match those of my adoptive sisters. I was hardheaded, self-contained and struggled to show affection toward the people I loved. I had difficulty expressing my thoughts and feelings. Friends would ask me why I made things so difficult for myself. I didn’t have an answer.

I was middle of the road in most things in school and struggled to find my place among sisters who excelled academically and athletically. Although I did indeed feel “lucky,” I also felt an overwhelming pressure to make the most of the opportunities I’d been given.

In truth, I never felt British, Afghan or Pakistani. I tried to hire private investigators to find my birth parents. A slick businessman in a dodgy one-room London office above a bakery laughed off my request. A beefy man in hobnail cowboy boots met me at a swanky hotel in Dubai, then said he was reluctant to take on such a small but difficult job. No one was interested in digging around in a country at war.

And so I set out to Jalalabad to do it myself.

I learned from my conversation with Mahzala that the violence that tore apart my family had continued as Afghanistan lurched from civil war to a grinding conflict between the U.S. and the Taliban, al-Qaida and later ISKP (Islamic State Khorasan Province, the Afghan offshoot of the Islamic State). As I made calls and sifted through local news reports, my focus shifted from exploring my personal story to something else.

Over the next three and a half years, I did what it appeared that no one else was doing — nor will be able to do again — I tracked what the U.S.-trained and sponsored squads were doing on the ground, concealed from most of the world.

I cataloged hundreds of night raids by one of the four Zero Unit squads, which was known in Afghanistan as 02 unit, eventually identifying at least 452 civilians killed in its raids over four years. I crisscrossed hundreds of miles of Nangarhar interviewing survivors, eyewitnesses, doctors and elders in villages seldom, if ever, visited by reporters. The circumstances of the civilian deaths were rarely clear. But the grieving families I spoke to in these remote communities were united in their rage at the Americans and the U.S.-backed Kabul government.

My pursuit would take me from the palatial Kabul home of the former head of Afghanistan’s spy agency to clandestine meetings with two Zero Unit soldiers who were ambivalent about their role in America’s war. It would lead me back to the United States, where I met an Army Ranger in a diner in a bland middle American city. Over breakfast, he casually described how American analysts calculated “slants” for each operation — how many women/children/noncombatants were at risk if the raid went awry. Those forecasts were often wildly off, he acknowledged, yet no one seemed to really care.

My reporting showed that even the raids that did end in the capture or killing of known militants frequently also involved civilian casualties. Far too often, I found the Zero Unit soldiers acted on flawed intelligence and mowed down men, women and children, some as young as 2, who had no discernible connection to terrorist groups.

And the U.S. responsibility for the Zero Unit operations is quietly muddied because of a legal carve-out that allows the CIA — and any U.S. soldiers lent to the agency for the operations — to act without the same oversight as the American military.

The CIA declined to answer my questions about the Zero Units on the record. In a statement, CIA spokesperson Tammy Thorp said, “As a rule, the U.S. takes extraordinary measures — beyond those mandated by law — to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict, and treats any claim of human rights abuses with the utmost seriousness.”

She said any allegations of human rights abuses by a “foreign partner” are reviewed and, if valid, the CIA and “other elements of the U.S. government take concrete steps, including providing training on applicable law and best practices, or if necessary terminating assistance or the relationship.” Thorp said the Zero Units had been the target of a systematic propaganda campaign designed to discredit them because “of the threat they posed to Taliban rule.”

My reporting, based on interviews with scores of eyewitnesses and with the Afghan soldiers who carried out the raids, shows that the American government has scant basis for believing it has a full picture of the Zero Units’ performance. Again and again, I spoke with Afghans who had never shared their stories with anyone. Congressional officials concerned about the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan said they were startled by the civilian death toll I documented.

As my notebooks filled, I came to realize that I was compiling an eyewitness account of a particularly ignominious chapter in the United States’ fraught record of overseas interventions.

Without a true reckoning of what happened in Afghanistan, it became clear the U.S. could easily deploy the same failed tactics in some new country against some new threat.

May - October 2019 • Nangarhar Province

When I conceived this investigation, I knew if I was going to track the dead, I’d need some help. I met Muhammad Rehman Shirzad, a 34-year-old forensic pathologist from Nangarhar.

As a government employee, Shirzad had access to official records to verify the identities of those killed. But helping me was a risk. Nevertheless, he was keen to join. “We have to share the truth,” he told me. We began building a database of alleged civilian casualties and hit the road.

In the late spring of 2019, the trail led to the basement office of Lutfur Rahman, 28, former university professor who’d found himself unexpectedly chronicling the stories of Zero Unit survivors. He’d taught literature but had also acted as a counselor to young men with no one else to talk to.

“Nangarhar is the most restless province,” Rahman said. “They witness these raids every day.” He handed me a beat-up notebook. Inside were 14 stories of deadly Zero Unit raids that his students had described to him over two years.

We’d just started talking when Rahman got a call from a professor at the University of Nangarhar who said one of his students had missed classes for several days and then returned distracted and distressed, saying there’d been “an incident.”

A few days later, I found Batour, 22, in the university’s science lab, sitting sandwiched between plastic models of dissected human bodies. Slight, disheveled and with wild eyes, he looked lost. I suggested that we move to the privacy of the roof. He didn’t have to talk to me, I said. “It’s OK,” he said, then took a deep breath and cocked his chin, as if bracing for a blow.

They came a week earlier, on April 26. “It was a normal Thursday,” Batour said. He and his brothers prayed at the mosque and then returned to their home in Qelegho in Khogyani district. As Batour spoke, his skinny ankles swayed back and forth, not quite reaching the ground.

Around 9 p.m., he said, the 02 soldiers descended from helicopters and he knew a raid had started. They hit four houses before reaching his home hours later and “blew up the door.”

A soldier with a megaphone announced: “Your house is surrounded. Come out.” Inside, soldiers were asking everyone: “What is your name? What do you do?”

Batour and his father were led out of the house while his two brothers remained inside.

Two soldiers were speaking in English, he said, but there was a man with them translating their words into Pashto. Batour told them he was a student at the university and gave them his university ID. The soldiers checked his name against a list, he said, then ordered him to sit under a tree. As long as the planes are circling above, they told him, do not move.

Batour paused and stared at his hand, flexing his fingers.

“My back was to the house and I don’t know how long I was sitting there,” he said quietly, but that’s when he heard the sound of firing. “It was just like pop-pops, so it was silenced guns.” Batour heard the helicopters take off. “Immediately my father ran to the house screaming, but I couldn’t hear him. I ran after him. My father said: ‘Come on. They are finished.’”

They found his two brothers dead. They’d been shot many times.

That night, 11 people were killed including Batour’s brothers: Sehatullah, 28, a teacher at a secondary school in Khogyani district, left behind a wife and three young sons, and Khalid Hemat, 26, who went to university with Batour, had married just four months earlier.

The following day, Batour heard the local radio station announce that teachers from a government school were killed in the raid by the 02 unit. There was no mention that insurgents had been successfully eliminated.

“While my brothers were alive, I was free to study. But now they are gone; no one is here to support me. My lessons are left half-completed.” He told me he can’t concentrate and has nightmares about the night of the raid, but his family can’t afford to move from the village. “We still don’t know the reason my brothers were slaughtered.”

Batour believes the Zero Unit strategy had actually made enemies of families like his. He said his brothers had both supported the government and he did, too, vowing never to join the Taliban. Now, he said, he’s not so sure. As Batour spoke, something round and black dropped onto the roof by his feet. He briefly cowered, before realizing it was a taped-up black cricket ball that soared up from the ground floor. After a moment he exhaled. It’s as if he’d forgotten to breathe the whole time we were talking.

As Batour told me his story, I heard echoes of the other witnesses I had spoken to about the psychological toll of the raids. As long as most of them could remember, the country had been racked by violence. The hum of drones, the whirr of helicopters and the deafening blasts of suicide bombings and missile strikes had scarred the land and seeped into daily life.

Kurdish-German psychologist Jan Ilhan Kizilhan trains psychologists who specialize in trauma to work with war victims in Iraq and Syria. He told me that in Afghanistan trauma has become an inescapable legacy. “They experience past trauma again and again as if it is immediate,” he said. “The repetition reinforces these experiences many times over, keeping them alive for numerous future generations.”

At the more than 30 raid sites Shirzad and I visited, we were often greeted with surprise, particularly by women, who had seldom been asked about what they’d seen and, if they were victims, sometimes not mentioned. One 60-year-old woman told me that after her three sons and son-in-law were killed in a July 2019 night raid, she simply washed, shrouded and buried them. At the provincial governor’s office, she was told that the 02 conducted the operation and “it was a mistake.”

“Not once did I think I had any other options, that any Afghan official, court or anyone would believe me,” she said.

In Qala Sheikh village in Chaparhar district, more than a dozen people witnessed Zero Unit soldiers shoot five teachers in their homes, leaving behind the blackened shell of one home with two burned bodies inside.

The 02 unit later said it carried out the raid in a statement, announcing that the men were ISKP members — a claim Abdul Rahim, who saw his brother and nephews burning in the fire, denied. “If they were ISIS, why didn’t they arrest them in the city where they teach at government schools?” Rahim said that October. “It’s the obligation of the Afghan government to ask this unit why they are killing civilians.”

Rahim told me that a presidential delegation had traveled to Jalalabad, ostensibly to investigate the raid, but it never came to Qala Sheikh or spoke to witnesses or the doctors who treated his brother’s injuries before he died.

1967 - Present Day

U.S. military and intelligence agencies have long used night raids by forces like the 02 to fight insurgencies and since the Vietnam War have defended the tactic, arguing that the raids are less likely to cause civilian casualties than aerial bombing.

But even a cursory review of U.S. military history raises serious questions about the operations, especially in places like Afghanistan, which is defined by deep tribal loyalties and where the high civilian death toll has, time and again, turned people against the United States and the local government it supported.

In 1967, the CIA’s Phoenix Program famously used kill-capture raids against the Viet Cong insurgency in south Vietnam, creating an intense public blowback. William Colby, then-CIA executive director and former chief of the Saigon station, conceded to Congress in 1971 that it wasn’t possible to differentiate with certainty between enemy insurgents or people who were neutral or even allies.

Despite the program’s ignominious reputation — a 1971 Pentagon study found only 3% of those killed or captured were full or probationary Viet Cong members above the district level — it appears to have served as a blueprint for future night raid operations.

The U.S. used night raids against al-Qaida in Iraq, under Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Military officials said many of the operations killed or captured their targets. But it’s impossible to determine how often the intelligence was wrong, or misguided, and civilians paid the price. As in Afghanistan, complete casualty data has remained either classified, unavailable or untracked.

When McChrystal took over operations in Afghanistan in June 2009, he declared that Afghan officials would now take part in the planning and execution of the raids, but he also accelerated them. As in Iraq, the raids were met with protests, and former President Hamid Karzai repeatedly called for them to be banned.

The raids, along with drone strikes, were part of America’s vast counterterrorism apparatus known as the “kill-capture program.” When Petraeus replaced McChrystal in Afghanistan, he expanded the program and in 2010 released figures to the media claiming spectacular success — thousands of al-Qaida and Taliban leaders captured or killed.

In a subsequent press conference, a U.S. admiral revealed that more than 80% of those captured “terrorists” were released within weeks because there wasn’t supportable evidence that they were insurgents. And the raids seemed counterproductive: as they ramped up, so did the insurgent attacks.

Petraeus and McChrystal declined to answer questions for this story.

Meanwhile, the CIA was separately funding, training and equipping its own series of paramilitary forces in Afghanistan. The Zero Units were officially established around 2008, according to Afghan officials and soldiers, and modeled on U.S. special operations forces like the Navy SEALs. Regionally based and staffed by local soldiers, the units were sometimes accompanied by CIA advisers, transported by American helicopters and aided by armed support aircraft.

Sandwiched between bomb blasts and attacks on government institutions by insurgents, the Zero Units, whose members are estimated to be in the thousands, received scant scrutiny until 2013. Under the Trump administration, CIA Director Mike Pompeo announced that the agency was ramping up its approach in Afghanistan: “The CIA, to be successful, must be aggressive, vicious, unforgiving, relentless — you pick the word.”

The following year, in 2018, The New York Times published a report about the 02 unit using brutal tactics to terrorize Afghans. In October 2019, Human Rights Watch documented 14 cases — some amounting to war crimes — involving the 02 unit and other CIA-backed strike forces. In 2020, The Intercept reported on 10 night raids by another Zero Unit, 01, that targeted religious schools.

While the stories described deadly raids, not much was said about why the intelligence guiding them was often flawed. It appeared to be a pattern that went hand in hand with the night raid strategy. I spoke with two self-proclaimed “geeks” who helped build or operate spy technology during the peak years of war. They said failure was predictable, despite the huge advances in technical intelligence. The most cutting-edge equipment in the world, they said, didn’t make up for the deficits in understanding “the enemy” by the Americans processing the intelligence.

Lisa Ling spent 20 years in the military and built technology that was ultimately used to process intelligence that targeted Afghans. “I understand very viscerally how this tech works and how people are using it,” she said. The counterterrorism mission is essentially: “Who am I fighting, and where will I find them,” she said. But the U.S. struggled to differentiate combatants from civilians, she said, because it never understood Afghanistan.

Her thoughts echoed what I’d heard from Afghan intelligence officials. “Every gun-wielding guy in this country is not a Talib because people in rural Afghanistan carry guns,” said Tamim Asey, former deputy minister of defense and Afghan National Security Council director general.

In Afghanistan, Air Force technician Cian Westmoreland built and maintained the communications relays that underpinned America’s drone program. His grandfather’s distant cousin was Gen. William Westmoreland, a key architect of the night raid operations in Vietnam. His father was a technical sergeant and, Cian said, “ordered the missile parts for the initial bombing of Afghanistan.”

It became clear to Westmoreland that civilian casualty reports from the drone strikes sent up the chain of command were inaccurate. “Unless there are operators physically checking body parts on the ground, they have no idea how many civilians were killed,” he said. “And they have no idea how many ‘enemies’ they actually got.”

When he finished his deployment in 2010, Westmoreland says he was handed his evaluation, stating that he’d assisted on 200-plus enemy kills in five months. He ran to the bathroom, he said, and threw up. “How many is the plus? Who is counting? And who knows who was killed?”

A source familiar with the Zero Unit program said it “stayed in close contact with a network of tribal elders,” who alerted program officials when civilians were killed. Any such deaths, the source said, were “unintended.”

At times, Westmoreland said, bystanders paid the price simply because they were near a suspected target’s cellphone.

Speaking with them, it became clear that the language of the intelligence world itself could hide its weaknesses. Ling said that when intelligence officers cite “multiple sources” of intelligence to justify an operation, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have confirmatory information. It could simply mean that they have an overhead image of a house and an informant telling them who’s inside.

October 2019 • Kabul

For six months, I pursued the most elusive perspective on the U.S. night raid strategy — the Zero Unit soldiers themselves; the men killing their own compatriots on U.S. orders.

In October 2019, two men whom I’ll call Baseer and Hadi finally agreed to meet me. Both in their mid-30s, they were friends, fathers and comrades-in-arms. Hardened by violence and the isolation of the Zero Units, they were initially baffled by my interest, not just because they feared discovery. Why would I want to talk to killers? They decided to speak, they said, because of their unease with missions gone awry — and their distrust of the motives of those directing the attacks. I agreed to protect their identities.

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“They are Americans killing Afghans, and we are Afghans killing Afghans,” Baseer told me. “But I know the Americans do not lie awake at night with the guilt I have.”

Clouds of cigarette smoke swirled through shafts of sunlight in the dimly lit backroom of a quiet fish restaurant on the outskirts of Kabul where we finally met. Outside, the day’s first light paled into a gray glare glinting off gridlocked cars waiting to pass through fortified checkpoints into the capital.

Baseer sat cross-legged on the well-worn carpet, balancing a cellphone on each knee and grasping a cup of green tea between his jeweled fingers. His neat mustache caught a bead of sweat as it dripped from his brow. His impeccable grooming was at odds with the mismatched socks peeking from beneath his shalwar kameez.

He took a long drag on his cigarette, and I noticed finger-sized bruises stretching around his neck. Although he caught me looking at the bruises, he made no effort to explain them. He rolled his neck from side to side to loosen kinks and rubbed his hands together. He was eager to talk.

Sitting off to one side, Hadi wore a leather bomber jacket (“like Top Gun”) that dwarfs his wiry frame. It was 80 degrees, but Hadi only removed his beanie briefly, to absently rub a long, silvery scar that stretched across the top of his head. He was wary and toyed nervously with the gold watch that hung from his skinny wrist. His eyes darted to the door at every hint of movement.

According to Baseer, Hadi is the joker of the two. He squeezed his friend’s shoulder reassuringly, grinning at him. “Don’t worry, she’s not American,” he said in Pashto. In an attempt to reassure them, I tell them I am English, not American, and of Afghan and Pakistani descent. Hadi smiled weakly, but it was clear he was unconvinced.

Both soldiers had obtained leave passes under false pretenses to meet me. The relationship between journalist and soldier seemed to offer them a space where they could discuss their actions — even boast about them when marveling at their superior training and autonomy — because I think they knew I wasn’t going to turn them in or use their stories as leverage.

Baseer’s family had left Afghanistan when he was 3, during the same fractious conflict that killed my own family. Eventually, his family settled in a refugee camp in Peshawar in Pakistan. Growing up, he considered both the Americans and the Soviets infidels, but he later came to realize that the Taliban have their own cruelties.

When he returned to Afghanistan at age 16, he lived in yet another refugee camp. “I wanted to be a politician, but there were no jobs.” Baseer eventually became a bodyguard for his father, a police officer, before signing on with the police as well. The poor pay pushed him to join the military and then the 02 unit in late 2016, where he said he was paid about $700 per month in American currency — more than three times what regular soldiers made. He also received eight months of training from Turkish and American soldiers at several locations in Afghanistan. “The 02 had the weapons and power, and I liked the idea of duty related to operations and fighting,” he said.

Hadi transferred to the 02 from the Afghan commandos in 2017. “It was my dream to join ‘the Infamous Zero Unit,’” he said. “I thought I would be part of building and securing a new Afghanistan, and as the Americans say,” Hadi briefly switched to English, with an American twang: “‘blast them out of their holes’ and ‘send them to hell.’ I wanted to get the bad guys.” He paused. “At first, the thrill was intense. But the job wasn’t this clear in the end. You know, I became the bad guy, or maybe I wanted to be the bad guy all along.” He looked away, fingering a frayed edge of the carpet.

Once in the units, the men said, it often seemed like they weren’t fighting Afghanistan’s battle at all. The CIA, with the aid of American soldiers on the ground, they said, ran the show. “They point out the targets and we hit them,” Baseer said, adding that about 80 soldiers go on a raid and “10 Americans, sometimes 12, join every operation.”

“After we return to base, we count how many soldiers were lost,” he said. Many Afghan soldiers have been killed, but not Americans: “They are out of the war.”

December 2019 • Kamal Khel, Logar Province

Over the weeks, Baseer, Hadi and a third Zero Unit soldier, Qadeer, updated me on their raids. They showed me chaotic videos they’d kept on their phones. Baseer had been keeping a diary, and he began sharing extracts with me.

At first, he gave me simple reflections: the time he stole the car keys for a joy ride or when they played volleyball and watched Bollywood movies with the Americans at their base. But over time, he began to share stark excerpts that showed he was keeping a count of those killed. One noted that a dead boy reminded him of his own son.

At an abandoned office one morning, Baseer and Hadi told me about a raid that seemed to haunt them. Hadi took a deep breath. It happened in July 2019 in the remote village of Kamal Khel in Pul-e-Alam district of Logar province, in eastern Afghanistan.

That night, he said, word had come that a handful of suspected Taliban militants were holed up in Kamal Khel. Thunder from a coming storm rumbled in the distance as he, Baseer and their 70-strong battalion scrambled aboard a fleet of camouflaged, heavily armed Toyota Hilux trucks. Tucked in “the cradle” in the middle, protected, were a dozen men he described as American special forces soldiers.

At 2 a.m. they roared out of the pitted concrete walls of Forward Operating Base Shank, a former U.S. stronghold famed for the sheer volume of Taliban rockets that had battered it. En route, their Afghan commander relayed details about the night’s four targets. As the city’s lights faded, the convoy split, driving into the storm to approach the village from opposite directions. Half a mile outside of Kamal Khel, they left the trucks to approach on foot over the rocky terrain and dry riverbeds.

As they grew close, their night vision goggles illuminated in fluorescent green hues a handful of family homes. Moving swiftly, they trained their weapons and laser sights on the houses ahead.

Suddenly, a rocket-propelled grenade shrieked out of the blackness behind them, exploding against one of the trucks. Even under his noise-canceling headset, Baseer said, the blast deafened him. Ears ringing, he and the other soldiers scrambled for cover. As bullets snapped overhead and muzzle flashes erupted from the surrounding darkness, one of the American soldiers gave the order to open fire.

“Smoke ’em,” an American voice ordered over the radio.

Baseer said he flattened himself against the mud wall of a nearby home. To his left, a soldier relayed updates to the base. To his right, Hadi squeezed off shot after shot.

It was 4 a.m. when the echo of gunfire finally subsided. As the first hints of dawn crept over the nearby mountains, the soldiers moved door to door searching for the raid’s targets. The suspected Taliban militants were nowhere to be found. But in a nearby doorway, four bodies lay on the ground — a man, a teenage girl and two children.

Baseer says he crouched by the bodies, his helmet camera capturing the carnage. The children were so covered in blood that it was difficult to guess their ages. The teenager’s body was twisted at an unnatural angle. “Don’t touch them,” Baseer said his commander ordered, calling the soldiers back to the trucks.

Baseer and Hadi looked at me angrily. “The militants were not in the target house,” Baseer said. “They were not even inside the village. They had changed location and started firing on us from behind,” he said. He paused and locked eyes with Hadi.

“I can’t say who killed them, the Americans or us … all of us were shooting,” he said, and there were no Taliban members residing in the compound they targeted. “The intelligence was incorrect. Or the Taliban had better intelligence than us.”

The raid, though it was like so many others, felt like a tipping point. They returned to the base that night with questions and anger. It was the responsibility of their commander to write the after-action report and send it up the chain of command, and they didn’t know if it included the four dead. After the raid, they asked him if anything would be done about those killed, but they said they never got an answer.

Instead, they said, all the soldiers on the raid were required to sign a battle damage assessment, prewritten by their superior, along with a nondisclosure agreement. The assessment, Baseer said, noted no civilian casualties.

“These deaths happened at our hands. I have participated in many raids,” Hadi said, his voice thin and raspy, “and there have been hundreds of raids where someone is killed and they are not Taliban or ISIS, and where no militants are present at all.”

September 2020 • Kabul

The person I really needed to talk to, prominent Afghan officials said, was Rahmatulah Nabil. The former director of the National Directorate of Security had overseen the units during a critical transition period that began in 2012, when the CIA gave the Afghan intelligence agency nominal control. Although Nabil was no longer at NDS, I’d come to learn his ears, and his hands, are everywhere.

For months, Nabil avoided me, but in September I received a message around 1:30 a.m. telling me to meet him at his Kabul home later that day. I was granted 30 minutes. After navigating a maze of towering, pockmarked blast walls, a taxi dumped me by a nondescript gate in the east of the capital. Nabil was a compromised man, so when I saw six men guarding a gate, I knew I was in the right spot.

I was buzzed through a series of armored doors and guided into a large basement room by two burly bodyguards. The room was adorned with backlit murals of turquoise lakes under snow-capped mountains. Dozens of velvet chairs lined the walls and a few men milled around at the door. Nabil strode in and took a seat in a chair at the end of the room, larger than the others and with gold trim. He crossed his legs, lit a cigarette and asked if he could use my tea saucer as his ashtray. Before I could answer, he reached over and took it.

The conversation started easily enough. The CIA, he said, provided the logistics, intelligence and money in cash, and the Zero Units “conduct” the raids and “deliver” the target, with U.S. special operations forces soldiers joining in. If there was an area where the Americans didn’t have a presence, they had the Zero Units to go there for them, he said. “They needed us and we needed them.” Nabil oversaw the units from 2010 — around two years after their founding — until December 2015, except for a short stint as deputy national security adviser.

In 2014, with local anger growing over the raids, Nabil said, the U.S. and Afghan governments signed a security agreement that all American operations must be approved by the Afghan government, a protocol that was “followed for a while.” The agreement also gave the units more autonomy to conduct raids of their own.

Under such an arrangement, I asked, who’s responsible when the Zero Units get it wrong? The U.S., Nabil said matter-of-factly. “If they provided the intelligence, and the intelligence turns out to be false.”

But he also said that if the system was working, the Afghan government “should take responsibility” because all intelligence is supposed to go through it as well.

He switched the subject to how he professionalized the Zero Units, instituting a code of conduct after “something really horrible happened” and the government asked him what the rules of engagement were. Soldiers, he explained, killed the wrong target, perhaps because of what he called “personal” problems with local people.

“Before me,” he said, “they were basically without any laws. The U.S. was under pressure before because these units were misusing their power.” Nabil said the United States’ plan to staff the units with local Afghans who were “cheaper” and knew the area had backfired. The U.S., he said, failed to understand that tribal ties might cause the Afghan soldiers to provide false intelligence or have conflicted allegiances.

Nabil said he also oversaw the creation of the Afghan National Threat Intelligence Center in 2015. Known as Nasrat, it unified Afghan intelligence used in combat operations with the help of Resolute Support, the NATO-led multinational mission in Afghanistan. “It was because some of these operations went wrong that we put this center together,” he said.

I interrupted this mild boasting to tell him that I’d been tracking all the operations that the 02 unit had recently gotten wrong, killing civilians. He turned to face me. Despite some problems, he said firmly, the majority of the operations were correct.

I told him that I’d seen videos of civilians killed by the 02 unit. Even though he’d left the agency, had he seen those videos?

Nabil paused and the conversation took a startling shift. “Yeah, but the problem is, nobody takes it seriously.” When these accidents increase, you become used to these deaths, he said, “and then you lose the sense of seriousness. Like when you see blood for the first time, you feel something. Tenth time, nothing.”

In 2019, I said, I found more deaths due to incorrect targeting or crossfire than any other year, pulling my crumpled notes from my pocket to show him just how many I had found.

“Yes, I agree,” Nabil interrupted, without looking at my notes, then offered a startling admission: He was aware that the units had been going on operations based on botched intelligence and that the soldiers, the commanders and higher-ups had faced no consequences if civilian deaths resulted. Nabil said he didn’t know how many civilians had been killed. He believed, in the end, that the units were used as tools by both sides, and that their targets were not always legitimate.

“One of the operations went wrong in Bagrami District and I went to the family myself and said: ‘We are sorry. … We want to be different from the Taliban.’ And I mean we did, we wanted to be different from the Taliban,” he said, trailing off.

October 2020 • Jalalabad, Nangarhar Province

After months of searching, the only night raid I could find that the Afghan government said it investigated was one so audacious that it captured the attention of both the current and former Afghan president. The raid killed four brothers, including one who was a legal adviser to the Afghan Senate and another who was a lawyer.

The night of the September 2019 raid, the family was at their home in Jalalabad, celebrating the recent return of one of the brothers from a religious pilgrimage. Qadir Seddiqi, the eldest brother who worked in the Senate, was in his room sleeping with his 10-day-old son in the crook of his arm. His father was joking with the youngest brother, while the other two drank tea with their mother.

After the raid, the 02 unit posted pictures on the NDS Facebook page of the brothers with weapons laid across their bodies, declaring that four ISKP militants had been killed. But when Shirzad and I visited in October 2020, family members told us that the photos were staged after the fact.

Mohammad Ibrahim, who found his nephews that night, believed the staging was to make them look like they had been killed because they had guns. As he talks, Ibrahim is jittery and keeps his head tilted, preoccupied by a helicopter circling above us in the fading light. Accounts of weapons being planted have emerged in several eyewitness reports about controversial operations led by British and Australian troops.

That night, the Zero Unit soldiers bound the brothers’ hands and wrote their names on pieces of tape they stuck to each man before shooting them, said their cousin Wasiullah. “That was the last time I saw my cousins, with labels on them.”

Wasiullah said a hood was placed over his head and he and eight others were taken to Forward Operating Base Fenty, the home of the 02, to gather biometrics, including facial images, iris scans and fingerprints. They were then left in a cell overnight, he said.

A day later, on President Ashraf Ghani’s orders, an investigative team arrived from Kabul. It was joined by prosecutors, the governor and the NDS director. “We gave them evidence,” Ibrahim said, including a bullet that had gone straight through one of the brother’s feet and into the mattress beneath him. One of the brothers was shot in the head and stabbed; another was “shot in the hands and feet and then twice in his head,” Ibrahim said. “His wedding ceremony was only two weeks away. My heart broke.”

A press release issued by the NDS initially claimed that the 02 soldiers targeted alleged members of the Islamic State. Afghan government officials later backtracked and admitted that the brothers were innocent. The provincial government said in a statement that the 02 had conducted the raid.

After the family protested, Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, the director of the NDS at the time, resigned. Ghani tweeted that the raid happened despite “previous assurances and changes in guidelines” for operations and declared that there was “zero tolerance for civilian casualties.” He ordered the attorney general to investigate the incident immediately “and to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

Family members said they were assured that an investigation would be carried out into the incident but told me they were never contacted again.

November - February 2021 • Kabul

As my tally of the dead and injured grew, tracking civilian deaths through official American channels was proving nearly impossible. Afghan officials told me they lacked the resources to investigate and reiterated that these were CIA operations. Researchers and experts questioned whether “collateral” deaths could even be tracked, arguing that such a count would be classified.

Michel Paradis, a national security expert at Columbia Law School and a senior attorney with the Department of Defense, said that civilian deaths during U.S.-Afghan operations can fall into a bureaucratic gray area, with no one interested in claiming casualties they don’t have to.

Under the international Law of Armed Conflict, the military must differentiate between civilian and combatant, but in Afghanistan civilians and fighters often live in the same villages. I found that civilian casualties could easily be shifted to categories that allow them to be labeled as legitimate kills. In Afghanistan, there are many reasons one would need to protect themself. If a woman picks up a gun because masked men with weapons have invaded her home in the middle of the night, she could be labeled a combatant, involved in “direct participation in hostilities,” despite any other evidence.

The law specifies that “in case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian,” and it’s up to the military to establish “combatant status.” In reality, I found the families of those targeted in Zero Unit raids had no way to prove otherwise. And it was impossible to find out how, or if, the CIA recorded their deaths. And then there were those whose deaths were written off as “collateral.”

Two lawyers working for years with whistleblowers on Afghanistan war crimes told me they’d experienced similar roadblocks. “There is not any real desire from the Pentagon or the executive branch to track civilian casualties accurately,” said Jesselyn Radack, a national security and human rights attorney who represented Daniel Hale, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst, among others. Hale was convicted for disclosing classified information that nearly 90% of the people killed by U.S airstrikes in Afghanistan were not the intended targets. Radack said Afghans who were killed because of faulty intelligence or botched raids were often classified as if they were caught in legitimate crossfire or were part of a terrorist group.

Radack said she’d seen official accounts from operations in Afghanistan in which children killed by mistake were called “TITS,” or terrorists in training. Or, she said, a child “had the wrong father, so he was adjacent to terrorist activities. The ages of children had been changed to make them appear older than they were. … The pressure to make civilian casualties not civilian casualties is pretty intense.”

By the time the reports get to the congressional oversight committees, she said, they’re “undercounting deaths and overstating accuracy.”

She and others I spoke to said they believe U.S. officials create the impression that the night raid strategy is effective by “sanitizing,” or removing relevant details from, the reports before they are shared with Congress.

A CIA official denied this: “When reports — which can be lengthy — are provided to the Hill, they are not ‘sanitized,’ but simply summarized as is regular practice.”

Congressional aides and former intelligence committee staffers said they don’t believe they’re getting an accurate picture of the CIA’s overseas operations. They added that intelligence committee members who theoretically monitor such operations lack the capacity, and sometimes the willpower, to get information about the programs — or even understand which questions to ask.

A congressional source on the House Foreign Affairs Committee told me that Congress had also abdicated its authority over the CIA’s operations. “It is really clear that we have backed a lot of groups that did pretty horrific things,” he said. “It benefits people up here to not have to actually deal with these sort of things.”

Over the years, the task of publicly counting the dead had fallen to human rights organizations, which have produced a series of strongly worded, but largely ineffectual, reports detailing some incidental deaths, summary executions, torture and disappearances resulting from the Zero Units’ night raids. Even so, more than a dozen human rights groups I spoke to conceded it’s nearly impossible to track such incidents, especially those involving civilians.

The only organization I found that appeared to be consistently attempting to document those killed during raids was the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. It reported on one raid in which NDS special forces supported by international soldiers entered a medical clinic in 2019 and “shot and killed three civilian males, two of whom worked at the clinic and one of whom was accompanying a patient.” The organization said deaths of civilians during the operations in 2019 were at their highest level since 2009. They found that the 02 unit alone killed 80 civilians and injured 17.

In trying to count the civilian dead from 02 raids from June 2017 through July 2021, Shirzad and I used news reports, nongovernmental sources and eyewitness reports. We mapped the raids using geographical coordinates and satellite imagery, then used medical records, birth and death certificates, in-person witness interviews and a forensic database to identify the dead.

At medical facilities, doctors told us they’d never been contacted by Afghan or U.S. investigators or human rights groups about the fate of those injured in the raids. Some of them later died, quietly boosting the casualty count.

One coroner in Jalalabad described how, at times, 02 soldiers had brought bodies to the morgue themselves, dismissing the staff and using the facilities before leaving with the dead. These deaths were not allowed to be recorded by him or other staff.

After years of searching, we realized that our resulting tally of at least 452 civilians killed during 107 raids was almost certainly an undercount. In some of these raids, authorities claimed to have killed or captured insurgents, an assertion that is difficult to independently substantiate. There were hundreds of additional operations in which we couldn’t determine if the dead were civilians or militants.

And this count also does not capture another cost of the raids: all of those who were injured, sometimes suffering permanent disabilities. Among those I met was a young man who’d been struck in the cheek by shrapnel. Unable to afford surgery to remove it, the metal shard migrated to his eye, leaving him partially blind.

Shirzad and I were overwhelmed. We kept thinking: If this count was from just one of the four units for just four years, what was the full tally?

April 2021 • Kabul

In the spring of 2021, I squeezed into the backseat of a beat-up Toyota Corolla off the highway between Kabul and Jalalabad to tell Baseer and Hadi that I’d finally tracked down what happened in the raid that they had told me about back in October 2019.

It had taken me a year and a half to find any record corroborating the raid at Kamal Khel despite the four civilians killed. Then I discovered a radio reporter who had gone to the site the following day.

In Kamal Khel, the relatives of the dead met me and described what happened: That July day, a drone had dropped a missile just outside their mosque, killing 13 people, including Nasibullah, 11, and injuring his cousin Sebghatullah, 18, who died in his brother’s arms on the way to the hospital. Such airstrikes often came in tandem with the ground operations.

Later that night — when Baseer and Hadi and the Zero Unit descended on their home — the family was still awake, in shock, and mourning their deaths. Nasibullah’s body was cradled in the arms of his grandfather, Ghulam Rasul.

Chaos ensued in the blaze of explosions and gunfire. Masked soldiers stormed into the house, forcing the men outside to face the courtyard wall until the soldiers had left.

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Only then did Rasul find his 16-year-old granddaughter, badly injured in the hand and abdomen, lying on the ground by the bodies of Nasibullah and Sebghatullah. She later died. Her uncle had also been shot in the raid and died from his injuries. Rasul’s wife and a grandson were injured.

Rasul, who was forced to drop his dead grandson and flee when the shooting started, said that when he protested the killings, the provincial governor told him, “They have their own intelligence and they do their own operation.”

At the end of the meeting, Rasul told me bitterly, “the provincial governor gave us a parcel of rice, a can of oil and some sugar” as compensation for their loss. But no one ever told the family members why they were targeted or if the Zero Unit had simply got it wrong.

Baseer said it didn’t make a difference who had killed the family, a drone strike or the unit. “They were just children.” He paused, “I don’t know how in any meaningful way I can say I am sorry to that family. How do I even express it? I can’t.”

“I have had the feeling many times, you know, when you feel like you’re trapped in a corner, with no way out ... but I made the choice, I joined the unit, and there’s nothing I can do to undo it now,” he said.

In the three years I’d spent interviewing Baseer and Hadi, I’d come to see them as flawed soldiers who, in their way, were trying to pull some good out of their lot by sharing what they know, even if it meant exposing their role in killing innocents.

Hadi said that Afghans lived in fear. “They get killed by all — if it’s 02, if it’s Taliban, ISIS, criminals and others. It’s the same for them. Everyone kills these civilian Afghans.”

Hadi whispered to himself: “In war, nobody wins. I have caused unforgivable pain on my people. We can’t ignore these deaths. Our minds are damaged, too. So are the Americans’.”

But neither Baseer or Hadi believed that there would be a day of reckoning for the Zero Units. As our conversation ended, they climbed out of the car and disappeared into the night.

September 2021 • The Midwest, America

Early in my reporting, a former U.S. special operations forces member told me that “no one would give a shit” about the killing of Afghan civilians. But it “would be more of a story” if I had American soldiers coming forward. Since then, I’d been searching for an American willing to speak candidly about his time with a Zero Unit.

It shouldn’t be that hard, I reasoned. The CIA had been pointing Army Rangers and other special operations forces at targets in Afghanistan for more than a decade.

My conversations with a Ranger I call Jason, who agreed to talk as long as I withheld identifying details about him, started over the phone after he’d left Afghanistan and finished several months later when I traveled to meet him in the United States just two weeks after the final U.S. planes left Kabul. I confirmed his service with one of the units and corroborated his impressions with other Rangers.

When we first began talking, Jason had recently left a stint with a Zero Unit after six years with two unrelated Afghan special forces units who joined the Rangers on night raids throughout the country. Now he was sitting in a booth in a diner in the heart of the Great Plains watching the Taliban set up their new government more than 7,000 miles away.

The Department of Defense did not respond to questions about the Zero Unit operations.

He was stocky and trying to sit tall, perhaps to appear taller than he was, even though he wore flip-flops.

Initially, he was focused, puffing his chest out as he talked. He wanted me to know that he understood Afghanistan. His reasons for joining the fight echoed those of Hadi’s, “to catch the bad guys,” but like his Afghan counterpart, he now wondered if the units’ mission had been squandered. His rage is not over the civilians killed — those, he said, are the cost of war — but for the terrorists left alive.

I asked him to lead me through how the raids worked and how intelligence could go wrong. “That just happens. If you do enough operations, there’s gonna be some times where it’s not the right person. The intelligence isn’t perfect.”

As the conversation went on, he began waffling: They didn’t kill civilians. They never botched operations. They just shot back. OK, they did kill them, but they were just collateral.

I was startled to learn that military planners baked potential “collateral damage” into the pre-raid calculus they prepared from overhead photography and other intelligence. “Ninety percent of the casualties are because you just can’t see them,” Jason said. “We have something we call a slant, which predicts the number of people in the compound. So 3/6/8 is 3 men, 6 women and 8 children. But because the women and children are hidden inside, that slant in reality will end up being 3/14/36, and a lot of times it’s the kids and women who get caught in the crossfire.”

In other cases, he said, civilians just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. “There’s a time we threw a grenade into a hole where an ISIS guy was,” he said. “But there were a bunch of women and kids and in the crossfire a pregnant woman got shot. She was fine, but obviously the kids’ eardrums exploded and everything like that.”

During his four months with the Zero Units, Jason said, Americans were often present at every stage of the operation. The questioning of suspects at the scene was done by the Afghan soldiers, and the “verification” of terrorists was typically done by the American soldiers through biometrics “or people at the site of the raid saying they are terrorists.”

“While the unit did get some known bad guys,” he said, it was also sent after the wrong people or just low-level Taliban to boost their count.

He initially tells me that every death was accounted for in after-action reports and sent up the chain of command, and that any raid gone wrong was investigated. The reports included “what went well and what went bad and how to fix it,” he said, and were written by senior commanders.

When I told him that his account conflicts with what I discovered, that the injured often died later or in hospitals and that the dead were sometimes misidentified as insurgents, he paused, then conceded that only those at the scene would know if they counted the dead and if they double-checked who they had killed.

“I don’t know how many times we said we killed this one Taliban commander before we actually killed him,” he said. “But the U.S. just claimed they got the right guy.”

March 2022 • Kabul

I was working to put the final touches on my reporting when I began to see alarming reports from Afghanistan. City after city had surrendered to the Taliban. U.S. authorities were scrambling to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans with ties to the American forces from the Kabul airport. The Zero Units had been deployed as a last line of resistance against the Taliban. In the end, they stood arms’ reach from one another securing the airport. Only some Zero Unit members made it out of the country.

Months later, I returned to see what was left of America’s secret war. Government offices were now inhabited by the Taliban, who targeted enemies much as the Zero Units did. The news archives I’d scoured had been deleted and the statistical records burned. The families of some victims had left the homes that bore the Zero Units’ bullet holes. The Afghan government officials who once brushed me off were now texting me to help them leave the country. And those heavily armed, widely feared Zero Unit trucks? They were now being used by the Taliban, who rode around the streets aimlessly with brand-new, American-made M4 rifles on their laps.

Baseer is one of those left behind. Our final meeting was at the fish restaurant where we’d first talked three years earlier. He and others who had served with the 02 were living off the grid. The Americans’ promises that they would never abandon their Afghan allies had proven empty.

After sending me months of desperate texts from different hiding spots, Baseer told me he no longer wants to leave his homeland. He said he realized he fought a messy, failed war for a country that he now believes never cared about Afghanistan. Angry, bitter and disappointed, he wants no part of America.

His feelings are the same reason that the Taliban grew, he said. “The U.S. and our NDS made a lot of enemies,” he said. “Look at me now. I will never support an American war in Afghanistan again.” (After months on the run, Baseer would later be detained by the Taliban. No one has been able to contact Hadi since the Taliban takeover. He is presumed to have been killed.)

After the fall of Kabul, my reporting partner and now friend, Shirzad, was airlifted with, ironically, thousands of Zero Unit soldiers and their families to Fort Dix in New Jersey. He was deeply troubled by the units’ killing of Afghans. But amid the foreignness of America, the soldiers were just Afghans like him, lost and frightened. He sounded almost confused by this realization. In December, he was finally allowed to leave Fort Dix to study for a doctorate at an American university.

I tried to find out what the U.S. was going to do with all the men it had trained to kill with precision. Would it just dump them into America? Or would it find a new use for them?

Only one of the 02 unit commanders picked up my call. He’d just arrived in Sacramento, California, after five months at a U.S. base and 20 days in a hotel in Los Angeles. There is no plan yet for him or his men. They’d been dispersed across the country, “but our skills and abilities are not being utilized and we are jobless.”

As for me, the trauma of compiling a body count had taken a toll. As I processed the grief of family after family and the photographs of blood-soaked bodies, I started waking up with bruises on my arms and legs. “It’s a psychosomatic disorder,” a psychologist friend told me. The splotches had started appearing, I realized, when I started sharing my personal story for the first time. It made me wonder what kind of bruises the Zero Units, and America, had left on Afghanistan.

I was devastated to find out that Mahzala died quietly in her home in December, just days from the anniversary of her sons’ deaths. She never got her answers.

Neither did I. The path to Pakistan to uncover my mother’s roots still taunts me, as do the questions about what happened the night of the attack that killed her. For now, the answers remain buried under so many other tragedies.

In the end, I got closure for my own personal story from the unlikeliest source: Baseer. He was not the one who killed my mother and sister, but he was a perpetrator nonetheless. Seeing his remorse, his torment over the hideous things he’d done to his country and his compatriots for someone else’s agenda loosened something in me.

“It will be good if you leave Afghanistan as soon as possible,” he said, warning of escalating violence. “At first I was thinking: ‘Everyone wants to get a visa to go out. Why do you want to come in?’” As he got up to leave, he turned to me. “I understand it now; I understand you now. You came for your story, not mine.”

July 2022 • Jalalabad

In the summer of 2022, I was in Afghanistan on another story when I was approached by a skinny teenager named Spin Ghar who wanted my help reading a letter from the U.S. military. Six years earlier, he told me, he’d been shot by 02 soldiers next to his home outside their base in Jalalabad. He was 12 when it happened, pulling up his shirt to show me scars from three bullet wounds. He still lives next to the once heavily fortified base, which is now empty, except for a lone Talib on his phone.

After the shooting, he received surgery at two U.S. bases, he said. The 02 soldiers gave his family the commander’s name and number. “They said they would give assistance.”

He showed me the claim form, which had been filled out in English by the Americans at the base. His age had been bumped up to 14.

In 2020, they finally received the letter, written in English. I told him the letter said the U.S. military had rejected his claim: “I understand that you suffered a serious injury in the incident, and sympathize with your situation,” wrote Capt. Andrew R. Dieselman, the U.S. foreign claims commissioner at the Jalalabad air base. “Unfortunately, because our investigation determined U.S. Forces were not involved in the incident, I am unable to compensate you.”

Spin Ghar looked straight ahead in silence and finally seemed to gather some strength, turning to me and saying, “What should I do now?"

Resolute Support, which is named on the letterhead, told me my questions are best directed to the CIA.

As I left Spin Ghar’s home that day, feeling helpless yet again, a woman, his neighbor, rushed toward me, waving a piece of paper. It was a claims card from a U.S. task force. Her sister, she said, “lost her mind” in 2019 after an American drone crashed into their house right next to the base, killing all three of her young children.

She asked me to take the claims card to the Americans. I told her the Americans have left Afghanistan.

She looked at me stunned. She had no idea. “When are they coming back?”

Sources

To understand the Zero Units’ operations and their consequences, as well as the CIA’s role in training, funding and directing them, Lynzy Billing traveled hundreds of miles across Nangarhar province, one of the most volatile regions of Afghanistan. She visited the sites of more than 30 night raids of the 02, one of four known Zero Units. She was joined by a forensic pathologist, who used a variety of government records to help verify the identities of the dead.

She conducted more than 350 interviews with current and former Afghan and U.S. government officials, Afghan and U.S. defense and security officials and former CIA intelligence officers. She spoke with U.S. congressional oversight committee members, counterterrorism and policy officers, civilian-casualty assessment experts, military lawyers, intelligence analysts and representatives of human rights organizations. To unravel what happened at the sites of raids, she interviewed doctors, hospital directors, coroners, forensic examiners, eyewitnesses, family members and village elders. She spoke at length with two active Zero Unit soldiers, an American Ranger who had participated in Zero Unit operations and the former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency.

Billing also reviewed leaked security incident reports from the country’s intelligence agency, police and nongovernmental organizations, and hundreds of local news articles, copies of emails, phone conversations and declassified intelligence files.

Methodology

Counting civilian casualties that resulted from CIA-backed operations during the war in Afghanistan proved to be incredibly challenging. It was chaotic. Raid sites were often remote and in dangerous areas, left inaccessible by the fighting. The victims sometimes died later in hospitals from their wounds or were quickly buried without anyone going back to investigate. No one organization was able to keep complete tallies. We set out to catalog the civilians killed during raids by the 02 unit over a four-year-period: June 2017 to July 2021.

In records and reports, the 02 unit appeared under different names and the raids were at times recorded as “search operations,” but 02 was the only such strike force — identifiable by its tactics, equipment, vehicles and ability to call in U.S. air power — operating in Nangarhar during this time period. In some cases eyewitnesses say the 02 announced themselves to those at the scene.

We obtained a comprehensive list of the 02 unit operations from a reputable international organization, including dates the raids were conducted, their locations and the number of casualties. We then collected additional alleged civilian casualties from lists kept by human rights organizations, as well as from local news and radio reports and government and police files. We sought corroborating records and eyewitness testimony for each raid.

Using satellite imagery and geolocation, we were able to verify the locations of many of those raids, especially those accompanied by airstrikes, by searching for evidence of damaged homes and structures. We mapped these against what we found during site visits, such as blown-open doors, burned homes and walls marked by bullet holes, as well as videos of the raids and their destruction obtained from eyewitnesses.

We traveled to the scenes of more than 30 raids to speak with survivors, eyewitnesses and family members of those killed. To determine who the dead were, we used government statistical department records, IDs and hospital records, which included such details as name, gender, estimated age and tribal affiliation. In some cases, we also found death certificates and coroner reports at the federal forensics department in Kabul.

ProPublica research reporters reviewed the list of hundreds of raids that Billing brought back from her years of reporting, cross-checking her list against the evidence she’d compiled and publicly available descriptions of the events including news accounts and NGO reports. From there we produced a list of raids and civilian casualties that, while certainly an undercount, was supported by the evidence available to us.

During the process of visiting villages to corroborate the unit’s night raids, we were continually told about other raids and other deaths. Almost every witness to a raid seemed to know another witness to another raid. We do not believe by any stretch that this is a full accounting of the 02 raids casualties. It is a tally that will now remain unreported and uninvestigated.

Contributors to this story include: design and development by Anna Donlan, ProPublica; research by Mariam Elba, ProPublica; and fact-checking by Hannah Murphy Winter for ProPublica.

Contributors to the videos include: illustration and animation by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons, ProPublica; field production by Lynzy Billing, Muhammad Rehman Shirzad and Kern Hendricks for ProPublica; and music by Milad Yousufi for ProPublica.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Lynzy Billing, video by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons.

For three weeks this fall, Israeli forces closed all roads leading in and out of Nablus, a Palestinian city of 170,000 people and the economic hub of the occupied northern West Bank. As residents of the city and surrounding villages were locked in or out — cut off from jobs, school, family, and access to medical care — Israeli soldiers entered the city with armored vehicles, placed snipers on rooftops, shot at homes, and reportedly blocked medical crews from aiding the wounded. At least six people were killed and dozens were injured during the siege, which a prominent Palestinian human rights group denounced as a form of “collective punishment.”

Israeli officials said the raids were targeting members of a new militant group that has emerged in recent months; the siege followed the killing of an Israeli soldier near the city in October. While Israel partially lifted the road closures earlier this month, the 21-day lockdown signaled a remarkable escalation of Israeli force in a part of the West Bank that is — at least nominally — under the control of the Palestinian Authority. But the incursions and blockade of Nablus were only the latest in a growing series of Israeli acts of aggression in the West Bank that have put Palestinians on edge even before an Israeli election returned right-wing former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power this month. While the territory, home to nearly 3 million people, has been under military occupation since 1967, and violence by Israeli soldiers and settlers is relatively commonplace, the last few months have reminded residents of past surges in Israeli violence that were met with widespread Palestinian resistance, including during the Second Intifada of the early 2000s.

Palestinians wait to enter the city of Nablus, after the Israeli army closed the checkpoint in the occupied West Bank, on Oct. 21, 2022.

Photo: Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett

“It’s the low-grade death by 1,000 cuts that they have perfected.”

Top: Tires burn on a road in Bethlehem following the funeral of 7-year-old Rayan Suleiman on Sept. 30, 2022. Left/Middle: Rayan Suleiman’s mother holds his body in the occupied West Bank, on Sept. 30, 2022. Right/Bottom: Relatives mourn the death of Palestinian teenager Mahdi Hashash, who died of shrapnel wounds from an Israeli raid, during his funeral in the refugee camp of Balata near the West Bank city of Nablus on Nov. 9, 2022.Photos: Getty Images

Members of the Lion’s Den resistance group fire into the air during the funeral of Tamer al Kilani in the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank on Oct. 23, 2022.

Photo: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images

Israeli soldiers arrive during a Palestinian demonstration against Israeli settlements in the village of Beit Dajan near the West Bank city of Nablus on Nov. 4, 2022.

Photo: Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Alice Speri.

A recent revival of local prime-time TV documentaries has highlighted some thorny social issues and raised awkward questions about justice and equality.

Among them was a revealing investigation this week showing the cost of white-collar crime dwarfs that of welfare fraud, but draws lighter punishments and gets a lot less scrutiny in the media than the kind of crimes that play out in public.

For years, the heyday of New Zealand TV documentary and current affairs seemed to be in the past.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: ‘Uncovering injustice and inequities’

Gone are the days of Mike McRoberts’ mellifluous voice introducing local investigative stories on 60 Minutes after a few seconds of distinctive clock-ticking. The popular franchise stopped producing local content some years ago.

20/20, while still on air, mainly releases repackaged content from the US these days and in spite of the continuing long-form journalism of TVNZ’s Sunday, documentaries have been fading from New Zealand screens for some time.

Lately though, TVNZ has revived the strand Documentary New Zealand with a series of eight new NZ On Air-funded films for TVNZ1 on Tuesday nights between Eat Well For Less and Coronation Street, and on the on-demand service TVNZ+.

Among the most engaging and often moving ones was No Māori Allowed, which aired last week.

Pukekohe discrimination
The documentary delves into the history of Pukekohe, where for decades Māori were subject to discrimination and sometimes, violence.

It deftly navigates several tensions — first between local Pākehā and Māori who lived though an era of segregated movie theatres, but also between the people trying to bring the area’s past to light and the kuia and kaumatua who lived through it, and still bear the scars.

While No Māori Allowed highlighted historic racism and the legacy it has left, this week’s documentary Crime: Need vs Greed trains its eye on a more modern form of racial and economic injustice.

Host Tim McKinnel argues we’ve “sleepwalked” into a $5 billion white collar crime wave of costly fraud and deception offences while the attention of our justice system and media is turned toward often low level street crime.

“While society and the media fixate on gang crimes, ram raids, and other forms of street crime, white collar criminals have been robbing us blind. We’ve sleepwalked into a $5 billion crime wave that no-one wants to talk about. Instead we’re tough on crime and spend billions locking up the poor,” he says in Need vs Greed.

Not only have white collar criminals been robbing us blind — the documentary presents evidence they’ve been getting away with it.

Tax law specialist Lisa Marriot delivers some staggering statistics on the double standard. Her research found people convicted of tax fraud crimes averaging $287,000 have a 22 percent chance of receiving a prison sentence — while those convicted of welfare fraud worth an average of $67,000 are imprisoned 60 percent of the time.

The lack of consequences for white collar crime belies its scale and impact.

$1.7 billion fraud prosecution
A 2014 investigation by New Zealand Herald journalist Matt Nippert helped trigger a $1.7 billion fraud prosecution against the company South Canterbury Finance.

In Crime: Need vs Greed, he says it’s “more than every Treaty settlement combined in New Zealand’s history” or “a hundred years of benefit fraud in one go”.

Given the relative figures involved, it’s worth asking why benefit fraud or street crime like ram raids get so much more attention.

Nippert says part of the reason is obvious: street crime is visceral and a lot more understandable to audiences.

“It’s the comparison between a Jerry Bruckheimer action flick and something much more slow and sedate like a documentary spread across, say, six episodes.

“I think ram raids are quite a violent, shocking act and should be covered. But they are also effectively a pre-scripted sort of action heist movie — with car crashes and getaways and splitting the loot — all condensed down to this one moment of action.

“But the white collar financial crimes often occur very subtly, very carefully, very deceptively over years, sometimes decades,” he says.

Fraud story legal threats
Fraud stories also pose legal difficulties, partly because the perpetrators can afford to hire lawyers and threaten defamation action.

Nippert is routinely threatened with legal action over his investigations. The Herald‘s lawyers have to check almost everything that he writes.

Meanwhile, street crime is more likely to come before the courts, and reporting on it is less likely to be subject to suppression orders and legal challenges from defendants.

“A lot of reporting comes from courts are a reflection of wider problem,” Nippert says.

“You will tend to get far more disadvantaged people in the District Court facing charges. On the other side of it, when you’re looking at sort of white collar crimes . . . I’ve run into suppression orders many, many times. So that not only maybe dampens down the reporting, but also slows it down enormously.”

Journalists have been highlighting inequities in the court system recently, with NZME running the Open Justice project and RNZ’s Is This Justice, which revealed — among other things — that Pākehā are discharged without conviction and granted name suppression at higher rates than Māori, that 90 percent of High Court and Court of Appeal judges are Pākehā, and that judges could be presiding over the cases of people they know.

Human brain ‘and zeros’
Another issue contributing to the comparative dearth of fraud reporting is that the “human brain does funny things when it sees zeroes,” Nippert says.

“The difference between $10 million and $100 million becomes quite ethereal. But everyone can understand what $1000 in the hand looks like.”

Despite the inherent disadvantages fraud stories have in a click-based media economy, Nippert says more reporters should cover them because of the huge costs these crimes impose on victims and society.

That might mean doing a basic accountancy paper at university or downloading Google Sheets onto their phone, but the barriers to entry aren’t as high as some reporters might think, he says.

“I used to think I didn’t have that sort of brain [for numbers]. But then I was made redundant and the only job I could get was a business reporter in the NBR and you know, if you give it a go, I think you’ll find it’s a lot more straightforward than you’ve conditioned yourself to fear,” he says.

“It’s important to point out for readers that some of these cases are alarming and we should be paying close attention because that $100 million isn’t just $100 million from some insurance company — that’s likely to be a thousand families who have lost their nest egg, and whose financial future is extraordinarily precarious, probably for the rest of their lives.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Early Tuesday morning, Turkish police simultaneously raided several homes and one newsroom in the cities of Ankara, Diyarbakır, Istanbul, Mardin, Urfa, and Van, as part of an investigation of the Ankara chief prosecutor’s office. The raids resulted in at least 11 journalists in police custody, multiple news reports said, detailing a secret investigation.

“Turkish authorities once again deprived several journalists of their freedoms under a court-ordered secret investigation. These journalists behind bars are unaware of what they are accused of, just like the journalists who were arrested in Diyarbakır in June who remain detained and uninformed,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Turkish authorities must immediately release the journalists in custody, return their confiscated property, and stop harassing the Kurdish media in Turkey with baseless charges that typically end up being related to their journalism.”

Diren Yurtsever, news editor for the pro-Kurdish Mezopotamya Agency (MA); MA reporters Emrullah Acar, Zemo Ağgöz, Berivan Altan, Selman Güzelyüz, Deniz Nazlım, Ceylan Şahinli, and Hakan Yalçın; and pro-Kurdish website Jin News reporters Öznur Değer and Habibe Erenare among the journalists in custody, according to those same reports, which said the detainees will be transported from other cities to Ankara. The police confiscated several cameras, computers, and other equipment while detaining the journalists, the reports said.

The 11th journalist in police custody was Mehmet Günhan, a former reporting intern at the MA’s Ankara newsroom, who was apprehended in the western city of Manisa.

The journalists will not be allowed to see a lawyer for 24 hours.

Police raided the MA newsroom in Ankara, entering the office with a lock pick during early morning hours with nobody from the outlet initially present and searched the office for six hours, MA reported. Police confiscated five computers, two hard drives, physical archives of print newspapers, notebooks with journalism notes, and several books.

In an unrelated case, Derya Ren, another reporter from Jin News, was taken from a house in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır by the police and sent to prison on Tuesday, her employer reported. CPJ could not immediately determine if Ren’s case is related to her journalism.

In June, a court in Diyarbakır ordered 15 journalists and a media worker from pro-Kurdish outlets to be held in pretrial custody as part of another secret investigation. These journalists remain jailed without being charged.

CPJ emailed the Ankara chief prosecutor’s office for comment but did not receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Public defender Merrill Nordstrom walked into a Mississippi federal courtroom in May 2021 ready to challenge the no-knock search warrant behind her client’s arrest.

It had happened two years earlier, after an informant bought less than a gram of marijuana from Antoine Bryant. Police broke open Bryant’s door with a battering ram, shattering the glass. Three children sleeping inside were startled awake.

Police found no cache of drugs, but they did find a pistol Bryant wasn’t supposed to have.

By the time Nordstrom asked a judge to toss out the evidence against Bryant, a year had passed since the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor during a no-knock raid in Louisville, Kentucky. Taylor’s death and the tactic that led to it had caused widespread outrage.

It was time, Nordstrom said, for similar scrutiny of how these warrants were used in Greenville, the Mississippi Delta’s largest city.

She had learned that most search warrants issued in Greenville were no-knock warrants, which allow law enforcement to barge into someone’s home unannounced. She suspected that many of those raids violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches.

“When I saw that they had orchestrated a confidential informant to purchase $10 worth of marijuana, and based on that went and asked for a no-knock search warrant — that, to me, was really egregious,” Nordstrom said. “That’s not what the Fourth Amendment is for. That’s not what our government is supposed to do.”

She faced a major obstacle. Though she had the search warrant for Bryant’s home, she couldn’t find records for most other raids in the city. The search warrants and supporting documents weren’t at the courthouse, even though the state Supreme Court’s rules require law enforcement to return warrants to the court.

Instead they were at the Greenville Police Department, hidden from view because law enforcement agencies, unlike the courts, can claim a broad public records exemption over records in their possession.

Greenville isn’t the only place in Mississippi where many search warrant records are inappropriately off-limits to the public. An investigation by the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal and ProPublica has found that almost two-thirds of Mississippi’s county-level justice courts prevent access to some or all search warrants and related documents. So do municipal courts in at least five of the state’s 10 largest cities, including Jackson, the capital.

Justice courts handle misdemeanor crimes, small civil cases and, often, search warrants. The judges who preside over these courtrooms are similar to justices of the peace in other states and are not required to have a law degree.

Some of those courts violate state rules by failing to require law enforcement to return search warrants and related documents. Other courts do keep search warrant records but won’t let the public see them, defying well-established jurisprudence about the availability of court records.

The independence and integrity of the judicial branch of government requires openness, said William Waller Jr., a retired chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court.

“You should have transparency,” said Waller, who helped write the rules of criminal procedure that some courts are violating. “After it’s been executed, the search warrant should be returned to a judicial officer and that should be a part of the files and available for public inspection.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized the public’s right to view court records, though it hasn’t ruled on the accessibility of search warrants in particular. Although federal appeals courts agree the public generally can view search warrants at some point in the legal process, they disagree on when those records become public. Because of those differing rulings, plus poor record-keeping and orders that seal the documents, it’s often hard to get access to warrants. Similar issues exist in many state courts.

Even against this landscape, legal experts say recordkeeping and access problems in Mississippi’s justice courts are extreme.

“It would be very, very atypical to have a jurisdiction where you never see any warrant materials,” said Katie Townsend, legal director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “That’s just not how it works.”

After Taylor’s killing, which occurred as police tried to enter her apartment to search for drugs they believed had been hidden there by a former boyfriend, activists called for bans on no-knock raids. But researchers and academics have little data about how often and why police use no-knock warrants.

Limited access to court records is part of the problem. A recent Washington Post effort to identify how many people have been killed in recent years during the execution of no-knock search warrants was hampered by sealed, missing or otherwise secret records.

“You can’t do justice in a corner,” said retired U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith, who reviewed applications for search warrants when he sat on the bench in Houston. He’s a vocal advocate for greater transparency in the process. “You have to see what judges are doing. It goes to the legitimacy of our legal system.”

In Mississippi, no-knock raids have caused fear, injuries and even death.

Two federal lawsuits over people who were shot in no-knock raids have been settled this year; a third suit over injuries caused in a raid is ongoing. Another federal suit involves a dispute about whether sheriff’s deputies entered without knocking. And in 2020, a state appeals court upheld damages awarded over a botched no-knock raid conducted several years before.

“It’s so dangerous for these guys to go in there the way they do,” said Michael Carr, a lawyer who has represented both clients whose homes have been searched and deputies who have been sued over such raids. “I’ve seen them kicking in people’s doors, and you’ve got little kids in there.”

Shot 17 Times Coahoma County sheriff’s deputies shot Maurice Mason at least 17 times after breaking down the door to search the home where he was staying in March 2020. Mason, who survived, was not the target of the search, was unarmed and was never charged with a crime. Mason sued the county, which denied any wrongdoing; it settled the lawsuit this year.

Grabbed a Gun When Police Burst In In January 2020, Coahoma deputies (the same ones who would later shoot Maurice Mason) burst into Trekevious Hayes’ home and shot him. In a court filing, he said he retrieved a gun for self-defense after the police shot first. Coahoma County Sheriff Charles Jones, however, said that deputies announced themselves and Hayes shot first.

Authorities charged Hayes with aggravated assault for allegedly shooting at the officers. He has not been indicted.

Shot While Holding an Air Gun In October 2015, Monroe County sheriff’s deputies shot and killed Ricky Keeton during a 1 a.m. no-knock raid. In depositions, deputies said he fired a pellet pistol and they shot back; his girlfriend said he thought someone was breaking in.

In September 2022, Monroe County agreed to settle a federal lawsuit over his death for $690,000, though the settlement hasn’t been finalized.

Raided the Wrong House In April 2015, state narcotics agents raided the wrong house in Vicksburg, forcing Henry and Rita Hunter to the floor at gunpoint — even after local police tried to intervene. A judge awarded the couple $50,000 following a civil trial.

No-knock warrants arose at the onset of the war on drugs under President Richard Nixon. Proponents argued that police had to be able to enter buildings without warning so suspects couldn’t destroy evidence or open fire on officers.

Despite complaints about the violence associated with these warrants, their use grew. The debate eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which considered the issue in three key cases and ruled that no-knock warrants must be the exception, not the rule.

In a key 1997 ruling, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court’s majority that if no-knock searches were broadly sanctioned, “the knock-and-announce element of the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement would be meaningless.”

Those rulings mean police must not only show a judge why they have probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of a crime, but they must also explain why the circumstances of the case justify a no-knock warrant.

That’s why Nordstrom grew concerned by the frequency of no-knock raids in Greenville. In a court filing, Nordstrom wrote that she had identified one case in which Municipal Judge Michael Prewitt allegedly signed a no-knock warrant even though police hadn’t asked for one on the application. She wanted to see if the judge frequently approved no-knocks without sufficient evidence.

Nordstrom sent her investigator to Greenville Municipal Court. Although Greenville authorities acknowledged that most search warrants in the city were no-knocks, the municipal court had no records of any searches authorized by Prewitt, the city’s only municipal judge for most of the prior two decades.

Nordstrom and Prewitt sparred in the May 2021 court hearing over whether the no-knock warrant in Bryant’s case was justified. Prewitt took the witness stand and acknowledged saying that he could issue a no-knock search warrant even to look for a sweater, but he denied “rubber-stamping” applications for no-knock warrants.

His explanation for signing so many no-knock warrants? Police conduct a lot of drug investigations in Greenville.

In an email to the Daily Journal and ProPublica, Prewitt said he meant to suggest that a no-knock warrant might be necessary to recover a sweater if it had forensic evidence that could easily be destroyed. (He did not offer that explanation when he testified in court.)

Greenville Police Chief Marcus Turner said his officers don’t execute no-knocks now due to staffing turnover among his investigators, but he plans to reinstate the raids.

Nordstrom couldn’t convince the federal judge overseeing Bryant’s case to throw out the evidence obtained in the search. Bryant ended up pleading guilty, but he has appealed the judge’s ruling on the no-knock warrant.

“I was so appalled by the no-knocks and how prevalent they are in that county,” Nordstrom said. “It would have been nice to figure out if there was a pattern.”

In any court, the clerk’s office, with its shelves upon shelves of file folders, is the place to go if you’re looking for key records in a criminal proceeding. Arrest warrants. Bail bonds. Judge’s orders. But not, in some of Mississippi’s justice courts, search warrants.

These are important documents. The warrant itself identifies the place police will search. The application for a no-knock warrant says why officers believe they should be allowed to barge into someone’s home without announcing themselves. The property inventory says what police seized during the search. Waller, the retired chief justice, and Matt Steffey, an attorney and law professor, said all that paperwork is supposed to be at the courthouse.

“We don’t keep those,” said Lamar County Justice Court Clerk Sandra Owen.

“Usually the return goes back to the sheriff’s offices,” said Jones County Justice Court Clerk Stacy Walls.

“I hardly ever see search warrants — before, during or after,” said Marion County Justice Court Clerk Wynette Parkman.

But Mississippi’s rules are clear: Law enforcement must bring search warrants back to court after serving them. Virtually all state courts in the country, as well as federal courts, have similar requirements.

“There needs to be a record that isn’t squirreled away in a law enforcement file,” said Steffey, who was involved in writing the rules of criminal procedure.

ProPublica and the Daily Journal surveyed all 82 county justice courts in Mississippi, as well as municipal courts in the state’s 10 largest cities. Although any judge in Mississippi can sign a search warrant, municipal and justice court judges commonly handle them.

More than a third of Mississippi’s justice courts are breaking rules that require them to keep all search warrant records. That includes 15 justice courts that have no search warrants among their records and 16 that have only some.

The reasons for the missing warrants vary because no two justice courts operate exactly the same way. Clerks say they don’t know when judges sign warrants, so they don’t know if police fail to bring a warrant back. In some counties, law enforcement agencies return some warrants but not others, and clerks don’t know why. Some counties have warrants only if charges were filed.

Few justice courts even keep a list of issued search warrants, making it easy for these documents to fall through the cracks.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Caleb Bedillion, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.

Six people were killed in Oke Hpo Aing village, two from Gway Kone, and one from Aung Chan Thar.

Two military columns of around 100 junta troops invaded villages around Taze township between Sept. 16 and Sept. 28.

"35 homes were torched in the east of the village when the military column left at four in the morning after they spent the night there," a resident of Kar Paung Kya village told RFA.

Homes were burned down in 20 villages, including Oke Hpo Aing, Aung Chan Thar, Yae U Kone, Inn Bat, Oe Thei Kone, Pay Kone, Gway Kone, Bay Yin Ywar Thit, Na Bet Gyi, Na Bet Nge, locals said.

There were 16 clashes between junta troops and People’s Defense Forces in Taze township. Fighting and mine explosions caused the deaths of five PDF members and roughly 50 junta soldiers, according to the local PDF.

The number of military deaths has not been independently verified. 

RFA contacted Aye Hlaing, a spokesman for the military council in Sagaing region, but he did not respond.

Myanmar’s military killed nearly 643 civilians and burned down almost 20,524 houses in Sagaing region in the year since Sept. 15, 2021, when authorities cut off internet access to townships where anti-junta armed resistance is strongest, RFA reported on Wednesday. The figures were compiled by RFA’s Burmese service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Sources in the area told RFA Burmese that the military had set nearly 50 villages alight since Aug. 22, forcing more than 20,000 residents from 80 villages in the area to flee their homes for safety.

Nay Zin Lat, the former National League for Democracy (NLD) representative for Kanbalu township, said a dozen people had been killed over the past 11 days and that three villages in Kyunhla township were set on fire on Thursday alone.

“Kyunhla township’s Hmaw Tone village is still burning today,” he said.

“Eight unidentified bodies were found on Aug. 23 near [Kyunhla’s] Tei Pin Seik village. They might have been burned to death or killed by heavy weapons. We cannot confirm anything yet.”

Nay Zin Lat said three fighter jets fired at Kawlin township’s Thit Seint Kone village at around 11:20 p.m. the same day, adding that “five villagers were hit and only one survived.”

The Kawlin Revolution Group, an anti-junta paramilitary organization, told RFA that four people were killed in the attack, including six-year-old Pyisone, Moe Aung, Zin Myo Tun, and his nine-months pregnant wife, Phyu Zar Win.

RFA tried to contact family members of the victims but was unable to reach them because the phone lines were cut.

Local anti-junta People’s Defense Force (PDF) groups announced that more than 40 enemy troops were killed in a skirmish between the PDF and the military near the border of Kanbalu and Kawlin townships on Aug. 22-23, and that three officers and a cache of ammunition were captured.

A resident of Aung Chan Thar village told RFA that junta troops started burning his and other villages in Kawlin township as they passed through the next day.

“The troops that were airdropped into the area set fire to our village. The fighting took place on Aug. 22 and they started burning the village on the 23rd,” the resident said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“There used to be 75 houses in our village. They set fire to almost every village they entered. All those from our village are on the run and are depending on food donated by people nearby. But when it rains, life is miserable and we don’t have any food or medicine.”

Sources told RFA that more than 500 houses have been burned since Aug. 22, including 75 from Kawlin township’s Aung Chan Thar village, as well as 59 from Kone See village, two from Tei Pin Seik village, 95 from Ein Chay village, 17 from Inn Yar village, and 53 from Ywar Koe Gyi village — all in Kyunhla township. They said at least 220 houses were torched in three other villages as well, without providing details.

“Even my pucca (brick) building has turned to ashes. All 95 of the houses have been destroyed,” said a villager from Ein Chay, who also declined to be named, fearing reprisal.

“Right now, we don't dare to stay [in the village] and we don't have a place to live. All the villagers have fled. When it rains, everyone has a difficult time.”

Other sources said the military had cut off internet access in Kawlin and Kanbalu townships and that details of the arson attacks remain unknown.

A member of a local armed-resistance unit said junta troops are still stationed in Kyunhla’s Ywar Koe Gyi and Kaing Wun villages and that a nearby area came under attack by air raid on Thursday night.

“The army columns are not leaving. They aren’t going anywhere,” the fighter said.

“Last night, a jet fighter came and fired at some places between their forces and our camp. It was between Ywar Koe Gyi and Kaing Wun villages and there were no casualties.”

RFA contacted the junta’s minister for social affairs in Sagaing, Aye Hlaing, but was unable to reach him on Friday.

The latest offensive in Sagaing came days after an Aug. 17 meeting between junta chief Snr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing and U.N. Special Representative Noeleen Heyzer, during which the former claimed that his forces were not responsible for using arson attacks against villages.

However, Data For Myanmar, a group that monitors the fires nationwide, said on Aug. 29 that a total of 28,434 homes have been burned across the country since the military’s Feb. 1, 2021, coup.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Chit Win, from a village in Kani township, was arrested by troops and ordered to guide them along a local highway.                                        

“About nine villagers were taken hostage by the troops along the way but I heard that only Chit Win was killed,” said a local who asked not to be named for safety reasons.

The army is advancing in two columns into Kani and Yinmarbin townships, where there is strong armed resistance to the regime. The two military columns are traveling very closely together allowing them to join forces in a pincer movement.

One group burned homes in Yinmarbin’s Yin Paung Taing village in a four-day raid that began on Aug. 11. Around 20 villagers’ bodies were discovered after troops left the village.

The military column continued to raid villages in Yinmarbin and Kani townships this week. 

A Monday raid on three villages forced hundreds of locals to flee, former residents told RFA.

The other military column traveled along the Chindwin River and raided three villages in Phaung Byin township, locals said.

On Tuesday, troops fired heavy artillery shells at Tha Ngar village.

“The army fired from up and downstream using six naval boats,” a local, who also asked to remain anonymous, told RFA.

“On August 24 the boats went up the river and docked at Kalewa. Security was tightened, then a military column with about 80 soldiers came ashore and occupied a monastery and a three-story building in Tha Nga village. They burned down more than 200 of the 500 houses in the village,” he said.

RFA’s calls to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Sagaing region spokesman Aye Hlaing went unanswered on Wednesday.

On Aug. 1, junta leader Snr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing gave a speech saying there could be no negotiation with terrorists and the military would fight back, in comments seen as referring to the shadow National Unity Government and People’s Defense Forces (PDFs). He also said the junta wanted to hold elections once fighting had been brought under control.

Sagaing residents say the junta does not differentiate between civilians and PDFs. They say attacks on villages by land, water and air are taking place because the junta considers Sagaing the region with the strongest armed opposition to the military and believes that villagers are sheltering PDFs.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

On August 18 Israeli forces carried out an overnight raid on the offices of seven Palestinian civil society organizations in the occupied West Bank. Armed soldiers stole documents, damaged property, and welded the office doors shut.

Six of the seven targeted groups (Al-Haq, Addameer, Defense for Children International – Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, The Bisan Center for Research and Development, and the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees) had been designated as terrorist organizations by the Israeli government in October 2021. Israel has never provided any public evidence to back up these allegations and classified documents obtained by +972, Local Call, and The Intercept show that the accusations are dubious.

Shortly after Israel designated the groups as terrorists, they presented the Biden administration with what they claimed to be "unequivocal" intelligence against the Palestinian NGOs. "We receive detailed information from the Israeli government," State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters at the time. "We appreciated the consultation. We're reviewing the information that they provided us."

That was ten months ago, but the Biden administration has still not made a public conclusion about the evidence. At an April 2022 State Department briefing Price reiterated the same sentiments from October and did not indicate that they were any closer to reaching a verdict. "We have received detailed information on that very question from our Israeli partners, and it's something that we're continuing to review," he said. "We received detailed information from our Israeli partners on the basis for their designation. We're taking a very close look at that ourselves."

At yesterday's briefing Price was hit with a barrage of questions from the AP's Matt Lee and Al Quds' Said Arikat about the raid. Price expressed "concern" about the raids and said the administration was awaiting information about situation from its Israeli partners, the reporters asked why it hadn't released a statement about the evidence from October and why people should expect them to assess any new evidence in a timely manner. Lee told Price that the administration seemed to be in a "perpetual state of limbo."

"We have not seen anything that has caused us to change our position," Price eventually admitted, which marks the first time that the administration has acknowledged that it doesn't share Israel's position on the issue. However, Price refused to disagree with the Israeli government directly, much less accuse them of lying.

"So you don't believe the Israelis' information?," asked Lee at one point.

"Intelligence information is always information that is the subject of analysis and different parties can read information differently," responded Price. "They can perceive of threats differently. Our own analysis heretofore of the information that was provided last year has not caused us to change our approach to these organizations."

When Price was asked why the administration is simply voicing concern, instead of condemning the raids, he curiously referenced October evidence. "I think the fact is that our Israeli partners..took an action..to designate these organizations as so-called 'terrorist organizations', said Price. "What we've seen publicly, what they've conveyed privately in recent hours, is that there's an appropriate basis for the actions that they have taken. It will be a matter of urgency for us to review the basis for that information."

U.S. complicity

On Twitter some pointed out that the Biden administration helped facilitate the raids via their inaction in regards to the original intelligence. "To be clear, while this is the furthest the U.S. government has come, it still falls very short of where it needs to be," wrote the Palestinian-American political analyst Yousef Munayyer. "Their equivocation for months emboldened Israel to raid these offices today. When will the US finally condemn these actions, how much further does Israel have to go?"

"The Biden Admin has had Israel's 'evidence' for almost a year," wrote Foundation for Middle East Peace president Lara Friedman. "It clearly knows this 'evidence' is BS—otherwise there is zero doubt they would have validated Israel's designations/designated the groups themself. But knowing the evidence was BS, they appear to have taken the politically & morally cowardly approach of staying silent—an approach that amounts to foreign policy gross negligence/complicity."

"Make no mistake: This is a Chekov's gun situation," she continued. "Israel put the gun on the table last October. The Biden Admin saw that gun and decided to do nothing to pressure Israel to remove it. Now, the Biden Admin cannot claim surprise when Israel aims/fires that gun at Palestinian human rights defenders."

A few Democratic House members also called Biden to act. "I am upset by the latest attacks by the Israeli army on Palestinian human rights groups," tweeted Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN). "Silencing human rights defenders is an attempt to avoid accountability. I reiterate calls from myself and my colleagues that the Biden administration immediately condemn this repression."

"Once again the IDF has launched a chilling attack on Defense for Children International-Palestine, a human rights organization supporting Palestinian children," wrote Rep. Betty McCollum. "The Biden administration must condemn these efforts to silence groups advocating for Palestinian human rights and civil society."

Last year McCollum introduced a resolution calling on the administration to condemn Israel's "authoritarian and antidemocratic" repression of the human rights groups.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Michael Arria.

Sources in Ye-U township told RFA Burmese that the military used helicopters to strike the village of Kone Thar three separate times on Wednesday after engaging with anti-junta People’s Defense Force paramilitaries and suffering heavy losses.

“They were shooting from two Mi-35 combat helicopters. They mainly fired at places where people were fleeing the war, like monasteries and schools,” said a resident of Kone Thar, who declined to be named for security reasons. “There were many injured."

“Earlier, there was an armed clash between a local PDF unit and junta forces somewhere between Ywar Meik Thar village and Kone Thar village. About 30 soldiers who got separated from the column were killed in the clash, and that’s when they began the attack from the air.”

The resident said several people were trapped in Kone Thar during the airstrikes and their status remains unclear.

The air raids on Kone Thar followed military attacks from Aug. 8-10 on Su Tat village in nearby Tabayin township, where a resident told RFA his was among around 500 homes destroyed by troop arson.

“The adults are very much depressed. Some women were crying and laughing, going crazy. As for the men, their spirits are quite low. They have lost houses and everything, which they had built with their life savings,” said the resident, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Everything has turned to ashes. The feeling is indescribable. The army that is supposed to protect the country is burning villages. It is so mean and despicable. It wouldn’t be so bad if they had taken away all the things in the houses. Burning the houses leaves nothing for us.”

The resident said this was the second time that the military had set fire to his village since a raid in June, when 165 homes were razed.

Representatives of the three-township Ayadaw-Myinmu-Chaung-U Revolutionary Alliance of PDF units said eight of their men were killed in a clash when they encountered junta troops near Ayadaw’s Kan Yin village on their way to Myinmu.

Sai Htoo of Ayadaw Township PDF said the deaths were among a number of casualties on both sides during nonstop clashes in recent days.

"The other day, the military killed eight of our men who had joined a meeting with the Ayadaw-Myinmu-Chaung Oo Revolutionary Alliance. They were brutally murdered — put in a car and the car was blown up,” he said.

“There's been fighting every day lately and there were casualties on both sides. They are attacking us from the ground as well as from above. They’re increasingly relying on airpower.”

Sources in Sagaing told RFA that fighting in the region since Aug. 8 had forced more than 12,000 civilians from nearly two dozen villages to flee their homes.

Attempts by RFA to contact junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun and the junta’s spokesman in Sagaing Aye Hlaing for comment on the situation in the region went unanswered Thursday.

Earlier this week, junta chief Snr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing said in an address that Sagaing has seen the most clashes of any region in the country since the military assumed control of Myanmar in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup, with 4,026. He vowed that the military will “restore the region to its original state,” without providing details.

Nay Zin Lat, a former Sagaing lawmaker, said he expects fighting there to intensify now that the military is focusing its efforts on the region.

“I heard that they are sending reinforcements to many townships in Sagaing region that are militarily important,” he said, noting that there has been an uptick in troop movements in Kanbalu township.

“I’m sure the fighting will become more intense very soon. There will be more frequent confrontations. The local civil defense forces will have to protect their families and relatives when junta troops come raiding and burning their villages. The more the troops act [this way], the more confrontations there will be.”

Residents of Sagaing told RFA that internet bandwidth has been reduced and, in some cases, entirely cut off in the region since March of this year.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs announced on Aug. 3 that 866,000 people had joined the ranks of Myanmar’s refugees since the coup, bringing the total number to more than 1.2 million, or more than 2% of the country’s population of 54.4 million.

Of the new refugees, some 470,000 were forced to flee their homes in Sagaing, where clashes between junta troops and the armed opposition are among the deadliest and most frequent in the nation.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party say the FBI carried out a violent raid on its properties with flash grenades and drones early Friday morning in Missouri and Florida. The pan-Africanist group has been a longtime advocate for reparations for slavery and a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy. The raid appears to be connected to a separate indictment of a Russian man accused of using U.S.-based groups to spread Russian propaganda and tampering with U.S. elections. We speak with Omali Yeshitela, chair of the African People’s Socialist Party, who describes how he was zip-tied while his home was raided. He says the FBI’s implication that their group was taking orders from the Russians is “the most ridiculous, asinine” narrative. “It’s an attack on the right of Black people,” says Yeshitela. “It’s an attack on our struggle for the absolute total liberation of every square inch of Africa.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“These are dark times for our nation”, former US President Donald Trump declared when he announced his mansion at Mar-A-Lago had been raided by FBI agents on Monday night Florida time.

An assault like this “could only take place in broken, Third World countries […] corrupt at a level not seen before”.

“They even broke into my safe!” he went on, comparing the FBI action to Watergate:

What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.

• READ MORE: The January 6 hearings have been spectacular TV, but will they have any consequences for Trump?
• Watergate at 50: the burglary that launched a thousand scandals
• US Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade – but for abortion opponents, this is just the beginning

Watergate was the hotel–office complex in Washington, home to the Democratic Party national headquarters, which was famously burgled in June 1972 by political operatives working for the re-election of Richard Nixon.

After more than two years of tortuous judicial and political inquiries, Nixon became the first — and still the only — American president to resign.

Trump says MAL has been searched by feds pic.twitter.com/UEC5KE5pJm

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 8, 2022

The differences between the raid on Trump’s mansion and Watergate are obvious. Trump’s mansion was raided by law officers executing a legally issued search warrant.

They entered by the front door and searched openly. Watergate was an illegal break in by political operatives acting secretly.

And where Trump, playing to his shrinking base, claimed last night’s raid was undertaken by “Democrats”, it was in fact conducted by a group of FBI agents. The Florida raid took place to enforce the law; the Watergate action broke the law.

Speculation intense
As of late Monday night Washington time, neither the FBI nor the Justice Department had made an official announcement about the raid.

However, on the basis of background comments by various officials, most media reports agree that its purpose was to secure various documents, including classified material, from Trump’s presidency. Some reports said the FBI officers left with 15 boxes of documents.

Trump had failed to meet the requirements of the innocuous-sounding national Archives Act, which exists to minimise the scope for corruption and abuse of process.

Trump has treated these legal obligations, and any accountability provisions, with contempt. Indeed, a soon to be published book by New York Times political correspondent, Maggie Haberman, includes photos showing Trump used to flush unwanted documents down the toilet.

The FBI raid follows the recent critical scrutiny of Trump’s actions in inciting a riot against the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when the congressional vote for the presidential election was declared. While politically humiliating to Trump, it is not clear that any legal action will follow from those hearings.

Congress has no power to initiate such action, and some speculate that Attorney-General Merrick Garland is reluctant to be seen to be undertaking politically motivated prosecutions.

Trump, speaking of himself in the third person, asserted in his statement on the FBI raid that “the political persecution of President Donald J. Trump has been going on for years.”

Loyalty or else
More than anything, that response is testimony to Trump’s paranoid worldview, which demands the loyalty of those around him despite any inconvenient principle or evidence to the contrary.

In another soon-to-be published book, Trump’s former White House chief-of-staff, John Kelly, a retired marine general, recounts how Trump said he wanted his generals to be loyal to him the way Hitler’s were loyal to him under Nazi rule.

One of the Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward, wrote a series of books about Trump and interviewed him several times. He reported an episode where Trump went through the faces of various Democratic congressional figures watching him deliver his State of the Union address, most of whom — according to Woodward — looked bland, bored or unemotional.

After each of them, Trump exclaimed to Woodward “look at the hate” – “they hate me”.

“It was a remarkable moment,” Woodward commented.

A psychiatrist might say it was a projection of his own hatred of Democrats. But it was so intense that it did not resemble the subdued reaction of the Democrats. His insistence that it was “Hate!” was unsupported by the images […] This Trump spectacle was unforgettable and bizarre.

From the Roe v Wade anti-abortion and anti-gun control rulings of the Supreme Court, to charges against Trump’s supporters for violence on January 6, to the various dubious activities of Trump himself, much in American politics looks likely to be played out in the courts over the next year or two — far more than is healthy in a democracy.

But when Trump has slashed and burnt his way through many political conventions, recourse to legal sanction may be the only means of protecting democracy. These are dark times for the American nation, but for precisely the opposite reason Trump asserted.

Dr Rodney Tiffen is emeritus professor, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Ex-President Donald Trump and supporters expressed outrage on Monday over an FBI raid on his Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago. The search, according to multiple media outlets, focused on illegally removed White House records. Robert Weissman, president of the advocacy organization Public Citizen, says while the raid on a former president’s private residence is unprecedented, it is too early to tell how it will impact the ongoing investigation of the January 6 insurrection. “I don’t think that we should jump on board of being too excited and trusting of the FBI,” says Weissman.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Image Source: Cap Badge of the UK Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) – Public Domain

The investigation by the Panorama programme of the BBC of the SAS unit alleged to have killed 54 detainees in Afghanistan in a six month period was wholly convincing. The death squads, which is what they were, appear to have made only cursory efforts to conceal the arbitrary killings, presumably because they had been covertly approved by senior officers.

A senior officer who worked at UK Special Forces headquarters told the BBC there was “real concern” over the squadron’s reports.

“Too many people were being killed on night raids and the explanations didn’t make sense,” he said. “Once somebody is detained, they shouldn’t end up dead. For it to happen over and over again was causing alarm at HQ. It was clear at the time that something was wrong.”

Internal emails from the time show that officers reacted with disbelief to the reports, describing them as “quite incredible” and referring to the squadron’s “latest massacre”. An operations officer emailed a colleague to say that “for what must be the 10th time in the last two weeks” the squadron had sent a detainee back into a building “and he reappeared with an AK”.

The email reads: “Then when they walked back in to a different A [building] with another B [fighting-age male] to open the curtains, he grabbed a grenade from behind a curtain and threw it at the c/s [SAS assault team]. Fortunately, it didn’t go off… this is the 8th time this has happened… You couldn’t MAKE IT UP!”

As the concerns grew, one of the highest-ranking special forces officers in the country warned in a secret memo that there could be a “deliberate policy” of unlawful killing in operation. Senior leadership became so concerned that a rare formal review was commissioned of the squadron’s tactics. But when a special forces officer was deployed to Afghanistan to interview personnel from the squadron, he appeared to take the SAS version of events at face value.

The BBC understands that the officer did not visit any of the scenes of the raids or interview any witnesses outside the military.

I want to make a further point about the night raids and the execution of prisoners, many of them held on the flimsiest evidence provided by paid informants who were often personal or tribal enemies. By so doing, the SAS delegitimised the Afghan government, foreign intervention, and became the recruiting sergeant for the Taliban.

The Americans had a similar campaign of killing alleged roadside bomb makers in Iraq. But a military survey found that the deaths only served to increase the number of bomb attacks on their forces. On the occasions when a death squad did kill a bomb making kingpin, he was immediately replaced by a more enthusiastic deputy or a vengeful family member and American losses went up.

Regular armies never seem to learn the lesson that a well-led insurgency will always try to lure them into inflicting collective punishment on a community. The French did this in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, the British in Northern Ireland – and then again in Helmand.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Cockburn.

Sources in Sagaing’s embattled Salingyi township told RFA Burmese that at least seven residents of Done Taw, Moe Gyoe Pyin (North), Ton, and Hpaung Ka Tar villages were killed, and three others reported missing following junta troops raids from June 15-25. Two men from Salingyi’s Ywar Thar village were taken hostage by the military on May 25 and later killed, they said.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal, a resident of Moe Gyoe Pyin (North) told RFA that Tin Soe, 46, and Wa Gyi, 47, were killed when the military shelled his village early on the morning of June 21, before setting fire to homes there later that day.

“They came in so fast; some people were not able to escape, and some were trapped,” the resident said.

“As they were killing people and burning houses, no one dared to stay. We just had to flee.”

The resident said that “around 20 people were taken hostage” during the raid and that the bodies of the two victims were discovered after the troops left the following day.

Other sources from the area told RFA that the body of 30-year-old Sai Myat Soe from Sar Htone village was found mutilated on June 26 near Hpaung Ka Tar village.

Junta troops attacked the Salingyi villages of Nat Kyun and Htan Taw Gyi as recently as Tuesday, residents said, forcing inhabitants to evacuate and seek shelter.

A woman who had to flee her home during Tuesday’s raid said she was separated from her family members during the ordeal and doesn’t know what became of them.

“I went back to the village today hoping things had calmed down, but just as we arrived at the village, soldiers came in from the other side through the forest, while others approached from the river. We had to leave right away,” she said.

“My whole family is on the run and I’m worried whether I’ll ever see them again or if I’ll be able to go back to my house. I can’t stop worrying because [the soldiers] were burning the villages.”

Sources claimed that the raids were conducted by military units based in a compound run by China’s Wanbao Mining Ltd., which operates the Letpadaung Copper Mine – a joint venture between the Chinese government and the junta that has been suspended for the 16 months since the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021 coup. Other villages targeted in the raids included Lin Sa Kyet and Wadan, they said.

The raids follow an April 21 warning issued by 16 local People’s Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary groups that the Letpadaung copper project would be attacked because it could provide income for the junta.

Attempts by RFA to contact junta Deputy Minister of Information Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun went unanswered Wednesday. He has previously rejected reports of military raids, as well as allegations of civilian deaths and acts of arson by junta troops.

Caught in the crossfire

Members of the local anti-junta People’s Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary group have said they are reluctant to intercept the raids for fear of causing civilian casualties while the military holds hostages. However, the group has attacked military units stationed within the copper project compound and recently destroyed a power line connected to the site.

Wanbao has strongly condemned attacks in the region, saying in a statement that its presence has nothing to do with the ongoing civil unrest in Myanmar and demanding that armed groups in the area refrain from targeting its employees.

A member of the anti-junta Salingyi Revolution Army (SRA) said that Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG), to which local PDF forces have sworn loyalty, has never ordered attacks on Wanbao or its employees.

“We haven’t attacked Wanbao, only the military units housed in the compound,” said the SRA fighter, who also declined to be named.

“Of course, some of [Wanbao’s] equipment might get destroyed in the chaos, but our NUG government has not instructed us to attack Wanbao and we would never do it on our own. The local defense groups are following the guidelines and instructions of the NUG.”

In an interview on May 29, Zaw Min Tun told RFA that all governments have a responsibility to protect foreign investment on both legal grounds and for reasons of security. He said at the time that the military’s use of force to clear the territory was aimed at protecting the Chinese project.

Thet Oo, a member of the prodemocracy Salingyi Multi-Village Strike Steering Committee, told RFA that the junta has deployed “two military columns for clearance operations in the Letpadaung area,” indicated that it “is clearly concerned with defending the Chinese project.”

But he said that his and other PDF units in the area do not want the mine to resume operations because profits from the project will be used by the junta to fund its repression of Myanmar’s people.

According to local sources, military raids have forced around 20,000 residents of 25 villages near the project site to flee their homes and take shelter in the jungle.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Reported by Burmese Service.

The post No-Knock Raids Rip a Hole in the 4th Amendment appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John W. Whitehead.

We’re all potential victims.

— Peter Christ, retired police officer

It’s the middle of the night.

Your neighborhood is in darkness. Your household is asleep.

Suddenly, you’re awakened by a loud noise.

Someone or an army of someones has crashed through your front door.

The intruders are in your home.

Your heart begins racing. Your stomach is tied in knots. The adrenaline is pumping through you.

You’re not just afraid. You’re terrified.

Desperate to protect yourself and your loved ones from whatever threat has invaded your home, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, a baseball bat, or that licensed and registered gun you thought you’d never need.

You brace for the confrontation.

Shadowy figures appear at the doorway, screaming orders, threatening violence.

Chaos reigns.

You stand frozen, your hands gripping whatever means of self-defense you could find.

Just that simple act—of standing frozen in fear and self-defense—is enough to spell your doom.

The assailants open fire, sending a hail of bullets in your direction.

You die without ever raising a weapon or firing a gun in self-defense.

In your final moments, you get a good look at your assassins: it’s the police.

Brace yourself, because this hair-raising, heart-pounding, jarring account of a no-knock, no-announce SWAT team raid is what passes for court-sanctioned policing in America today, and it could happen to any one of us.

Nationwide, SWAT teams routinely invade homes, break down doors, kill family pets (they always shoot the dogs first), damage furnishings, terrorize families, and wound or kill those unlucky enough to be present during a raid.

No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day.

SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of so-called criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling. In some instances, SWAT teams are even employed, in full armament, to perform routine patrols.

These raids, which might be more aptly referred to as “knock-and-shoot” policing, have become a thinly veiled, court-sanctioned means of giving heavily armed police the green light to crash through doors in the middle of the night.

No-knock raids, a subset of the violent, terror-inducing raids carried out by police SWAT teams on unsuspecting households, differ in one significant respect: they are carried out without police having to announce and identify themselves as police.

It’s a chilling difference: to the homeowner targeted for one of these no-knock raids. It appears as if they are being set upon by villains mounting a home invasion.

Never mind that the unsuspecting homeowner, woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, has no way of distinguishing between a home invasion by criminals as opposed to a police mob. In many instances, there is little real difference.

According to an in-depth investigative report by The Washington Post, “police carry out tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year nationwide.”

While the Fourth Amendment requires that police obtain a warrant based on probable cause before they can enter one’s home, search and seize one’s property, or violate one’s privacy, SWAT teams are granted “no-knock” warrants at high rates such that the warrants themselves are rendered practically meaningless.

If these aggressive, excessive police tactics have also become troublingly commonplace, it is in large part due to judges who largely rubberstamp the warrant requests based only on the word of police; police who have been known to lie or fabricate the facts in order to justify their claims of “reasonable suspicion” (as opposed to the higher standard of probable cause, which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property); and software that allows judges to remotely approve requests using computers, cellphones or tablets.

This sorry state of affairs is made even worse by U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have essentially done away with the need for a “no-knock” warrant altogether, giving the police authority to disregard the protections afforded American citizens by the Fourth Amendment.

In addition to the terror brought on by these raids, general incompetence, collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids are also characteristic of these SWAT team raids. In some cases, officers misread the address on the warrant. In others, they simply barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building. In another subset of cases, police conduct a search of a building where the suspect no longer resides.

SWAT teams have even on occasion conducted multiple, sequential raids on wrong addresses or executed search warrants despite the fact that the suspect is already in police custody. Police have also raided homes on the basis of mistaking the presence or scent of legal substances for drugs. Incredibly, these substances have included tomatoes, sunflowers, fish, elderberry bushes, kenaf plants, hibiscus, and ragweed.

All too often, botched SWAT team raids have resulted in one tragedy after another for the residents with little consequences for law enforcement.

The horror stories have become legion in which homeowners are injured or killed simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home invasion by criminals. Too often, the destruction of life and property wrought by the police is no less horrifying than that carried out by criminal invaders.

As one might expect, judges tend to afford extreme levels of deference to police officers who have mistakenly killed innocent civilians but do not afford similar leniency to civilians who have injured police officers in acts of self-defense. Indeed, homeowners who mistake officers for robbers can be sentenced for assault or murder if they take defensive actions resulting in harm to police.

Yet the shock-and-awe tactics utilized by many SWAT teams only increases the likelihood that someone will get hurt.

That’s exactly what happened to Jose Guerena, the young ex-Marine who was killed after a SWAT team kicked open the door of his Arizona home during a drug raid and opened fire. According to news reports, Guerena, 26 years old and the father of two young children, grabbed a gun in response to the forced invasion but never fired. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. Police officers were not as restrained. The young Iraqi war veteran was allegedly fired upon 71 times. Guerena had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

Aiyana Jones is dead because of a SWAT raid gone awry. The 7-year-old was killed after a Detroit SWAT team—searching for a suspect—launched a flash-bang grenade into her family’s apartment, broke through the door and opened fire, hitting the little girl who was asleep on the living room couch. The cops weren’t even in the right apartment.

Exhibiting a similar lack of basic concern for public safety, a Georgia SWAT team launched a flash-bang grenade into the house in which Baby Bou Bou, his three sisters and his parents were staying. The grenade landed in the 2-year-old’s crib, burning a hole in his chest and leaving him with scarring that a lifetime of surgeries will not be able to easily undo.

Payton, a 7-year-old black Labrador retriever, and 4-year-old Chase, also a black Lab, were shot and killed after a SWAT team mistakenly raided the mayor’s home while searching for drugs. Police shot Payton four times. Chase was shot twice, once from behind as he ran away. “My government blew through my doors and killed my dogs. They thought we were drug dealers, and we were treated as such. I don’t think they really ever considered that we weren’t,” recalls Mayor Cheye Calvo, who described being handcuffed and interrogated for hours—wearing only underwear and socks—surrounded by the dogs’ carcasses and pools of the dogs’ blood.

If these violent SWAT team raids have become tragically widespread, you can chalk it up to the “make-work” principle that has been used to justify the transfer of sophisticated military equipment, weaponry and training to local police departments, which in turn has helped to transform police into extensions of the military—a standing army on American soil.

The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”

A study by a political scientist at Princeton University concludes that militarizing police and SWAT teams “provide no detectable benefits in terms of officer safety or violent crime reduction.” The study, the first systematic analysis on the use and consequences of militarized force, reveals that “police militarization neither reduces rates of violent crime nor changes the number of officers assaulted or killed.”

SWAT teams, designed to defuse dangerous situations such as those involving hostages, were never meant to be used for routine police work targeting nonviolent suspects, yet they have become intrinsic parts of federal and local law enforcement operations.

There are few communities without a SWAT team today.

In 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT team-style raids in the US.

Incredibly, that number has since grown to more than 80,000 SWAT team raids per year.

Where this becomes a problem of life and death for Americans is when these militarized SWAT teams are assigned to carry out routine law enforcement tasks.

In the state of Maryland alone, 92 percent of 8200 SWAT missions were used to execute search or arrest warrants.

Police in both Baltimore and Dallas have used SWAT teams to bust up poker games.

A Connecticut SWAT team swarmed a bar suspected of serving alcohol to underage individuals.

In Arizona, a SWAT team was used to break up an alleged cockfighting ring.

An Atlanta SWAT team raided a music studio, allegedly out of a concern that it might have been involved in illegal music piracy.

A Minnesota SWAT team raided the wrong house in the middle of the night, handcuffed the three young children, held the mother on the floor at gunpoint, shot the family dog, and then “forced the handcuffed children to sit next to the carcass of their dead pet and bloody pet for more than an hour” while they searched the home.

A California SWAT team drove an armored Lenco Bearcat into Roger Serrato’s yard, surrounded his home with paramilitary troops wearing face masks, threw a fire-starting flashbang grenade into the house in order, then when Serrato appeared at a window, unarmed and wearing only his shorts, held him at bay with rifles. Serrato died of asphyxiation from being trapped in the flame-filled house. Incredibly, the father of four had done nothing wrong. The SWAT team had misidentified him as someone involved in a shooting.

And then there was the police officer who tripped and “accidentally” shot and killed Eurie Stamps, an unarmed grandfather of 12, who had been forced to lie face-down on the floor of his home at gunpoint while a SWAT team attempted to execute a search warrant against his stepson.

Equally outrageous was the four-hour SWAT team raid on a California high school, where students were locked down in classrooms, forced to urinate in overturned desks and generally terrorized by heavily armed, masked gunmen searching for possible weapons that were never found.

These incidents underscore a dangerous mindset in which the citizenry (often unarmed and defenseless) not only have less rights than militarized police, but also one in which the safety of the citizenry is treated as a lower priority than the safety of their police counterparts (who are armed to the hilt with an array of lethal and nonlethal weapons).

Likewise, our privacy, property and security are no longer safe from government intrusion.

Yet it wasn’t always this way.

There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary, safe and secure from the threat of invasion by government agents, who were held at bay by the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Fourth Amendment, in turn, was added to the U.S. Constitution by colonists still smarting from the abuses they had been forced to endure while under British rule, among these home invasions by the military under the guise of “writs of assistance.” These writs gave British soldiers blanket authority to raid homes, damage property and wreak havoc for any reason whatsoever, without any expectation of probable cause.

To our detriment, we have come full circle to a time before the American Revolution when government agents—with the blessing of the courts—could force their way into a citizen’s home, with seemingly little concern for lives lost and property damaged in the process.

Rubber-stamped, court-issued warrants for no-knock SWAT team raids have become the modern-day equivalent of colonial-era writs of assistance.

Then again, we may be worse off today when one considers the extent to which courts have sanctioned the use of no-knock raids by police SWAT teams (occurring at a rate of more than 80,000 a year and growing); the arsenal of lethal weapons available to local police agencies; the ease with which courts now dispense search warrants based often on little more than a suspicion of wrongdoing; and the inability of police to distinguish between reasonable suspicion and the higher standard of probable cause.

This is exactly what we can expect more of as a result of President Biden’s commitment to expand law enforcement and so-called crime prevention at taxpayer expense.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no matter what the politicians insist to the contrary, militarized police armed with weapons of war who are empowered to carry out pre-dawn raids on our homes, shoot our pets, and terrorize our families are not making America any safer or freer.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

At least 19 were injured around occupied Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque on Sunday after a violent crackdown by Israeli police cleared out worshipers from the compound. It was the second raid since Friday, when Israeli police used rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas on unarmed Palestinians, resulting in the arrest of more than 300 and at least 158 injuries. This latest violence in Jerusalem comes as the holy days of Ramadan and Passover overlap. Meanwhile, Western media has been describing the attacks as “clashes” and using other obfuscatory language “as if there is no imbalance of power here, as if there is no nuclear state using its rubber-coated bullets and tear gas against worshipers at a mosque,” says Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On March 5, officers with the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Center for Combating Extremism and the OMON special riot police raided the office of Pskovskaya Guberniya, an independent newspaper in the western region of Pskov, according to news reports and posts on the outlet’s Telegram channel.

Separately, on March 18, law enforcement officers also searched the homes of Pskovskaya Guberniya chief editor Denis Kamalyagin and journalist Viktor Agafonov, as well as Pskov-based journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva, according to news reports, a police document posted online by human rights lawyer Pavel Chikov, and Kamalyagin, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

“Russian authorities’ harassment of journalists in Pskov is a blatant effort to stifle their reporting,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities must cease fabricating cases aimed at hindering the work of media outlets, which are essential to keeping independent regional journalism alive.”

The March 5 raid was conducted as part of an investigation into the liberal opposition Yabloko political party in Pskov, which shares an office building with Pskovskaya Guberniya, after an anonymous woman filed a complaint alleging that the party had violated new legislation barring actions that are “discrediting” to the military, according to news reports and a post on Telegram by the party’s regional head, Lev Shlosberg. Officers also raided the party’s headquarters that day, Shlosberg wrote.

Shlosberg’s post states that the anonymous woman alleged that the Yabloko party was connected to anti-war email she received, and that the woman named Kamalyagin as one of the party’s heads. Kamalyagin told CPJ that he was not affiliated with that party.

During that raid, officers seized computers and journalists’ phones, and later that day authorities blocked the outlet’s website, according to additional news reports and Telegram posts. The following day, Pskovskaya Guberniya announced that it was suspending activity because it was impossible to work without technical equipment.

The March 18 raids on Kamalyagin, Agafonov, and Prokopyeva’s homes were conducted as part of an unrelated defamation investigation stemming from a post in an anonymous Telegram channel criticizing statements by Pskov Governor Mikhail Vedernikov about Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, according to news reports.

Kamalyagin told CPJ that he and Prokopyeva were identified as witnesses in the defamation case. He told the independent outlet Mediazona that he believed the case was authorities’ attempt to “find a reason” to search independent journalists’ homes.

In that interview, Prokopyeva, a reporter at the U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster RFE/RL’s project Sibir.Realii and 2020 recipient of CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award, also said that she was not responsible for the anonymous Telegram post.

She also said that police handcuffed her and threw her to the floor during the search, and then seized her phone, e-reader, modem, and her husband’s laptop.

Authorities also searched Kamalyagin’s parents’ home on March 18, and raided a total of seven locations that day, according to a press release issued by the Yabloko party.

Prokopyeva and Kamalyagin have fled Russia and are in Riga, Latvia; Pskovskaya Guberniya journalists Maksim Bartylev and Pavel Dmitriyev are planning to leave the country soon, Kamalyagin told CPJ. According to Pskovskaya Guberniya, Kamalyagin left Russia the day before the search.

On Monday, a Pskov court ruled that the searches of Kamalyagin and Prokopyeva’s homes were “lawful and justified,” according to reports.

CPJ called the Pskov prosecutor’s office and the Investigative Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Pskov region, but no one answered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.